Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
to companies who had close connections to the
George Bush Junior Administration (see Klein,
2007: 3-7).
In many respects, the most serious problems
associated with Hurricane Katrina were not caused
by the physical impact of the hurricane itself,
but related technological and political failures
within national, state and city governments. This
chapter is interested in the role of government,
particularly at a national scale, in the management
and regulation of environmental affairs. Nation
states remain a key context within which political
and economic life is organized in the world
today. The gradual emergence of nation states
corresponds closely to the rise of the kinds of
socio-environmental relations that have become
associated with the Anthropocene.
A key goal of
this chapter
is thus to uncover the dual role of states
as both guardians of the natural world and as
facilitators of the exploitation of the environment
for human ends. While there is no direct evidence
connecting Hurricane Katrina with the broader
processes of global warming, it is clear that, in
theory at least, these forms of extreme weather are
likely to become more frequent and more intense
if climate change continues on its current trajecto-
ries (see IPCC, 2007: Para. 3.8.3). It is in this
context that we can immediately see the complex
challenges that confront the state in its attempts to
regulate human relations with the environment.
While the US government may have resisted
significant action on climate change for many
years (due to the potential impacts of such action
on its economy), one consequence of failing to
protect the global environment could be the need
to better protect its citizens from more frequent
extreme weather events. This situation was sum-
marized well in a piece that
The Economist
ran
several months after the events of Katrina. It
observed that 'after Hurricane Katrina, the balance
between protecting people from nature, and pro-
tecting nature from people, has become an urgent
matter of public policy' (
Economist
, 2005b: 29).
This chapter begins by exploring the historical
emergence of the nation state and systems of large-
scale government, and the impacts that this process
had on the human exploitation and management
of the environment. The
second section
outlines
a series of theories that attempts to explain the role
of states within the control and regulation of
environmental affairs. The following two sections
consider two case studies of state-environment
relations: the first being the British government's
reaction to the 1952 London fog disaster, the
second being the interventions of the US federal
government in the Florida Everglades.
When the Levees Broke
To find out more about the political
controversies surrounding Hurricane
Katrina, watch Spike Lee's four-part, HBO
documentary about the hurricane, When
the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four
Acts. A full length version of this docu-
mentary is available on YouTube at:
7.2.1 Unpacking and defining the
state
The story of the nation state takes us back to 1648
and the towns of Osnabrück and Münster, in what
is modern-day Germany. Between the May and
October of 1648 a number of peace treaties were
signed in these towns. These treaties sought to find
a peaceful solution to a series of conflicts that had
been raging for decades in Europe. These treaties,
which collectively produced something that is
routinely referred to as the Peace of Westphalia, are
of historical significance because they laid the
diplomatic and legal foundations of what we today
refer to as the nation state. Before the Treaties of
