Should ‘Rebuilding’ Be The Goal After Climate Disasters? This piece makes a strong case for rethinking that approach:
Disaster intervals are collapsing, with one catastrophe following another in such quick succession that one bleeds into the next and the old metabolism of disaster recovery fails to keep pace. Climate scientists sometimes talk about whiplash: conditions of extreme drought followed by conditions of historic rainfall, for instance, with flooding made worse because the dirt and soil has been baked into a surface as unwelcoming to water as concrete.
Wildfires often denude hillsides, leading to lethal mudslides when storms come; fires can even be fed by heavy rains, as happened in Europe this summer, when spring precipitation nurtured new vegetation which baked under the continent’s historic heat waves and then burned. When rains hit desert, you can get achingly beautiful floral superblooms in Death Valley or lethal flash flooding in the Grand Canyon. This summer we got both. When decades of glacier loss is followed by an unusually hot summer in the Himalayas, you can get landslides that feel like a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.
Cosmic anomalies now arrive serially, disrupting paradigms as reliably as they do landscapes. When a thousand-year storm hits the Texas hill country and the floodwaters drown 139 people and the entire grounds of Camp Mystic, it might look like an act of God, even when the waters overwhelm something long known to locals as Flash Flood Alley. When another flood hits 12 months later, it suggests a very different calendar of grief — and recovery.
“Nobody really knows what real recovery looks like,” says Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Barack Obama and now a disaster-management scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “But the whole apparatus was built on the assumption that disasters were random and rare and that recovery was one and done.”
This, she says, is the original sin of recovery — that we don’t recognize what the disaster itself is telling us. A true thousand-year flood doesn’t reveal much about what new resilience must be built over the next decade, since you only expect to see something like it again 10 centuries from now. That it might come again before the next census or town council election is such an unnerving prospect that we resist it almost magnetically, preferring to believe our suffering was freakish and improbable. And in the immediate aftermath of disaster, public attention and collective ambition are pulled perversely backward, toward restoration, as much as pushed forward, toward adaptation.
The immediate playbook of recovery is familiar, even for those watching from afar: search-and-rescue, clearing debris, restoring some basic public services and temporarily standing up others. “But when Anderson Cooper leaves town, it’s not as sexy,” Kayyem says. “It’s not all the madness, with the cops and the firefighters, and it’s not the child reunited with the mother or the dog reunited with the senior citizen. It’s just the really difficult stuff, which we didn’t take seriously before, because we all figured disasters were random and rare. We figure we’ll just throw a lot of money at the problem, get the community back on its feet and move on.”
Perhaps some local group will rally for new flood barriers, or a county official will press a weather-hardening initiative for local homes. But once you’re out of immediate danger, the recovery often grows rudderless against an ocean of contrary currents. Insurance payments frequently reward rebuilding in precisely the same spot, and for homeowners the highest priority is typically to return as quickly as possible — even if that means not waiting for new codes and building guidelines, let alone paying more to implement them. The tax base has a status quo bias, too, since localities expect certain revenue to stream from certain places, which happens only if the community returns to form. Local transportation and social services, too, were designed to serve the needs of the old community.
Highly-recommended. Especially for public officials.
‘Ludes Making A Comeback. Should’ve happened 40 years ago, when I could still enjoy them:
Quaaludes all but vanished after the US banned the euphoria-inducing sleeping pills in 1984. The sweeping measure was the one unequivocal success of the “war on drugs”, since “ludes” were produced entirely by the pharmaceutical industry – which complied with the order to cease doing so.
“We eliminated the problem,” said former Drug Enforcement Administration diversion control head Gene Haislip. “We beat them.” (Bastards!)
Then the 2013 movie Wolf of Wall Street plucked quaaludes from the annals of drug history and became a box office hit, making a new generation suddenly curious about the drug. It didn’t happen overnight, but now, thanks to niche underground chemists and exclusive drug concierges, quaaludes are back.
Without the film, “quaaludes would have disappeared into oblivion”, says Jack Allocca, an honorary neuroscience fellow at the University of Melbourne and a drug pharmacology researcher. “It created such a hype around the drug. The people that are doing quaaludes are either connoisseur psychonauts, or they want to be ‘Wolf of Wall Street cool’.” (Or, perhaps, ’70’s nostalgists?)
Quaaludes all but vanished after the US banned the euphoria-inducing sleeping pills in 1984. The sweeping measure was the one unequivocal success of the “war on drugs”, since “ludes” were produced entirely by the pharmaceutical industry – which complied with the order to cease doing so.
