“Isn’t that something?” Morty says. “Middle of a drought and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.”

Not just in L.A., of course. All of California has a talent for catastrophic paradox—as this winter is reminding us.

Even as we suffer under a dangerous drought and tough water restrictions, atmospheric rivers flood our communities, force neighborhoods to evacuate, and contribute to dozens of deaths.

We are a state with surpassing wealth, and one of the nation’s highest poverty rates. We are packed with people—nearly 40 million—and yet we battle an epidemic of loneliness. We all but invented the suburban ideal of the American home, and yet we can’t house our people.

Our sunny weather—gorgeous—makes us feel alive, but ultimately delivers darkness. It overheats and burns, and with our winds, destroys our precious landscapes, our homes, and our dreams.

The greatest paradox of all, in fact, lies in California’s beauty. One of the world’s most breathtaking places also produces extreme ugliness.

The latest storms and floods targeted our most stunning sites. Overflowing rivers turned the Monterey Peninsula into an island. Lightning struck the Golden Gate Bridge. Santa Barbara County ordered Harry and Meg and Oprah and all the beautiful people in Montecito to evacuate, before their magazine-beautiful homes could slide down toward the sea.

The logic of this place is hard to accept. But here it is:

There is nothing so dangerous as beauty.

And there is nothing so beautiful as California.

This might be the most dangerous place on earth.

Show me something beautiful in California, and I’ll show you a killer. Those coastal waves you can surf for hours? They’ll swallow you whole. The cliffs from which you watch the waves? They are collapsing. The forest-carpeted mountains we love to explore? Just so much fuel for the next firestorm.

Southern Californians love to brag that they can surf in the morning and ski in the afternoon. That’s true, but they also can flee the floods of the morning tide in Newport Beach at breakfast, and escape fires on the hiking trails of the San Bernardino mountains by lunch.

The reality is that the beauty that makes it great to live here also makes it hard to live here. And this is a human condition, not just a California one. “Life can be magnificent and overwhelming—that is the whole tragedy,” Albert Camus observed. “Without beauty, love or danger it would almost be easy to live.”

The greatest wisdom Californians might acquire is a distrust of beauty. The wisest among us don’t marry actors. They don’t buy houses on hillsides.

And they learn not to trust their eyes. Because beauty attracts us to dangers, and also distracts us from them, it makes us miss big problems. In my reporting across California, I’ve developed a trick when I’m in an interesting place, which (more likely than not) is also beautiful. I close my eyes, and just try to listen—to nature, or to what people are saying. You end up learning more that way.

In a time of deadly tragedy in California—and when is it not such a time?—it can be considered insensitive to think about all the risks we take by living here. It can sound as though as you are forgetting, or even blaming, the human victims of our floods, our fires, our quakes, and, yes, our beauty.

But those offended by such talk are as much at risk as the rest of us, and need the warning.  Perhaps there should be some sort of disclosure form that you sign, upon entering California. “I hereby acknowledge,” the form might say, “that I am living in a film noir. I will not trust that glorious mountain peak I want to scale, the waves crashing on the beach, or the alluring blonde.”

Of course, acknowledging dangers can’t protect us from all of them. And behind the carnage of our catastrophes is a real and enduring California question: Should we be here at all?

It’s worth remembering that Robinson Jeffers, perhaps the emblematic 20^th century poet of California, lived amidst Carmel’s splendor—and concluded that the presence of humans here (and throughout the planet) was the real problem. He advised us all, his fellow Californians included, “not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.”

“The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself,” Jeffers also wrote. “The heartbreaking beauty will remain when there is no heart to break for it.”

You may love California and all its rocks and valleys and waterways and gorgeousness. But the beauty won’t love you back, much less offer you any sympathies.

Not even over your dead body.

The post California’s Beauty Doesn’t Love You Back appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As a sociologist who studies disasters, I wasn’t surprised. I study the role that communities play in avoiding, preparing, responding to, and recovering from disasters. This view holds that while natural hazards are common, they become disasters due to the social conditions in which they happen.

So if a hurricane strikes a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, that’s not considered a disaster. But when a hurricane hits an island that has been in crisis for many years, as was the case in Puerto Rico, the disaster can be very large.

Hurricane Maria lifted the veil on the “broken system” governing everyday life on the island. One common theme in the many conversations I have had with people in Puerto Rico is that Hurricane Maria did not create these conditions. These were the result of years of a weak economy, a political system with little power, underinvestment in infrastructure, and fiscal mismanagement.

This system, broken as it is, has proven to be resilient. In other words: While disasters often provide an opportunity for communities to confront their social and economic realities, it doesn’t always happen that way. There’s no reason to assume that pre-disaster conditions are going to magically be erased after a catastrophic event like a hurricane. They certainly weren’t in Puerto Rico.

One could argue that the current disaster has been centuries in the making. Discovered by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1493, Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony for almost 400 years, until it became a territory of the United States after the Spanish-American War. Between 1898 and 1948, Puerto Rican governors were appointed, at first by the U.S. military and later by U.S. presidents with some congressional oversight. It was not until 1948 that Puerto Ricans could elect their own governor. To this day, although they are U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans residing in Puerto Rico cannot vote in presidential elections.

In the mid-1940s, Governor Luis Muñoz Marín developed Operation Bootstrap to modernize Puerto Rico from an agricultural economy into an industrial one—using federal funding to increase manufacturing. This accelerated the economic prospects of the island, but it also led to massive urban developments and an economic system that was fundamentally dependent on federal resources.

By 2016, the government was facing a financial crisis with an outstanding debt of more than $70 billion. Fiscal mismanagement, political pandering, corruption, and nepotism created an ongoing financial and economic crisis that led to a 7 percent population loss from 2010 to 2015, which continues to this day. While the winds of Hurricane Maria eventually stopped, the fury of the financial crisis still pounds the island.

The big challenge for Puerto Rico is how to overcome the realities that Maria revealed. The task is not only how to help the island recover from the current crisis, but how to transform the system so that residents avoid the trap of returning to the broken system that led to the catastrophe in the first place.

Indeed, the experiences of many with whom I spoke suggest that certain issues of the “broken system” manifested themselves before, during, and after the storm. Among them: emergency management plans that were not followed (if they were ever completed, practiced, or implemented); a broken emergency communication system that prevented timely and efficient response by the central government; no-bid contracts; inadequate distribution of supplies at the ports; and the very slow federal response.

The hurricane also revealed the resilient spirit of the Puerto Rican communities, many of which responded quickly during and after the storm. There are countless stories of neighbors checking on the welfare of others, of people finding ways to communicate, and of individuals cooperating to remove debris and get supplies to people when no other services were available.

