Prof blog: what was Sandy?

I don't think it's overly dramatic to say that Hurricane Sandy was the future, not the past, of New York City. I say this because the catastrophic effects of climate change will continue to materialize, in large part because the main source of global warming (and hence climate change) is carbon pollution, and the entire global economy is dependent on carbon waste for growth. You hear all kinds of people talk about 'sustainability,' or the idea of an ecologically-friendly economy, but I've yet to see the large-scale developments that might actually take the global economy off its carbon base.

With all this mind, then I'm reasonably certain that more storms like Sandy will occur. After all, these storms are the result of higher ocean and air temperatures, and those higher temperatures are caused by global warming. New York City sits on the coastline, and is therefore vulnerable and exposed to the vagaries of storms like Sandy. The scary part to imagine is that future storms will be, on the whole, both larger and stronger than Sandy was.

My final point riffs off the weirdness of the Wall Street Journal video we watched in class, in which we saw a bunch of white talking-heads and no conversation with people that actually went through the storm (people of color included, but really, anyone). There were moments of the aerial footage from the video where I swore I was looking at Hurricane Katrina, where the racial consequences of inequality were on full-view, and where many people left behind without resources died during the storm and its aftermath (something our class will look at closer in the text Zeitoun). I believe similar kinds of problems occurred during and after Sandy: the least-fortunate among New Yorkers ended up being the hardest hit, particularly in places like the Far Rockaways. While this isn't necessarily true for Staten Island and New Jersey, I believe the damage in those areas had equally catastrophic effects on an even larger scale. Why the storm had such social consequences is part of what we're going to investigate as a class this semester. How do issues of class and race become inseparable from issues of 'natural' (uh, human-created) disaster?