More climate disasters — and solutions
How many of you have been following the effects of weather events in the last 30 days or so in the US? This article covers some grim realities, but also solutions and action items, so bear with me. We cannot solve these realities if we don’t understand them. To solve these big problems, we have to think big, and outside the box. The exciting part is that some of the best out of the box solutions address so much more than climate disasters. They can improve our lives on many levels.
Family and friends in Iowa have been sharing photos and descriptions of the equivalent of a Cat 3 hurricane that swept from west to east through several midwest states in early August, damaging hundreds of miles of area, called a “derecho” (see the progress of it in the time lapse radar shot below).
It wiped out 65% of the old growth trees in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, known for it’s beautiful tree canopy, some of which crushed cars and buildings. The winds damaged well over half the homes and buildings in town, killed power for a minimum of a week for most people (some for much longer), and flattened 10 million acres of corn. Many areas were given only 15 minutes of warning to seek shelter and most people had no idea it was coming until it was on top of them.
Tornadoes are a regular occurrence in the midwest of course, but cover only very small territories compared to a storm that is hundreds of miles wide and travels hundreds of miles. Derechos, or “straight line wind storms” dozens or hundreds of miles wide happen regularly in the mid west (have you heard of them? I’ve been in at least one, but didn’t know it had a name. With up to 80 MPH gusts, it ripped our homemade seedling greenhouse to shreds, but harmed little else). Rarely do they create this much damage — winds of up to 140 MPH were recorded in some parts of Iowa, the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane.
A thought — if we practiced agroforestry instead of single crop grain farming, would the storm been as powerful, would the winds have done as much damage? Trees can mitigate some wind damage if there is enough of them.
An early hurricane, Isaias, hit North Carolina on Aug 4 as a Category 1 and traveled up the East Coast into Canada. While winds were not strong, the extreme rain and unusually heavy tornado action damaged many areas over several states, causing over $4 billion in damage. This makes Isaias the most expensive hurricane to hit the east coast since Sandy. Did you see that fact in the news? Is that level of hurricane damage becoming the new normal?
Two hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast almost at once in late August, Laura and Marco. Laura intensified from a Cat 1 to Cat 4 in the space of a day, becoming the strongest hurricane to hit Louisiana and in the top 10 hurricanes to hit the US. This rapid intensification of hurricanes has become a trend, with Michael being perhaps the most well known. The damage to towns, timber and the fishing industries in Louisiana and Texas was extreme ($8.9 billion and counting) and they will be recovering for some time. Millions of people were without power and some will not gain power back for months. This is the first storm to hit Arkansas with tropical storm force winds. Currently, we have six potential tropical storms or hurricanes in the Atlantic/Gulf region.
In Northern California, friends have had to drop everything to deal with a series of huge fires started by an intensely bizarre and unusual lightning storm. Some of them have lost their homes and organic farms that have been stewarded for over 20 years. This is still early in the fire season.
Meanwhile, record temperatures have been affecting most of the western states, moving into the 90s and 100s — 130F in Death Valley. These are accompanied by Santa Ana winds which further dry out forests and cities, creating the conditions for more conflagrations.
California has seen over 2 million acres burnt in fires in August, well above recent years, and fires are still burning. Much of the West coast is now on fire. Washington State hit a record, with 330,000 acres burning in 24 hours, more than the last twelve fire seasons in Washington combined. In Oregon, 500,000 people have had to flee the fires — that is 10% of the population of the entire state. Far more acreage has burned in 3 days than during an entire average year.
The particulates from the smoke created by these fires are traveling all the way to the east coast and beyond, creating health problems in multiple states.
San Francisco has been shrouded in an orange, smoky haze, and smoke from new western fires continues to travel thousands of miles. The direct cost of these wildfires will reach tens of billions.
There are several things that contribute to the damage of these fires.
1. Developers have continued to build in fire prone areas without taking responsibility for ensuring there is a fire safe zone around the development. The state is doing controlled burns, but can’t keep up with the new developments. The complex checkerboard of public and private lands also makes controlled burns complicated, with increasing legal risks.
2. A significant percentage of California’s old growth forests have been logged, and are secondary growth forests. These are more vulnerable to fire because they are younger, and many are monocrop. Natural old growth ecologies tend to have less underbrush, retain moisture levels better, and are less prone to fires that kill the overstory trees — one can see much evidence of fire in redwood forests, for instance, but the older trees survive.
3. Because of logging and development patterns, drought, invasive insects and other factors (sometimes started decades ago), numerous trees have sickened and died. This creates an extremely flammable situation.
4. Regulations, such as pollution standards, prevent controlled burns when smoke could reach cities.
5. Too many of the various interests that are impacted by these fires have dug in and are not even trying to work together or listen to one another.
