Family and Friends in Times of Disaster

These last couple of weeks, we have experienced natural disasters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tornadoes have raked through parts of the city. Heavy rain has swollen the Keystone reservoir. The Arkansas River is within inches of being higher than it has ever been. Though relatively few people have actually been harmed by these disasters, all Tulsans have had to be ready to evacuate from either or both of these kinds of catastrophes. Just today, Tulsa was on the national news again, this time because the flood waters are receding as fast as they rose.

And that is where being a member of a family or a network of friends is very important. My wife and I have a sturdy home not far from the river; though not on low land, flooding is possible. My daughter and son-in-law have a flimsy apartment on high land. And I have a second home, the one where I reside when I teach at the university in Durant, 160 miles away, out of the current danger zone.

In the event of flood, we will go to my daughter’s apartment; in the event of tornado, they will come to our house; in event of both, we all go to Durant. We have a plan. Those who do not have family or friends have only one place to go: an evacuation shelter.

My family is really fortunate to have the flexibility of three residences. A network of family and friends is, and has been throughout history, the most important way that humans have survived, and recovered from, disasters.

Natural disasters will become larger and more unpredictable in the future because of global warming. This is Tulsa’s third “five-hundred-year flood” since 1984. The only way the world can survive climate change disaster will be international cooperation. Many nations are cooperating in global warming prevention and adaptation.

The United States used to be one of those nations. But, as part of his interminable anger, Donald Trump pulled us out of international agreements on global warming. And, in several other ways, he has done his best to piss off even our closest allies.

It’s not just tension with China. Trump refused to endorse the joint statement from the 2018 G7 meeting. Our allies in the G7 group of nations seem to have decided that they must cooperate among themselves, leaving America in its self-imposed tantrum. Below is a BBC news photo that shows a typical moment in what is supposed to be constructive cooperation between America and its allies:

Leaders in this photo, besides Trump and Bolton, include Japan's Shinzo Abe (4), Germany's Angela Merkel (6), France's Emmanuel Macron (7), and Britain's Theresa May (8).

As a result, the United States cannot expect any international assistance in the event that we should suffer a natural disaster, or, for that matter, any other kind of disaster. Trump says that he wants a policy of America First, but what he is actually doing is creating a policy of America Only. In so doing, we are rejecting any help that anyone else might ever be willing to give us. We are like the man who tells his family and friends that under no circumstances will he take shelter in their houses if floods or tornadoes come.

As we have known since the days of Petr Kropotkin, mutual aid (cooperation), a form of evolutionary altruism, is our most important human adaptation. Trump is rejecting nature’s most important evolutionary accomplishment.

This essay also appeared in my science blog.

Emails from Hell, part nine.

{beginning of email}

            As we sat there with General McArthur, we saw a man in a robe coming along. His robe was all the colors of the rainbow. And with him was a flock of the cutest animals you ever saw. Kitty cats with big eyes, puppies with big eyes, hamsters with big eyes. Animals that would have torn each other to pieces in the wild but as a result of human domestication and the influence of Heaven, they played with one another in peace. The lion and the lamb, as described in two places in the Old Testament, followed. Then along came lobsters and octupuses and levitating fishes. I was puzzled, because this was supposed to be Hell.

            The man drew closer and wished us an effusively good day.

            “Good sir!” I called out. “I think I know why your robe is all the colors of the rainbow.”

            “You do?” he said in a piping voice. “What do you think the reason is?”

            “You are or were a member of the GLBT community.”

            “The what? Never heard of it,” he said.

            “Okay, let me guess again,” I said. “You are Joseph with the Amazing Dreamcolor Coat right out of Genesis 37.”

            “Wrong again,” he said. “I am Noah, and the rainbow was associated with me a long time before Joseph or the BLTs.”

            “You should have guessed it, with the animals,” Joe whispered to me.

            “Please explain, Mr. Noah, why you are in hell.”

            “I built an Ark—actually, I contracted the work out—and saved two of every kind of animal from dying in the Great Flood.”

            “So how did you get them to all come into the Ark?”

            “It was a miracle,” said Noah.

            “Two of each species of insect?”

            “It was a miracle.”

            “Two of each species of spider?”

            “It will always be the same answer. It was a miracle. I still don’t know how it happened, or how we found places to stash all of them.”

            “Very well. But how did that get you sent to Hell? Oh, wait, I know. It’s when you got drunk afterwards.”

            “No, that wasn’t it. As I said, I saved two of every species of animal.”

            “Am I missing something?” I asked.

            “You most certainly are,” Noah said. “Every species. Not just the ones that humans found useful, but even the rattlesnakes and the mosquitoes and the spiders. They each had their place in nature, regardless of their utility to humans. Why, you may ask.”

            “Why?”

            “Partly because no one could know which species might be useful later,” said Noah. “We had to look all over the place to find the flatworm Caenorhabditis elegans, and we never knew why. But nowadays it is one of the favorite animals that scientists use in genetic research. Same thing with that fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. But also, it is just because God had this idea that if He made it it was good.”

            “I still don’t see what was so bad about that,” I said.

            “Do I have to explain everything to you?” asked Noah.

            “Yes,” said Joe.

            “Well, it’s like this. The fundamentalists who decide who goes to hell believe that most species are useless, and that it is not worth the trouble or the cost to save them. You saw how much the conservatives despised the Endangered Species Act in the United States! God did not ask me if I could afford to save all of them, or even if I wanted to. But you just let an American environmentalist say that we need to save the Lesser Prairie Chicken, for example, and the conservatives start howling like extinct dire wolves—Canis dirus—and calling them godless communist atheists. See, they believe that God wanted me to save all the species so that American conservatives can let them go extinct in the twenty-first century. I, sir, was the original bleeding-heart environmentalist. And so, here I am.”

            “Well,” said Joe, “being as you know all the different kinds of animals, can you recommend what kind of meat we can have for lunch?”

{end of email}