All,
A most interesting discussion about Sunstein's essay on Montreal and
Kyoto protocols. One remark of David Downie's caught my eye: "there
is an emerging consensus regarding a very real possibility that one
or more tipping points exist in the global climate system. Going
beyond these points could produce very large, very negative, and, for
all practical purposes, nearly irreversible impacts."
This isn't a new observation, of course, but I was thinking about
Katrina and New Orleans recently, and pondering all the science that
warned of pretty nearly exactly what happened, science that did not
succeed even in enabling intelligent hedging by, say, short-sellers
in insurance stocks. Never mind saving people's lives and property.
One element of the Katrina story that has gotten no attention in the
anniversary news coverage is the Atchafalaya and the vision it offers
of a radical rethinking of how to rebuild New Orleans. The
Mississippi River is an impressive stream, and on a time interval of
a small number of centuries, the river switches its course. This is
how the Mississippi managed build a delta from Memphis down to the
Gulf of Mexico that is about 200 miles wide. In the 1950s
hydrologists realized Ol' Man River was gonna switch again. The new
channel is the Atachafalaya River, about 90 mi north of New Orleans,
and it now carries about a third of the flow of the river. It is
trying to capture the rest.
If it did, that would doom the port of New Orleans and force a costly
relocation of the petrochemical facilities along the lower
Mississippi. When such a threat appeared in the 1950s the logical
answer was to call in the Army Corps of Engineers. They built an
elaborate system of plumbing that has so far kept the river in its
bed, mostly. And the cost of doing so helped to make Louisiana by
far the largest recipient of Corps money in the country. (Sort of
like Israel and Egypt for our foreign aid program. Holding back the
Red Sea for a while is small change compared to denying the
Atchafalaya.)
So if the people of the US were really alert to tipping points and
irreversible change, we'd be talking about how to facilitate the
opportunity for the poor people scattered by the four winds of
Katrina to resettle peaceably, and how to move New Orleans over to
Morgan City, where the Mississippi wants to be.
I won't say that Cass Sunstein's approach to climate looks as narrow
to those who have posted here as Mayor Nagin and President Bush do to
a hydrologist thinking about the Atchafalaya. But I have wondered if
any of you have ideas about how ideas so far from conventional move
into the main stream in time. The Times-Picayune warned of a big
hurricane destroying New Orleans in a major series in 2004. That
wasn't soon enough, or maybe nothing would have been. And climate
change seems, like Katrina, an abundantly, even meticulously
predicted catastrophe.
What do we social scientists have to offer in light of these
developments? (Hint: that is a genuine question.)
Cheers,
Kai
Kai N. Lee, Rosenburg Professor of environmental studies, Center for
Environmental Studies, Williams College, Kellogg House, 41 Mission
Park Drive, Williamstown MA 01267 USA. Voice & voicemail: 01
+413-597-2358; fax: 01+413-597-3489.
http://www.williams.edu/ces/ces/people/klee/klee.htm
