Study of Hurricane Katrina's dead show most were old, lived near levee breaches

Four years later, researchers still count New Orleans' Katrina dead, parsing them into categories, puzzling over exactly how each of the more than 1,400 victims perished -- and what might be done to protect them the next time a big one rolls in off the Gulf.

Their findings, though incomplete, jibe with common sense. The dead were overwhelmingly old. Most lived near the levee breaches in the 9th Ward and Lakeview. About two-thirds either drowned or died from illness or injury brought on by being trapped in houses surrounded by water.

The rest died from maladies or injuries suffered in or exacerbated by an arduous evacuation -- or an inability to evacuate quickly enough, including many who died in local hospitals that lost power and other life-sustaining services. Neither race nor gender made anyone more likely to die, only a failure to evacuate and a location near a levee breach.

Emergency preparedness experts and government officials say the data reinforces the dire need for continuous improvement in the government's evacuation apparatus, particularly for the area's most frail, poor and often hardest-to-motivate residents.

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Ujjwal is a 22-year-old labourer sitting outside a makeshift tent in a posh part of New Delhi. By day he works on repaving the road. By night he sleeps on the pavement.

Like millions of Indians, he has migrated to the big city to find work and earn money. It is the only way he can gain any benefit from the mainly-urban economic boom which has swept through this country.

"There are so many more opportunities available here than there are at home," he says.

"You have to work hard and the hours are long. But I don't want to go back to my village in Bengal. I want to stay here in Delhi."

Hundreds of thousands of migrant construction workers live in Delhi alone, many of them working on big marquee projects in advance of next year's Commonwealth Games.

Ujjwal earns about 5,000 rupees ($102) per month and manages to send at least 1,000 rupees home to his family.

'Creaking'

But as more and more migrants arrive in Delhi, the pressure on land, on water supplies, and on urban infrastructure intensifies.

India's capital is creaking at the seams.

It's the same story across the developing world. Mega-cities have been growing at an incredible rate, and are struggling to cope with the demands of millions of new inhabitants.

Take the example of Mumbai. Its population has roughly doubled in the past 25 years, and millions of people live in the slums.

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Corps of Engineers will not lead new coastal panel

A new interagency working group being created by President Obama to tackle coastal restoration planning in Louisiana and Mississippi is likely to be led by either the White House Council on Environmental Quality or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, not the Army Corps of Engineers.

That's just fine with Louisiana officials.

"We believe that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has proven that they're incapable of leading the effort to restore coastal Louisiana, " said Garret Graves, Gov. Bobby Jindal's adviser on coastal issues and chairman of the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

"The critical issue here is that this working group needs to be empowered. We've studied and we've talked about the restoration of coastal Louisiana for decades." Graves said. "It's time for action."

Creation of the panel was included in a briefing paper about Obama administration responses to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita given to reporters last week.

"The group will enable federal agencies, working with state and local governments and other regional stakeholders, to come together and develop a strategy to increase both the economic and environmental resiliency of the region, " the paper stated.

The two states are targeted because they are facing threats to wetlands and barrier islands from rising a sea level that is a byproduct of climate change, according to the paper.

Both coastlines are the subjects of comprehensive studies by the corps into ways to protect coastal communities from major hurricanes.

The draft Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Study estimates the cost of increased protection, including much higher levees and gates and improvements to wetlands and barrier islands, to be as much as $100 billion for just the New Orleans area.

The working group also will act as a pilot for addressing similar climate-change challenges in other coastal regions, the paper stated.

Louisiana officials first heard about the working group from two articles in connection with an interview with Obama that ran in Sunday's Times-Picayune, Graves said.

Graves said he expects the new panel and financing for levee- and coastal-restoration projects to be the subject of meetings later this week with new Assistant Secretary of the Army for Public Works Jo Ellen Darcy, who oversees the corps, and White House Office of Management and Budget natural resources specialist Sally Ericsson.

