New Orleans and the Consequences of Consumption without Consequences

For as awful as the disaster in New Orleans is, and it is of course truly terrible, I am having a little bit of a hard time feeling as bad for the fate of that city as I am for Gulfport and Biloxi. Of course, the plight of the impoverished trying to survive in New Orleans is saddening and awful. Those latter two cities are directly on the Gulf Coast but are in reasonable places for people to live. There is no good reason to have a city like New Orleans that is below sea level and in the direct line of hurricanes. To me, this is the primary example in my lifetime (so far) of how Americans blind themselves to nature and believe that technology will protect them from its ravages. Scientists have predicted such a disaster for New Orleans for decades. These predictions have become more dire in recent years as the enormous damage to the bayous and the Mississippi Delta from flood control and the oil industry has become evident. Since the bayous are starved of the fresh sediment they need to survive, they have rapidly dissipated and have returned to the sea, thus eroding New Orleans' buffer from the strongest storms.

To me, this is the perfect example of the idea of consumption without consequences, which American subscribe to more than they do to low taxes and Christianity. And like those other two ideas, consumption without consequences has serious negative consequences. We simply cannot expect to live in a place like New Orleans without consequences. Everyone is saying that they will rebuild--why? What good is it going to do to rebuild a city that will likely be destroyed again in the next 50 years as another result of our consumption without consequences, global warming, leads to more and stronger hurricanes that make all the cities along the Gulf of Mexico vulnerable to complete destruction, not to mention rising sea levels from the melting ice caps?

But it's not just living in a dangerous city below sea level that reflects our ideas of consumption without consequences. For instance, at what price will Americans stop driving so damn much? And I include myself too. I drive a car that gets around 38mpg so the price of gas hasn't hit me as hard as it has other people. And I'm a little glad I guess to be pumping less carbon monoxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere than other people, at least per mile. But even me, when will I adjust my schedule so I take the bus into Los Alamos twice a week rather than drive? I am a little stuck on driving to my class in Albuquerque twice a week--even if there was a bus service, it wouldn't run at a time where I could get home after my night class. When will New Mexicans demand mass transit between Albuquerque and Santa Fe? Ever? When will people give up their gas guzzlers? When, if ever, will people realize that their driving is causing more of the kind of storms that destroyed New Orleans? And when they do realize this, like myself, when will they change their lifestyle to do their part to stop it from getting worse?

Living in the West, this consumption without consequences has its own unique issues. Of course we are not going to be hit by hurricanes. And living at 7000 feet I'm probably not going to be flooded out of my house by rising sea levels. But we do consume water at an enormous rate. I know of people who know how little water there is for new housing developments, but move there anywhere figuring that the government won't let them die of thirst. Maybe they're right. But at some point, we are going to have to face the reckoning of our water consumption. Because with all the people moving to Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, and with the likelihood of extended droughts due to global warming, at some point in the not too distant future, we are just going to run out of water. There simply will be no more water. All the damming of rivers, all the pumping of aquifers, all the pipelines will not provide the water we need to survive. Will it take that long for us to realize that our consumption of natural resources has real consequences? I hav e to say yes it will. A new development has been announced for the area west of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, Albuquerque's unfortunate and soulless exurb. This Rio West, the brainchild of a Phoenix-area developer (a good sign if there ever was one) could hold up to 75,000 people. Where is that water going to come from?

And when will the winds of silence blow over the ruins of southwestern cities like they are blowing over the waters of New Orleans right now?