Environmental Mismanagement Makes Floods Worse
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Over the past few weeks, deadly floods have raged around the world to calamitous effect in Central Europe, Nigeria, and Myanmar. Typhoons are rampaging across Southeast Asia, causing tremendous damage. The death toll from these floods is still unknown, as 64 people are still missing in Myanmar, and the floods have not abated yet in Romania, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia. Over a million people are being displaced from the deluges (their homes destroyed, livelihoods in question) and uncountable creatures are dying in the floods as well.
At the risk of being misunderstood, I think it’s worth taking a moment to discuss the problem with pointing to climate change as the boogey-man that is causing these floods. Climate change may very well be playing an outsized role in the intensity of these storms, and its clear for so many different reasons that our industrial society, which is inherently and inextricably reliant on fossil fuels, needs to make radical changes in order to stop disrupting the carbon cycle as we have. Depending on how we do this, and for what reason, however, we might create another even more disastrous set of problems that we then have to solve. I personally have little faith that we can decarbonize without creating more pollution, colonizing more people, destroying more landscapes, and on and on and on, primarily because technological advancement and economic growth are taken for granted in all “serious” conversations about what we should do about the environment. Unintended consequences, after all, are built into technological advancement.
What I very rarely see when these “acts of God”, which are now just “acts of Climate Change”, befall a region of the world is any discussion of how human mismanagement of the landscape makes these events more catastrophic. Reporters will routinely blame governments for not evacuating quickly enough, or not having the proper plans in place, but rarely will they extend their view outwards to ask how human management of the local environment has directly led to worse outcomes. Instead, like blaming God, they blame climate change, which is neither something that the average citizen can do much about (as CO2 stays in the atmosphere for around 1000 years anyway) nor do governments have any real intention to resolve (because they would literally have to shut down the entire global economy in order for us to stop using fossil fuels to any meaningful degree, which they cannot and will not do). This breeds fear and hopelessness, and makes the problem of local environmental management not seem like the obvious first step to avoid future disasters.
In all of the cases of flooding that are occurring right now, they are being made far worse because dams are being breached and destroyed, releasing far more water than this storm ever could have wrought if those dams weren’t there. Dams are as serious as cutting off an artery in the human body. Not only do they disrupt the weather systems below them (primarily by creating artificial dryness and cutting off nutrient cycles), but they create blockages above them that can lead to catastrophic build-ups of silt, sediment and other debris that weaken the dam and make the reservoir capacity smaller than planned. In any case, dams are an unnatural addition to landscapes which evolved with functioning river systems and floodplains that absorb excess water. In addition to that, dams are subject to wear and corrosion like anything else, and only have a lifespan of 50-100 years, so when big storms come, and they’ve already been worn down and have been collecting alluvial sediment, they are likely to fail, which is exactly what is happening around the world right now.
We are an adaptable creature, but we’re also an irrational one, and through scientific rationality we have created so many more problems for ourselves. We thought that we could “tame” the rivers with our technology so we could make settlements on floodplains without asking whether nature had other plans.
While every single article about these floods pays lip-service to our complicity in these floods, not a single one, from my point of view, is pointing to the correct genesis of our complicity. It’s not just random happenstance that humans are causing some level of climate change — it’s part of a deeper story of our dominion over nature, our supremacy as lords and masters of the world, and our belief that through technology, we can control life itself. It’s a result of us killing rivers for our own devices and never wondering what consequences that would lead to.
The best we get is this:
“Extreme rainfall is more common and more intense because of human-caused climate breakdown across most of the world, particularly in Europe, most of Asia, central and eastern North America, and parts of South America, Africa and Australia.1 This is because warmer air can hold more water vapour. Flooding has most likely become more frequent and severe in these locations as a result, but is also affected by human factors, such as the existence of flood defences and land use.”
Now I understand, journalists are journalists and editorializing can often be unhelpful. I’m not asking journalists to write about man’s hubris — but at least explain that there is a thread here, and what that means moving forward. Because what it means is that we can adapt to these changes in weather. This is what adapting to climate change should mean — we repair the water cycles, we change our agricultural practices to reflect the limitations of the landscape so we don’t rely on irrigation, we change our settlement strategy to not settle on floodplains, etc. But more importantly, we understand as a culture that weather has never been tamable and our attempts to implement order onto nature always lead to disasters like worse wildfires, worse floods, worse droughts and so on.
Of course, the problem with my idealism, after the dust has settled, is that the global industrial system needs Nigeria to export cash crops. Europe needs “green” hydropower, even though it only makes up a tiny fraction of their energy supply. Myanmar has been plagued by civil war for years, and adaptations to climate change might not be on the top of the list of their humanitarian needs at the moment.
These issues are multivalent, and I’m simplifying tremendously here, but I stand by my thesis that focusing too much on climate change rather than local adaptation is a mistake that costs people’s lives. For now, people are just trying to survive, grieve their losses, and deal with this horrific incident. I hope that the death toll does not rise more, that missing people are found, and that people are able to rebuild their lives without too much further suffering. My heart goes out to all of the victims of these disasters, and I hope that as a global community, we can be more aware of the complex reasons why these disasters are made worse and adjust our behavior so that we can truly adapt to the coming storms, and they are coming.
Hey guys, I don’t have much for you this week as we are really pushing to finish this first episode and I am deep in the digital trenches editing, filming and creating various visuals for “What is the Human Animal?”
Right now, we are tucked away, house-sitting in a very peaceful mountain town, enjoying the last bits of sunlight and calm before all of this political madness ramps up. Very soon we will wrap this up and have some more space and time to share thoughts about all things in this crazy world. Stay sane out there everyone!
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This sentence is copied and pasted across many articles on this subject from The Guardian.