"The president has indicated an interest in the restoration of coastal Louisiana. We're excited about that, " Graves said. "But we look forward to the president dedicating construction funds to coastal-restoration projects."

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Ancient Man Hurt Coasts, Paper Says

The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Now scientists are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.

In an article in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa and California’s Channel Islands, where the researchers do fieldwork.

“Human influence is pretty pervasive,” one of the authors, Torben C. Rick of the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview. “Hunter-gatherers with fairly simple technology were actively degrading some marine ecosystems” tens of thousands of years ago.

And, the researchers say, unless people understand how much coastal landscapes changed even before the advent of modern coastal development, efforts to preserve or restore important habitats may fail.

Dr. Rick’s co-author, Jon M. Erlandson of the University of Oregon, said people who lived on the Channel Islands as much as 13,000 years ago left behind piles of shells and bones, called middens, that offer clues to how they altered their landscape.

“We have shell middens that are full of sea urchins,” Dr. Erlandson said. He said he and Dr. Rick theorized that the sea urchins became abundant when hunting depleted the sea otters that prey on them. In turn, the sea urchins would have severely damaged the underwater forests of kelp on which they fed.

“These effects cascade down the ecosystem,” Dr. Erlandson said.

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Nile Delta: 'We are going underwater. The sea will conquer our lands'

Maged Shamdy's ancestors arrived on the shores of Lake Burrulus in the mid-19th century. In the dusty heat of Cairo at the time, French industrialists were rounding up forced labour squads to help build the Suez Canal, back-breaking labour from which thousands did not return. Like countless other Egyptians, the Shamdys abandoned their family home and fled north into the Nile Delta, where they could hide within the marshy swamplands that fanned out from the great river's edge.

As the years passed, colonial rulers came and went. But the Shamdys stayed, carving out a new life as farmers and fishermen on one of the most fertile tracts of land in the world. A century and a half later, Maged is still farming his family's fields. In between taking up the rice harvest and dredging his irrigation canals, however, he must contemplate a new threat to his family and livelihood, one that may well prove more deadly than any of Egypt's previous invaders. "We are going underwater," the 34-year-old says simply. "It's like an occupation: the rising sea will conquer our lands."

Maged understands better than most the menace of coastal erosion, which is steadily ingesting the edge of Egypt in some places at an astonishing rate of almost 100m a year. Just a few miles from his home lies Lake Burrulus itself, where Nile flower spreads all the way out to trees on the horizon. Those trunks used to be on land; now they stand knee-deep in water.

Maged's imperial imagery may sound overblown, but travel around Egypt's vast, overcrowded Delta region and you hear the same terms used time and again to describe the impact climate change is having on these ancient lands. Egypt's breadbasket is littered with the remnants of old colonisers, from the Romans to the Germans, and today its 50 million inhabitants jostle for space among the crumbling forts and cemeteries of those who sought to subjugate them in the past.

On the Delta's eastern border, in Port Said, an empty stone plinth is all that remains of a statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who built the Suez Canal; somewhere along the Delta's westernmost reaches, the long-lost tomb of Cleopatra lies buried. With such a rich history of foreign rule, it's only natural that the latest hostile force knocking at the gates should be couched in the language of occupation.

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Making fuel at home: Waste wine primes the pump

It sounds too good to be true: A residential system that allows people to make fuel from waste products and use it to run their vehicles. That’s what inventors of the E-Fuel MicroFueler claim, and there's support for the idea in government, industry, technology and pop culture. MicroFueler buyers are eligible for a $5,000 tax credit. Former L.A. Laker Shaquille O'Neal is an investor in the company that distributes them.

The $10,000 E-Fuel MicroFueler consists of a 250-gallon holding tank for organic feedstock, such as waste wine and beer, and a still that converts it to 100% ethanol, or E-Fuel. The still doubles as a fuel pump, which works similarly to those at traditional gas stations. The only waste product is distilled water, which can flow down a drain or be used to irrigate plants.

