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| Other Environmental Imbalances The crowding and poor sanitary conditions that accompanied the growth of Latin American cities in the late nineteenth century caused air pollution and a diminished water supply and provided the ideal conditions for the growth of respiratory and digestive illnesses. As human population densities increased, diseases such as malaria and yellow fever were spread more rapidly. In addition, agriculture itself can create environmental imbalances because of the way humans have reordered the natural world to satisfy their own desires. Producing large quantities of crops, for example banana plantations, necessitates reorganizing nature into very homogenous, thus very simple, ecosystems. Planters argued that it was economically rational to make the crop as standard as possible. These plants are not just food for humans, however, but food for all types of other living things, such as fungi and insects. Agricultural ecosystems become extremely vulnerable to disease because the large number of identical host plants makes it very easy for the disease to spread and very difficult to control. Furthermore, attempts to breed strains of plants that are immune to certain diseases can often cause mutations of the disease that are stronger and more resistant to pesticides. As an economy is given over entirely to one crop, anything that threatens that crop threatens the economy. If the crops fail, at the very best the economy can fail, and at the worst, people can starve. These diseases would find it more difficult to survive and spread on smaller plots or in mixed agriculture. And for crops such as coffee or cacao that take years to mature, individuals and communities often don’t have the resources to sustain themselves and their families until the next crop cycle if a blight strikes. Multinational companies began a system of geographical diversification to insulate themselves from a dependency on one community for their crops. The United Fruit Company, for example, had plantations in Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, and the northern coast of Colombia. As banana diseases became rampant in Latin America, the company could minimize its losses. If the Costa Rican plantations got hit, the company would buy more bananas from Colombia, playing geographical chess. While minimizing the impact on the company, this practice did nothing to assist the individuals and communities when a blight struck. Banana graveyards, as they were called in the 1930s, sprung up where the banana crop failed and as a result, the society also failed. A Hope for the Future The natural world actively participates in the historical process. Nature is not merely something that people act upon, nor is it simply a cultural construction, although at times it can be each of these. Society and nature are interlocking parts of a whole, whose relationship changes over time. The choices we make as societies involve tradeoffs; there are hazards to the way we choose to organize nature. By studying the history of natural disasters, we can begin to view them as social events. As we view the natural problems that confronted Latin American export agriculture we see them not simply as natural problems but as the consequences, at least in part, of the way people chose to organize the natural world. In particular, we see how they chose to organize the natural world to feed the global markets with crops such as sugar, bananas, and coffee. In addition, when we look at the social consequences of these natural disasters we see that they have unequal social impact. What was a minor inconvenience for United Fruit Company in Boston was a major disaster for a banana farmer in rural Costa Rica. Wealthy landowners with good irrigation systems and the best seed can often withstand droughts, early frost, hailstorms, and other natural events. On the other hand, bad weather had fatal effects on small landholders with fewer resources. The destruction of the Brazilian rain forest has as much or more to do with problems of urban poverty in Brazil than it does with foreign companies manipulating the economy, causing the destruction of the environment. Government programs to resettle the poor and to give them land have led to the destruction of countless acres of the rain forest. It also placed an additional strain on an already environmentally fragile area. And, the patchwork of social and political policies of the last 30 or 40 years have not generated any lasting agriculture. The solution is much more complex: to solve the environmental problems one must solve the problem of urban poverty. Here is yet another example that the natural process cannot be separated from the social and political process. Through his research, McCook wants to contribute to determining how natural disasters have happened and why some communities or regions are much more severely impacted—by loss of life and destruction of property—than others. He hopes this will open up options in planning to prevent these disasters from causing mass destruction and tremendous loss of life in the future. This planning will require a paradigm shift—an acknowledgement that natural disasters are not human failures to control nature. It will require a shift in thinking so that power is viewed as more than the capacity to withstand or resist natural disasters, but as the ability to reduce or prevent the impact these disasters have on human lives and property through smart planning. McCook sees the beginning of such a shift. Individuals and communities are acknowledging, for example, that if an area is prone to flooding, it should not be built upon. We can see the beginning of this shift closer to home, in Manville, NJ. Hit hard by Hurricane Floyd in September 1999, 250 homeowners and several business owners in the town’s flood plain have asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to buy them out and level their homes or businesses. Others simply have moved their businesses to new locations. While it is unlikely that all of these owners will be bought out by FEMA, it does represent a shift in thinking. Once, businesses and homeowners would have faulted the town or the government for not preventing the flood. Now, many are beginning to believe that these floods are inevitable—that man simply cannot always control nature. At the very least, Manville is taking a serious look at its flooding problems to determine ways to minimize or prevent such devastation in the future. Admittedly, the choices are difficult, particularly in light of one of the mantras of globalization: efficiency. Efficiency, if cast only in terms of dollars and cents, is precisely the mentality that has led to many of the natural and social disasters of the long nineteenth century—from 1780 to 1920—which was similarly an age of globalization and free trade. If we are going to globalize in an intelligent way, we need to look beyond simple economic efficiency to consider the natural and social implications of the choices we make. Author’s Note: Much information for this article was gathered from the research of Stuart McCook. |
