By John Taylor; 2 September, 2005
Let us pray for the victims of hurricane Katrina, of the New Orleans flood and its now its anarchic aftermath. The levee broke and hell has broken loose. There is looting, violence and even starvation as the social fabric unravels under extreme stress. Katrina's winds have exposed a rot underneath the materialistic veneer of civilization. And the sad and frightening fact is that this is no isolated disaster, it is a harbinger of what is to come. We habitually call these disasters "natural" but the evidence conclusively demonstrates to most scientists' minds that global warming is hard upon us and that humans are complicit. The planet's climate has been decisively deranged by pollution, environmental mismanagement, corruption and a thousand small acts of selfishness and irresponsibility. Still, as the world examines New Orleans under a magnifying glass (with satellite imaging, this is true literally as well as figuratively) and the media mavens deplore how New Orleans' surrounding wetlands could have protected the city, but they were drained and sold off as industrial parks and residential subdivisions. The poverty in the midst of obscene wealth, the greed, corruption and neglect of responsibility behind such decisions, all these are hardly restricted to New Orleans or the United States. They are everywhere and cannot be ignored. And we can look forward to more disasters of the same kind, only severer and more often. With the melting of the polar icecaps, the inundation of islands and coastal areas and mass exodus of refugees from large cities will soon be routine. Only radical structural changes will see us safely through the ubiquitous challenge that a rise in sea-level poses.
What can be done about it? How can we assure that this does not happen again, even with sea levels rising in virtually every place on earth? One answer lies in something I learned from my spiritual sister, Anne Pearson, at a fireside she gave the other night in Flamborough, at Mrs. Javid's. Anne said that we tend to look at the physical, technological changes that mark modernity and leave it at that, ignoring the non-physical progress that is being made. Inventions like autos, airplanes, computers and other physical advances in technology are just the tip of a huge iceberg. Vaster still are organizational improvements going on everywhere, the establishment of equality between men and women, the abolition of war and measures against domestic violence … plus thousands of other legal and structural improvements, all are summed up by Baha'u'llah's magic phrase, the "consciousness of the oneness of humanity." The increasing awareness of all that we are essentially one increases our potential to work real improvements, radical but non-violent change. It allows all to see that we have the same basic needs and responsibilities and that real progress will only come if we make it fair for all, rich and poor, whether one's skin is yellow, red, black, brown or white. This consciousness constitutes the most basic paradigm shift in the history of humanity; whether you call yourself a Baha'i or not, it is undeniable and inevitable.
In the present atmosphere of suspicion and worldliness a realistic response to global warming seems utterly utopian, pie-in-the-sky and hopeless. But this consciousness is spreading every day. Soon we will be capable of astonishingly futuristic structural changes. The shift within the shift is consciousness not only of our similarity, but in how close our humanity is to the divine Merciful God. This sense will for the first time enable us to organize locally and internationally, together, in harmony. We will effectually consult, plan and act in unison as a united human race. Localities will respond to world needs and the world in turn will reach out and touch the heart at every point on our planet. Given such change in heart and mind, individual and group, the actual solutions to the problems of global warming actually seem simple and easy. Let me go through some of the more obvious ones, none of which I claim as original to me.
The first step would be a complete shift to modular housing. If everyone, rich or poor, had a standard housing unit about the size of a small trailer home -- or as the industry prefers to call them, manufactured home -- it would be a simple matter in an emergency like a Hurricane Katrina to put both family and their possessions into their base housing unit, load them onto a containerized transport vehicle -- be it a train, ship, truck or helicopter -- and move them to safety.
If apartment buildings everywhere were built to accept as a minimum for each apartment unit one of these standard housing units, there would be minimal work, expense and dislocation. Mass evacuation of an entire city would be for most inhabitants no more traumatic than moving to a new neighborhood under normal conditions. If New York were flooded and there was a surplus of apartments in Hong Kong or Jakarta, the refugees would simply move there at the first sign of a rise in sea-level. If we took all the Baha'i principles seriously including the adoption of a world language, there would additionally be no language barrier and therefore minimal culture shock for those who undergo such an exile. For the fact is that most of the trauma of being a refugee comes from lack of organization, standardization and -- there is no other word to use here -- love between our brothers and our sisters, not just some but all.
Modular housing and a world language, of course, are only part of the solution. At our present level of disorganization the rapid migration of millions even if they were properly housed in compact, semi-autonomous units would still cause major dislocation. The three basics of physical survival are known by all to be food, clothing and shelter, and we have covered shelter and clothing. As they are finding out in New Orleans, unless food and water are readily available wherever people are, inanition and starvation set in rapidly. When the three basics are not secure and assured, stress levels go higher, leading to harm both in the short term (anger, crime, mistakes, looting) and long term harm as well (for example, children born of pregnant mothers undergoing such stressful conditions are born weaker and have lower intelligence). The solution is full capitation of resources everywhere. Every neighborhood and inhabited area must be subject to standard rules to assure the basics, potable water, medical care, every essential, for each soul living there.
As far as the food question goes, I think that gazpacho soup is a good place to start for a basic, standard planetary diet. Under capitation every apartment or survey planned and built would have to include built into the roof or on its grounds enough greenhouses to grow locally the vegetables that go into a bowl of gazpacho soup supplementing every meal for each resident. I have been supplementing my meals with a bowl of gazpacho for almost a month and I feel much healthier and more vital now; the scientific study that gave me this idea discovered in test subjects after two weeks of one bowl of soup per day (the amount that most easily gives us the required minimum daily servings of vegetables) that cholesterol, anti-oxidants and other base lines shot up to optimum levels. Even if one's diet remains otherwise terrible, a basic gazpacho supplementation would raise the general health of all. Gazpacho is so basic that it should be supplied free to the poorest and is so easy to prepare that it could be literally pipelined into disaster areas like New Orleans.
So as we pray for and offer what help we can to the New Orleans refugees let us at the same time pray for the gumption and the love to organize real solutions for all of humanity. God's plan is going forward and we need only settle on its ways and means.
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John Taylor
badijet@gmail.com
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