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09/15/2005:

"Katrina Havoc Reflects the New America"

by Bill McKibben
...Over and over in the last few weeks, people have said that the scenes from the convention center, the highway overpasses and the other suddenly infamous Crescent City venues didn't "look like America," that they seemed instead to be straight from the Third World. That was almost literally accurate, for poor, black New Orleans (whose life had never previously been of any interest to the larger public) is not so different from other poor and black parts of the world. Its infant mortality and life expectancy rates, its educational achievement statistics mirror scores of African and Latin American enclaves.

But it was accurate in another way, too, one full of portent for the future.

A decade ago, environmental researcher Norman Myers began trying to add up the number of people at risk of losing their homes from global warming. He looked at all the obvious places - coastal China, India, Bangladesh, the tiny island states of the Pacific and Indian oceans, the Nile delta, Mozambique, on and on - and predicted that by 2050 it was entirely possible that 150 million people could be "environmental refugees," forced from their homes by rising waters. That's more than the number of political refugees sent scurrying by the bloody century we've just endured.

Try to imagine, that is, the chaos that attends busing 15,000 people from one football stadium to another in the richest nation on Earth, and then multiply it by four orders of magnitude and re-situate your thoughts in the poorest nations on Earth.

And then try to imagine doing it over and over again - probably without the buses.
commondreams.org