http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16849
Our Summer Vacation: 20,000 Dead
Mike Davis, tomdispatch.com
September 29, 2003
Europe's long, hot, tragic summer begs a little North American
background.
In July 1995, the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley in Chicago
was an accomplice in the murder of more than 700 of its senior
citizens. As temperatures climbed above 40C (104F), the city's airless
tenements and skid-row hotels became charnel houses. Thousands of the
poor and elderly, mainly blacks, were mortally stricken.
By the second day of the heat wave, overcrowded hospitals were closing
their doors to the critically ill and paramedics were unable to
respond to the deluge of emergency calls. Medical workers warned of a
death epidemic and begged for help.
But the Daley Jr. machine bunkered itself in denial and inaction. Heat
mortality among the forgotten poor received less attention than had
winter snow days, which caused few deaths but greatly inconvenienced
suburban commuters and Loop businesses. Thus, the fire department
refused to call in more staff or ambulances, while the police ignored
requests to canvass the tenements for isolated seniors.
City hall stonewalled the media: "What disaster?" As bodies overflowed
the morgue, the Mayor complained to reporters. "It's hot. But let's
not blow it out of proportion... Every day people die of natural
causes."
The Chicago "heat catastrophe," as it is now officially called, was of
course anything but a "natural" disaster. As radical sociologist Eric
Klinenberg explains in a brilliant book published last year (Heat
Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago), "These deaths were not
an act of God." He demonstrates instead that they were the preventable
consequences of poverty, racism, social isolation, and criminal civic
negligence.
Klinenberg's approach is generally shared by public health analysts.
Indeed, the lessons of Chicago 1995 were enshrined in authoritative
studies published by the Centers for Disease Control and the New
England Journal of Medicine .
An Avoidable Massacre
These reports, whose findings have now been widely adopted in North
American cities, advocate early warning systems, the immediate opening
of neighborhood "cooling centers," door-to-door searches for ill
seniors, adequate summer staffing of hospitals, and the subsidizing of
air-conditioning in low-income apartments.
This literature is now scientifically canonical, easily accessible on
the internet, and well known to European professionals. The lesson of
the Chicago heat wave, in other words, screams from the bookshelf.
There was no excuse for not heeding it.
Yet this August, the vulnerable poor were again massacred under
analogous social conditions by Chicago-like responses. In France, for
example, the rightwing health minister Jean-Francois Mattei continued
his vacation -- 'tennis, anyone?' -- while thousands of his fellow
citizens perished. Heroic lethargy was also the response of the
Berlusconi government in Italy, which lied to the press and suppressed
heat-death statistics.
The overall European death toll is probably the equivalent to five or
more World Trade Centers: at least 20,000 victims and probably more.
Official estimates are at least 11,400 in France; more than 4000 in
Italy; 1400 in the Netherlands; 1300 in Portugal; and some 900 in the
United Kingdom. The Spanish figure of only 100 is hardly credible and
should be the stuff of scandal.
While the Euro-right blames the 35-hour-week and the collapse of
family values for these atrocities, the Left must be relentless in
holding neo-liberal policies accountable. Socialists must demand the
kind of 'social autopsy' -- of which Klinenberg's study provides an
admirable model -- that lays bare the causative roles of poverty,
unaffordable housing, and underfunded public services, as well as the
collapse of intergenerational solidarity.
In face of this small mountain of corpses, moreover, it can no longer
be taken for granted that European neo-liberalism is actually more
'compassionate' than its more raptor-like American cousin. After all,
it takes a pretty big hole in the vaunted social safety net for 20,000
or more people to fall through.
Our Nonlinear Future
But what of the strange Augusts yet to come? How should we address the
increasingly violent interaction between environmental change and the
late-capitalist city?
First -- to stay within a public health framework -- there is growing
evidence of a sinister synergy between heat stress, traffic, and air
pollution. The post-Chicago studies generally focused on hyperthermia
and dehydration, paying little attention to air quality per se. But
French scientists now believe that high ozone levels were a key factor
in as many as 3000 deaths. August holiday gridlock may now be deadly
in a double sense. This is why groups like Greenpeace are renewing
calls for temporary or permanent traffic moratoria in major urban
centers.
Second, August was a vivid illustration of the kind of "unnatural"
history we must come to expect as the norm. This will not be a history
slowly unreeling itself in tidy linear progression, as in biographies
of Victorian liberals. More likely, the dialectic of global warming
and neo-liberalism -- especially the Bushite doctrine of "consuming
all the good things of the earth in our lifetime" -- will produce a
non-linear roller-coaster ride between unpredictable disasters.
Let me share with you my summer nightmare. It is a much scarier story
than any by Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King.
While the pavements were boiling in Paris this summer, the French
newspaper Le Monde ran a cover story about the melting sea ice in the
Arctic. The gist was simply that Norwegian polar researchers, tops in
the field, were predicting that the Arctic Ocean's ice cover would
completely disappear by the middle of this century.
The nightmare part is not rising sea levels since ice already
displaces its water volume. Rather it is the radical change in
"albedo," the amount of solar energy reflected from the surface. Right
now Arctic ice is a huge mirror sending heat back to space; remove the
ice, however, and the clear blue sea absorbs immense additional
amounts of solar energy.
Warming, as a result, will suddenly accelerate. At least in
geophysical terms, it could prove a far more drastic blow to Gaia than
even nuclear winter.
Paradoxically, this Arctic warming, by eventually melting icecaps and
increasing river flows, might actually shut down the circulation of
the Gulf Stream and turn northwestern Europe into an icebox. This is
the worst case scenario that one of the world's most famous climate
researchers, Wallace Broecker of Columbia University, recently warned
about in the pages of Science magazine.
Indeed, he points out that something like this actually happened
12,000 years ago: It was called the Younger Dryas event. Incredibly
this shift of global climate regimes took less than a decade to occur.
Indeed, abrupt climate change is one of the fundamental scientific
discoveries of our lifetime.
Global capitalism is the runaway train on which we're all held
hostage. And each extreme summer may be inching us closer to the
precipice of catastrophic environmental change.
© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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