Another resource has been the Puerto Rican diaspora, which mobilized to get supplies and bring attention to conditions on the island. There are approximately 5.1 million Puerto Ricans living stateside that are concerned about the future of the island and want to be part of the solution. The Puerto Rican diaspora, particularly in Florida, has the political power to hold the federal government responsible for failures in the response to the disaster.

Courting the Puerto Rican electorate has become an essential campaign strategy for political candidates. Nonetheless, much of the courting will likely dissipate if Puerto Ricans do not vote or get involved in the political process. The diaspora also has more financial resources to take on temporary assistance to family members moving stateside looking for better opportunities. However, the diaspora is ideologically divided, particularly over the political status of the island of Puerto Rico, and these divisions have prevented the diaspora from really imposing its considerable power on issues facing the island.

There is no doubt that federal resources are important to the recovery of the island in the wake of the ongoing financial crisis. And the island will certainly be dependent upon the federal government to rebuild the physical structure of the island, particularly its power grid.

Still, it’s a myth that communities without financial resources are helpless in the face of disasters—they still have the capacity to adapt. Social resources are extremely important in disasters. For instance, in my research, I explored how a community of farmworkers in Central Florida was able to build a food shelter and a community emergency plan with little to no financial resources.

Thus, for the people of Puerto Rico, recovery will imply more than financial resources. It will require a new way of thinking, a new beginning driven by innovative ideas to account for the multitude of problems the island is facing. It will require uncomfortable and necessary discussions on past practices that allowed the island to reach this point. In all, it will require a dramatic shift from a dependent path to one that accounts for the realities of being an island nation with economic challenges but enormous social and human capital resources.

Puerto Rico faces a long recovery. While the hurricane was one of the worst disasters to strike the island, not transforming the seemingly resilient “broken system” will have lasting consequences for its future. This is a moment when Puerto Rico can make a break with the past, and move forward in ways that enable all of its communities to mitigate, prepare, respond, and recover from future hurricanes and threats.

The post Hurricane Maria ‘Lifted the Veil’ on Puerto Rico’s Broken System appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I visited, six months after Maria, the roadside debris still hadn’t been removed. Electric lines drooped from trees or lay abandoned on the shoulder. Tattered blue tarps served as makeshift roofs. Other houses stood abandoned, missing doors and windows. Power to many rural areas hadn’t been restored, which meant that thousands of people were living without refrigerators and other necessities that we take for granted. Many people had left the island to escape these conditions, and a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that several thousand people may have died because of the storm.

Hurricanes are a natural occurrence, and the island and its people know them well. If you want to study what happens when hurricanes hit tropical forests—which they are doing with increasing frequency—then El Yunque is where you want to be. The forest here was hit hard by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, had considerable damage from Georges in 1998, was side-swiped by Irma in early September 2017 and then floored two weeks later by Maria and her 140-mile-per-hour winds.

For nearly a century, scientists have been observing how El Yunque handles hurricanes. Ecological systems don’t function separately from human systems. Rather, the two are always intertwined. Researchers at El Yunque attempt to parse how human actions—such as building roads, harvesting timber, and diverting water for domestic and municipal use—affect how this forest deals with its periodic hurricanes.

El Yunque is uniquely positioned for not only observing but also measuring what happens when hurricanes “batter” the forest, though scientists like Zimmerman actually use the word “affect.” This is not simply a scientist adhering to a language standard, it’s how the scientists at the Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research site routinely describe what happens here. Changes this dramatic and on this grand a scale are natural. These forests have evolved with hurricanes, so they are remarkably resilient. “Everybody asks, ‘How’s the forest?’ It’s a hurricane forest, it has gone through this before. It looks pretty bad right now, but you wait,” Zimmerman said.

He’s confident in its recovery because he and his colleagues have seen it happen before. Since the 1940s, foresters then ecologists and biogeochemists at El Yunque have been staking out their study plots, delineating them with surveyors’ pin flags and white PVC pipe. The forest is further festooned with mesh baskets to measure how many seeds and leaves fall from trees and plants, flagging tape (green, orange, yellow, red) to mark study areas that are monitored regularly, small solar collectors to run equipment, and instruments for recording all sorts of data, including soil nutrients, temperature and humidity, tree diameters, and outputs of methane and nitrous oxide.

The Luquillo research site spans the whole national forest, and Zimmerman is its lead principal investigator as well as director of the El Verde field station—one of two in the forest. Right after Hurricane Maria hit, while the rest of the island was reeling from the loss of power, the scientists at the forest were in a race against time to get back to their measurements. Some of their equipment was buried by leaves and branches torn from the trees above. “In Hurricane Georges, we had some gaps in the data, and I didn’t want that to happen again, so I was just focused on keeping up that rhythm and getting out to all those different plots,” Zimmerman said. “I don’t think I picked up my computer for three weeks.”

The roof to the research building had been blown off, and trees were leaning on other buildings. After assessing the damage, and locating some tarps to stretch over the missing roof, Zimmerman led a crew out to the forest. His staff, along with some researchers and volunteers, used hand saws and a lot of grunt labor to open the trails to the various study plots. They worked steadily and with a sense of urgency, as a number of the experiments relied on timely data collection. For instance, the staff measures nitrate and potassium levels in the soil water every two weeks, and understanding Maria’s effects on these nutrients was crucial. “It’s samples like that you don’t want to lose the rhythm to in an event like this,” Zimmerman explained.

The most striking thing about the forest in those first days was its new color: brown. If you gazed up at a once verdant hillside, you might think it had been burnt—all the green leaves were gone.

No mature tree, anywhere, can withstand 140-mile-per-hour winds. Along with the leaves, something has to give, and it will be the weakest part of the structure: the roots, the trunk, or the crown. In temperate forests where hurricanes are a rarity—as in much of the mainland United States—most large trees are uprooted because the roots are the weak link. In the tropical forest at El Yunque, the roots held, some of the trunks were snapped, but nearly all of the crowns blew apart. The vast majority of the trees—maybe 95 percent of them—remained upright, even though they’d lost most of their limbs, branches, and leaves. It was as if someone had replaced trees with telephone poles.

During Hurricane Maria, high winds snapped all of the branches off the crowns of trees in the forest, leaving these bottle brush-like trees. Photo courtesy of Stephen Long.

