Last Tuesday on the New York Times website, I saw the picture shown above. I’ll call it simply Survivors. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a comparable picture. One that comes to mind is the famous picture known as Napalm Girl, which shows a naked Vietnamese girl and other hysterical children running away from a napalm bombing [see]. Both pictures are about horror and flight, but Survivors, while less jolting, is deeper in its grimness.
A few things jump out in Survivors. First, there’s the devastation all around the fleeing pair (a woman and her daughter, I assume): standing water, wreckage, bent and torn trees. Typhoon Haiyan was indeed a monster. Then I see the bandana covering the woman’s nose and mouth, and the girl covering her nose with her hand. The stench of death must be horrible. What is the woman carrying? A statuette of Jesus, apparently her most treasured possession. It’s stunningly ironic: devastation and death surround her; her husband is elsewhere and perhaps among the dead; her home and other possessions are gone, save for her earrings, a Calvin Klein pullover, and a sporty windbreaker; hunger and possibly disease lie ahead. Yet idolatry remains at the center of her life. The entire image is a testament to unshakeable faith.
Not directly in evidence is the villain behind this scene. It would be easy to say that it’s Typhoon Haiyan if it weren’t for the fact that the second most powerful storm to strike the Philippines, Typhoon Bopha, occurred less than a year ago. So perhaps the real villain isn’t the storms themselves but the dynamic in the world’s climate that has jacked up the temperature of our oceans—what we call “global warming” or, more recently, “climate change.” That phenomenon also gave us Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. It’s also generating severe thunderstorms with increasing CAPE (convective available potential energy) and wind shear, the makers of tornadoes. A recent study predicts that by the end of the century, climate change will increase severe thunderstorms in the eastern U.S. by 40%. [source] How many EF5 tornadoes will that bring us?
The problem with this analysis is that it’s completely impersonal. Climate change didn’t create itself; people created it. More specifically, the users of carbon-based fuels in the industrialized nations created it. So when I look at Survivors, I see a poor people whose country is being ravaged by the wealthy people of the world. More than that, though, I see insanity. Everyone’s a loser, because the ravagers are also ravaging themselves.
The Scratching Post 