Stan Cox and Paul Cox describe the destructive force
of nature in the context of climate change.
The reader of
How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, From the
Caribbean to Siberia (New Press, 2016) must be agile. The book demands
that one navigate between several modes of consciousness in order to face the
reality of human input into the “weather on steroids” that is routine these
days.
How the World Breaks takes us on a long tour, but not
one launched with vacation or adventure in mind; rather it books us in at one
disaster site, then another, and another.
Led by our worthy guides, we visit the scene of 2013’s
Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines in which entire settlements were washed away
and some 6,300 people killed; Java where a mud volcano caused by gas drilling
plastered 2.5 square miles of fields and villages with 40 feet of wet clay,
cost 40,000 people their homes, and caused property losses of more than a
billion U.S. dollars; and Kansas, where in 2007, a 205mph tornado flattened an
entire town, destroying 1000 buildings. But surprise: just as the book takes us
on this bleak journey, it also becomes an electrifying, can't-put-down
detective novel exploring the whats, hows, whens, and whys of each catastrophe.
And lest we become too diverted by intrigue, How the World Breaks is
a sober investigation of the economics, politics, science, and psychology of a
disaster's origins, progression and aftermath. Taken together, the landscape of
climate change becomes a disquieting documentation of the mess we inhabit.
Stan Cox is the perfect person to write such a tome. A
former government wheat geneticist, he is now research coordinator at the Land
Institute in Salina, Kansas. He is a fervent advocate for sustainable
agriculture, plus the author of books that explore the environmental impacts of
air conditioning and of corporate food/medicine production, as well as
rationing as one answer to capitalism's out-of-control consumerism.
The second perfect person to craft such a book is
anthropologist and development/disaster writer Paul Cox (Stan's son). He lives
in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he works for European and African development
organizations while writing independently in such publications as Disasters and The
New Inquiry.
I delved into How the World Breaks on a
spring day boasting brutal unseasonal rains in a small city in the Andes. I
needed no more than to pull the blanket to my chin to know the magnitude of
this book's importance, so I asked Stan and Paul to join me for an online
conversation.
Chellis Glendinning: What is How the
World Breaks about? And how did you end up working on it as father and
son?
Paul Cox: The title is a bit misleading, by
design. The book is about how and why disasters happen, but the explanations
aren’t all our own; we don’t have one big model or answer. Instead we were
interested in all the explanations that spring up around disasters and,
crucially, who embraces which explanations.
Stan Cox: It started after a disaster with many
explanations: Superstorm Sandy. In 2012, following that calamity, my editors at
The New Press asked me if I'd be interested in writing one on the increasingly
unnatural nature of natural disasters. I had no direct experience in that
world, but I knew there was much to be written about their increasingly human
causation. I decided to write to Paul, who had studied the anthropology of
disaster.
He started his response with, “Wow, that's a pretty huge
topic,” and discussed the debates among disaster researchers and policymakers
about vulnerability, resilience, inequality, and adaptation, along with what he
called “the big issue: climate change itself, or the whole complex of pressures
and vulnerabilities that it fits into.” I thought, “Oh oh, this is going to be
a much bigger book than I expected, and I don't think I can do it without
Paul.”
CG: How did you start?
SC: We resolved not to restrict ourselves to
just climatic events, but to include hazards that emerge from the ground, sky,
and sea. Since so-called "natural disasters" are
social/political/economic phenomena linked to increasingly unnatural hazards,
we dropped the term “natural disaster.” We wrote of “geoclimatic” hazards and
disasters instead, and we hope that term catches on. We also realized that this
could turn out to be a boring book if we made it an armchair study of U.N.
policy debates, studies on risk reduction, international climate negotiations,
etc. Instead, we decided to build our analysis on stories from the scenes of
actual disasters.
PC: The subtitle, “Life in Catastrophe’s Path,
from the Caribbean to Siberia,” might represent the book better than the title
does. Since this seems to be the life of the future, we wanted to consider what
such a life looks like—for rich and poor.
