I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!

These words, well known to most Australians, were penned over a century ago by poet Dorothea Mackellar at age 19. These days there is a scientific explanation for Australia’s infamous “droughts and flooding rains”.

It’s called the El Niño-La Niña effect – a weather phenomenon that affects other Pacific rim countries as well. El Niño brings the dry, hot weather and La Niña brings the rain – and plenty of it. It’s nothing new though scientists warn that climate change is likely to bring more extremes, making heat and droughts and floods more prevalent and more severe.

In December I moved back to Australia after nearly seven years living abroad, first in London and then San Francisco. For the past few weeks I’ve been glued to the 24-hour news channel watching the Queensland flood crisis unfold, and then further flooding in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. While I’m safe and dry in Sydney, like many Australians, I have family and friends in Queensland. Thankfully they are all fine but thousands of others were not as lucky. We are use to “flooding rains” every so often, but the flood crisis in Queensland has been truly epic.

Three-quarters of Queensland has been declared a flood disaster zone. That is no small area – Queensland has a land mass twice the size of Texas or five times the size of the United Kingdom. Throughout the state, entire townships have been wiped out as rivers burst their banks or torrential downpours brought flash floods. In the south-eastern corner, the central business district and many suburbs of Brisbane – home to two million people – were submerged last week in the city’s worst flood since the 1970s.

Queensland grows a lot of Australia’s food but much of the produce was washed away where it lay in the fields, or sat rotting on stranded trucks. The cleanup, described by Queensland Premier Anna Bligh as of “post-war proportions”, will cost billions and economists are saying the destruction of farms and mines and tourist facilities could wipe one full percentage point off the national GDP.

The environmental cost is also huge. Large numbers of wild animals lost their lives in the floods. The floods carried away precious top soil and mixed it up with human debris and toxic chemicals, which has been dumped into waterways flowing to the southern states or out to sea. Much of it has blanketed the delicate eco-system of Great Barrier Reef, threatening the health of the coral reefs and other marine life. To prevent future floods, the state government is considering building more levees and dams to protect townships in flood zones.

Yet as bad as it’s been, I’ve never felt more proud to be an Australian. The human response has been fantastic. As I watched footage of people huddling on the roofs of their houses or clustered in evacuation centers, I recalled scenes from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Queensland floods were collectively bigger but in contrast to the New Orleans experience, government has played its part perfectly.

The response of the emergency services was highly effective and citizens were kept informed with clear, up-to-date information. Bligh, the state premier, gave televised press conferences every two hours for days and was on top of her game. She didn’t give the fine-sounding motherhood statements so beloved by politicians, instead delivering hard details about what had happened, what was happening and what was likely to happen. She did so without notes and usually without referring questions to the State Emergency Service or the police because she knew what was going on. The federal government also stepped in early, contributing Australian defense personnel to the crisis management and clean-up effort, and Prime Minister Julia Gillard announcing emergency welfare payments to people and businesses affected by the floods.

What impressed me most was the community spirit. We didn’t see scenes of looting but instead footage of people helping one another. Strangers came together to help move property to higher ground before it was claimed by flood waters. They turned out in their hundreds to stack sandbags in front of homes and shops in an effort to stave off the floodwaters. Our former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, himself a Brisbane-ite, mucked in just like everyone else, wading through muddy flood waters with residents’ suitcases on his head.

It’s not all rosy, of course. The determination to rebuild towns on flood plains is misguided. We’re still clearing forest and mangroves. And the long history of flooding means that no one wants to look seriously about what climate scientists are telling us about our future. There were howls of outrage when Greens leader Bob Brown sensibly suggested some of the taxes on the super-profits of the mining industry be diverted to a fund to deal with future natural disasters. Despite all this, I feel that the Australian spirit rose to the occasion beautifully.

The outpouring of concern and offers of help from around the world has been moving. But the fact is that Australia is a first-world country with a well-prepared emergency response system and enough wealth to help our citizens cope with their losses and rebuild essential infrastructure. As terrible as the floods have been, it’s impressive that our death toll stands at just 20 people. (Of course my heart goes out to the families of those 20 people but it could have been so much worse). There’s no false pride when we say we can look after our own.

It’s Brazil that needs your help right now.

Image: Kingbob86, NASA Goddard Photo and Video

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We’re all familiar with the human and environmental tolls that immediately follow natural disasters. But there’s one aftereffect of hurricanes and earthquakes that often goes overlooked: rape. In Haiti, the aftershocks of the January 12th earthquake continue in Internally Displaced Person camps as men rape women. According to a story in Women’s eNews, aid workers in the Champ-de-Mars camp in Port-au-Prince – home to 50,000 internal refugees and pictured above – field reports of rape on a daily basis. And United Nations workers say that sexual violence has increased in recent months.

There is no concrete data on the number of rapes that have occurred since the earthquake. Haiti’s formal tracking system, created by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, was destroyed with the quake. But the uptick in rapes is a typical phenomenon in the wake of a natural disaster.

After Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, aid workers cited an increase in the number of rapes. Exact statistics, however, are difficult to come by because police officers refused to document rapes that happened outside of their jurisdictions. This meant that women raped in New Orleans and then evacuated to Houston could not report their assaults with Houston police. While aid workers scrambled to piece together a picture of post-Katrina sexual assault, one high-profile rape brought national attention to the epidemic. Charmaine Neville, daughter of musician Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers, recounted her rape on Baton Rouge television, saying that she and several other women were assaulted after they sought refuge on the roof of a school.

