[extropy-chat] re: news in perspective

Mike Lorrey mlorrey at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 1 23:26:23 UTC 2005



--- BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> Twice in eight months, Nature has given Man a brutal lesson about the
> cost of disrespect. Last December 26, beachfront resorts in Thailand
> were swept away by a tsunami that could have been tamed if developers
> had not destroyed coral reefs and ripped up mangroves, a natural
> bulwark against killer waves.
> 
> On August 29, Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, a city built
> below sealevel, sustained by a complex system of dams and whose
> buffer
> against storm surges, the wetlands of the Mississippi Delta, had been
> eroded by reckless development.
> 
> <snip>
> ---------------------------------
> 
> Rather than blame everything (even bad weather!) on those evil left
> wing pinko communists, it looks to me as though rampant free market
> developers are far more to blame. Making as much money as they can
> while destroying 'the commons'.

NO didn't get flooded from the delta side, they were flooded from Lake
Ponchartrain, which has an open outlet to the sea through which the
storm surge came. It was environmentalist opposition to building a
conventional hurricane barrier, like Dutch engineers have advised for
years, that was the cause. Claims about wetlands protecting NO are only
true in that the storm surge did not come from the delta side of town,
it came from lakeside, upon which NO has always been on the shoreline of.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
Founder, Constitution Park Foundation:
http://constitutionpark.blogspot.com
Personal/political blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com


		
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