Disasters are, of course, terrible by definition. All that
ought to matter is how to reduce people’s vastly unequal vulnerabilities to
them and how to stop creating more. But instead, some explanations have turned
into normalizations of it. We tried to make the book an antidote to that
normalization by choosing disasters mostly from the last decade and pulling out
all the awful, sad, strange, funny, and infuriating details that make each
irreducible to a simple explanation.
SC: So from mid-2013 through early 2015, we studied
and visited a dozen or so communities around the world whose inhabitants were
struggling to recover from disasters. We benefited from the help provided by my
wife, Paul's stepmother, Priti Gulati Cox—especially with the trips in India where
she could translate not only language but much else. Priti also drew maps for
each of the disasters.
CG: My guess is that New Press doesn’t have the
funds to send a couple of investigators around the world. How did you get to
all those places?
SC: You guess right. We didn't have big travel
budgets ourselves, so we made modest travel plans. In 2013 Priti and I were
already going to Mumbai, India, for a family visit, and we figured that if Paul
joined us, we could talk with slum residents about the 2005 catastrophic flood
they'd lived through. From there, we could go to the Philippines—which is
famous for cultural adaptation to the world's worst frequency and variety of
geoclimatic hazards—and on to East Java, Indonesia, site of a human-caused mud
volcano.
Soon after we made those plans, the Indian Himalaya was
ravaged by unprecedented monsoon floods and landslides. Two months before we
set out for Asia, Typhoon Yolanda hit the Philippines in probably the most
powerful storm landfall ever recorded. Were we superstitious, we might have
decided at that point not to make any more travel plans! But the fact is that
you can throw a dart at a map, and there has probably been—or will soon be—one
or more terrible disasters somewhere near where the dart sticks. So we included
Tacloban in the Philippines and the Garhwal region in India in our tour.
Paul had ridden out Superstorm Sandy when he was living in
New Jersey and had helped with Occupy Sandy; then he found himself back in the
area around the second anniversary of the disaster. For me, there were short
drives to two tornado towns: Greensburg, Kansas, and Joplin, Missouri. And
living in Copenhagen, Paul could easily get to the Netherlands and Russia.
PC: Our biggest concern was not to put ourselves in
situations where we would be a burden on anyone. We worried most about that in
Tacloban, where bodies were still being recovered when we arrived. We rode in
on a public bus and spent the day in the city, staying out of the way of the
relief activity and speaking only with people who were interested in talking
with us.
The places we went and the people we met made this book what
it is. But the one thing we didn’t want it to be, I think, was a travelogue.
The literary scholar Graham Huggan has written, “Much of what passes for
contemporary travel writing operates under the sign of the disaster.” Our book
falls easily into that claim. But if accounts of disaster and climate change
are taking over the role of travel writing—and I also have to give credit to
Rune Graulund of Denmark for this observation—then there’s a huge amount of
baggage that comes with the genre. Disaster writing can also be colonial,
exoticizing, and self-centered. Our choice was to keep ourselves out of view.
CG: Tell me about what happened on the island of
Montserrat.
SC: Montserrat is a papaya-shaped island five by
10 miles in size, located 250 miles southeast of Puerto Rico. It’s a British
Overseas Territory—in other words, a colony. The first Europeans to settle
there were Irish Catholics in 1632. By the early 1800s, the slave population
was 6,500. Britain abolished slavery in 1833, but Montserrat remained under
white minority rule until the 1960s.
In recent decades, the island has been the most
disaster-plagued place in the Caribbean outside Haiti. Its residents were still
recovering from 1989's Hurricane Hugo when the long-dormant Soufrière Hills
volcano exploded in 1995. For two years the island was punished with volcanic
violence, including explosive eruptions, fast-moving floods of steam, ash, gravel,
and rock; and downpours of ash that covered everything. The eruption remains
active to this day, with continuous release of gases that have been punctuated
by ashfalls in 2003, 2006, and 2010. Almost two-thirds of the island, including
now-buried former capital Plymouth, remain uninhabitable. Before the eruption
the population was more than 10,000. It’s now 4,000. Many people emigrated, and
those who remained had to move up to the previously undeveloped northern part
of the island.
CG: I don't recall even hearing about this.