This article discusses some of the complexities of doing controlled burns in the West, and the need for much greater cooperation and problem solving between agencies and public and private sectors to solve this. It’s encouraging that more people are making an effort to coordinate and collaborate on solutions.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article230481684.html
In the Rocky Mountains in early September, the jet stream made an aggressive dip, taking temperatures from 90F to 20F in a few hours. This killed most of the crops across several states. I was on a Zoom call with a colleague in Colorado with a farm who had to cut the call short to harvest crops early in hopes of saving some of them. His frustration was palpable, and he was worried not only about losing crops for the year, but losing young fruit trees because of the shock of the temperature change.
These very early frosts do happen but rarely with such extreme temperature changes. The jet stream makes these aggressive dips out of season because the arctic is warming up — forcing the cold air down through Canada and into the US. The jet stream is moving lower, and also “sticking” and slowing down, thus causing more severe frosts more often — increasing the risk of losing crops in fall and spring. We experienced this dip in Florida twice since I moved here in 2008. Both times, crops and entire young fruit trees were lost.
There are many similar disasters happening worldwide. Most of us have seen Australia burning, but how many know about the impact of fires in Siberia, or the historical flooding happening in China, destroying significant food supplies, displacing millions of people and putting many more millions at risk?
I have seen very little of much of this in the news, other than western fires. Most people have no idea how damaged the midwest is, or Louisiana or the Rockies, or other Western states from the extreme weather. Parts of the midwest are still recovering from last year’s massive flooding that covered millions of acres of crops with water. Some farmers stopped farming because of it. It was the last straw for them. Some of the best farmland and fishing areas on the lower Mississippi River were underwater for months too.
Who bought the farmland these frustrated farmers sold? China and other foreign countries own increasing shares, while investment firms are also substantial buyers. There are various risks to this which others outline far better than I (see appendix).
Mega billions of dollars in damage from weather events is becoming the new normal. On top of this, we have COVID.
Our economic system is not designed to deal with this new normal. We need to wake up, and change the way we measure progress, success, and survival. The GDP and a rising stock market do not indicate long term survival potential or resiliency of our culture or our country.
We need an economic system that reflects the value of our ecosystem services and wealth, so that we can respond appropriately when they are being destroyed. We need an economic system that is much more responsive and resilient to real life situations than our current model — which puts economic profits of companies far ahead of individual or community survival or well-being, or future survival potential. Of course, companies need to make a profit to survive. That is not the issue. The problem that needs to be addressed is what kind of products we’re focusing on, and what we are investing and spending our money on.
We have a pass-the-buck economic system. Developers can build in flood zones and in the paths of hurricanes or fires and be exempt from any liability when entire communities are destroyed by predictable natural events. This practice has greatly increased the costs of natural disasters, even aside from the fact that these disasters are becoming more extreme.
There are key actions we must take as a society to address these new normals. We cannot continue to practice business as usual because the way we do business isn’t sustainable, from any angle. It isn’t sustainable economically or emotionally, to have our businesses and communities destroyed by crazy weather or diseases or spats between nations that have nothing to do with us and our farms or restaurants or services or skill sets.
What can be done? One permaculture principle is based around leverage points for change. What point could be changed, that would create the greatest benefits with the least amount of energy or harm? That is the point that, if we put all our energies and focus on, could benefit all of us the most in the long run.
SOLUTIONS
There are solutions and they are within our reach:
- Use whole systems design/permaculture to address all of these issues holistically, as there are many interrelationships and interdependencies. Take a big picture look, think outside the box, and be willing to creatively respond to change. Use indigenous methods well-demonstrated to be successful and indigenous wisdom and skills to control fires and flooding. Indigenous people have stewarded many lands for thousands of years, preventing major disasters like this. Permaculture is scaling up in a number of areas and has the capacity to do, to address key problems on a massive scale. Recently, veteran permaculture designers met online at the North American Leadership Summit to plan extremely doable and practical carbon drawdown, the creation of resilience hubs, resilience networks and transition to regenerative systems, a million tree planting project (the first of many), and many more related subjects. Action: Support PINA. Study and practice permaculture. Connect up with your local permaculture network or increase actions to strengthen it if you already are connected.
- Create laws that hold developers economically accountable for building in flood plains, fire corridors, hurricane zones. They should pay the penalty when houses they knew would flood (like the suburban housing orgy in Houston flood plains), actually flood. Obama created an executive order that discourage developers who rebuild in disaster corridors. Trump removed this consumer protection. You’re on your own. Buyer beware. Developers do not have to tell you if the odds of your home being harmed or destroyed by weather are excellent. Developers have proven they will continue to build in places that create great risk to the home buyer, so this is one leverage point that could reduce the cost of disasters and protect homeowners. Action: Let your representatives know you’d like some common sense policy on this subject that protects honest people.
