I was going to do a little comparison between the earthquake in my ancestral homeland of California and the one in Bam, Iran. (Please, no comments on the unfortunate onomatopoeia of "Bam.") But lo, Jonah Goldberg beat me to it.
The California earthquake was somewhat smaller than the Iranian one, but killed two people instead of 30,000+. The anti-globalizers on the Left want to ensure that these disasters happen from now until the end of time. Who cares about mothers wailing for their children, or thousands of homes wiped out in a few minutes of screaming, suffocating chaos? All these things must be offered up to the god of environmental primitivism.
What do I mean by "environmental primitivism"? The anti-globalizers think that poor non-Western people are cute, so they don't want them to change their charmingly backward ways, which are (they imagine) the way people lived before the nasty Industrial Revolution with its so-called "abundant food," "long lifespans," and "housing codes." They love that poor people don't consume much energy or natural resources, and they use "organic" methods of agriculture -- which aren't very helpful for crop yields, but they don't use evil pesticides or fertilizers. And harvesting by hand -- so darn cute!
Likewise, the stone-and-mud-brick houses of the Third World are environmentally friendly. They're also a deathtrap during a natural disaster. But not one tree was bulldozed to make room for them.
Wealth brings medical training, healthy food, and houses that won't crumple during an earthquake. Poverty kills, and therefore the misguided leftists who want to keep poor people poor are, in an indirect way, conspiring to make sure poor people keep dying in earthquakes, famines, and epidemics. Maybe if our brothers in the Third World promise to keep being cute somehow, the anti-globalizers would let them build their houses out of solid masonry and sheetrock?
Nice post, Eric. I admit that I have fallen prey, somewhat, to some of the leftist environmental opinions. I have always suspected though, as is the case with pretty much anything the left pushes, that I am not getting the whole story from them. Your post and Jonah's article have given me a new light on this. A Catholic Light? :)
God bless,
Tom
Richter scale measurements don't tell the whole story. The nature of the rock composition and strata at a site, the depth of the quake, etc., all have tremendous effect on the intensity at the surface.
Bam was an ancient living city more than 2000 years old. An archaeological treasure.
These are all factors to take into consideration, in addition to the third world factors you mention in your post.
Thanks for the compliment, Tom. Environmentalists should realize that wealth brings environmental awareness and the ability to conserve. That is, as living standards rise, people become increasingly dissatisfied with pollution, wanton destruction of land, etc. Someone worried about his next meal isn't going to worry about wiping out an endangered species.
Steve, surely there are many physical factors at work, but even though 35 million people live in California, only a few score have died from earthquakes in the last century. Hundreds of thousands have died from them in the Third World, and will continue to do so unless they are wealthy enough to build better homes.
When you see that the earthquake death rate is 1,000 times highter in Armenia, India, Iran, Mexico, and many other poor countries, you can reasonably conclude that the cause is something other than rock composition.
I am waithing for the Iranian Government to go after Emeril Lagasse who keeps using his phrase "Bam." I would imagine that they would want him to call his wrath down on another city instead; preferably somewhere in the bounds of the Great Satan.
I lived through a major quake (Northridge 1994) and saw the damage that can be wreaked on even a well built city with lots of resources. I drove home 17 miles from work about 9 hours after the quake - I saw people in tents on their front lawns, I saw the collapsed exterior of a major mall, pancaked apartment buildings, etc. When I heard the news about Bam, I could only imagine how much worse it must have been without the wealth, building codes, infrastructure etc. no FEMA, either.
It took close to 5 years to rebuild much of what was damaged in Los Angeles, and there are STILL some places that have been neither repaired or bulldozed. How long do you think it will take in Iran?
The reasons why tens of thousands died in Iraq and only 2 died in California are simple - building standards, and the wealth and the legal property structure that allows people to implement these building standards. Yeah, Bam is an old city, but most of the buildings folks lived in were not. They were simply built poorly and cheaply. The were made with concrete ceilings atop mud brick walls; several floors meant several layers of concrete on more mud brick walls. When the earthquake hit the walls disintegrated and the ceilings crushed the building's inhabitants. It is really that simple. Thank you, environmentalists and socialists (am I being redundant?) for yet another massive human tragedy.
Excellent post, excellent observations. An irony worth noting is that the modernization of farming, with pesticides, fertilizers, and such, enables the "first world" to grow sufficient food for its population and then some, in much smaller space than is necessary without these modern innovations. This means fewer trees cut, less land reserved for farming, per bushel of food grown. Contrast that with the hunting/gathering of the Kalahari, where the land has been damaged perhaps beyond repair by a lack of protection of natural resources.
You're right. It is, to some, all a matter of the "noble savage" being cute. How dehumanizing.
Christina, there are plenty of other examples you could add. The Indians hunted species to extinction, burned gigantic swaths of land to drive animals to killing grounds, and stampeded herds of buffalo off of cliffs. The problem is man and his inherent selfishness, not Western man per se.