Mangrove swamps

In the wake of the Burmese cyclone, the BBC web-site has published a report with a sickeningly familiar tone
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7385315.stm).

The ASEAN (Association of South-East Nations) Secretary-General, Surin Pitsuwan, suggests that it was the destruction of the mangrove swamps of the vast Irrawaddy delta for the sake of sprawling coastal developments which enabled the cyclone to have such destructive power. This is desperately sad, but no surprise: it was exactly the widespread process in many areas of South-East Asia that enabled the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 to wreak such havoc, and which conversely reduced fatalities where mangrove swamps were still to be found in profusion.

Debbie and I saw these enormous mangrove swamps in southern Nigeria in the 1970s, and they occur all around the world. They are fascinating natural 'bio-guards' for coastal settlements, in that their complex intertwining root-systems have been shown to dissipate wave energy (see the BBC article). The article also reports that 3.6 million hectares of mangrove forest have disappeared since the 1980s. They seem(ed) to be useless and unproductive; now we know how important the 'useless' was, and how much 'use' they are. (But the local people always knew.)

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. It is clear that many such events are nothing to do with spectacular 'acts of God'; rather, the globalisation of the mad modernist myth of progress (and foreign holidays to countries ruled by dictators) has enabled people everywhere to treat creation as dispensable, to be re-ordered according to our own whims. Disaster follows. cf. floods in England: plant (build) on flood-plains, reap the floods.

What adds two further sour notes is that predictions were given but not broadcast in Burma (do. prior to the Boxing Day tsunami). Secondly, the Burmese government has acquired vast financial resources from mining over the past 20 years, which it has largely spent on building a new capital inland (far away from the sea), funding the army, genocidally destroying the Christian population in the East Karen and Kachin tribes; cf. Sudan)
(See http://dynamic.csw.org.uk/country.asp?s=id&urn=Burma; www.cswusa.com/countries/burma.htm),
and most recently committing atrocities against thousands of Burmese monks.

For further reading, see James Maudsley, The Heart Must Break (2002: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heart-Must-Break-Burma-Democracy/dp/0099426943)
Benedict Rogers, A Land without Evil (2004: http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Land-Without-Evil/dp/082546059X)