SC: We first became interested in Montserrat
because of a British-funded development project aimed at generating electricity
with geothermal energy from beneath the same volcano that had almost destroyed
the island—a classic case of a silver lining. But that turned out to be a minor
story. The bigger part was the failure of both the British Parliament and a
series of island governments to rebuild decent housing and good livelihoods and
help the people get back on their feet.
Four months before our visit, the island’s new political
party, a group of activists called the People’s Democratic Movement, had been
voted into power. Hopes were rising that Montserrat could finally get unstuck
from the unnatural disaster/development crisis plaguing it. The PDM’s leader is
Donaldson Romeo. As a journalist and videographer during the long crisis of the
’90s, Romeo had exposed the consequences of British neglect, including the
horrific conditions that people fleeing the south of the island had to endure
in refugee housing and tent camps. In the 2000s he got into politics to
challenge the negligence and failures; he led the PDM to victory in 2014.
CG: It’s typical in the Caribbean for volcanoes
to lie dormant for centuries, and then when they do start shooting sparks,
steam, fiery rock, and sulphur/methane/carbon-dioxide gas, the episode can last
for a year. But this volcanic activity has gone on for 20 years! How does
detrimental human activity contribute to the activation of volcanic activity,
particularly these irregular and unpredictable explosions?
SC: We talked with Rod Stewart of the Montserrat
Volcano Observatory, and he said that this volcano is unique for the length of
its eruption. There’s no ready explanation for it, and he won’t hazard a guess
as to when the eruption will end. Human activity is a factor in volcanic
disasters generally. Volcanic slopes like the one where most Montserratians
lived before 1995 are attractive places to settle: the soils are fertile, the
landscape is beautiful, and there is often employment in tourism. People may be
able to live and work on those slopes for 350 years without problem—but there’s
always a risk.
CG: Who else did you talk to?
SC: I had interviews lined up, but wanted most
to talk with ordinary people and with Don Romeo. Over the next couple of days,
in between interviews with government officials, I talked with local citizens.
One was a woman named Janeen who had migrated to Montserrat from Jamaica just
before the eruption began, had to evacuate homes twice, and now operates a
run-down bar and grill on the island’s one main road. Simply by persevering
through the past two decades, she has proven her resilience, but like everyone
else, she is getting tired of being so resilient. She said she had high hopes
for Romeo and the PDM. On the other hand, she feared that the government in
London might never “step up.” She and other Montserratians had worn out their
bootstraps long ago.
CG: One thing that surprised me is the
islanders' desire to boost the economy with "disastourism."
PC: Ha! We sort of made up that word, although I
assume we aren’t the first. Unlike nearby islands like Antigua and St. Kitts,
Montserrat has no good harbor, so it has never been a major cruise destination.
But before Hugo and the Soufrière Hills eruption, ferries, small cruise boats,
and private craft would visit the Plymouth pier. Many North Americans bought
houses and spent winters there. Romeo and the local government want London to
build a new port in the north that can bring some of that small-scale tourist
traffic back—with an added attraction: tours of the volcano observatory and
zone of destruction in the south.
CG: Did you see the disaster area?
SC: Priti and I went into the zone in the south
that had been opened to daytime entry. The volcano loomed above, belching huge
clouds of steam and sulfur dioxide. Below we could see the area that people are
barred from entering for safety reasons: a broad gray plain ringed by mangled,
abandoned structures. Across that expanse there was no visible sign that the
city center of Plymouth lay fifty feet below.
CG: It sounds almost like a sacred place.
SC: Yes. We stood there in utter silence for a
long while, as our minds struggled to piece together a rational image from the
post-apocalyptic landscape. After that, we wandered into long-abandoned houses.
In one, plates and pans, now covered in volcanic ash, were still sitting in
dish drains where they’d been abandoned years ago. Another neighborhood was
being reclaimed by tropical vegetation, and we noticed a man who was sweeping
dust and ash out of a house. He wasn’t interested in talking. I decided that
“disastourism” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
On our way back to the habitable north, we stopped at a shop
to buy vegetables. As we were paying, in came none other than Don Romeo. “Heard
you on ZJB Radio today,” he said. “When are you leaving?” I told him Sunday
morning. “OK ... what if I drop by on Saturday evening? There are some things I
need to tell you.”
