Ten Lessons from Katrina on Our Ability to Cope with Crises

Posted on May 15, 2007 by Dave Pollard
hurricane stan
Relief workers in Guatemala rescue victims of mudslides caused by Hurricane Stan
 
Yesterday I provided my answers to the questions I will be asking others in upcoming Blog-Hosted Conversations about what we need to know, to learn, and to do to prepare ourselves and our loved ones for whatever the future will hold.
 
An editorial in today’s NYT, lamenting how little has been done to rebuild and protect New Orleans since Katrina, provides some important lessons about the current state of our civilization and its ability to cope with such crises. Here are, I think, the ten most important lessons:
  1. Our political, social and economic systems are incredibly fragile: The problem with big, centralized, ‘efficient’ systems is that they lack resilience and cannot handle external stresses well. In our hellbent effort to keep all these unsustainable systems going, and strip ever more cost out of them, we have pushed them to the breaking point. Natural disasters, political sabotage, environmental stresses, resource exhaustion, economic overextension — any of these can quickly cause these systems to collapse, and since they are so inter-dependent, a collapse of one can set off a cascade of others. Katrina was far from the ‘perfect storm’ but it has ruined one of the US’s largest cities, apparently beyond repair. On 9/11, a single spectacular act of sabotage by a handful of deranged ideologues has so far cost the US economy trillions of dollars, most of it utterly wasted. These systems are so thinly stretched and vulnerable they are an accident waiting to happen. And as we refuse to take steps to create resilience and let the vulnerabilities grow — the spiraling US debt and trade deficit, the ever-worsening state of our food systems, the exhaustion of the oil and water and soil on which our society is utterly dependent, the overheating of our atmosphere, the gap between rich and poor — the probability of a cascade of crises grows to virtual certainty.
  2. In a crisis, you’re on your own: Governments and other institutions are incapable of responding to emergencies. It’s not that their people don’t want to help: they cannot. Big, bureaucratic systems simply can’t move that fast, and they’re hopelessly inefficient to the point of dysfunctionality. FEMA is a joke. The CDC in a pandemic will be able to do little more than process information. In every crisis right back to the Great Depression, most of the responses of governments and other large institutions, public and private, have only made the problems worse. We need to create local, community-based emergency preparedness plans and training, and community-based systems that have the resilience to cope with crises effectively. And we need to get over our ‘learned helplessness’ that leads us to believe that, in the case of a crisis, the government will tell us what to do. This helplessness, and governments’ fraudulent claims to be prepared for crises, are not only unhelpful, they’re dangerous.
  3. The ‘free market’ is useless in a crisis: The untrammeled ‘free’ market does not rebuild, because it is never economic by its measures to do so. That’s why cities are full of brownfields and abandoned industrial and slum areas — it’s always cheaper to let them rot and instead develop new ‘virgin’ areas in ever more far-flung suburbs. That’s why you pay fire insurance premiums on your house based on a rebuilding cost wildly in excess of its market value. And as long as we remain averse to large-scale public investment in rebuilding infrastructure, that infrastructure will never be rebuilt by anyone. That’s why the population of New Orleans is still half what it was before Katrina. That’s why the ‘rebuilt’ levees for the remaining half are still incomplete and already eroding.
  4. It is not in our nature to prepare for crises: We did not prepare for the collapse of the levees in New Orleans, even though we knew that it was inevitable. We are not prepared for pandemic disease, or the End of Oil, or the impacts of global warming. We prepare only when the crisis is imminent and certain, and that is often too late. That is our nature. If we invested in the future we would have much less today, and our affluent nation economies would be much like those of struggling nations. We are not prepared to do that.
  5. We are over-extended only because we can be: Other cultures believe that we have a responsibility to all life on Earth and to future generations. Ours doesn’t. As a result, we allow ourselves and our governments to take actions that will have negative consequences for non-human life and for future generations. To incur debts that we cannot possibly hope to repay — resource exhaustion, pollution, financial deficits — is not immoral in our selfish culture. And only when we incur such reckless debts do we get over-extended, and hence extremely vulnerable to crises. We knew New Orleans would be swamped, and that the cost would be staggering. We just hoped we wouldn’t be around to see it. That debt suddenly came due in our lifetime, and we can’t pay it. Yet we expect future generations to pay the debts we are burdening them with. And those generations know they can’t repay them either, so they must plan on getting even more over-extended so they can push the repayment even further into the future. Or they must look to technology or the Rapture to save them, so they won’t have to pay.
  6. In any crisis, the poor have it worst: In New Orleans, as in the Great Depression, those who have money are least affected. And generally, the rich also have the political power to deal with the crisis, and are the least motivated to act. Although the disgrace of New Orleans today has strong overtones of racism, it is mostly about money and power and greed.
  7. We never learn from others’ mistakes: History is full of lessons that could teach us the folly of not being prepared, and teach us what to do when crises threaten and occur. But we don’t learn from them. We keep making the same mistakes over and over again. We only learn from our own, personal, first-hand experience. Anyone who wasn’t there, then, is unlikely to learn anything, and is likely to repeat the mistakes the next time, in the next place.
  8. We don’t know what we’re doing: We have no conception of the consequences of our collective actions. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent trillions on huge projects that have wrecked the environment and made us much more vulnerable to environmental and health crises. When we pollute, when we strip mine, when we create factory farms, when we add crap to our food and water and soil, when we dam rivers, when we wage wars, when we wipe out natural waterbreaks and replace them with flimsy man-made levees, we have no idea of the long-term implications of what we’re doing. We just make it up as we go along, hope for the best, and see what happens. When it goes wrong, we hire expensive lawyers or PR agencies to get us out of it, or deny responsibility. When it comes to complex systems, we are idiots.
  9. We are less and less self-sufficient: A few generations ago, most people knew how to grow their own food, make their own clothes. How to dig a well. How to fix things. When crises hit, they struggled, but they survived, because they could look after their own essential needs. How many of us today can say that?
  10. It will happen again.
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6 Responses to Ten Lessons from Katrina on Our Ability to Cope with Crises