"If we give everybody the ability to make their own fuel, you break the oil infrastructure," said MicroFueler inventor Tom Quinn, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who also developed the motion-control system for the Nintendo Wii gaming system, a version of which is used in his new micro refinery. "Three years ago, I looked at where the world was going and energy caught my eye. As a world, we had no replacement fuel for gasoline, and that led me to alternative fuels, such as ethanol."

The problem with ethanol at that time, Quinn said, was energy inefficiency -- not only in the carbon cost of growing, harvesting and transporting the corn that was used to make it but in the distillation process that turned it into usable fuel.

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America's Food Crisis and How to Fix It

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

Horror stories about the food industry have long been with us — ever since 1906, when Upton Sinclair's landmark novel The Jungle told some ugly truths about how America produces its meat. In the century that followed, things got much better, and in some ways much worse. The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmland, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can't even raise their wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals. Add to the price tag the acceleration of global warming — our energy-intensive food system uses 19% of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the economy.

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In Obama Garden, Less Lead

WHEN the Obamas decided to turn some of the South Lawn at the White House into a kitchen garden, they did what many smart urban gardeners do: they had the soil tested for its nutrients and potential contaminants, like lead. The results prompted a number of headlines suggesting that the level of lead in the garden, 93 parts per million, was dangerous.

It wasn’t. The level is well below the 400 p.p.m. considered hazardous by the Environmental Protection Agency, though not below the more stringent goals recommended by some countries like the Netherlands, at 40 p.p.m.

Work done to improve the fertility of the soil before planting helped reduce the lead level, and test results just released by the White House indicate that the levels are now so low (14 parts per million) that they are similar to those found in places where there are no automobiles.

According to Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “if you do measurements around the U.S. where there has been no human activity and where there has been no impact from automobiles or other sources of lead these are kinds of levels you will see.”

Even the 93 p.p.m., she said, “is not associated with increased risk of harm.”

“When you are thinking of things to worry about,” she said, “I would not be thinking about those levels of lead.”

While acknowledging that 93 p.p.m. was not a hazard, Mother Jones magazine’s Web site attributed the long-term use of sludge as a fertilizer on the White House lawn for the presence, not just of lead, but of many other undesirable substances like antibiotics and sleeping pills. Sludge comprises the solids in sewage that separate out during treatment. According to the magazine, sludge was used for at least a decade on the White House lawn, possibly until the late 1990s.

But Irvin Williams, who retired as head groundskeeper at the White House last year, after 59 years on the job, said sludge was used only once there, in 1985.

And in 1994 President Bill Clinton sent a directive to government agencies telling them to start using environmentally friendly practices for landscaping government grounds, like reducing the use of toxic chemicals.

Sam Kass, White House food initiative coordinator and an assistant chef, who now combines his duties of cooking for the first family with garden expertise, explained what the White House had done before planting to make sure the soil was safe for vegetables.

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Fatal Sunshine: The Plight of California's Farm Workers

The bountiful harvest of California strawberries, melons, grapes, peaches and nectarines overflows the nation's summer tables. But that luscious crop mostly emerges thanks to farm workers who labor in flat fields under a scorching sun — and has a price higher than the grocery-store bill. Every year many farm workers become sick, and some die. Typical of the fatalities was Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, who was just 17. In May 2008, she died after picking grapes in Merced County for nine hours in 95-degree heat. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger attended her funeral and promised to do more to protect workers.

A lawsuit is now underway to ensure just that. Last week, the ACLU and the blue-chip law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson sued California's occupational-health and safety agency on behalf of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and five farm workers who had become sick or are relatives of workers who have died from heatstroke. According to the lawsuit "large numbers of agricultural employers fail utterly to provide basic access to water and shade for their employees" and, as a result, hundreds suffer heat-related illnesses and hospitalizations — or worse — each year .

The complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court provides graphic details. Audon Felix Garcia, 41, became sick July 2008 after loading grape boxes into a truck in 112-degree heat from morning to early afternoon in Kern County. He had 15 years of experience in the fields and, according to the complaint, his "core body temperature was 108 degrees Fahrenheit at the time of his death." Maria de Jesus Bautista had worked in the fields all her life and had never been sick from the heat, but in July 2008 while picking grapes in Riverside County in 110 degrees she complained to her sister of a "headache, nausea and cold sweats." According to the lawsuit, "She continued to work the rest of the day because her employer did not provide any shade and she felt pressured to keep pace with her co-workers. Over the next two weeks, her headache persisted, she became disoriented and was unable to recognize family members, and she was hospitalized on three separate occasions." She died on Aug. 2 last year.

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The English Encourage Urban Beekeeping

A new and improved design of beehive could be used by city dwellers to harvest up to 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of their own honey each year, according to Natural England, a British government conservation agency. The hives could also help stem the decline of bee populations.

Natural England will erect the so-called Beehaus on its roof in Victoria, central London, on Friday. The agency said the device should make it easy for anyone — from amateurs to seasoned apiarists — to help bees find a home in urban gardens.

“With the help of urban gardeners, bees can have access to a wonderfully diverse source of plants, resulting in fantastic flavorsome honey,” said James Tuthill, a co-founder of Omlet, the company that made the Beehaus, in a statement. The risk of city dwellers receiving bee stings would not be increased by the practice, officials said.

Urban beekeeping is already more than just a hobby just for gardening enthusiasts or dedicated apiarists.

Fortnum & Mason, a food emporium in London, and the Palais Garnier, the Paris opera house, both boast rooftop hives. In the United States, hives have been planned for the lawn of the White House.

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The wisdom of crowds

When was the last time you tried to convince your partner or a friend to do something for you? Washing the dishes, say — something you have to do, but you'd rather put off until later. The negotiation probably involved some coaxing and complementing, and then possibly some complaining or coercion. That's quite a lot of diplomacy for a situation involving two people and a minor task. Now imagine groups of hundreds of people trying to get thousands of people to do what they want them to. It's head-spinning stuff, but it's what the world is up against when it comes to dealing with climate change.

What's more, scientists who spend their time measuring the rate of ice melting in the Arctic or working out the chemistry of storing carbon underground aren't likely to solve this thorny problem. Luckily, there is a field of study that has at its heart human activity and social structure — why and how we do what we do. That discipline is sociology.

"Climate change is the ultimate collective-action problem," says Steven Brechin, a sociologist at Syracuse University in New York. "How do you get people to agree in the short term to solutions for a long-term problem?" The answer, like the problem, has to be wide-ranging and global, says Jeffrey Broadbent of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who also studies how societies affect their environments. "Its only solution lies in a level of global cooperation that humanity has never seen before."
In short supply

Broadbent is just starting to investigate what factors contribute to this kind of cooperation at the national level. He has recently begun a project, called Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks, that aims to find out how information about climate change enters a particular country's network of interested parties and what happens to it once it's found its way to organizations and governments.

Broadbent is now one of a band of sociologists that has begun to turn the discipline's tools towards climate change. In May last year, over 30 sociologists met at the US National Science Foundation's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to discuss what sociology is already contributing to climate change research and what questions sociologists need to be answering next. "Purely technological 'fixes'", concluded the meeting report, "will not be sufficient to mitigate or successfully adapt to climate change."

But this can-do attitude hasn't always been in evidence. "There are a lot of valuable contributions that could be made, and very few of them have been made," says Paul Stern, director of the US National Academies Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change. That's partly for financial reasons: funding from the US Global Change Research Program (GCRP, formerly the Climate Change Science Program) for research on the 'human dimensions' of climate change has actually fallen in the last 20 years. In 1992, three per cent of funding from the GCRP was spent on human dimensions research, including social science, and now this figure has dropped to less than two per cent. Diana Liverman, co-director of the Institute for Environment and Society at the University of Arizona in Tucson and director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, agrees with Stern: "Funding for social-science approaches to climate change has been pathetic given the size of the research challenge we're facing."

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