Our Summer Vacation: 20,000 Dead

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Our Summer Vacation: 20,000 Dead

 

By Mike Davis, tomdispatch.com

September 29, 2003

 

Europe's long, hot, tragic summer begs a little North American background.

 

 

 

In July 1995, the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley in Chicago was an

accomplice in the murder of more than 700 of its senior citizens. As

temperatures climbed above 40C (104F), the city's airless tenements and skid-row

hotels became charnel houses. Thousands of the poor and elderly, mainly blacks,

were mortally stricken.

 

 

 

By the second day of the heat wave, overcrowded hospitals were closing their

doors to the critically ill and paramedics were unable to respond to the deluge

of emergency calls. Medical workers warned of a death epidemic and begged for

help.

 

 

 

But the Daley Jr. machine bunkered itself in denial and inaction. Heat mortality

among the forgotten poor received less attention than had winter snow days,

which caused few deaths but greatly inconvenienced suburban commuters and Loop

businesses. Thus, the fire department refused to call in more staff or

ambulances, while the police ignored requests to canvass the tenements for

isolated seniors.

 

 

 

City hall stonewalled the media: " What disaster? " As bodies overflowed the

morgue, the Mayor complained to reporters. " It's hot. But let's not blow it out

of proportion... Every day people die of natural causes. "

 

 

 

The Chicago " heat catastrophe, " as it is now officially called, was of course

anything but a " natural " disaster. As radical sociologist Eric Klinenberg

explains in a brilliant book published last year (Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

Disaster in Chicago), " These deaths were not an act of God. " He demonstrates

instead that they were the preventable consequences of poverty, racism, social

isolation, and criminal civic negligence.

 

 

 

Klinenberg's approach is generally shared by public health analysts. Indeed, the

lessons of Chicago 1995 were enshrined in authoritative studies published by the

Centers for Disease Control and the New England Journal of Medicine .

 

 

 

An Avoidable Massacre

 

 

 

These reports, whose findings have now been widely adopted in North American

cities, advocate early warning systems, the immediate opening of neighborhood

" cooling centers, " door-to-door searches for ill seniors, adequate summer

staffing of hospitals, and the subsidizing of air-conditioning in low-income

apartments.

 

 

 

This literature is now scientifically canonical, easily accessible on the

internet, and well known to European professionals. The lesson of the Chicago

heat wave, in other words, screams from the bookshelf. There was no excuse for

not heeding it.

 

 

 

Yet this August, the vulnerable poor were again massacred under analogous social

conditions by Chicago-like responses. In France, for example, the rightwing

health minister Jean-Francois Mattei continued his vacation – 'tennis, anyone?'

– while thousands of his fellow citizens perished. Heroic lethargy was also the

response of the Berlusconi government in Italy, which lied to the press and

suppressed heat-death statistics.

 

 

 

The overall European death toll is probably the equivalent to five or more World

Trade Centers: at least 20,000 victims and probably more. Official estimates are

at least 11,400 in France; more than 4000 in Italy; 1400 in the Netherlands;

1300 in Portugal; and some 900 in the United Kingdom. The Spanish figure of only

100 is hardly credible and should be the stuff of scandal.

 

 

 

While the Euro-right blames the 35-hour-week and the collapse of family values

for these atrocities, the Left must be relentless in holding neo-liberal

policies accountable. Socialists must demand the kind of 'social autopsy' – of

which Klinenberg's study provides an admirable model – that lays bare the

causative roles of poverty, unaffordable housing, and underfunded public

services, as well as the collapse of intergenerational solidarity.

 

 

 

In face of this small mountain of corpses, moreover, it can no longer be taken

for granted that European neo-liberalism is actually more 'compassionate' than

its more raptor-like American cousin. After all, it takes a pretty big hole in

the vaunted social safety net for 20,000 or more people to fall through.

 

 

 

Our Nonlinear Future

 

 

 

But what of the strange Augusts yet to come? How should we address the

increasingly violent interaction between environmental change and the

late-capitalist city?

 

 

 

First – to stay within a public health framework – there is growing evidence of

a sinister synergy between heat stress, traffic, and air pollution. The

post-Chicago studies generally focused on hyperthermia and dehydration, paying

little attention to air quality per se. But French scientists now believe that

high ozone levels were a key factor in as many as 3000 deaths. August holiday

gridlock may now be deadly in a double sense. This is why groups like Greenpeace

are renewing calls for temporary or permanent traffic moratoria in major urban

centers.

 

 

 

Second, August was a vivid illustration of the kind of " unnatural " history we

must come to expect as the norm. This will not be a history slowly unreeling

itself in tidy linear progression, as in biographies of Victorian liberals. More

likely, the dialectic of global warming and neo-liberalism – especially the

Bushite doctrine of " consuming all the good things of the earth in our lifetime "

– will produce a non-linear roller-coaster ride between unpredictable disasters.

 

 

 

Let me share with you my summer nightmare. It is a much scarier story than any

by Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King.

 

 

 

While the pavements were boiling in Paris this summer, the French newspaper Le

Monde ran a cover story about the melting sea ice in the Arctic. The gist was

simply that Norwegian polar researchers, tops in the field, were predicting that

the Arctic Ocean's ice cover would completely disappear by the middle of this

century.

 

 

 

The nightmare part is not rising sea levels since ice already displaces its

water volume. Rather it is the radical change in " albedo, " the amount of solar

energy reflected from the surface. Right now Arctic ice is a huge mirror sending

heat back to space; remove the ice, however, and the clear blue sea absorbs

immense additional amounts of solar energy.

 

 

 

Warming, as a result, will suddenly accelerate. At least in geophysical terms,

it could prove a far more drastic blow to Gaia than even nuclear winter.

 

 

 

Paradoxically, this Arctic warming, by eventually melting icecaps and increasing

river flows, might actually shut down the circulation of the Gulf Stream and

turn northwestern Europe into an icebox. This is the worst case scenario that

one of the world's most famous climate researchers, Wallace Broecker of Columbia

University, recently warned about in the pages of Science magazine.

 

 

 

Indeed, he points out that something like this actually happened 12,000 years

ago: It was called the Younger Dryas event. Incredibly this shift of global

climate regimes took less than a decade to occur. Indeed, abrupt climate change

is one of the fundamental scientific discoveries of our lifetime.

 

 

 

Global capitalism is the runaway train on which we're all held hostage. And each

extreme summer may be inching us closer to the precipice of catastrophic

environmental change.

 

 

 

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