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Today I was chatting with a British colleague, Justin Sharpe, about disaster risk reduction public education. He lamented the low level of public awareness about natural hazard risk, but also the lack of public action when that risk is known.
The empirical research shows that natural hazard risks are often perceived as less critical than other more daily hazards. Crime and pollution, for example, have immediate visible signals. Yet, even when people live in relatively high risk areas like California, and even when preventative measures are relatively simple, people put off disaster preparation.
Justin Sharpe pointed out that the research he read suggested that being married and having children leads to greater preventative action. Living in a place of high risk has the opposite effect. It leads to a sort of risk tolerance calibration where people become less likely to take action the longer they live in a place. These trends certainly seem to have been true in Turkey and New Orleans, where I have worked previously.
The question Justin posed to me, and which I now send out as a challenge/suggestion is this:
Why haven't Disaster Risk Reduction practitioners targeted 'new' families through ante and neo-natal groups, for instance, showing how simple adjustments can protect both them and their young family?
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Targeting New Families for DRR
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Monday, March 3, 2008
Local food systems
I just finished a fascinating autobiographical account of a young BC couple that decides to eat only food produced within 100 miles of their home for a year. The book, Plenty by by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon, suggests what locally-based, resilient communities of the future may look like.
The authors discover that most of the items on the shelves of their neighborhood grocery stores and co-ops are off limits. However, they also slowly come to appreciate the utter bounty that does surround them. They learn to eat seasonally, can and store for the winter but they also discover that they enjoy a more varied diet and that the tastes of their new diet are profoundly better than before.
Living in the region where this experiment commenced, the chapters that described past and present ecological abundance in our temperate "rain forest" are particularly interesting. Finishing the book, however, I now hunger for not only for some fresh local food, but for a stronger analysis of this and similar movements towards regional food systems.
Being a first person narrative, the book focused on the logistics and emotions of a 100 mile diet. The authors do not spend much space debating the merits or short comings of various local and regional food systems approaches. One study they do mention indicated that it was more energy efficient to ship fresh food from New Zealand to British eaters than to get the same food to them from the English countryside. Inefficiencies and waste are apparently replete in the local British farms.
I completely agree with the authors that this suggests that the British system needs improvement (not that the trans-global food system is necessarily better). But still, there are questions that need deeper discussion. Is the trans-global trade more energy efficient because regional markets try to replicate what can be grown better elsewhere? What does the balance sheet look like when comparing a standard no-season trans-global diet with a local, seasonal diet?
And how to include the energy costs that the authors induced during their 100 mile diet? One of the reasons they put forth for attempting a 100 year diet is that it was ecologically unconscionable and wasteful to have fresh food, on average, travel 1500 miles to their plate. Yet, they seems to also log many miles in their car that year driving out to local farms for the small amounts needed to sustain two people. The authors learned much in the process and came to emotionally connect with their food suppliers. This is important and cannot be discounted, but it was likely also a lot less energy efficient than a more centralized distribution system (certainly a centralized, regional distribution system).
They also did not address the politics of food distribution. While this made the book less provincial, I just happened to read a New York Times op-ed, entitled My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables) by Jack Hedin, the day after completing Plenty. The op-ed discusses how federal farm subsidies penalize a farmer who switches from soybean, rice, wheat, or cotton to fruits and vegetables in order to meet rising demands for local fresh produce. The piece is eye-opening, and suggests that there is a lot more politics to a wider adoption of a local foods diet (100 miles or not), than appears.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The future of flooding
Today, Alex Prud'homme wrote an interesting opinion piece in the New York Times entitled There Will Be Floods. The piece discusses the likely increases in levee failure. As Pred'homme states, levees fail and reach their limit - rodents and tree roots, land subsidence and rising water and trigger events like earthquakes.
