Environment & Energy

Barrett808

(12,955 posts) Sat Dec 31, 2011, 02:14 PM Dec 2011

Desdemona Despair: 50 doomiest images of 2011

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While collecting doom-laden images for 2011, Desdemona experienced a bit of déjà vu: another year of record flooding in the Philippines, and another year of record flooding in Pakistan. The Texas drought stretched on through all of 2011, causing record agricultural losses and depopulating the center of the state. Again, record-breaking wildfires swept through North America, and Russia’s forest fires exceeded even last year’s record-breaking 1 million hectares burned. Drought and food insecurity in the Horn of Africa expanded. Climate disaster in 2011 was a re-run of 2010, only worse.

Paradoxically, world attention to these matters waned: international aid to Pakistan flood victims is a mere fraction of what’s necessary, and the Russia fires were barely noticed by news media.

The year’s biggest technogenic disaster, the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, did get a lot of press, but by the end of 2011, coverage had fallen off greatly. Now begins the long, futile “cleanup” effort and the unglamorous wait for casualties to accrue.

The world financial system continued to crumble, which might be viewed as another sort of slow-motion technogenic catastrophe. Desdemona is fascinated by the most visible artifacts of the peak, the uninhabited structures that were constructed out of pure speculative frenzy in China, the Persian Gulf nations, and the United States. Consider how those resources might have been usefully spent, say for moving cities away from inexorably rising seas; consider how much natural habitat might have been spared.

For Desdemona, there are a few images from 2011 that are iconic: the ghostly outlines of irradiated dandelions from Fukushima; satellite views of Cyclone Yasi poised to hit the Queensland coast of Australia; the 600-year-old tsunami warning stones along the coast of Japan. Sometimes, Desdemona hopes that this blog will serve a similar function for future generations.

For now, Des shares the frustration of Mansour N’Diaye, chief of cabinet at the Secretariat of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification.

Like everyone, we are very much moved by the image and news that we are seeing from not only Somalia, but also the whole Horn of Africa. … No one can say that we didn’t know. It was known, including by policymakers. The fact of the matter is that perhaps priorities were given to something else. And therefore, one has to face the fact that policy failures are here very much at stake.

50 doomiest images of 2011