Amid the distress brought by Cyclone Gabrielle, questions begin to form around who is to blame. As is the case in most 'natural' disasters, various corporate and government organisations are left holding smoking guns.
Comment: It has been a disastrous few weeks: the floods and then the cyclone in the North Island, the catastrophic earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.
Natural disasters, accidents – nobody’s fault. But is it really nobody’s fault? Criminologists and other critical analysts have disputed this assumption for decades.
When you look closely at major disasters, they very often have human fingerprints on them. For example, in her 2005 paper titled Disaster by Design, the director of the International State Crime Initiative, professor Penny Green, wrote that the Turkish government bore significant responsibility for the thousands of lives lost in the earthquakes of 1999 and 2003.
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The building codes in Turkey were widely flouted and unsafe buildings were signed off by the authorities, thanks to an ingrained and well-known culture of corruption that existed in government agencies. The earthquake was a natural event, but the disaster was that it resulted in so many deaths that were avoidable.
Readers of the international press will no doubt be familiar with this perspective because it has resurfaced again in the coverage of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria this year. Our general understanding of culpability should include the background factors that have created a context in which the destructive outcomes of natural events are amplified. If you have substantially increased the chances that people will come to harm, then you are part of the cause of the harm.
Cyclone Gabrielle was about as natural as cheese in a can – as natural as the many other so-called accidents and disasters that form the casebook of the history of white-collar and environmental crime.
In the midst of the distress that we are all feeling about the wrath Gabrielle brought to our shores – the houses wrecked, the loved ones lost, the lives up-ended – it has been distressing also to see the questions forming around who, if anyone, is to blame. It is distressing because, as ever, there are various corporate and government organisations holding smoking guns.
Local councils have allowed building on river flats that were clearly marked as known flood risks. Finance Minister Grant Robertson has pondered whether the government would be responsible if it encouraged people to return to floodplains, like Esk Valley, to rebuild. Surely it would be, and surely it has been.
Forestry and logging have risen to the level of public enemy in New Zealand with their slash – the detritus from intensive logging operations left in-situ rather than properly cleared up – recognised as a contributing factor to bridge failures and river overflows. Slash was picked up by floodwaters and became a key part of the destructive force bearing down upon our vulnerable communities and their fragile infrastructure.
The Government has announced there will be an inquiry, but that should have been done years ago. Numerous calls have been made in the past for officials to intervene in the forestry industry’s dumping practices, including criticism of its inconsequential fines for slash-related harms. In 2019, Juken New Zealand was fined $152,000 for various failings and consent breaches that resulted in slash clogging waterways near Gisborne, although this can hardly be a deterrent in a multi-billion dollar industry.
So the scene was set for tragedy – but wasn’t Cyclone Gabrielle an exceptional event, unpredictable and extreme, well beyond what we might reasonably have foreseen and prepared for? Well no, not really. You don’t have to look very hard to find a huge amount of literature about how the climate crisis is forecast to bring more of precisely these kinds of high-intensity weather-induced disasters.
The chain of human responsibility for the destructive consequences of natural disasters extends back to those whose business activities have influenced our weather. The large fossil-fuel enterprises and their acolytes and apologists have brought us here: they are a significant contributing cause in the destructive power of storms like Gabrielle.
For decades they have used execrable tactics of delay and evasion, waged public relations wars promoting doubt over socially responsible truth, and greenwashed their malign influence on the future of our planet and our species.
So, from where we sit, Cyclone Gabrielle was about as natural as cheese in a can - as natural as the many other so-called accidents and disasters that form the casebook of the history of white-collar and environmental crime.
Is this the perfect storm of our times? Key contributing causes of extreme weather disasters are geographical and meteorological, yes, but they are also political and economic: the limp and ineffective government housing planners; the profit-oriented forestry loggers who care not for protecting the public interest; the socially irresponsible oil corporations who choose their own short-termism over our collective future.
Our hearts go out to those affected by these disasters: forces of nature magnified in their destructive results by a perfect storm of the perverse consequences of a negligence that is all too human.