The admiring looks on the faces of the people in the shop
confirmed what we already knew: Romeo is a heroic figure. But he knew he
wouldn’t be a hero for long if Montserrat remained stuck in disaster time. His
first words when he arrived at the cottage were: “I didn’t expect to become
premier this soon.” He went on to talk about how he was having to metamorphose
from an activist into the island’s leader and how he’d better not let people
down. Then he told us how the British government had betrayed the people of
Montserrat. He believed the refusal of the colonial power to restore housing
and livelihoods after the eruption was not really a failure but a strategy. In
the mid-1990s, having just finished rebuilding Plymouth after Hugo, the British
had no interest in funding the island’s development again. Romeo believes they
let conditions become intolerable so people would have no choice but to
evacuate. He told us, “The idea was to get us off the island. But we’re still
here.”
He became emotional when the conversation turned to the 1997
flash eruption that killed 19 people. He said those people had been pushed into
risking their lives in the hazard zone by the deplorable conditions in the
refugee camps and the lack of opportunity to earn a living in the north.
“People were so desperate,” he said, “they would go back onto the volcano to
grow food and keep animals.” Life on his island, he told us, will never be
restored until the UK takes full responsibility for its “deliberate deception”
and neglect of Montserrat. I'd been reading accounts of that era and the
British betrayal with growing frustration, but to hear Romeo talk about the
rawness with which he and other Montserratians view those events… I was boiling
inside.
CG: You visited one scene of destruction after
another. What was that like?
PC: What always confronted me first was
awareness that what I feel is only a shadow of the experience of the disaster.
CG:You felt a sort of timidity then? Or perhaps awe?
PC: More like caution: just as there is much
more of the volcano down under the ground, there is so much more human
experience wrapped up in a disaster than one can possibly know. Some things
can’t be communicated if you weren’t there. But other things can. At least that
was our assumption in writing a book.
Often my second feeling was déjà vu. That is to say:
awareness of repetitions and patterns. This awareness can feel like a betrayal
of the uniqueness of the pain and the place, but as writers it was essential to
our job. There are patterns to how the ground can shift; that’s what makes
seismology possible. There are only so many ways the roof can come off a house;
that’s why we have engineering. And likewise there are certain ways people deal
with pain and shock and re-establish hope; that’s the basis of psychology.
Disasters knot these patterns up together, even if no two events are wholly
alike.
CG: In my work as a psychotherapist, I
specialize in recovery from personal trauma. Some people say to me: “Isn't it
depressing?” Yet I never feel down because I am working with people who want to
heal and therefore have the wherewithal and spirit to heal—so being their
partner in the process becomes an uplifting experience. I am struck with how
you begin the book with a testimony to renewal.
SC: That first story occurred in the Indian
Himalaya, and our trip there was probably the most disturbing experience we
had. Paul suggested we begin and end the book with it because the floods there
were in many ways the most spectacular and tragic of all the disasters we wrote
about. Those who survived have been put to the ultimate test of emotional
strength and perseverance—with virtually no help from outside.
PC: It was depressing. Yet the story with which
we begin the book, Ramala Khumriyal’s personal experience, was a hopeful one.
In June 2013 a natural dam holding back a large lake 12,000 feet up in the
Himalayas melted. The entire lake emptied within minutes, and the busy
pilgrimage site of Kedarnath a mile down slope was buried by water, mud and
rock. Ramala barely escaped up the mountainside with his six children; as they
fled, they looked back to see thousands being swept to their deaths. With roads
and footpaths destroyed, they had to find their way home through the landslide-scoured
mountains. It took them six days.
Once they had to cross a river on a fallen tree trunk,
inches above the still-raging flood. Many people did not make the crossing, but
Ramala’s family did. This, he said, was the last of many tests they’d received
from Lord Shiva, who resides in these mountains and is worshiped at Kedarnath.
Ramala and his children had passed all the tests, and in this he found the hope
he expressed to us.
SC: By the time we arrived, Ramala had become
co-owner of a new startup! Before he’d run a tea shop in Kedarnath, but he had
no desire to return there. So with assistance from Adarsh Tribal, a young
outsider working for the aid group iVolunteer, Ramala and another man started a
soap-making business. Adarsh helped them get the necessary ingredients up to
the mountain. It was a low-tech operation, and their product was top-notch.
They used a vegetarian recipe—without tallow—and that was a selling point in a
pious Hindu region.
PC: The closest we reached to Kedarnath was the
village where the pilgrimage footpath begins, Gaurikund. The road having washed
away, we had to cling to rocks and tree roots for the final kilometer to get
even that far. We were talking to people who were playing carom in front of the
only open shop on the half-main-street—the other half had fallen into a chasm
along with a number of hotels. Our discussion paused when two outsiders came
along the street leading a pair of donkeys. One was wearing a well-tailored
wool jacket and the other was carrying a camera. They silently continued toward
the start of the pilgrims’ footpath—and returned ten minutes later. As they
passed the second time, the cameraman explained to a local that the visitor was
on a government fact-finding mission from New Delhi. He was supposed to report
on the state of things in Kedarnath, but he’d just gone to the trailhead so he
could have his photo taken on the back of a donkey with snowy peaks in the
background. Our hosts thought this was a fitting demonstration of the extent of
their government’s sympathy; Adarsh, who was interpreting, couldn’t even
translate the obscenities they used!
SC: The floods and landslides had not only cut
Kedarnath and Gaurikund off from the rest of the world; they had wreaked ruin
along the 100-mile road that leads up the valley from the plains.
PC: We experienced pure terror on the jeep ride
up and back, especially where the road had become a thin shelf hanging off the
mountain face and we could see right through potholes down to the valley floor.
SC: Before the flood, there’d been a burgeoning
new industry that hauled well-heeled pilgrims up the mountain in helicopters.
Like road-building, the construction of the 400 helipads serving that business
worsened the landslides, and almost all of the helipads were damaged beyond
usability. The tourism industry was crippled. Neither Adarsh nor the people in
Gaurikund nor anyone else said they could foresee any potential economic
activities that might provide the valley’s people the modest incomes they had
derived from tourism. That was the tragedy: the only route anyone could see to
local economic viability was to rebuild the very industry that had almost
destroyed them once and could well destroy them in the future. Now three years
after our visit, despite recurring monsoon floods, the 2015 earthquake in
Nepal, and raging forest fires in 2016, slow efforts to piece tourism back
together have been the only official response.
CG: Reading your book, I remembered the
collective disasters I've endured, which include Hurricane Hazel in 1954, the
2001 Los Alamos fire catastrophe and a rain-hail storm/flood in 2013 that laid
flat the campesino community in Bolivia where I was living.
Have you been through any such events?
SC: Well, I’m thankful that neither of us has
had the wealth of experience of disasters-in-progress that you have!
PC: I remember filling sandbags there during the
Great Midwest Flood of 1993, when I was nine. I remember the pizzas that
someone delivered to the crews filling sandbags. That was an early taste of
disaster solidarity.
SC: Pizza: the quintessential disaster food!
What we both can say, though, is that a tornado 80 years ago had a profound
impact on our family. Lucille Brewer Cox was my grandmother, Paul’s
great-grandmother, and she was among 203 people killed by the Gainesville,
Georgia tornado of April 6, 1936. It struck downtown in the middle of a
business day. Lucille was working in a department store on the town square. My
grandfather had a ground-coffee business just off the square. The tornado left
him buried under sacks of coffee beans, which protected him from falling
debris. He dragged himself out and ran over where Lucille's store had been, and
tragically, recognized her shoes protruding from the rubble.
The catastrophe struck a population that was struggling to
survive the Great Depression. So everyone in town went through severe times.
But it was also the height of New Deal optimism. President Roosevelt visited
twice, and his administration set out to make Gainesville an example of
government as a positive force. Reconstruction aid poured in, and the town
gained a lasting reputation as a vigorous, progressive city.
CG: The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton spoke of
a loss of belief in the future among survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and
as the nuclear arms race grew to threaten the entire planet, generalized this
response to include all of us. How do you feel now that you know intimately
what so many still living in non-disaster bubbles “know” only by watching
videos and reading newspapers? I ask this with a view toward the ultra-right
presidency of Donald Trump, with his troupe of oil executives and
climate-change naysayers.
