Articles by Emily Gertz

Wet

Is this image from post-Katrina New Orleans? A burly American rescue team dispatched to Mexico?

No, it's...

Hurricane Stan not as friendly as name might indicate

Mexico and northern Central America are still staggering from the aftermath of the latest Gulf Coast tempest, Hurricane Stan. Some are already calling Stan's impact worse than 1998's Hurricane Mitch.

Stan hit along Mexico's southern Veracruz coast on Tuesday as a Category 1 hurricane, and was downgraded to a tropical storm shortly thereafter -- but it's the landslides and flooding from the resulting rains that have been devastating. In Guatemala, storm-induced rains only ended on Sunday, and the army began evacuating people stranded in remote towns and villages. As many as 1,400 are feared to have died in villages inundated by mudslides; the government says it will declare them hallowed ground, as mass graves. Thousands are displaced and many fear their livelihoods have been destroyed.

In Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, more than 100 have been reported killed and thousands displaced from flooded areas. In Mexico, the storm destroyed key crops including coffee, and about 300,000 people -- primarily in the country's poorest regions -- were evacuated to shelters. About $1.85 billion will be needed to rebuild the hardest-hit areas, according to President Vincente Fox.

The Grist staff are taking the rest of the day off to go home and hug their kids and puppies.

Journalist Jacques Leslie on dams

Hydropower is one those issues that can make a good green go pale with contradictory impulses. Abundant clean energy, sure, plus all that Woody Guthrie populist goodness. But also the potential for massive destruction to land and landscape, anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people displaced, and all sorts of downstream ecological and economic disruptions. About 140 countries have major dams, which generate about a fifth of the globe's electricity and enable a sixth of its agricultural output. So while the idea of just tearing them down can have a lot of emotional appeal for some, it just ain't that simple anymore.

Five years ago, jounalist Jacques Leslie wrote 12,000 words on the politics of water for Harper's: "Running Dry: What Happens When the World No Longer Has Enough Freshwater?" He was intrigued enough to keep investigating once that assignment was done -- and the result is a new book, Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment. Just one of his insanely alarming findings: "The world's dams have shifted so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered the speed of the earth's rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field."

(And here I've been freaking out about a little thing like global warming!)

An ongoing interview with Leslie is the current feature over at The WELL's open-to-the-public inkwell conference, where readers from the wide world can send in questions for Leslie to tackle. His hopeful view is that big dams will someday be relics. Asked about the alternatives, he says:

... there's a substantial list that includes both traditional and new technologies, including rainwater harvesting, water recycling, drip irrigation, desalination (for water supply) and solar, wind, fuel cells, and pump and turbine redesign (for energy). In the Indian state of Rajasthan, a fellow named Rajendra (my spelling may be off) won the Magsaysay Prize (a kind of Nobel Prize for the developing world) by developing a system of ponds and rainwater harvesting that recharged groundwater, revived streams, and rejuvenated villages in an arid area. I hope to write about this work some day.

This is a conversation worth checking out.

(Full disclosure: I've been a volunteer community host on The WELL for about a decade. This plug for inkwell may net me a warm "thanks!" in e-mail.)

Blaming enviros for New Orleans is a clever government strategy

Do Senate Republicans really think they can shift the blame for the flooding and deaths in New Orleans to environmentalists? Maybe that's not the question we need to ask ourselves.

This smear effort could become a significant distraction for eco-advocates -- at a time when a focus on implementing good wetlands policies in the Gulf is crucial, and as Republicans try to weaken environmental protections and implement bad energy policies as part of rebuilding efforts.

Groups ranging from Louisiana's Save Our Wetlands to American Rivers to the Sierra Club have issued angry rebuttals to the charges that environmental lawsuits helped destroy New Orleans. Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) have also issued statements castigating the effort.