Six months after the hurricane, when I visited Luquillo and walked out into the forest with Zimmerman, the green had returned. The telephone poles had already transformed into bottle brushes—their green leaves growing like bristles from the upper stem. Unlike mainland forests, a tropical forest has no dormant season, so the palm, the tabonuco (known for grafting its roots to those of its neighbors), the ausubo, with deep buttresses at its base, and all the other trees began sprouting branches and putting on leaves almost immediately. The trees had no time to waste, because they continue to respire and the only way to replenish the storeroom of carbohydrates is through photosynthesis—which requires leaves.

Luquillo’s forests are primary forests, which means that they were never cleared for agriculture, unlike most of Puerto Rico’s forests. There has been some sporadic logging, but that ended 70 years ago. So some of the larger ausubos and tabonucos are surely hundreds of years old, though it’s impossible to know, since the lack of a dormant season also means there are no annual tree rings to count.

It’s safe to assume that many of these trees stood through San Felipe II in 1928, the most recent hurricane comparable in strength to Maria. The strategy that has enabled them to survive this long is that they sacrifice their crowns, like sailors reefing their sails when the wind gets too rough. Any species less windfirm has been knocked off the mountain by now. Researchers have shown that selection for hurricane resistance also operates within species. Palms and mahoganies grown from seeds from hurricane-prone areas are more windfirm than those from areas lacking hurricanes.

Even though the greening of the canopy overhead was spectacular, it was no match for what was happening on the ground, where a sea of verdant jade was flooding in around us. Zimmerman pointed out the pioneer tree species soaking up the sun. These species cannot grow in the deep shade of a rainforest, but when a hurricane blows the canopy away, they seize the day. Seeds that were deposited in the soil decades ago—the last time the canopy was wide open—suddenly have enough sunlight to germinate. They do so by the thousands. One of these pioneers, the cecropia, gathers light with a leaf so huge it could function as an umbrella.

After the hurricane removed the dense tree cover that shielded the forest floor, sunlight awakened seeds—some of which had been waiting for decades—and the green understory sprang to life. Photo courtesy of Stephen Long.

“We’re seeing a lot of herbs that we haven’t seen,” Zimmerman said, pointing to a lush heliconia, a wild plantain. “There are huge patches of these heliconia, and they were virtually non-existent before the storm. I’ve seen pokeweed. That’s a pasture plant, not a forest plant. In two or three years there will be tons of shrubs in the understory. This is their time to grow, to flower, and to produce fruit to fill up the seed banks and to wait for the next hurricane. This is their opportunity to go.”

Grasses, vines that completely envelop tree trunks, begonias, tree ferns, all of these plants thriving in the sudden gift of sunlight are turning what was once an open park into a puckerbrush. But they are racing against the clock. This is a very dynamic time at Luquillo. Can any of the new trees grow fast enough to make it to the canopy? Sprouts on residual trees become branches, branches become limbs, and the canopy fills in the gaps. The 30 percent canopy cover of today will return once again to a full canopy, leading to light levels near the ground low enough to make photographers weep. And the live-fast, die-young pioneer species will indeed die young, starved of sunlight, though they will most likely have made plenty of deposits in the seed bank.

The ecological concept of resilience is surprisingly straightforward. It is a measure of how long it takes for a system to return to pre-disturbance conditions after an event like a hurricane. The forests of El Yunque have shown that within 25 years, they can return to pre-hurricane conditions. Only time will tell if Puerto Rico’s political, social, and economic systems will be able to make the kind of recovery that we can expect to see from its treasured rainforest.

The post The Puerto Rican Trees That Can Stand Up to Hurricanes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Two things are funny about this: First, I didn’t actually experience Andrew, because I didn’t move to Florida until 1993. Second, that was the extent of hurricane preparations back then—duct tape to be sure that if the windows shattered, the glass would stick together, instead of splintering into tiny and dangerous little pieces. When you’ve grown up with hurricanes, their memories—like the tape residue—never quite go away.

My first real hurricane was Erin in 1995. Then nine years old, I had no idea what to expect, but figured that all hurricanes were the same and this one would tear my house apart. So I took matters into my own hands. I got that green plastic mover’s wrap you can find at U-Haul, fully wrapped the 13-inch CRT television I’d negotiated having in my bedroom, and put all of my books, Barbies, and beanie babies in plastic storage bins.

During Erin, every window in our home was covered with plywood, so inside the house it felt like it was 2 a.m. even during the day. I plopped down to watch the living room TV, but all broadcasts had the same information on loop until the next National Hurricane Center forecast was released (every 6 hours). After several hours of this, I decided that my house was not going to flood and that I could unwrap my bedroom television and go back to watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

I don’t mean to be flip—I know that hurricanes can kill people and destroy entire regions, and, when response and relief are slow to arrive, the aftermath of these storms can be even deadlier, as Puerto Rico is tragically experiencing right now.

The author as a child in front of her family home in Davie, Florida, October 28, 1994. Photo courtesy of Dulce Vasquez.

But for those who have lived in hurricane-prone places, these epic disasters can come to feel routine. For me ever since Erin, hurricanes have been business as usual to me. Floridians rarely flinch at anything weaker than a Category 3. You go through the motions: put plywood on the windows, get enough water and non-perishable goods, fill every car you own with gas to the brim, and hope for the best.

As a kid, I always hoped the hurricanes would come during the week so school would get cancelled. If we were really lucky (which I was a few times), the storm would hit on a test day and I’d have a few extra days to study.

The familiarity of the pre-hurricane procedure was, in its way, comforting. My family would sit on the couch and flip between The Weather Channel and Spanish news. My mom would go up to the TV and point to all possible trajectories, always deciding that we’d be a direct hit. My dad would then reason with her. But we were all experiencing it together.

The feeling that this was a holiday continued during the lull after the storm passed through. It almost feels like Christmas morning, where everything is quiet, and no one is in the streets yet and riding their bicycles.

The storms, like birthdays or holidays, eventually become part of the way you remember life.

In 2004, there was Ivan, which made me late for my first day of college in Chicago. The airport didn’t reopen until an hour after my flight was supposed to take off. Similarly, Ernesto in 2006 made me one week late to my study-abroad program in Paris.

I remember Katrina. My mother’s prediction of our home being a direct hit finally came true in August 2005 when the eye of Katrina made its first landfall just north of Miami as “only” a category 1. It was nothing compared to what happened in Louisiana, but it still managed to leave a million Floridians without power and cause $630 million dollars’ worth of damage.

In the lull after that storm, sitting in my bedroom, I managed to write to one of my dorm mates from college, who lived in New Orleans. I warned that as a category 1 storm, it’d been very powerful, and hoped he’d be careful. He wrote back to confirm he and his family had evacuated to north Florida. When we got back to school a few weeks later he let us know that his home was under 6 feet of water and was a total loss.

That same season was when I experienced my first hurricane from afar. Wilma ripped through Florida later in 2005. It was one of the latest-forming storms I can remember, hitting in late October. Comfortably welcoming fall in Chicago, I talked with my parents every day. They called to say they were safe and had a generator to power the fridge. Within a few days, my dad had run hundreds of feet of extension cords to power our three neighbors’ refrigerators. It took three weeks for their power to get restored.

A map showing the author’s family home during Hurricane Irma, September 6, 2017. Photo courtesy of Dulce Vasquez.

I still visit often, but I haven’t lived in Florida since 2005. As it happens, no major hurricane since Wilma in 2005 had made direct landfall in Florida, until this year. Over the last 12 years, my family had dealt with warnings and evacuations, and my parents, instead of scurrying to Home Depot for plywood, replaced those outdated jalousie windows with some double paned windows with beautiful colonial grilles. To protect them, they invested their tax refunds on accordion shutters that take no more than 5 minutes per window to close.

But Irma brought the hurricanes back home. From Los Angeles, where I live, I started tracking Irma as soon as it became a category 5 storm. On Monday, my mom texted “Looks like pinche Irma is coming.” Harvey had just destroyed Houston, and this was poised to be an even stronger hurricane, so there I was again, every six hours looking for the next National Hurricane Center forecast update.

On Tuesday, I asked my mom if they wanted to evacuate, and volunteered to book their flights. She said they’d wait and make a call on Thursday. On Wednesday, I sent my mom a graphic of the latest trajectory, which showed Irma blowing directly through their house. I asked again if they wanted to evacuate.

On Thursday my mom said she wanted to evacuate but my dad didn’t want to. My anxiety and frustration grew. That night I had a dream that the roof of our home tore off. On Friday, I took action and told mom that the safest place in the house was in the bathroom (most inner, central place in the house, without windows). I wasn’t sure if that’s true or not, but it made me feel better.

On Saturday, my aunt, uncle, and cousin came to my parents’ house—they live in a mobile home and those are always unsafe. Curfew started at 4 p.m.

On Sunday, as soon as I woke up and still in bed, I texted my mom to check in, but my iMessages were not going through. That meant they lost power and/or cell service. I started to panic. I texted everyone else in the house: Mom, Dad, brother, cousin, aunt. Nothing. Finally, after what seemed like the longest 20 minutes of my life, a message finally came through. All were safe. Relief.

Through the whole process, every ounce of me wanted to be there, in the storm with my family.

The post Longing for the Softer Side of Hurricanes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This question often has been answered by referencing Mexico. Political scientists often link Mexico City’s devastating 8.0 magnitude earthquake on September 19, 1985, to the end of the PRI’s seven-decades-long rule of the country 15 years later. Their argument is not that the party was responsible for the loss of some 10,000 lives, but rather that the disaster exposed the incompetence and corruption of a regime that until then seemed to control everything. While the government of President Miguel de la Madrid looked hopeless, if not helpless, ordinary citizens took the lead in rescuing survivors and helping the injured. It was this unexpected bottom-up movement of people that presaged the eventual demise of the then-ruling PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional).

Today, the question of earthquakes and politics is again alive, with two new terremotos, including a 7.1-magnitude quake on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 disaster, devastating Mexico as the PRI again clings to power. The response of ordinary citizens has been reminiscent of the 1985 quake: Tens of hundreds of young people in hard hats spontaneously joined the rescue operation, digging into rubble with bare hands and forming long lines to carry away pieces of concrete and mortar from collapsed buildings.

Despite the parallels, however, predictions of a political earthquake are overblown. Mexico’s quakes may shake the earth, but their political power has long been overestimated. The story of Mexico City quakes, past and present, reminds us that such events make slow impacts, and only damage political orders that were already weak and cracked. And for all the civic action that a tragedy may produce, the impact is temporary.

As a longtime resident and observer of Mexico, I have waited in vain for decades for an autonomous civil society to emerge there. The 1985 earthquake certainly didn’t produce it—nor was the quake the main catalyst for the end of the PRI’s rule.

The unraveling of Mexico’s one-party system really began with the economic crisis of 1982, which shook the country far more than any movement of the earth. The collapse of the peso was followed by high inflation, a deep recession, and a widespread sense of despair. There had been a lesser crisis and currency devaluation in 1976, but it was soon hidden by important off-shore oil discoveries and massive foreign borrowing. After 1982, there were no such band-aids. It was this moment that broke the unwritten contract between the PRI and Mexico’s middle classes.

This contract was simple. A broad political class, which controlled the peasantry, labor unions, and civil servants through the PRI, had brought the country three decades of steady economic growth nicknamed the Mexican “miracle.” In exchange, the growing urban middle classes spent more time vacationing in Acapulco than engaging in politics. Occasionally dissident groups appeared, even armed guerrillas in the mid-1970s, but they were either crushed or co-opted by the system.

The lack of economic growth was far more unsettling. Without it, the ruling political elite was unmasked as self-serving and corrupt and the middle classes began demanding a voice in the country’s affairs.

The demands grew in 1988 when the PRI resorted to fraud to insure the victory of its presidential candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, over his left-leaning opponent, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Ignoring pressure for greater political freedom, Salinas instead chose economic reform, which included privatization of major state-owned companies and utilities and, later, negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada.

Darker days followed. When an armed group known as the Zapatistas took up arms in the southern state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994, the rebellion won popular sympathy simply for daring to defy the regime. Three months later, Salinas’s hand-picked successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was murdered. Weeks after his PRI replacement, Ernesto Zedillo, took office, a new economic crisis erupted and, with it, fresh middle-class anger at the regime.

With his back to the wall, Zedillo sought to release political pressure by permitting genuinely free elections, with the result that in mid-term elections in 1997 the PRI for the first time ever lost control of the Chamber of Deputies. Then in 2000, to the fury of PRI party dinosaurs, Zedillo refused to step in to block the victory of the conservative National Action Party’s presidential candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada. The impossible had happened: the PRI had been ousted peacefully. The earthquake was merely one small part of a generation-long transformation.

Fox occupied the National Palace in Mexico City’s Zócalo, but he did not inherit the near-absolute power enjoyed by PRI presidents since the 1930s. His party did not control Congress and, as the traditional vertical structure of government fell apart, state governors exercised greater independence and labor unions slipped from central control. The coherence of PRI rule, however perverted it may have seemed to many Mexicans, vanished. As new centers of power emerged, powerful drug cartels which controlled the traffic of cocaine from Colombia to the United States posed a growing threat to the nation’s security.

In the 2006 presidential election, Fox’s party candidate, Felipe Calderón, was the narrow victor, but his leftist opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, claimed fraud and his supporters blocked Mexico City’s streets for months. To assert his power, Calderón declared war on the drug cartels, with disastrous consequences. The estimates of the number of people killed or disappeared during his six-year term range between 60,000 and 100,000, most of them as a result of territorial wars between rival cartels. These gangs also set out to terrorize the population, bombing nightclubs, hanging bodies from highway bridges, and even leaving the heads of victims outside some schools.

The perception of a breakdown in law and order was one explanation for the PRI’s return to power in 2012: The PRI may have been corrupt, the saying went, but it knew how to govern. It also benefitted from the undisguised support of Mexico’s dominant television group, Televisa. Even then, its presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, was hardly given a national mandate. Because Mexico has only one round of presidential elections (unlike, say, Brazil), Peña Nieto won with just 38.2 percent of the vote, with López Obrador again in second place and Calderón’s own party candidate trailing in third.

At first, Peña Nieto’s boast that he was leading a “new PRI” seemed to carry some weight, above all when he dared to break the exploration monopoly of the country’s oil giant, Pemex, and to challenge the near-monopoly of the telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim. But while a different approach to the drug war resulted in the capture of several leading capos, including the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the number of cartels has multiplied. Further, the old ogre of corruption returned: Peña Nieto’s wife bought a mansion with the help of a prominent businessman, and several PRI governors were caught enriching themselves. For many Mexicans, there was nothing new about this PRI.

Then Donald Trump appeared, with his insults toward Mexicans and his threat to build a wall along the common border. Peña Nieto tried appeasement, inviting Trump for hombre talks in Mexico City, only to find Trump resuming his flailing of Mexico immediately upon his return home. Given blossoming anti-American sentiments, Peña Nieto had no choice but to refuse to pay for any border wall, but he did persuade Trump to engage in talks to renew NAFTA rather than denounce the treaty.

On the eve of this September’s earthquakes, polls showed Peña Nieto’s approval rating at well below 20 percent, lower than any Mexican leader on record.

Will the seismic tremors push Mexico into another political earthquake? There’s reason for skepticism. This Mexico City earthquake, and the earlier major quake in southern Mexico, were less devastating than the 1985 quake, with the number of dead in the low hundreds, not the thousands. While some 40 buildings collapsed in the capital, including the wing of a packed primary school, the city as a whole remained intact, and Mexican authorities were better prepared than in 1985.

Once life returns to normal for all but the earthquakes’ victims, the issue consuming most Mexicans will be next July’s presidential elections. The political earth may again move because the current front-runner is the perennial leftist candidate López Obrador, known throughout Mexico by his initials of AMLO. Because his promises of sweeping economic and social reforms have alarmed the private sector and middle classes, the other three main parties are determined to stop him. But can parties of left, center and right agree on a “unity” candidate? If they fail, as seems likely, López Obrador could win with an even smaller percentage of votes than Peña Nieto won in 2012.

If the actual earthquakes and their aftermath reinforce public disenchantment with the political establishment, AMLO, with his cultivated image of the political outsider, could benefit. But even if by next July the disaster has been largely forgotten, and even if most Mexicans oppose him, enough voters may still opt for the unknown variable of a populist with a radical new message to elect him. And at that point, a new cycle of Mexican political instability will unavoidably begin.

The post Mexico’s ’85 Earthquake Didn’t Start a Revolution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Fall foliage and hurricane season go hand in hand in New England. But what few people realize is that the spectacular blazing colors from our hardwood forests are the result of the great hurricane of 1938, which brought 100 mph winds inland to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine 79 years ago on September 21.

The storm that came to be known as “Thirty-Eight” (the system of naming hurricanes didn’t begin until 1953) was the first Category 2 hurricane to reach Vermont and New Hampshire, and it came without warning. Thirty-Eight made landfall on Long Island, crossed the Long Island Sound into Connecticut and Rhode Island, and raced through Massachusetts and Vermont. It had been at least a generation since any hurricane had hit the region, even the coast.

Because of the lack of warning, or preparedness, more than 600 people died, most of them from the storm surge that swept beachfront houses into the sea. Floods and high winds—the fiercest wind was measured near Boston at 186 miles per hour—destroyed roads, bridges, houses, barns, and railroad tracks.

Inland, these winds uprooted nearly 1,000 square miles of forest, ripping holes in the tree canopy ranging from the size of a city yard to as large as 90 acres. And in doing so, the hurricane created a new forest across much of New England.

Most of the people who lived through the hurricane are gone, but I have been fortunate to hear the stories of many of them. One dramatic story came from Fred Hunt, at the time a 14-year-old boy playing hooky in the woods in Rindge, New Hampshire. Late in the day, a huge pine—more than 100 feet tall—was uprooted and landed five steps behind him, its trunk parallel to the ground. Thinking quickly, he scrambled into the space beneath the trunk of the fallen pine and stayed there for 10 minutes while the winds howled mercilessly and blew down every other tree in the forest. When there were no more trees left standing, Fred scrambled through the tangle of downed trees the last half-mile to home.

The white pine that served as Fred’s refuge happened to be growing in that spot because of the history of the area’s land, which was typical of much of rural New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In the 17th and 18th centuries, farmers cleared most of the original forest to grow crops and raise livestock. With the advance of the Industrial Revolution, these farmers left to work in the mills. Starting in 1860, the cleared fields reverted to forests. In New England, there’s no need to replant trees because they happily grow on their own. One of the most prolific colonizers of farm fields is white pine.

So when Thirty-Eight raged through, forests covered 80 percent of the land in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much of that forest was white pine. Before the storm, many rural families saw their woodlots as living bank accounts, where a few trees could be cut and sold when they needed money. Ninety percent of the trees that were blown down were white pine.

With the disaster, the federal government saw a need to get involved. The Great Depression had not yet ended, and in the forested areas of New England the New Deal make-work programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were well-established. Fearing the kind of fires seen in the West each summer, the U.S. Forest Service directed the WPA and CCC to strip the downed trees of their branches, twigs, and needles to reduce the fire danger. Simultaneously it created the Northeast Timber Salvage Administration to purchase logs from the blowdown. Five times the annual harvest of trees had been blown down in a five-hour period, creating a huge glut of wood. NETSA created a market for the logs and purchased nearly half of the salvageable timber, providing some income to the 30,000 families that otherwise would have lost their woodland bank accounts.

And so, New England’s largest hurricane was followed by its largest logging job, and this one-two punch brought about the forest that we see today. When the towering canopy of white pine blew down, what was left were the seedlings and saplings of deciduous hardwood trees. If they hadn’t been blown down in 1938, those pines might still be there, holding the ground until they died from wind, disease, or logging. Instead, the mix of maple, birch, and oak that relished the new sunlight (having been released from the shade of the pines) grew vigorously. This new forest closely approximates the species mix of the original forest that had greeted the settlers, and its vibrant display of turning leaves attracts leaf peepers from around the globe.

Not all of New England experienced Thirty-Eight the same way. In Vermont, for example, farming had continued well into the 1930s, so only half of the state was covered in forests. So hurricane damage appeared mostly in woodlots on top of ridges and in the sugar maple orchards that produced the springtime crop of maple syrup. Maple syrup was a hugely important crop in Vermont, because dairy farmers used the income from syrup to pay a year’s wages for hired help. With so many sugar orchards laying in ruins, many Vermont farmers had no choice but to get out of farming. The regrowth of the forest began in Vermont 80 years later than in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the process was different because Vermont’s soils are better than those of its neighbors. Vermont’s forest cover has now reached 80 percent, and the vast majority of it is the mix of northern hardwoods—maple, beech, and birch—that makes the hills come alive in the fall.

When I last spoke to Fred Hunt, just months before he died at 87, he said, “I’ve always been a white pine man.” He told me that after graduating with a degree in forestry from the University of New Hampshire, he ran a logging business for 10 years, specializing in thinning pine plantations. He then earned an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts studying white pine and its effect on the water supply. Along the way, his master’s thesis served as the first management plan for the 58,000-acre forest surrounding Quabbin Reservoir, which provides the drinking water for Boston and 40 other nearby towns. He then taught forest management and managed a large forest deep in the Adirondacks for 10 years before he decided at the age of 54 to make his final career change, moving back to Reading, Vermont and tending his own forest.

Hunt spent a lifetime working to grow superior white pine because it provided a good living and because he loved the practice of forestry. But it’s possible that his lifelong affinity for white pine could have little to do with money or forestry. It could have more to do with an event when he was 14 years old. On that day, as New England’s most destructive hurricane passed through, a white pine saved his life.

The post The 1938 Hurricane That Revived New England’s Fall Colors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Through the curtain-like trees, the 1927 viewer—perhaps a Manhattanite drinking her Sunday morning coffee—peeped at a gallant steamboat, a columned Great House, and a close-up scene of rural black people caught in a picturesque predicament of floating roofs and tugging mules; she saw, even as she looked at an image of catastrophe, a tableau bedecked in plantation nostalgia. To think of the South from the distance of Manhattan was somehow to think back—back to 1868, back to a storied river battle in 1863, or maybe all the way back to an “ancient” time when chivalrous men tilted at dragons. It was hard for Northerners to imagine the South as modern.

It was harder still for Northerners to see the news of 1927—the most destructive river flood in U.S. history—as an industrial disaster partly of their own making. After extreme weather swept from the plains states to the Ohio River valley in fall 1926, levees began bursting in the Lower Mississippi Valley in March of ’27 and kept breaking through May. In all, water covered 27,000 square miles, land in seven states where about a million people lived; 13 major crevasses occurred; roughly 637,000 people became homeless, approximately 555,000 of whom were racial or ethnic minorities; somewhere between 250 and 1,000 people died; and financially, direct property losses totaled $250 to 500 million, while indirect losses brought that figure up to $1 billion. Floodwaters did not fully drain until the end of the summer.

The flood’s most dramatic moment occurred on April 29, when authorities—hoping to protect New Orleans—dynamited the levee 13 miles below the Crescent City at Caernarvon in order to flood the relatively less populated Acadian region of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. The black-and-white photograph of the blast, with earthworks catapulted skyward, look like a scene from the Great War in Europe.

This slow, months-long disaster occurred in an era of a fast new medium—radio—and became intensely consuming for Americans, who had never before experienced a virtual disaster in something close to real time. The media coverage gave citizens outside the flood zone, especially in the North and West, a great deal of time to think out loud about the distressed South. Inhabitants of the Delta in 1927—white planters, but even more so poor whites and African Americans—were imagined by the rest of the country to be historically retrograde, caught in “Lost Cause” nostalgia, outmoded Christian fundamentalism, or feudal social and labor relations. The Harlem Renaissance spokesman Alain Locke, for example, had in 1925 described the northward migration of southern blacks to be not only a geographical move from countryside to city, but also a temporal leap forward “from Medieval America to modern.”

Not only did the South seem perennially behind, but it seemed to need repeated fixing. This sense of the South-as-problem dated back (understandably) to the antebellum period, but it was especially alive in the Progressive Era, as Northerners turned their reformist eye southward, when the region became a laboratory for “readjustment” and “uplift.” By the 1920s, despite their homegrown attempts to remake themselves according to a Northern model, Southerners were feeling especially assailed by the rest of the nation for committing, in the words of Fred Hobson, “crimes against progress.” The South had come to be ridiculed as “a region of belts—the Bible Belt, Hookworm Belt, Malaria Belt, Chastity Belt.” When the flood became a national sensation then, it was no surprise that the Northern pundit H. L. Mencken—a committed critic of Dixie—imagined all Southerners to represent “a hostile tribe on our borders.” The South appeared to be doing what it always did: getting into a mess that required Northern know-how to solve. Southerners needed to be rescued from themselves once again.

On May 20, just before the levee break at McCrea, Louisiana, 35,000 people fled from the fragile levee standing between them and the swollen Atchafalaya River—just as another type of flight, also historic, was underway. Early that morning, a young airmail pilot, Charles Lindbergh, took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island and flew his single-seat, single-engine Spirit of St. Louis in a nonstop arc to Paris. Upon his landing, the world went completely mad with joy. Soon enough, ongoing news of the flood seemed almost an insult amid this brave new world of aeronautical daring. A June 15 editorial in The Nation admitted: “People can stand only so much calamity. After a while it begins to pall and finally it has no meaning whatever.” The editorial added: “We have had spectacular flights to think about.” Lindbergh’s flight stood for the exuberance of the modern world, for humanity’s transcendence of physical limitation. The flooded Delta stood for humankind’s ancient cowering before Nature.

