How do you know you are advocating for the right change?
By Liz Fisher of Portland, Oregon. Liz works in alumni relations at Lewis & Clark, and is a recovering sustainability consultant. She and her dog, Dora, live it up in the 97214. Previously, she contributed "Only in Oregon".
My friend Sara spent time in Sri Lanka in 2002, so she was anxious to return to the place of her memories after the tsunami hit Southeast Asia in December 2004. She found a community organization which was sending a team to assist with the relief efforts and departed in January 2005.
After Sara arrived in Sri Lanka, I received almost weekly email correspondence along with one hundred other family, friends, and acquaintances. She and a group of field workers met with organizers, politicians, and NGOs to determine that an organization with their resources could make the largest impact by assisting villagers return to and rebuild their village by the coast.
They persuaded leaders from the community to move back to the remnants of their village. Villagers were employed to clean away the debris from too much devastation, which gave them reason to return. They commenced plans to disassemble the temporary camps, so investments in community infrastructure could be made.
And when they villagers voiced their fear of another natural disaster, they preached the impossibility of another giant, catastrophic wave with religious zeal. If no one says it is possible, it must be impossible.
Sara and the field workers heard news of another tsunami at 3 a.m. on March 28, 2005, but they didn't know if this was another fear-based rumor or an impending disaster. After their failed attempts to confirm the warning by satellite phone, they packed up their most precious belongings and headed for higher elevations.
When they returned from what was not a false alarm, but a somewhat organized evacuation from a potential, but unrealized, situation, Sara and the field workers had to rethink their approach. They assumed they were advocating for the right change. But, the odds against a duplicate tsunami aren't as certain as they'd like.
No person, group, or organization is infallible. But, could we be just as wrong about other causes? Just as wrong about our other passions?
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April 05, 2005
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11:29 a.m.
Apr 5, '05
I remember an exchange I read years back between two characters in a novel who are watching a dog scouting its new yard. The uncle points out that the dog will be disoriented for a very short time, because it will soon be satisfied that it has all the info it needs to settle in.
The nephew asks if that's because the dog is satisfied with wrong answers, but the uncle points out that the dog, limited by its senses and smaller brain, has only a limited capacity ask the right questions.
So too, with us........
2:39 p.m.
Apr 5, '05
Jeff here, from the 97212. This is a rich topic, Liz, and I will throw two more logs onto the fire.
In the 60s, Americans were motivated fairly purely (fairly, I said) in their Peace Corps efforts. But some really bad assumptions accompanied some of the work they did. In some cases, volunteers had bad or incomplete data about local customs. In others, they had bad data about things like wells, so they dug into arsenic-rich (lead?--I forget the details) aquifers. Villages quit getting cholera, they just died of poisoning.
Then there's Dubya's great freedom war. This is in some ways a totally bogus comparison, but what the hell. I understand it's really a stretch to give the fanatic neocons credit for democracy in Ukraine or Lebanon, but we do have to confront a kernal of truth in that approach, no matter how thickly it may have been wrapped in layers of incompetence and lies. Is it possible that for democracy to flourish, it needs active champions willing to force the issue at the point of a sword? I'm not assuming the answer is yes, but before Dubya's follies, I would have assumed--strongly--that the answer was no.
4:38 p.m.
Apr 5, '05
Jeff, I'll argue that democracy does needs its champions. After all, the American Revolution was not a bloodless affair.
That said, I think it's a mistake to assume that the Ukraine and Lebanon and Krgyzstan are the dominos falling according to George's grand plan.
Certainly, Krgyzstan was an active democracy years ago - it's just that the democratically-elected president got corrupt in recent years; not only that, but there are indications that the democratic mobs in the capital were bussed in by rival ethnic groups.
Ukraine had nothing to do with Iraq - after all, the first election there happened before Iraq's, and it was the corruption of that election that led to the re-vote.
Lebanon? That one's tougher to say. I do think that regardless of Iraq, when Syria assassinated the most popular politician in the country, they created their own popular uprising. On the other hand, the Syrians may be feeling less stable what with George rattling his saber.
5:58 p.m.
Apr 5, '05
Don't forget the despots. We've given the Saudis and Jordanians a pass for years and they've kept their side of the deal by staying focused on US demands for oil and stablility. (Yeah, I know that Jordan has no oil, but the old man was a CIA asset who kept his nose clean regarding Zionist....er.....US foreign policy) Others, like Saddam Hussein, Hafez al Assad, and Ghadaffi were not so cooperative and so put themselves at risk.
Now that naked imperialism (read Democratization)is on the wind, Ghadaffi's become Born Again and Bashir Assad has replaced his father, Lybia and Syria might join the always numerous ranks of despots that we ignore or ally ourselves with.
<hr/>I'm unwilling to give the 15 or 20 true Neo-Cons that are running our entire foreign policy apparatus any credit for altruism or some urge to "do the right thing" in the sense that Liz is addressing.
Apr 5, '05
Steve here in zip code 97754 (why are we doing this? - and yes that's an Oregon zip code!)
Back to the original post, doing the right thing. I wonder about a lot that we do locally. Take flood plains. We had a 100-year flood here in Prineville in 1998. The first response was to build a new dike in the part of town that was hit the worst by the flood. And a higher dike went in on the south side of Ochoco Creek. Then FEMA made the dike come down, because the higher dike on the south side of the creek would have meant more flooding on the north side of the creek, and backed the creek up in another flood - into the downtown core area of Prineville.
All along 5th Street were single family homes that had flood waters half way up the first floor walls. Some were repaired, and there they sit in the flood plain. Others were too damaged, and they were removed. The replacement homes sit on tall foundations above the flood plain elevation line.
So, I guess sometimes you can rebuild - if you do it right.
But there is a lot of denial about these types of earthquakes and tsunami's. There are two places in the world most likely to have tsunami waves. The Indian Ocean wasn't really even on the list. Off the coast of S. America / Pacific side, they had a subduction quake and tsunami a number of years ago. So, the pressure is off the fault line there for awhile until it rebuild.
The place with the most likely tsunami last had a big quake in 1700. Geologists tell us that this long subduction fault line has a median period between the large quakes of 300 years, so it is about due now. The energy going into the built up pressure is a plate movement of 10 cm. per year - over three hundred years it is now 30 meters of arrested movement over a fault line that is roughly 400 miles long. It is expected to produce an earthquake in the 8.0 to 9.5 range when it goes. When it goes there is likely to be a 40 meter high tsumami wave hit the nearest coast line, in times varying between 10 and 20 minutes after the quake depending upon where on that coast line you are.
So, it would be foolish to build there, right? We should help the poor folks that live there to relocate now - the quake is 5 years overdue, and every year that goes by the intensity of the quake that will happen goes up. We should really help these people - shouldn't we?
Of course, them is us, this is the story of the Oregon Coast and the Cascadia subduction zone that runs from N. California up to near Vancouver Island.
What is the right thing to do?
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