  2. Jacob Haqq-Misra says:
    May 15, 2007 at 18:27

    With regard to #8 (“we don’t know what we’re doing”) I always think of introduced species–especially when a species is intentionally introduced to a new ecosystem. We really have no idea how a new organism will impact an ecosystem, yet it still gets tried now and again.

  3. Brad Hinton says:
    May 15, 2007 at 22:01

    You’ve pretty much summed thing up – particularly point 9. I know this is a generalisation, but it seems to me that people today do not take personal responsibility seriously and rely on someone other than themselves to “do something” (the school, the police, the government, someone else) to take care of things for us. A strong commitment to personal responsibility would definitely help in trying to overcome the other nine points as well.

  4. Ryan M. Davis says:
    May 16, 2007 at 12:55

    Your first point is exactly what has become so clear to me over the past few years that was never quite so obvious before. Our society is FRAGILE. In fact, I fear it is still not obvious enough for the vast majority of us in the U.S., despite what recent tragedies have befallen us. I even wonder about the wisdom of rebuilding a city like New Orleans when rising ocean levels over the next few decades may simply render it a modern Atlantis. Perhaps there are other places where the money may be better spent…

  5. Steve Barth says:
    May 17, 2007 at 11:05

    Dave, Hi from Bangkok. I was here, too, in August of 2006 watching the nightmare unfold in New Orleans. People in Southeast Asia empathized with Katrina

  6. Raging Bee says:
    May 17, 2007 at 12:36

    The problem with big, centralized, ‘efficient’ systems is that they lack resilience and cannot handle external stresses well.Some people have been warning of the imminent collapse of “the system” for decades, and some for even longer; and it still has yet to happen. All such dire jeremiads do is prove the predictor’s inability to understand how “the system” actually works. Sort of like all those wingnuts raving in the wilderness about how gold was the only “real” money, and our paper-money economy was going to collapse like a house of cards any day now.There are two problems with using Katrina as “proof” of “the system’s” imminent collapse. First, you’re confusing Bush’s failure with “the system.” And second, we’ve responded much better to MANY other hurricanes, including two in 2004; so Katrina is hardly a representative sample.”We never learn from others’ mistakes?””We don’t know what we’re doing?””NEVER?” Not even once? Your negativity has put you completely out of touch with reality.

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