“We eliminated the problem,” said former Drug Enforcement Administration diversion control head Gene Haislip. “We beat them.” (Bastards!)
Then the 2013 movie Wolf of Wall Street plucked quaaludes from the annals of drug history and became a box office hit, making a new generation suddenly curious about the drug. It didn’t happen overnight, but now, thanks to niche underground chemists and exclusive drug concierges, quaaludes are back.
One regular consumer of quaaludes, who does not wish to be named because he manufactures psychedelic drugs, recalls his reaction was when he was first offered the drug at a party more than a year ago: “I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, dude.’ Because of Wolf of Wall Street, quaaludes have this proper vibe to them. They’re these very classy, ancient, extinct drugs.”
His understanding is that several chemists, mostly along the west coast, started synthesizing them because the demand for them grew after the success of the Oscar-nominated Wolf of Wall Street, but that it may have taken time to procure the precursors and establish a supply chain. “I don’t think many people were really aware of quaaludes before Wolf of Wall Street came out,” he says. “I didn’t know about them.”
The co-organiser of the party where he first took quaaludes has played a key role in reintroducing the drug to certain elite scenes. “Movies reawaken awareness about compounds,” he says. But the representation of quaaludes in the movie is akin to seeing someone chugging a whole bottle of mezcal and incapacitating themselves, he says: “It was not a great model of how it can be used to mitigate anxiety. They’re very pleasant and low-risk if used responsibly.”
Meaning, don’t mix with alcohol. Man, I miss those days…
Meditation–The Biggest ‘Con Job’ Since Global Warming?:
In 2004, Willoughby Britton, then a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, began recruiting participants for a study that, she felt sure, would show meditation improves sleep.
Britton, a meditation teacher, was so devoted to the practice that she saw herself as a “double agent,” someone who uses science to promote meditation. Although she had grown up in a nonpracticing Episcopalian home, she’d become deeply invested in Buddhist teachings. She read meditation books in her spare time and at one point considered becoming a Buddhist nun. She was confident that meditation improved most things, including sleep; it had already improved much about her own life.
For her study, Britton split 26 participants into two groups: one that would go through an eight-week-long meditation class, and one that would serve as a control group. She brought them all into a lab to sleep overnight while sensors measured their brain waves, muscle activity, and eye movements.
But when she reviewed the results, she was dismayed to find they were the opposite of what she had predicted. The participants in the meditation group slept more fitfully, with more frequent awakenings, than those who didn’t meditate. They spent more time in “Stage 1,” the lightest sleep phase, from which people are easily roused. “Graph after graph after graph, no matter how you looked at it—number of awakenings, number of micro arousals, number of Stage 1 minutes,” Britton told me, the amount of meditation that the subjects practiced was directly correlated with worse sleep quality.
Britton wasn’t sure what had happened. Had she done something wrong? Designed the study poorly? Was the result a fluke, a random finding that didn’t mean much? Or perhaps meditators just need less sleep. At the time, promoting meditation was more important to her than scientific ethics, and she worried that publishing the results would mean “harming the dharma”—criticizing the teachings of the Buddha. So she didn’t.
On a meditation retreat not long after this, she was chatting about her study with a meditation teacher when the teacher said, “I don’t know why all you psychologists try to make meditation into a relaxation technique. Everyone knows if you meditate enough, you stop sleeping.”
On some level, Britton must have known this. At that point, she had spent years both meditating and studying the brain. Because most kinds of meditation aim to enhance concentration, the practice can act like a stimulant. And just as chemical stimulants such as caffeine and Adderall can interfere with sleep, so, too, can excessive meditation.
What else, she wondered, did meditation teachers know that they weren’t telling people? Gradually, starting with that sleep study, the tiers of thought propping up Britton’s worldview—that Buddhism is a cure-all, and that meditation was always beneficial, and could never cause harm—would collapse. Over time, she would find that meditation, a multibillion-dollar industry that is promoted as a treatment for anxiety, chronic pain, alcohol abuse, addiction, and many other ailments, can sometimes, for some people, cause severe and lasting side effects: depression, anxiety, even acute psychosis. Losing the belief system that had been foundational to her life would lead her to produce a trailblazing body of research about the adverse effects of meditation, and then to found a clinical practice geared toward helping the people—a lot of them, as it turns out—who believe that meditation has harmed them.
Cue The Fab Four:
