The death toll from yesterday’s earthquake in eastern Pakistan already stands at “more than 20,000 people” and is expected to rise. This IRIN story says:
- About 19,400 people were killed and more than 42,000 hurt in Pakistan, Reuters quoted interior minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, as saying, with the divided territory of Kashmir and its capital Muzaffarabad worst hit. But the communications minister for Pakistani Kashmir, Tariq Farooq, said the toll there alone could reach 30,000 as the focus so far had been only on the main towns, not mountain villages. At least another 600 people died in the Indian side of Kashmir, where many mud and stone houses were buried by landslides.
On Tuesday, torrential rains and mudslides hit Central America, leaving at least 640 people dead. With 338 people still listed as “missing” in Guatemala alone, it seems very likely the regionwide death toll there will rise above 1,000.
It seems clear to, from my 23 years living in the US, that the Gulf of Mexico storm systems have been getting fiercer in recent years. Central America already got hit very badly back in May… and then we had Katrina and Rita… In September 2004, and September 2003 there were previous bad hurricane systems in the Gulf of Mexico…
And it is less than a year since the South Asian tsunami…
Can’t we all ask our political leaders to, please, take a few deep breaths and then start focusing on protecting humankind from these kinds of disasters, and from the others like avian flu that might be “waiting in the wings”, instead of continuing to wage wars and foment tensions that may well lead to the waging of wars in the future?
Of course, some of the worse natural disasters will always continue to have significant death tolls. But the death tolls from all disasters can be greatly reduced by taking steps like using suitable building methods, enforcing of building codes, installation of early warning systems, planning and implementation of evacuation schemes– and also, steps like long-term ecological planning that could reverse the effects of decades of deforestation in a place like Central America, and could slow down and then hopefully also reverse the effects of global warming.
You could say that an event like the mud-slides that have killed so many this past week in Guatemala– or even, the ferocity of many of the storm-systems now coming out of the Gulf of Mexico– is a combination of a natural and a man-made disaster.
And how about the continuing (and largely avoidable) death toll from disease and malnourishment in vast swathes of Africa: is that the result of “natural” or “man-made” factors? Well, however you choose to describe these phenomena, there are known human actions that could be taken, that would massively reduce the numbers of those deaths… So in a sense, if the world– we, us, and primarily the well-resourced portion of humanity– does not take those steps, then we must bear some responsibility for the deaths of those children, women, and men.
Instead of which… There are George Bush and Tony Blair waging war and causing multiple new cascades of death and disaster in Iraq… there’s Vladimir Putin waging war in Chechnya, and the Chinese playing potentially escalatory war-games around Taiwan… Talk about man-made disasters!
Enough! Those four leaderships make up 80% of the “Permanent Five” who hold the fate of humankind in their hands. (And the French have done plenty of bad things in their time, too.)
So okay, the P-5, when are you going to get your collective act together, declare a moratorium on your own new arms acquisitions, on your transfers of arms to other parties, and on you continued pursuit of war? When are you going to declare a worldwide humanitarian ceasefire, and call the nations of the world together to discuss:
- 1. The resolution of all outstanding conflicts by nonviolent means, and
2. The mobilization of the resources of all the nations to end global poverty and strengthen the resilience of all communities worldwide to the ever-stalking ghosts of hunger, disease, ecological disaster, and war.
It so easily could be done. All it would take is a slight shift of mindset… “An injury to one is an injury to all”– but on a truly global scale.
Helena,
You are completely right, but I fear it won’t happen. For instance, many scientists see the ecological threat as the greatest danger facing humanity, and we should change the way we do things simply to survive; but people tent to worry about things like the price of oil. If we really would do what needs to be done in order to avert disaster we would have to change our attitude towards the economy and a lot of other things we take for granted completely.
we are in grave danger. But in the West we don’t really talk about it; the only thing we really talk about is making money and selling stuff. The television has only one message to the public: buy, buy, buy! The scientists have a completely different message, but aren’t listened to.
So the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (a study by 1300 scientists, coordinated by the UN, which confirmed the feared deterioration of the earth’s capacity to sustain us), was largely ignored (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4563499.stm), as was the warning of 11 of the most prestigious scientific academies in june this year:
“An unprecedented joint statement issued by the leading scientific academies of the world has called on the G8 governments to take urgent action to avert a global catastrophe caused by climate change.
The national academies of science for all the G8 countries, along with those of Brazil, India and China, have warned that governments must no longer procrastinate on what is widely seen as the greatest danger facing humanity” (http://mambo.agrnews.rack2.purplecat.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=489&Itemid=70)
We should, among much more, do things like limiting the use of cars and airplanes. I don’t see us doing that. We rather deny our own children a future (which is exactly what we are doing).