Month 9, Day 7: By “God,” Do You Mean “The Industrialized West?”

The New York Times had a front page story on Pakistan and its misery. It’s taken them a while.

HATA SIAL, Pakistan — When the governor of Punjab Province arrived recently in this small town with truckloads of relief goods for flood victims, his visit was as much a political mission as a humanitarian one. His message to the hundred or so displaced people gathered under an awning was that the government was there for them. Long after floodwaters subside, Pakistanis will face a lack of housing, food shortages and price spikes, among other hardships.

“The people say this was an act of God,” the governor, Salman Taseer, said in an interview after reassuring the crowd. “But what comes now, they say, is the act of man. If we don’t deliver, they will not forgive us.”

The “act of God/act of man” construction gave me a nice hook for the letter.

To the suffering Pakistanis, the floods that have destroyed their lives may seem an “Act of God,” and their government’s paralysis an “act of man.” But the grim reality is that the greenhouse effect brought about by the West’s profligate consumption of fossil fuels drastically increases the probability of catastrophic weather events. Thus, the floods are as much an act of man as the dysfunctionality of the Pakistani government. And just as Zardari’s administration is stymied and near-helpless in the face of this disaster, America’s national politics is mired in a quicksand of anti-science rhetoric that has rendered it unable to address humanity’s most pressing problem, or even to acknowledge that the problem exists. Global climate chaos is going to give us many Pakistans, each with an overwhelming share of human misery. Will we admit our own responsibilities, or will each new climate disaster still be an “Act of God?”

Warren Senders