In the rush to fix blame, the most important lessons of the two major natural disasters to strike in the past year, the Asian tsunami and hurricane Katrina, are being ignored. Unless the real lessons are finally given the attention they deserve, we will continue on the same perilous course. It will already be too late in planning for the next disaster.

First and foremost, the hackneyed distinction between “natural” and “human-caused” crises is not only seriously out-of-date, but it is completely bankrupt. It no longer serves any useful purpose. At best, it is an anachronism, a carryover from a simpler age. At worst, it is major contributor to the crises we face because it delays action until they are seriously out of control and hence it is too late to do anything effective.

Both the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina should teach us that there is now a seamless connection between “natural” and “human-caused” crises. As sure as night follows day, one inevitably follows the other. Indeed, the time between them has essentially shrunk to zero. The initial natural crisis and the resulting human-caused crises are so interconnected that they can no longer be viewed as two separate events but rather as two overlapping phases of the same phenomenon.

For example, consider the 6 plus magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey a few years ago. On its face, it was a case of a pure natural disaster. However, because of the substandard construction of high-rise apartment buildings, it quickly turned into a human-caused crisis. As the result of the earthquake, a number of apartment buildings collapsed killing hundreds of poor people. (It is always the poorest of the poor that are affected the most.) Investigations afterwards revealed that government officials had accepted bribes from shady contractors.

As a result, government officials closed their eyes to the faulty construction. The buildings were so poorly built that the supporting walls were compared to cardboard.

The earthquake may have been the initiating natural disaster, but its effects wouldn’t have been as devastating had it not been for the underlying human caused crisis waiting to happen. The point is that the human-caused crisis actually preceded the natural one.

> Read the complete article