Disasters Natural and Economic
Tampa, Florida skyline, posted one day before Hurricane Milton's landfall
In September, hurricane Helene swept through the southeast and hit especially hard some of the mountain areas of the southern Appalachians, including around where I lived in the Tri-cities area of Northeast Tennessee. We are today looking at hurricane Milton about to batter much of Florida. After the pressing issue of rescuing lives and stabilizing critical services, a further question will be the manner in which rebuilding takes place.
Even the words recovery and rebuilding imply a return to a certain state of affairs, a stable state to which we return. Part of this is our desire to avoid loss and see our stability conserved: our inherently conservative nature as humans who have mixed feelings about change. Major hurricane-induced change is almost always a sad and negative one, and so the rebuilding feels like it’s repairing a harm that needs healing. And for the inhabitants who lost their property, their livelihood, their dreams, and even for some of them, their family members, it is in their utmost interest to have the option to repair their lives to the extent possible.
Yet, as we zoom out, we might consider that as a society we make choices about how we invest. Right now, the nationwide housing shortage is in the news. Everyone is talking about it from the political to the financial press. Our country is known to have underbuilt housing for well over a decade since the great recession. People were talking about that in those years, including the organization at which I served on the executive team, Fahe. As a society, our actions effected a choice to not address that underbuilding, and lower income Americans in those years felt the burden as they were pushed into the margins of housing.
There are subtler ways over an even longer arc that we make choices about how we rebuild. There are ghost towns in the west where people now visit as tourists. In their day when cattle and agriculture supported many more people out on the Great Plains in those locations, they were the commercial centers. We allowed them to decline. In the coal fields of Appalachia, counties of over 100,000 in the 20th century have declined to less than a fifth of that today as mechanization and western coal drove the jobs away and uprooted families.
Natural and economic forces change. They have always changed. In some cases, the change is slow and seems to make sense, ranching doesn’t require the same number of cowboys, hence the ghost towns. In other cases, we decide as a society that we are going to rebuild what was before we did in Houston after 2017’s hurricane Harvey (“Downtown is once again humming”).
When we have a disaster of flooding along the coast, in the mountains, or with our great rivers in the midcontinent, how do we express our values as a society? How do we decide when we rebuild to a similar (if more resilient state) as before? It is known that very few property owners in the southeastern mountain areas had flood insurance to prepare for the catastrophic flooding. It is known that the flood maps were dated. It is known that climate change can cause more extreme storms. Hurricane Helene in the mountains where I used to live was more extreme than people thought they would see in their lifetime.
What kind of ethical choice should of those areas make when they think about their families? What kind of choice should our society make, when we think about how we support? How important is it to repair these residents’ hometowns? How important was it to the coal families in the 20th century in the face of mechanization?
Is the decision made by the fact that we are a rich country and people deserve to stay near their family, friends and loved ones so we are going to help that happen? That wasn’t often our policy, but other countries have had much more place-based policies and we have moved in that direction in current years.
Is the deciding line for society the extent to which the areas are important in our modern post-industrial economy? So Houston is important and coal towns in southern West Virginia or cowboy towns on the plains were not? Where do the increasingly gentrified lifestyle communities of the southern Appalachian mountains, serving Charlotte, Atlanta, and other metro areas, end up in our lifetimes? Knowing that in another couple of generations the answer may change again.
I suspect these questions will not be decided solely on the plight of the dispossessed thousands of residents in those areas. How do we balance our human yearnings to come back home with the reality of powerful natural and economic forces? I have pondered on many long drives visiting partners and clients, and I welcome any thoughts you dear reader may share, for I confess that I do not have the answer. My mind and heart go to those people suffering, the pain of these dislocations whether fast or grindingly slow. We do not live in heaven on earth. I encourage you also to find a way to donate or otherwise support the immediate recovery of life and stabilization of critical services.