"What has made this a disaster is that people have started to occupy part of the landscape that they shouldn't have occupied," [Swiss-based World Conservation Union Chief Scientist Jeff McNeely] told AFP in a telephone interview from Paris. "Fifty years ago the coastline was not densely occupied as now by tourist hotels." It is a tale of our times, throwing out the baby of received wisdom with the bathwater of outmoded superstitions in favor of a rootless Utopian world:
"The hotels did not replace traditional villages because the villagers built inland," McNeely said.
"What has also happened over the last several decades is that many mangroves have been cleared to grow shrimp ponds so that we, here in Europe, can have cheap shrimp," he told AFP in a telephone interview from Paris. "Fifty years ago the coastline was not densely occupied as now by tourist hotels."
"The mangroves were all along the coasts where there are shallow waters. They offered protection against things like tsunamis. Over the last 20-30 years, they were cleared by people who didn't have the long-term knowledge of why these mangroves should have been saved, by outsiders who get concessions from the governments and set up shrimp or prawn farms."
The shrimps and prawns are sold to Europeans and other foreigners "at a price that does not include the environmental cost which is being paid today," McNeely said.
Those who do not study history -- including natural history? -- are doomed to repeat it. Poignant in that as far back as Vitruvius, whose first-century BC The Ten Books of Architecture advised against building on flood plains and such, humans attuned to their environment could have told us how not to build in harm's way. Vitruvius's insights re siting draw on the superstitions of the time, of course -- superstition being the forerunner of science in our view -- but still hold a lot of water:
First comes the choice of a very healthy site. Such a site will be high, neither misty nor frosty, and in a climate neither hot nor cold, but temperate; further, without marshes in the neighborhhood. For when the morning breezes blow toward the town at sunrise, if they bring with them mists from marshes and, mingled with the mist, the poisonous breath of the creatures of the marshes to be wafted into the bodies of the inhabitants, they will make the site unhealthy [think malarial-bearing mosquitos].
The point being, you don't build on lowlands (unless you're as resourceful as the Dutch, of course, and prepared to engineer walls against the sea). We have lost touch with the forces of nature to our sorrow.
Note: Aussie blogger Tim Blair begs to differ: "Thousands of dead people is not an "environmental cost", Mr Science Guy. In fact, the environment came out of this relatively unscathed, as McNeely admits":
The mangroves are not particularly rich in species, the species that live there are used to typhoons, to storms and all that.
But that, of course, is our point. The mangrove and its native species, having evolved together in this specific littoral environment, are used to "all that." Cut the mangroves down, though, and replace them with shrimp farms, and all bets are off.
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