JEFFREY ST CLAIR
The scale of the destruction defies the
imagination. There are images and maps. But still you can’t quite wrap
your mind around it. With reason. We’ve never seen anything like this.
Never experienced it. Heard stories about it. There’s nothing to compare
it to, not even the Biblical floods. We’ve gone beyond our own myths
and legends.
A third of an entire country–a big country,
a country the size of Turkey and Venezuela–lies underwater, inundated
by fierce floods from all directions.
Thousands of miles of roads have been wiped
out. Hundreds of bridges washed away. Rail lines and airports
submerged. Nothing getting in, nothing getting out. The entire nation
brought to a standstill. A nation with nuclear weapons and an unstable
government, bordered by a hostile regime which has demonstrated every
inclination to take devious advantage of Pakistan’s devastated
condition.
Fields flooded, crops lost, livestock drowned.
Dams crumbled, power stations shorted out, transmission lines toppled, water treatment plants swamped.
Refineries, factories, hospitals and schools engulfed.
At least 220,000 houses were destroyed
(imagine all of the houses in Spokane demolished), maybe a million more
suffering some kind of damage, many beyond repair. At least 33 million
people–more than the population of Texas and Oklahoma combined–at least
temporarily displaced by the storms that have ravaged Pakistan since
late June.
At least 1,200 have died, 400 of them
children. More are missing. More than 330,000 people (about the size of
Cincinnati) are living in camps with no idea when they can return home,
how they will get there or what they will return to.
One of the fastest warming bodies of water
on the planet, the India Ocean is becoming a simmering cauldron, cooking
up heat waves and super-monsoons. This year the heat–heat almost beyond
the point of human survivability–came first, in two back-to-back waves
in May and June. Then came the rains. Rains like few other regions on
earth have ever experienced. Rains that swelled the ancient Indus River
over its banks and beyond its floodplains, creating a giant lake 100
kilometers wide almost overnight, which remains visible from space. A
lake which can’t be drained, because there’s no place to pump the water
to.
The rains that drenched Sindh were 784%
above the average for August. The rains that flooded Balochistan were
500% above normal. As much as 40 inches more than normal. Numbers so
high they don’t really have a meaning.
One searches for a precedent and finds
nothing even remotely close. This is now the precedent. This is the new
benchmark. We’re told we must adapt. Adapt to what? Cataclysm? How?
But the floods of August weren’t just
driven by extreme rains, they were also charged with runoff of from
collapsing glaciers in the Karakoram, Himalaya, Hindu Kush and Pamir
Mountains, producing torrents of water crashing down from 20,000-foot
peaks. Pakistan has more than 7,000 alpine glaciers, more than any place
outside of the polar regions. And this glaciers have been melting
10-times faster than their historic average over the last two centuries.
Pakistan, a country responsible for less than 1% of global carbon emissions, now faces the 8th highest climate risk in the world. But it’s coming for all of us, eventually, regardless of the level of culpability. There’s no place to hide.
Ecological time is moving very fast now, so
fast that we risk losing our bearings as a species, losing our
connections to the landscape of the past, the very terrain that defined
our existence, our ways of living, our sense of who and where we are.
What were once fields are now lakes, what were once glaciers now
cascades.
And yet the floods of Pakistan are a mere
prelude, an overture for the future that awaits us. There’s no going
back now, no bridge fuel to the past, no carbon capture time machine, or
nuclear techno-fix wormhole out of our predicament. At this terminal
point, such fantasies are only a measure of our failure to confront how
we got to where we are.
COUNTERPUNCH
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