There were many problems with the 1927 version of this abiding narrative of Northern progress and Southern regress. Southerners were the first to make those problems clear. Mississippi journalist Harris Dickson wrote in a nationally syndicated, 12-part series on the flood: “Glance at a map of Father’s vast watershed. Note that our lands lie in the mouth of an enormous funnel. Then remember that every creek and gutter from Western Pennsylvania to Wyoming empties its water into the top of that funnel.” He concluded: “Two-thirds of this Union combines its flood to drown us. So we do earnestly insist that those who dump water into the funnel should help to minimize its disastrous results.”

The popular entertainer Will Rogers, who raised more money than any other individual for flood victims, told the rest of the nation, in his newspaper column, about the Southern attitude: “The cry of the people down there is, ‘We don’t want relief and charity; we want protection.’”

Eventually, other papers and many environmentalists espoused the Southerners’ position: The Mississippi watershed was a continental feature requiring a coherent national strategy and, moreover, it was the human mismanagement of this watershed that caused the 1927 catastrophe. These commentators saw the flood as not merely the result of an engineering mistake in levee design but as the product of environmental practices in the upper part of the watershed: deforestation of the upper Midwest, mowing under of prairie grasses to the west, industrial growth of corn and wheat, and drainage of wetlands.

Without trees, grasses, deep roots, and wetlands, the denuded soil of the watershed could not do its ancient work of absorbing and stalling water after seasons of intense snow and rain. All the work of water management was meant to be accomplished by the towering levee system, one which had no outlets or spillways at the time. When a four-story-high levee burst, the river emptied itself upon southern land with the fierceness of Niagara Falls. Not only were levee structures a modern, industrial feature in the Delta, then, but the water draining so swiftly into the “funnel” was a byproduct of industrialized environmental development.

One might have expected Southern commentators, just two years after the Scopes Trial, to have hailed this disaster as an Act of God. To the contrary. While Northern pundits were reviving old ideas of Dixie, or mythical ideas of the Mississippi “dragon,” it was Southern journalists and writers—from Dickson to luminaries like William Faulkner and Richard Wright—who recognized the forms of human miscalculation in evidence. “Progress” had not occurred in a manner that was sustainable or equitable across regions and races. The flood made that all too clear.

The flood showed too that the U.S. had become one country connected by modernity and industry and an abiding faith in using technology to alter nature and climate. In 1927, Americans demonstrated a lack of preparation for the consequences of that faith—a deficiency that would become tragically apparent again, in the same part of the country, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005.

The post A Devastating Mississippi River Flood That Uprooted America’s Faith in Progress appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

***

But it
won’t help to think of it as a city,
although that’s one way now to get your mind
around it, eight lanes and a loop to link
the extremities, a tree-lined tollway
for the privileged to escape in a hurry,
which is what it feels like, some gathering
and panicked vector, an irritation
pressing on the half-thought until it pops,
and when we imagine it for ourselves—
ice-melt, the woken virus, some sublime
rock on its immovable course—there’s still
mineshafts to hunker down in, the makeshift
oil drum flotilla. Best collect our seedlings
and geniuses. Better for us to splice
our stories into roaches who’ll survive.

The post Then on the Shore of the Wide World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As we both fell to the floor, sliding around, he grabbed my arm and kept trying to reassure me, “It’s OK, Olga Didi” (older sister). A heater on wheels with a propane tank came rolling toward us, and I kicked it back, slithering to get under my desk—my “go to” place in the event of an earthquake. The shaking stopped, and we went outside with Ram, my cook.

The earthquake happened four hours before a big early birthday party for me—I’ll turn 90 in June. We were expecting 600 guests, including many people who made long bus trips from other parts of Nepal.

My first thought was for the children who live in the J and K houses, the two children’s homes in Patan run by the Nepal Youth Foundation, which I founded in 1990. These 60 boys and girls range in age from 2 to 16; some of them are orphans or were abandoned by their parents, some were child beggars, and some are disabled. Thankfully, all the children survived the earthquake, along with the foundation staff and their families.

For 25 years, I’ve divided my time between Nepal and Sausalito, California. I first visited Nepal in 1984 when I was 60 and about to retire as a research attorney at the California Supreme Court. I was overwhelmed by the stunning scenery and friendliness of the people—and especially by the children I encountered. They had so few material possessions, yet they were the most joyful, funny, amiable little kids anywhere on earth. Their most fervent wish was to go to school someday.

Totally unexpectedly, I discovered a country and a cause to which I would devote the rest of my life. I formed the Nepal Youth Foundation in 1990; since then, the organization has provided education, health care, shelter, and freedom from servitude to more than 45,000 children.

In the immediate aftermath of the quake, about 50 people took refuge at my house, including 19 girls who came to my home from West Nepal to perform their incredible local dances at the birthday party. These girls were once trapped in the Kamlari system—sold into domestic slavery by their desperately poor families. Since 2000, NYF has liberated over 12,000 of these girls and paid to educate them, giving their families piglets to compensate for lost earnings. Recently, the government agreed to cover these costs—but we continue to provide former Kamlari girls with training and mentoring. I was worried about the girls, but we thankfully managed to find them. They were quite traumatized, and some were crying. But within a few hours, they calmed down. They napped in the sun and felt safe—together and in an open space.

That night, the girls helped Ram to prepare the Nepali staple dinner of dal bhat and tarkari (rice, lentils and vegetables) for the big crowd. For that meal, Ram used cabbage from my garden. I’m worried that food and water may become a serious problem; our water filter operates on electricity. There has been no electricity since the quake, and the Internet connection is spotty.

There have been more than 80 aftershocks, some of them quite severe. Everyone who wasn’t injured in Kathmandu spent the afternoon outside—and hundreds of thousands of people slept outside all night.

My house has a large garden with a high wall around it. There was a crowd of people camped in the empty space on the other side of my wall, and every time the earth shook, a great shout went up.

Almost everyone at my house slept outdoors, including two families with newborn babies. The former Kamlari girls also slept outdoors on mats until it started to rain and they ran inside and spread out on the floor of my living and dining rooms. I told them that, as a California girl, I wake up two or three times a year in a shaking bed at my home in Sausalito. I just put the cover over my head and go back to sleep. They told me later that when the aftershocks began on Saturday, they thought about what I had said and went back to sleep.

The girls left on Sunday for the 14-hour bus ride back to Dang in West Nepal. That day, I wanted more than anything to see the kids, but CNN called for interviews, and by the time I finished with them, it was dark. The children have been camping out at the empty lot next to the J and K houses. I understand the little boys view this as an adventure, but I am sure many of them are shaken by the experience.

Some of the alumni, who are now college graduates, have returned to the J and K houses—not only because they view them as their homes, but also to help the “uncle” and “auntie” who supervise the kids.