PC: I don’t think we know that much more than
people watching videos and reading newspapers.
CG: I'm amazed to hear you say that.
PC: Reporters and videographers are good at
communicating pain, and disasters are among their most powerful material. If
someone can see all that pain and rationalize their way out of being affected,
I don’t think it’s because they haven’t seen something that we’ve seen.
We write about various forms of rationalization, and about
something like a loss of belief in the future, but that doesn’t always look the
way you expect. Take the idea of resilience—which has been spectacularly
popular in recent years. The resilience doctrine rationalizes that disaster is
inherent in everything, and that the most people can hope for is to get better
at bouncing back. At heart this attitude has little to promise for the future.
This discourse has been thoroughly critiqued, and we join
that critique. But the resilience doctrine is really the stuff of global
neoliberal governance, of U.N. conferences and development cooperation regimes.
You could say it’s the sort of “globalist” project that the Clintons were
accused of furthering.
The election happened in the middle of this conversation
with you, Chellis, and we felt it like an earthquake. Or maybe it was more like
a forest fire; the fuel had been building up for many years. Up until Election
Day, we thought our biggest worries were well-intentioned international
initiatives that would actually make life worse or be band-aids on the
catastrophes of climate change. We were concerned about an abundance of
optimism that says climatic disaster can be endured if our economies just keep
growing.
CG:Astonishing—and yet denial does help people feel
better.
PC: Now it feels like we were the ones in
denial! We wrote in the book that climate change optimism would be “what we
will have to worry about when we don’t have to worry about climate-change
denial anymore.” As it turns out, we still have to worry about it—and also
about resurgent zero-sum nationalism, triumphant oligarchies, and fascism. We
face a lack of regard for common humanity that’s based on forthright racism.
SC: We set out to share stories of communities
on the front lines of the ecological crisis in hopes of influencing US citizens
and our government’s policies. But far too many people don’t want to hear about
anyone’s predicament but their own—enough of them to make the November 8
political temper tantrum succeed. Those angry Americans had no regard for the
consequences to be suffered by vulnerable people and communities here or
elsewhere.
The rest of the world has pledged to carry the Paris climate
agreement forward without the U.S., but even if they do fulfill their emissions
commitments, under the agreement those commitments would still allow warming of
2.7 to 3.5 degrees Celsius, which in itself would trigger planet-wide
catastrophe. The past couple of years have shown that unforeseen political and
social change can come suddenly and dramatically, and that’s certainly what
we’re going to need now—but in the opposite direction.
PC: “Sudden and dramatic” are also the qualities that
make a disaster a disaster, as distinct from the general, slower trend of
climate change. And there is often a hope expressed that if a disaster comes
along that's just bad enough, it will shock societies into transformation.
Please understand that it’s not what we are hoping for: we are anti-disaster!
Besides, the scholarship on possible links between disasters and political
change is tentative about shocks causing positive change. If we can draw a
conclusion from our research, it is this: when positive change happens in the
aftermath of a disaster, it’s because the people affected are ready for change
and have the power to see it through.
SC: Until there is deep political and economic
transformation to roll back climate change, communities like the ones we wrote
about will keep paying the price. Remedies we put forward—like a fund to
protect people in the global South from the disastrous impact of the North’s
carbon dioxide—had no chance in the political world that existed even before
November 8. But we weren’t devising a political strategy; we were saying,
“Look, this is what it would take to deal with coming disasters. We have to
talk about what’s necessary, not just what politicians and corporations will
accept today.“
Likewise with emissions reduction. We have to insist that
the only way to head off climate catastrophe is to eliminate fossil-fuel
burning on a timetable much more rapid than Paris’s. Now, in this toxic
political atmosphere, many on our side will stop discussing that necessity and
seek small compromises instead.
CG: Is there anything that heartens you?
SC: Yes. I'm heartened by declarations from
cities and states around the world that commit to forging ahead on climate, no
matter what Washington does. That, and a lot of rebellious political activity,
will have to do for now.
__
De ALTERNET,
20/04/2017
