I’m sure that I’ve thought, of the oil spill in the Gulf, that it must be the worst ecological disaster in our history. At Commentary, John Steele Gordon asks the question, “The Worst Ecological Disaster Ever?” and concludes that the Gulf spill’s not our worst experience.
He offers some experiences far worse:
….how about the Aral Sea, where the Soviets diverted for agricultural use all the water that had flowed into it, destroying what had been the fourth largest lake in the world (26,000 square miles), as well as the vast ecosystem (and fishing industry) it had nurtured?
Or how about the London killer smog of 1952 that is thought to have killed upwards of 12,000 people, more than a thousand times as many people as have died in the Gulf Oil spill?
In this country, the worst man-made ecological disaster was, by order of magnitude, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Drought and poor farming practices in an area that should never have been farmed at all destroyed 100,000,000 acres. One dust storm that started on the high plains on May 9, 1934, dumped an estimated 6,000 tons of dust on the city of Chicago alone — four pounds per person. New York had to turn on the streetlights in broad daylight the next day. Two and half million people fled the area over the decade. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, died of dust pneumonia. Many more, especially children, died of malnutrition. Others were blinded when dust got under their eyelids.
I’m sure he’s right. There are valuable reminders of economics and history in his examples: one doesn’t always assess costs correctly from appearances, and one understandably but erroneously considers present disasters worse than distant, ill-remembered, earlier ones. More than one book has been written on these subjects, so to speak.
(The reverse is surely true, as well — that supposed cost savings from green technologies are sometimes exaggerated, omitting costs of adoption not properly considered. Worse, some of these terms are used like incantations, as though saying green or sustainable about a project makes it a genuine conservation effort.)