On Sep 28, 2005, at 2:51, romdom wrote:
i have the feeling a very large part of the US would have no population if one was to build in safe areas only ...
Dominique, except for the big cities, the population density is US is much less than that in Europe. And even in the cities, it's only the centers that are dense; the rest is the urban and suburban "sprawl". We don't have the - mandatory in UK, for example - "green belts" between one little community/town and the next; they run into one another a lot of times.
We are all entitled to privacy (a word that doesn't even exist in Polish <g>) and, for us here, it mostly means privacy enforced by physical distance, not by learning to coexist or by good manners (as in Japan, for example). So, whoever can afford it, will have his own house, preferably with enough land around not to see the neighbour's house. If your land margin is small, you plant tall trees, and thick bushes below the crowns of the trees as screen.
At the same time, very few people are willing to live in the middle of nowhere, with no infrastructure at all. So, sometimes, we take risks and build in unsafe places, as long as they're within the vicinity of schools, shops, hospitals, gas stations, etc, hoping we can have the cake and eat it too. More often, we rearrange nature to suit our needs/demands. And, sometimes, she objects to such rearrangements, as she's been doing more and more frequently recently, with more and more force. At least part of the Gulf drama is due to the coastal erosion, due to human interference. Another part is due to raising temperatures of the ocean, also caused by humans.
But you're right; there's no *totally* safe place to build. But that's true not only in US, but in Europe as well, as far as I can see. This past summer - unusually hot and dry - brought fires all accross the Iberian Peninsula, no? Several summers ago, parts of Poland and the Czech Republic had been devastated by - unprecedented and unexpected - floods.
And it is always, always, the regions and the people who are already worst off that get hit the most. They settled where they are either because they couldn't afford better, or didn't know better - they're new to the area, there's been no "history" of disasters, etc. And then they remain poor, so can't buy off the politicians who'd be willing to work to ameliorate the situation. And, if the situation *is* improved, it's only for a few moments, because it's a stop-gap improvement, and every action brings a reaction - perhaps in the next community. It's a vicious circle, and altogether depressing.
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