{"id":27827,"date":"2010-08-19T15:25:43","date_gmt":"2010-08-19T20:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=27827"},"modified":"2010-08-19T15:39:34","modified_gmt":"2010-08-19T20:39:34","slug":"climate-change-and-pakistan-floods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/climate-change-and-pakistan-floods\/","title":{"rendered":"Ohh, the water…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reflect on these facts from our friends at wikipedia<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The 2010 Pakistan floods<\/strong> began in July 2010 after heavy monsoon rains, largely affecting the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. At least 2,000 people have been killed and more than 722,000 homes have been badly damaged or totally destroyed. The United Nations estimates over 20 million people are suffering with over 160,000 square kilometers<\/a> (one-fifth of Pakistan) affected as a result of the flooding, exceeding the combined total of the affectees of 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.<\/strong> Around a fifth of Pakistan’s total land area was impacted by the flooding. UN Secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon said that it was the worst disaster he had ever seen, and asked for an initial $460 million for emergency relief, 20% of which had been received as of August 15, 2010. Extensive damage to infrastructure and crops significantly harmed the struggling Pakistani economy.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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This year it seems our planet Earth has been tumbling around the roulette wheel, too frequently landing on the letter “C” —\u00a0for cataclysm.<\/p>\n

This makes five so far for 2010: the earthquake in Haiti, the Icelandic volcano, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the heat wave and massive fires in Russia, and now the floods in Pakistan.<\/p>\n

In the US,\u00a0a comparable\u00a0disaster this magnitude would drown all\u00a0coastal states. California, Oregon, Washington would be gone. The east coast from New York to Florida, and the Gulf states would all be under water. Yet, as 20 million Pakistanis\u00a0struggle to survive the aftermath of these terrible floods, aid is still just trickling in.\u00a0 So far, the aid they\u00a0have received\u00a0falls\u00a0too far below the requested UN\u00a0aid, which addresses the country’s immediate needs as the monsoon rains abate and waters recede\u00a0so that\u00a0rescue and recovery can commence.<\/p>\n

But its the longer term costs of returning 20 million people to a new “normal” life\u00a0that should concern us.\u00a0The recovery of this fragile state\u00a0happens under a web of immense\u00a0political tension:\u00a0 Pakistan borders\u00a0India,\u00a0our economic partner, and Afghanistan, where we are waging a ten-year war. The weak government in Pakistan, a nation with nuclear weapons, is focusing all its efforts on disaster relief while the Taliban, like a spider,\u00a0lies in wait for opportunity.<\/a><\/p>\n

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Yet its so odd that there isn’t the same media circus we’ve come to expect of our disaster coverage for this disaster. Is it because a flood is not as instantaneous a disaster as a volcano that disrupts international airspace or\u00a0the flattening of\u00a0 a\u00a0country by massive earthquake? Is it because we’ve reached the limit of so many disasters in one year that we’re feeling relief fatigue<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Or is it because the reason why there’s an\u00a0abnormal heat wave and devastating fires in Russia and epochal floods in Pakistan\u00a0is\u00a0that the waters of the planet have warmed up by one degree — another clear indicator of climate change? This year, we’ve seen a “snowpocalypse”, the hottest summer in decades, and the worst monsoon season in Asia in over eighty years. I wonder if there’s anyone old enough who is still alive who could attest that what we’re seeing is part of a normal weather pattern.<\/p>\n

Perhaps\u00a0our reluctance to address Pakistan aid\u00a0is a form of denial, a mental compartmentalization helping us block out anything having to do with\u00a0our responsibility in the planet’s warming.\u00a0 The floods in Pakistan may yet be seen as one of the first environmental cataclysms with serious geopolitical fallout triggered by global warming — the cost of our\u00a0over-consumption of energy in the western world.\u00a0 Disaster comes home to roost.<\/p>\n

That Pakistan is a predominately Muslim country probably puts another brick into the wall imprisoning our hearts. Maybe that’s\u00a0the reason\u00a0we can’t hear more than\u00a0a whisper about the\u00a0country’s flooding disaster —\u00a0there’s too much\u00a0yelling about\u00a0whether a new Muslim cultural center should be\u00a0built close to Ground Zero, New York.\u00a0The house is burning and yet we don’t want to understand that we need to stop whitewashing the fence. We really don’t have the luxury to quibble about the ridiculous. Not by any stretch.<\/p>\n

We mark this week feeling our bodies, as Len, Eric, the cardinal cross and the T-square would have us do. Not just our own physical human bodies, but the body of our mother\u00a0planet as she goes through yet another shock to the system. This time, she’s being pulled from all four corners: elements of earth, water, air and fire all active, powerful, contentious, wounding and stretching\u00a0her\u00a0and her children to the max.\u00a0Our mother’s\u00a0physical, mental and emotional body is stressed; reflective of our own black and white dialogue on immigration, terrorism, religious freedom, freedom to marry and race, which seems to have neither solution nor end.<\/p>\n

Include in that mix the hearts and minds of others from whom we fearfully separate by countries and cultures in disagreement, and can find no common ground. The square between Saturn and Pluto,\u00a0which Eric describes as “the immovable object versus the unstoppable force”\u00a0makes us highly suspicious, obsessed, paranoid and looking to find a scapegoat. And nothing it seems, is on a small scale.\u00a0\u00a0Certainly\u00a0in this case,\u00a0not disasters, and\u00a0certainly not the\u00a0disaster in Pakistan.<\/p>\n

But the immovable object could be the human heart meeting the unstoppable waters, and maybe, with a little luck, cooler heads and warmer hearts can\u00a0start getting involved in this situation. I want<\/em> my country to get involved, but its got its head too far up its mosque-fearing ass to pay attention. And it needs to pay attention. Perhaps Uranus in Pisces and Mercury\u00a0retrograding in Virgo can help unveil more truth and let us reconcile ourselves to our roles and responsibilities in\u00a0this disaster.\u00a0There needs to be thinking beyond what will attract viewers in a 24 hour news cycle, or what will get one more closeted bigot’s vote closer to a Republican majority in Congress.<\/p>\n

I wish the elements of this piece were far more mundane. I wish I could be writing about potential election results for the Senate seat in California than a natural disaster that probably came man made and with geopolitical implications. But I also wish that somehow the magnitude of this moment, and the lesson inherent in it for all of us here on the ground does not elude us.<\/p>\n

I wish for the sake of all of us, that the waters of the human heart spring back to life and find something deeper, something better than the false fears that keep us apart. This is a much bigger, more connected world than we let ourselves realize. The simple movement of planets above us, below us and at our sides, tugging and pulling at creation, keep telling us that in events that need no words other than these:<\/p>\n

We need each other to be bigger than ourselves. <\/em><\/p>\n

There is so much that we all have to do.<\/p>\n

Yours\u00a0& truly,<\/em><\/p>\n

Fe Bongolan<\/strong>
\nSan Francisco<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reflect on these facts from our friends at wikipedia: The 2010 Pakistan floods began in July 2010 after heavy monsoon rains, largely affecting the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. At least 2,000 people have been killed and more than 722,000 homes have been badly damaged or totally destroyed. The United Nations estimates over 20 million people are suffering … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,1788,1678,52,1054,1361],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27827"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27827\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}