“I found some police officers. I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys who had come (into)… the neighborhood where we were, that were helping us to save people. But other men, and they came and they started raping women and… and they started killing them,” Neville said. “And I don’t know who these people were. I’m not going to tell you I know who they were because I don’t. But what I want people to understand is that if we had not been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn’t have happened.”

According to the New York City Alliance on Sexual Assault, rape following natural disasters can be explained by a number of reasons – some of them preventable. First there’s the fact that societal support mechanisms – social norms that stigmatize rape and crime, for instance – dissolve during crises. Then there’s the fact that psychological strain and deep-seated sexist attitudes lead some men to see unaccompanied women in refugee and IDP camps as public sexual property. But other causes may be more easily prevented. Refugee camps are often hastily constructed out of necessity. That means that large groups of unrelated people sleep in the same rooms, creating opportunities for sexual assault. Additionally, the lack of police officers in refugee camps means that crimes go unpunished.

In Haiti, the United Nations is addressing the rise in sexual violence by sending a unit of 130 female Bangladeshi soldiers to protect Haitian women and serve as their allies. While similar deployments have been successful in post-war Liberia, Haiti’s anti-rape workers remain skeptical that this will stem the tide of sexual assault. “What we need is security,” Marie Eramithe Delva, a co-coordinator at a Haitian grassroots female empowerment organization, told Women’s eNews. “Right now we have none and the rapes are happening not only at night, but in the daytime.”

Image: BBC World Service

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In the Book of Genesis, God punishes wicked humans by creating a flood to destroy the earth, leaving Noah to salvage biodiversity on his fabled ark. This narrative paradigm – men and women misbehave, God causes a natural disaster – may sound like the stuff of biblical legend. But ask some religious extremists and they’ll tell you that people – women in particular – are causing catastrophic events.

In 2005, a group called Columbia Christians for Life said that women caused Hurricane Katrina by having abortions, evidenced by the fact that satellite images of the storm resembled (if you squint a bit) a six-week-old fetus in utero. Earlier this year, Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson claimed that Haitians brought the devastating January earthquake upon themselves when their ancestors signed a (historically dubious) pact with the devil to liberate themselves from the French.

And now, a senior Iranian cleric named Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi says that Iranian women cause earthquakes when they wear immodest clothing. “Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes,” he said during a prayer sermon. “What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble? There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”

Inane and bigoted assertions like those above deserve to be reckoned with. But they shouldn’t be reckoned with with even more inanity, which is exactly what happened earlier this week when Jennifer McCreight of Blag Hag staged her much-hyped Boobquake by urging women the world over to harness the tectonic power of their ta-tas by wearing low-cut tops. With nearly 70,000 members participating, according to Boobquake’s Facebook page, the Monday event went off as planned – women bared their breasts, the earth remained still (save for a coincidental quake off the coast of Taiwan), and – as if there were any doubt – the cleric’s theory proved false.

So what’s the problem here? It’s not that McCreight and friends were wrong to confront the sexist statement. And for the record, there’s nothing suspect about women baring their souls or their bodies for a cause. The issue is that Boobquake devolved into a Girls Gone Wild-esque spectacle for the male gaze. According to Salon writer Beth Mann, who reviewed hundreds of comments on the Facebook page, “it seemed to be turning into something else, with many men chiming in, with their ‘show us your tits’ camera-ready attitude. Women on parade again… sigh.”

What’s more, Boobquake, while well-intentioned, didn’t do much to help out the cleric’s target audience – Iranian women. “By Iranian cleric standards, every day in America is boobquake.  And according to the original story, the cleric was chastising not women around the world for flashing a little boob or wearing tight jeans, but going after Iranian women who show a little hair or wear clothes that indicate that a shape might be visible underneath,” notes Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon. Instead of using this as an opportunity to learn about the lives of Iranian women, or to comment on the fact that blaming earthquakes on female immodesty is akin to blaming rape on female immodesty, Boobquake became a diversion.

Next time someone blames a natural disaster on human moral behavior, let’s think our response through a little more. And while we’re at it, how about a little information on the way that humans do contribute to natural disasters – not through moral or immoral activity but through pollution.

Image: Lawrence OP

The post Can Human Moral Failings Cause Natural Disasters? appeared first on EcoSalon.

It’s a classic feud predicated upon the idea I have my land, now you cannot have yours.

In this case, the land is the pristine white beach that stretches along the Florida Panhandle, a beach that has been restored over the past 30 years through a renourishment and restoration program.

Turns out homeowners with wonderful views of the green waters of the Gulf of Mexico have challenged the program to save eroding shorelines because the new strips of sand imported belong to the public and not to them.

According to the Washington Post, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the homeowners’ property rights had not been infringed upon. And now those homeowners have produced a new challenge, stating their constitutional rights and 100 years of common law have been ignored in support of the program.

The  U.S. Supreme Court will hear the argument next week, considering whether a decision by the judicial branch, rather than the executive or legislative, can create the kind of private property seizure forbidden by the Constitution. The court has yet to decide whether restoring storm-damaged beaches is an unconstitutional taking of private property.

“It’s one of the great open questions” in property law, said D. Benjamin Barros, a law professor at Widener University who edits a blog on such topics.

Most often, the money spent on Florida’s beach renourishment and restoration program has gone to coastline ravaged by erosion and hurricanes. For example, Destin and Walton County spent about $22 million in 2006 to restore about six miles of beach in western Walton County and in the city. In he past, homeowners have appreciated the assistance and have filed no claims.

Main Image: Just Jennifer

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