The US Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees many of the nations levees, has suffered budget losses for decades. This, as more development occurs behind levees and deterioration of existing levees grows. The Corps has listed 122 levees as at risk of failure, 19 of which are in Washington State. While the Netherlands has moved towards levees that protect against a 1 in 10,000 year event, many of our levees do not even meet the 1 in 100 year flood event protection criteria. With this rather depressing statistics, Prud'homme argues that the situation may be an opportunity to work towards a greener flood management system, one that combines current levees construction and dredging with wetlands and land use restrictions.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Corn has duped us again
I found this video of Michael Pollan on the TED.com lecture series. Here he argues that perhaps humans aren't the pinnacle of evolution, but just one species duped by another into fertilizing and spreading another. It's a humorous but fascinating view of ecological systems - one that he argues may help us all address current and future food security crises.
The approach is also useful for considering other natural hazards. Much flood mitigation debate is stuck in the "nature wins, we loose" or vise versa. Lewis county commentaries on the recent December flooding often pit environmental policies for preserving stream ecological systems for salmon habitat against flood victims, arguing that debris buildup and dredging restrictions causes more extensive flooding. Others arguments for why flooding occurred pit marshland protection against developers. What we need to look for is solutions enhance human and non-human system interactions.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
businesses in Centralia and Chehalis
Over the last week, I have been talking with local business association leaders and economic development officers in Chehalis and Centralia, two towns heavily impacted in the December flooding that closed Interstate 5 for 4 days.
Concerns are starting to mount. Directly after the flood waters receded, local businesses were able to gut and clean out their businesses. Many of them had a flood of support from friends, families, and even their clients. This represents the best of what small towns and dense social networks have to offer. It offered bright hopes of recovery for local businesses.
Two and a half months after the flood, association leaders and the economic development officers say that things are bleaker. Taxes are being filed and bills are coming in. Many younger businesses cannot apply for SBA loans. Others are concerned about getting further into debt. The downtown business association president says most businesses are reporting a loss of sales of about 35% for the 2007 year. This area was not hit by the flood directly. But with many local clients devastated by the flood, Christmas sales were minimal. Others didn't come shopping in the city, assuming everything was closed. A few businesses are closing.
There is also a need to retain manufacturing and outwardly oriented businesses. Businesses that have a non-local client base may find that it is easier to start over in a less risky location. A location that hasn't had 3 floods in the last 17 years...
The towns are struggling, as all cities do after a disaster. IGCR is going to be working with them to survey the businesses. We all want to try and learn what policies, incentives, education or support would help these cities bounce back from this event. The goal, however, needs to be bouncing back in a way that reduces future flood risks. Like elsewhere in the world, disasters wipe out (unsustainable) development. These events also undermine the resources a city has for moving towards sustainable planning and development.
Getting out of that negative feedback loop is going to be Centralia and Chehalis' grand challenge in the years ahead.
Monday, February 4, 2008
The Future of Food
Last week, I participated in a panel discussion on the "Future of Food " at Western Washington University (contact me for copies). I was greatly encouraged that we can well easily have a 20 mile diet in this county! A diet that includes healthy fats! In a recent review of Performance without Pain: A Step-by-Step Nutritional Program for Healing Pain, Inflammation and Chronic Ailments in Musicians, Athletes, Dancers…and Everyone Else I wrote of the extensive work on refined grains and sweeteners, and refined and pasteurized food products in general and how such relates to degenerative diseases. King Corn (see http://www.kingcorn.net/) provides more information on "metabolic disease" and the "plague of corn" (in the word of nutritionist Daphne Roe) in this country. Such books and films tell the sad story of how lack of quality fats (including saturated fats from farm-fresh dairy and pasture-fed meat animals, and healthy doses of high-nutrient cod liver oils) and an overdependence on all refined foods, including sugar, has resulted in epidemics of obesity and other diseases. Basically, this is all a call for nutritional ecology -- establish a healthy digestive ecosystem and follow a nutrient-dense diet, guided by the maxim “It’s not what you eat, it’s what you absorb!” Both on the screen, and off.
Gigi Berardi