Unnatural Disasters
A better world is necessary.
The US has been inundated with a barrage of particularly destructive natural disasters in recent years—just last week, a winter wildfire destroyed close to 1,000 homes in Colorado. While the natural processes of Earth make some amount and degree of these events inevitable, the conditions that create them and the extent and distribution of the damage they cause to human societies are not. In other words, the effects, and increasingly the causes, of these events are decidedly political.
Most people in the US think of politics as elections or Republicans versus Democrats, but those things are just expressions of what it actually is: the distribution of power and resources. Consequently, the harm from natural disasters is borne along the unjust structural power relations of our society—disproportionately working class and racialized.
Despite tornado warnings, workers at a Kentucky candle factory and an Illinois Amazon warehouse were forced to stay on the job, and 14 of them died in the subsequent tornadoes. Hundreds of people died during last year’s Texas winter storms and resulting power outages because of a lack of medical care or adequate shelter. Evacuation requires adequate money and transportation, and sheltering in place requires an adequate shelter and supplies. But here in the US, people are mostly just left to fend for themselves with a dearth of public infrastructure and support, so less wealth, resources, and power means less ability to avoid disaster harm. The working class has to rely on partially filling in the gaps with mutual aid, a critical tool not only for disaster response but for building the social cohesion needed for a mass movement that can create systemic political change.
In the aftermath of natural disasters, the unjust and unnecessary suffering not only continues but gets structurally reinforced in what Naomi Klein dubbed disaster capitalism. Capitalists use the chaos and destruction as an opportunity to extract more profit, privatize public goods, and loot public coffers, like the privatization of the New Orleans school system after Hurricane Katrina and the Puerto Rico energy grid after Hurricane Maria. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is responsible for disaster mitigation and recovery, increasingly relies on public-private partnerships. So not only are rich people more likely to lose little and rebuild without difficulty, they may actually get even richer—and the poor often lose everything.
It does not have to be this way. The fact that disaster harm is a political construction is important to understand because it means we can change it.
One vital piece is stopping greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible. The climate crisis is increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. Warmer and drier conditions cause droughts and longer fire seasons with more tinder for more intense wildfires. Warmer oceans lead to stronger hurricane winds. Warmer air can hold more water, causing more extreme precipitation and therefore flooding. But even in a best case scenario, further warming will be baked-in for decades on top of what is an already untenable status quo. Fortunately, there is much more we can do.
Ecological restoration can help mitigate the climate crisis by sequestering carbon, and it can also directly reduce disaster harm. Wetlands prevent flooding by absorbing stormwater and slowing water flow, and they also act as buffers for wildfires. Agroecological farming practices can reduce soil erosion from flooding and increase drought resilience. Indigenous peoples produced these landscapes for thousands of years and retain that knowledge of alternative ways of relating to the land, so recognizing and restoring Indigenous sovereignty is important both morally and ecologically. For example, Indigenous fire management using prescribed burns can reduce wildfire severity.
Many of the most destructive recent wildfires have been sparked by the faulty infrastructure of investor-owned utilities, which put a significant portion of their billions of dollars in profits towards unnecessary things like dividends, exorbitant executive pay, lobbying, and public relations rather than maintenance and upkeep. Public power, untethered by the profit motive, can invest in burying power lines to avoid causing wildfires or power outages from storms and in weatherizing infrastructure to withstand freezing temperatures. It can help build interconnected supergrids powered by renewable energy that can reduce the severity and frequency of outages.
Additionally, there are many places in the US where unnecessary disaster harm is caused by the geography of development, like in fire-prone areas or flood plains. And as the planet warms, rising sea levels and desertification will make many areas uninhabitable. Nonetheless, builders keep building (and rebuilding), investors keep buying, and insurers keep insuring because there is profit to be made and working class people are getting pushed out of increasingly unaffordable urban centers. Stricter building codes and more sustainable urban planning can prevent construction in excessively dangerous or ecologically sensitive areas, and ensure more resilient buildings and more dense, livable communities everywhere else. A managed retreat with equitable and democratic decision-making can relocate people and communities to safer grounds and provide comprehensively better lives in the process with money, green public jobs, and social housing.
The common thread in this by-no-means-exhaustive list of examples of how to mitigate disaster harm is valuing the public good instead of profit, which requires central planning and building state capacity for care rather than violence. Dealing with future natural disasters in just and sustainable ways, particularly as the effects of the climate crisis intensify, requires a comprehensive understanding of how the effects of extreme weather events are produced. What makes them disasters and not just climatological or ecological events is the death and destruction they cause, which is by no means natural or inevitable.