Who Ya Gonna Call in an Environmental Disaster?

Nine out of ten Americans now live in places of
significant
risk, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) These
risks include things like dam
failure, hazardous material exposure, nuclear explosion, terrorism and
natural
disasters like wild fires, heat, hurricane, thunderstorms, tornados,
tsunami,
earthquakes, floods, landslides, volcanoes and winter storms.

Actually, it appears that the increased risk of
disaster is
occurring worldwide due to climate change, deteriorating ecosystems and
the
expansion of poverty, says a UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster
Risk Reduction.

So what are we to do in the face of such threats
to our
lives, our homes, our communities-and our world?

"We need to change behavior in this country,"
Craig Fugate,
FEMA's new director, told his emergency-management instructors at a
conference
last June. The "government-centric"
approach to disasters increases the odds of catastrophic failure in a
big
disaster, as Hurricane Katrina so clearly showed.

Fugate not only has extensive and relevant
experience in
disaster management, he is not an FOTP (friend of the powerful)
as many
of his predecessors were. The former
firefighter and paramedic, has served for the
past 15 years as chief of emergency management in Alachua County and
later for
the State of Florida. He is reputedly a
tell-it-like-it-is kind of guy who has had to plan for the worst and
deal with
the most difficult like Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Jeanne and Ivan in
2004 and
Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005.

"We tend to look at the public as a liability,"
says Fugate.
"[But] who is going to be the fastest responder when your house falls
on your
head? Your neighbor."

In fact,
the 4,400-person agency was designed to defer
to state and local officials. However,
when the locals are overwhelmed by "system collapse," as Fugate calls
it, the
government must rely on the public because it will take the feds too
long to
respond.
This is not a far-fetched idea, judging from Rebecca
Solnit's new book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary
Communities that Arise in Disaster.
In a "tour" of the some of the biggest disasters over the 100 years,
she notes that people at the scene consistently react in a spirit of
solidarity, generosity and altruism despite the prevailing belief among
the authorities that disaster turns people into panicked and ruthless
savages.

Solnit cites sociologist Charles E. Fritz,
a former captain in the U.S.
Army Air Corps stationed in Britain during World War II, to refute
these social Darwinist beliefs.

"Disasters provide a temporary liberation from the worries,
inhibitions, and anxieties associated with the past and future," said
Fritz, "because they force people to concentrate their full attention
on immediate moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs within the context of
the present realities."

For example, thousands of people escaped San Francisco after the 1906
earthquake and then set up a tent city in Golden Gate Park. On the
third day after the quake, Anna Amelia Holshouser started a soup
kitchen there with only a tin can and a pie plate. She subsequently
raised money to buy supplies in neighboring Oakland and was soon
feeding two to three hundred people a day. She did all this without
fear, trauma or despondency and was one among many who pitched in to do
whatever was possible in the wake of this devastating disruption to
their lives.

Then the authorities moved in to take control because they feared
people would loot and murder. They treated citizens with suspicion and
shut down their assistance efforts, which they regarded as "renegade."

It's important to recognize that this negative attitude toward the
public is rooted in Gustave le Bon's 1894 book, The Crowd: A Study
of
the Popular Mind. His thesis
is that when people gather in crowds,
they become primitive beings who act on instinct, which is akin to
madness. The job of the authorities is to rein them in.

Such thinking has typically led to unnecessary imprisonment and
needless killing of people as a gesture of saving the city from "the
unlicked mob" (as one military commander in the San Francisco quake
referred to the public) rather than saving the people from the disaster
that destroyed the city.

While Solnit admits that some savagery does happen, people for the most
part are just trying to survive. That Black people were reported to be
taking food, clothing, shoes from retail stores after Hurricane
Katrina, revoltingly overlooks the fact that most of them were trying
help their neighbors who had largely been abandoned by the
authorities. Of course, it also suggests the disgusting tinge of
racism that still exists in our country today.

British authorities in London during the Blitz of World War II reacted
in a similar overbearing and paternalistic way by worrying that
citizens would act "like frightened and unsatisfied children." The
truth was that the people carried on their lives during the day and at
night they bedded down on the platforms of the underground because
their homes were among the tens of thousands that had been destroyed.

"The people's role in their own defense and destiny was downplayed in
order to stress an old-fashioned division of leaders and led,"
reflected historian Mark Connelly on the British response.

As Solnit examines people's resort to self-sufficiency, readers learn
that disasters usually signal a societal turning point where its values
and the strength of its structures are challenged not only by the
obvious destruction of property but by a disruption of the social
order. Yes, class war exists even in disaster where an imperceptible
undercurrent resides among elites who are all about protecting their
privilege and control of the society. (We last saw this in the
man-made disaster of the bank failures and subsequent bailouts and
bonuses.)

Kathleen Tierney, director of the University of Colorado Natural
Hazards Center,
refers to this phenomenon as "elite panic" where the
concentration is all on preventing property crime as a justification to
the use of force. And whom do the elites fear most? You guessed it:
the poor, minorities and immigrants.

Sociologists contend that looting and civil disturbance are rare during
disasters, however, the media can't resist it in order to "entertain
our worst fears and then allay them...[when] all those rugged men and
powerful leaders and advanced technologies" save the day. These
portrayals of strength and control are especially important during a
time of uncertainty. However, what the media consistently miss are the
citizens' acts of bravery and kindness, which is what Solnit's book
documents in a compelling way.
Given all this sociological data, it is refreshing to see that Fugate
is trying to influence change in FEMA's disaster response. For
example, he's veered away from the agency's paternalistic vow to
"protect the Nation from all hazards" in favor of a more collaborative
promise to "support our citizens and first responders to ensure that as
a nation we work together."

He is also attempting to overcome today's therapy culture that regards
citizens as fragile and traumatized victims.

"You're not going to hear me refer to people as victims unless we've
lost 'em," says Fugate. "I call them survivors."

In reality, Fugate is tapping into something precious when it comes to
Americans' response to disaster: our democracy, our public life, our
own sense of ourselves as actors on our circumstances and our
relationships to each other.

Disaster has the potential to bring us together as a society, says
Solnit. Given the history of Americans' initial response to disaster,
we seem to know what to do if and when disaster strikes. In the
meantime, we need to build confidence and self-reliance in ourselves
and educate our leaders about how we want to be treated when we are
most vulnerable because given the depth of environmental damage due to
climate change, most of us will most surely be affected.