In the life of this nation, we have often been reminded that nature is an awesome force and that all life is fragile. We are the heirs of men and women who lived through those first terrible winters at Jamestown and Plymouth, who rebuilt Chicago after a great fire and San Francisco after a great earthquake, who reclaimed the prairie from the dust bowl of the 1930s.Every time, the people of this land have come back from fire, flood and storm to build anew and to build better than what we had before.
Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature, and we will not start now.
Interesting choice of prior disasters, since nearly all of them arose from people putting themselves at the mercy of nature out of ignorance or carelessness. Moving to a continent where you're utterly unprepared for the climate, or for eeking a living in the wilderness is certainly trusting your destiny to the whims of nature, however fervently you might be praying at the time. Building practices in Chicago at the time of the great fire made it particularly vulnerable to the "awesome forces" of fire and drought. (Similarly, the great forest fires in northern Michigan and Peshtigo, WI that same year, 1871, were fueled by piles of dry slash scattered by loggers over acres and acres of ground.) The Dust Bowl was exacerbated by farming practices that loosened and dispersed the soil. We could say too (as people have for decades) that building a large settlement below sea level is to ask for trouble at some point. Or that turning a blind eye to ongoing climate change has placed people around the world in greater danger from floods and storms.
Like it or not, to live on this planet is to be at the mercy of nature to some extent, and, pace Mr. Bush, no one can opt out of that on the basis of nationality. We can manage and reduce risks, but never eliminate them entirely. But we are never more vulnerable before nature than when we live in ignorance of or indifference to our enviroment, and our impact on it. The Bush administration has expressed such ignorance and indifference since it took the stage and, references to new and improved flood control for New Orleans aside, I fear that to some degree it will poison the federal efforts to reconstruct the Gulf coast. The simple triumphalism of Bush's speech gives the impression that we can put things back together so as not to have to worry about his happening again. A bad idea when you're living along a great river inclined to change course periodically, on land that tends to sink into a part of the ocean that is a prime conduit for hurricanes. I've never heard Bush encourage people to significantly rethink the way they live and interact with the world around them (even by, say, consuming less gasoline) in any other situation--I don't expect he'll encourage it in this one.
Fortunately, people did learn something from the disasters enumerated above, and practices were changed to prevent or at least mitigate recurrences. Often citizens are more sensible than their so-called leaders, and that gives me some confidence about the rebuilding of the Gulf.
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