I returned home to California on Wednesday night. The international airport is open, but (tragically) the airport for domestic flights is not operational. The devastation in rural areas, where 80 percent of Nepalis live, is overwhelming and there is no way to get relief to most of them.

I am so sad to be leaving at a time like this, when so many people I care for are suffering. But I think I will be more useful working from California to raise money for the relief effort.

Because NYF is on the ground, we know where the greatest needs are in Nepal right now. The hospitals are jam-packed with the injured and lacking in beds, medical equipment, food, and medicine. On Monday, NYF bought 200 mattresses, and bedding and delivered them to one of Nepal’s main government hospitals. We also bought $30,000 worth of surgical supplies for the most advanced and efficient public hospital in Nepal.

NYF has also established a shelter for patients who are ready to be discharged from the hospital but have no place to go because their homes are destroyed, there is no transport, and their relatives can’t come for them. Doctors are desperate to discharge these patients because seriously injured people are lying in the corridors or outside, waiting for a hospital bed.

We have a beautiful facility we constructed right outside Kathmandu a few years ago to rehabilitate malnourished children. We began moving discharged patients into it on Tuesday afternoon. Some of these patients will need ongoing care, so 40 former bonded girls we are training as health assistants are coming down from Northern Nepal to work in the facility.

Looking ahead, we already know there be a massive demand for skilled construction workers. NYF has experience in job training and construction projects, and we plan to train 1,000 people in construction skills that incorporate seismic safety, mostly in villages where the majority of the destruction occurred. In addition to allowing them to earn a livelihood, this will enable people to rebuild their own homes. NYF will provide them with supplementary funds to purchase steel rods and concrete so that they can replace their mud homes with solid structures.

Hundreds of schools have been flattened. Using our experience in building more than 100 schools or schoolrooms, NYF also plans to rebuild 50 of these devastated structures so that children can resume their education.

We’re certainly not the only group that has sprung into action to help in the aftermath of this catastrophic earthquake, but we are trying to address the most pressing needs. The scenes of destruction all around Nepal are sickening. My heart goes out to so many people here who have lost so much. Now we have to do what we can to help them recover from this devastation.

The post The Destruction in Nepal Is Sickening appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For instance, think about how we have built practically right up to shorelines in the New York City area and how quickly Hurricane Sandy flooded streets and subway terminals in 2012. Consider the way Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the levee systems and devastated New Orleans in 2005. The list of urban crises goes on: Fukushima, Japan (2011), the floods in Fort Lyons and Boulder, Colorado (2013), tornadoes in Moore, Oklahoma, and the deadly European (2003) and Chicago (1995) heat waves.

For all its attractive features, Los Angeles, too, is vulnerable. L. A. is not only vulnerable to acute disasters like earthquakes and floods; we also experience chronic hazards like air pollution and high temperatures. After all, the city is in a three-year drought and is vulnerable to 13 of the 16 federally designated natural hazards. (The only three we don’t have to worry about: volcanic eruption, snowstorm, and tornado.)

Strengthening our city is the motivation behind the recent announcement that Los Angeles will create the position of “chief resilience officer.” L.A. is one of the first 32 cities to create such a position, as part of a campaign backed by the Rockefeller Foundation. The goal of the program is to build urban resiliency around the world by pursuing collaborations across government, private, and nonprofit sectors to address complex human, environmental, and economic challenges.

The city’s emergency management departments–the fire department equipped with search and rescue capabilities and a well-trained police force–respond to acute disasters. But L.A. also needs one person to lead a city-wide effort to make the important and thoughtful decisions that will increase resiliency while reducing vulnerability to human and environmental threats in the future.

What does resilience mean in this context? The Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization, defines resilience as the ability of natural or human systems to survive in the face of great change. Resilient systems possess the ability to return to a state of equilibrium following a disturbance while non-resilient systems struggle to restore equilibrium or fail to recover altogether.

Old-school emergency management focuses on a reactive strategy–recovering from a disaster such as an earthquake, flood, or fire. (We are seeing this approach in the response to water main break and flooding near UCLA.) But resiliency planning also adds a second approach, a proactive position: anticipating and protecting against threats to critical infrastructure prior to a disaster. Seismic retrofitting of buildings as well as earthquake drills fit into this category. Similarly, green spaces and vegetation help reduce the “urban heat island effect” found in cities. So would efforts to restore marsh habitat in Louisiana to absorb storm surge in a hurricane. Another way cities can increase their resiliency is by diversifying their energy sources; wind and solar are local energy resources that can and should be developed to provide power the local economy.

To work on both these strategies, the job of the Los Angeles chief resilience officer (CRO) requires several different types of skills: the local knowledge to know what risks the city faces; the technical capacity to do the planning; and the ability to bring together very different kinds of people, from scientists to politicians to media and neighborhood leaders.

By way of example, consider how the chief resilience officer might confront repeated heat waves in the city. Before the heat wave, the CRO would work to redesign our city to minimize exposure–adding trees and green spaces that have cooling effects (L.A. River restoration plans, especially removing the concrete, would have benefits here). Coordinating heat warnings with the National Weather Service also would be important. During the heat event, the city could provide cooling centers, water and aid stations, and health services to assist people in need. Post-heat wave, the CRO would work to return residents and the city to normal. Think how complex such work would be on this one subject. And then think about all the other threats Los Angeles faces.

The benefits of such work would go far beyond preparation and response to disaster. Resilience planning can create jobs for those engaged in the work, add to knowledge and science as the city gathers and analyzes data on its vulnerabilities, and improve education (in part by involving scholars and other experts in the work). Incorporating technology and social media into these planning efforts could create easily available real-time, geo-referenced data regarding evacuation routes and hazards during a disaster. And once we learn lessons on effective resiliency planning, we can share them with others. The Dutch, for instance, are experts in land reclamation and levees, and they provided their expertise to New Orleans officials dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

If the CRO is to succeed, people around Los Angeles will have to collaborate as never before, and many of us–at least in the academic sector–are eager to contribute to this work, and learn from it.

In fact, students in my USC program on GeoDesign–a first-of-its-kind major that brings together architecture, planning, and spatial sciences–have already started investigating how resilience can be engineered. Younger students, from kindergarten to high school, can be engaged as well, through class projects and field trips.

The appointment of a chief resilience officer to Los Angeles is a demonstration of global leadership. It’s also timely because, unlike New Orleans or New York, L.A. has not experienced a major disaster recently. L.A. can get a head start on investing in critical infrastructure and services before we encounter the disasters that we know are on their way.

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