- We need to include value of ecosystem services into our economic statistics. If we’re pillaging our natural wealth and destroying its ability to continue to provide, in order to create temporary money wealth, what does the future hold? Action: Become more educated about these issues and share that information with others. The more people who understand the myriad benefits of ecological systems and their interdependencies, the better.
- We need to demand full cost accounting for harmful externalities, so that companies that damage large tracts of natural wealth are held accountable. This will quickly motivate them to come up with ethical, non-criminal ways to make money. We need to stop being ok with criminal pollution. Not only from the viewpoint of climate change risks, but because of rising health care costs from toxic exposure, lost productivity, and other losses that pollution causes. Action: Be a conscious consumer. Let companies you buy from know you want ethical supply chains. They do hear us, if enough of us bother to do that!
- It’s time to get serious about climate change. The top 1% in this country control $35 trillion dollars in wealth. The most expensive Green New Deal being proposed, by Bernie Sanders, comes in at $16 trillion. We can afford to fix this problem. We actually can! It’s entirely a matter of will power and intelligent design, not resources. We do have the resources and the know how. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t going to be fixed just by throwing money at it. We will have to modify our lifestyles significantly to pull it off. I and many others have already done that. My life is infinitely richer, better, healthier and more fun. I live on a farm and eat super healthy and deeply delicious food from my food forest daily. I meditate and relax in it, surrounded by butterflies and the scent of flowers. Our community is supportive and caring, we can handle being without power or infrastructure for weeks or longer if necessary, and we love our work, and it is meaningful and helpful to others. It is not a penalty, to live in an ecologically friendly way — it can be heaven! Action: Take a step by step approach to living in more holistic and ecologically friendly ways. Gradient steps will get you there! It’s how I and many others have gotten as far as we have. More action: Demand that our society gets serious about ending pollution! Support those who are working on this. One organization that is taking a scientific approach to finding the key leverage points for change is Project Drawdown.
- And this one point is key, above all others perhaps. We need to solve this together. We need to stop carping at each other because Russia (or whoever) is goading us to fight. We really do. Let’s stop! Please!
There is a bigger enemy confronting us than anything either “side” is scared and afeard that the other “side” will do. When a wall of fire approaches your home, it really doesn’t matter if the fire responders are too socialist or capitalist, or not enough, if they have helicopters and water and they’re willing to use them, does it? The situation is severe enough that at this point, we actually don’t have the luxury of fighting over political or economic ideologies. The above article only covers the obvious stuff. There are many other areas of ecological degradation that are going to impact our ability to survive if we don’t address them. We are at the point where we need to use ALL of our resources — both public and private — to solve this, together. We can argue later. The issues will still be there! If we actually have homes and food and stuff, we can argue a lot more comfortably, like we’re doing now, on our couches, on Facebook. This is not hypothetical — millions of people don’t have that option right now, because of the disasters that happened just in the last 30 days alone, and we’re not even fully into disaster season yet, nor am I addressing COVID in this article.
I am not suggesting people should not be politically active. It is important! But I am encouraging you to find some common ground for effective action, because we all live on this planet and need it to be healthy. This is a gnarly, complex problem that will take cooperation to solve. The situation is harming people of all political persuasions and that is only going to increase if we don’t act — together. Action: Let’s find those points we can agree on, and make some headway. Politicians will do that, if WE do that. It starts and ends with us and what we do on a day to day basis. Gently educate. Communicate solutions. That common ground is there for the majority. Most of us care about these things and want solutions.
Resources:
Permaculture Institute of North America
https://pina.in
Ecosystem services
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service
Company responsibility for externalities
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/externality.asp
Project Drawdown
https://www.drawdown.org/
Further information:
Derecho:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2020_Midwest_derecho
Farmland ownership:
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/27/723501793/american-soil-is-increasingly-foreign-owned
https://thecounter.org/who-really-owns-american-farmland/
Hurricanes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Laura
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Isaias
Spiraling costs of California wildfires:
https://www.statista.com/chart/19807/california-wildfire-emergency-fund-expenditure/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-fire-insurance-premiums-pricing-out-homeowners-2019-11-01/
Causes of wildfires and solutions:
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article230481684.html
From a filmmaker on the topic:
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=3418094804878928&set=a.352597891428650
Crops damaged by snow:
https://news.yahoo.com/crops-damaged-early-snow-cold-205159134.html
Cost of disasters:
Billion dollar disasters through May 2020
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/events.pdf
How much would it cost to handle climate change?
