why I care so damn much about climate change
Katrina, Sandy, New Orleans, …
jdeboi.com & goCaptainPlanet.com
1. Katrina
Katrina hit when I was a junior in high school, flooding my home, my school, my city— rendering my family, like thousands of other families, homeless 21st century climate refugees. My hurricane experience was unequivocally the most emotionally traumatic, significant, and life-defining experience of my life to date. And the mental scars associated with watching my home and its citizens get swallowed alive by one of the most destructive natural disasters in American history is the reason I decided to study climate change and is the number one reason why I am so passionate about combating the climate crisis.
I could spend hours talking about this subject, but for the sake of holding your attention, I’m going to share just a few particularly vivid memories.
The first is about my father. As the Medical Director of the Intensive Care Unit at Charity Hospital, a public hospital and a long-time sanctuary for less fortunate New Orleanians, he had to remain in the city to keep the hospital running during the storm.
There were 11 patients in the Medical ICU at the time, 9 of whom were on breathing machines- all of them very, very sick. When the levees broke on Tuesday, the day after the eye of the storm passed, water rushed into the city, flooding the hospital and destroying the backup up generators. All of the infusion pumps, defibrillators, monitors, and batteries started to fail.
For four days, they were forgotten; they were left without food, without water, without electricity, air-conditioning,flushing toilets, or any way to communicate with the outside world. At one point my father had to perform surgery on a young man in the back up a pickup truck— without anesthesia— using a flashlight and a scalpel. And while they were struggling to keep their patients alive with limited resources, refugees from the city were coming to the hospital for a safe haven.
Here’s a pic of my dad in a Black Hawk with a patient when FEMA finally showed up:
In the interest of time, I’ll leave you with a link to the ABC story written about his experience.
Needless to say, I didn’t hear from my father for over a week, a horrendously agonizing experience, especially when every news outlet was reporting rampant looting, and chaos, and fire, and deluge. I’ll share a few more — I came back to New Orleans for the first time in November (the storm was in August). At the time, the national guard was only allowing first responder type personnel into the city, so my best friend and I had to hide under blankets in the back of her minivan while my father drove through the security checkpoint. We left really early to make sure we could get into the city. It was probably about 4:30 in the morning when we rolled into the CBD, and I pulled my head out from under the blanket for the first time. Here are some imagery bullet points:
- completely unlit skyscrapers; an early morning sky pocked with stars
- thick brown sludge coated every car, plant, surface.
- a desolate, sepia post-apocalyptic war zone; the only sign of life— National Guard trucks
- brown water marks circling every home like the rings of Saturn
- spray-painted neon Xs, a sign the National Guard had searched for bodies
- interiors: mold-infested, black oozy, smelly alien planets
There’s one thing that no New Orleanian who returned after the storm will ever forget: the smell. I don’t know how to do it justice. It’s reminiscent of mildew or some other type of mold, but it had a faintly sweet scent- almost like pine sap. Or spoiled eel sauce- sweet and noxious at the same time. I’ll stop there and finish with a conclusion:
Katrina gave me a truly visceral understanding of the destructive capacity of nature as well as the fragility of modern society.
And so senior year of high school when I learned that climate change had the potential to create more frequent and more powerful storms- storms like Katrina- I knew that combatting climate change was my calling.
2. Sandy
After graduating from college, I moved to New York City and started working for a software company. I had been there for about a year when Hurricane Sandy, the second costliest hurricane in US history, hit the East Coast.
If Katrina was my wakeup call, Sandy was the fire the under my ass. This “superstorm” marks my transition from environmentalist to activist.
I’ll share a few Sandy stories that really hit home. I lived in Brooklyn, but I evacuated to my office building in SoHo- a trick I learned in New Orleans to prevent cabin fever (which was critical in New York since I lived in a tiny studio). When the lights went out Monday afternoon, I was afraid to be in the building by myself (and technically, I wasn’t supposed to be there at all), so I decided to go across the street and stay with a coworker at his uncle’s SoHo apartment. As a seasoned hurricane pro, I itched to experience the storm on the ground, and so at 10pm that night, as the storm made landfall on the coast of New Jersey, with sturdy boots and thick parkas my coworker and I ventured out into the city.
Exploring the southern tip of Manhattan as the rain and the wind whipped through man made glassy steel canyons, was oddly reminiscent of my experience entering New Orleans for the first time after Katrina. The streets of Manhattan- streets that never sleep, streets continuously packed with busy bodies, luminous advertisements, pungent smells and sounds— a deluge of stimuli— these streets were desolate; the starry steel skyline— completely black. Eerie to the core.
At that moment I realized a natural disaster had the power to render the world’s most vibrant metropolis completely silent, empty, and lifeless.
But even more profound was the following morning’s revelation. When we woke up on Tuesday there was no power, no internet, no cellphones, no way to communicate with the outside world whatsoever. We had no idea when the power was going to come back on. And we quickly realized that we had enough food to comfortably feed the group for one or two days, which was especially frightening considering the fact that most of the grocery stores were already empty. There was no leaving the city. The subways weren’t running, and very few New Yorkers have cars. Even if we did have a car, it probably would have been easier to walk out of the city given the traffic insanity that would undoubtedly ensue.
And that’s when it hit me: 9 million people trapped on a tiny rock without food, running water, electricity, or communication with the outside world. And I experienced, for the second time, the fragility of modern society; self-subsistence is a thing of the past. I felt certain that if all of New York City- not just the southern tip of Manhattan- had lost power for multiple days, the situation could have easily devolved into mass chaos.
Last story. While New York was in a limbo state (no subways or electricity or work), I decided to do some exploring. I walked around the tip of the island and up the west side along the Hudson River. When it was time to head back, I had to cross Lincoln Highway. Cars were barreling down the West Side at 40 mph, blazing through intersections DESPITE THE LACK OF TRAFFIC LIGHTS (which were completely defunct without electricity). The cars were traveling fast enough and the traffic was thick enough that one driver’s decision to tread cautiously and politely through an intersection might actually lead to a massive pile up. So who’s to blame?
So there I was, playing a very difficult level of human Frogger with no brake [pun intended] in sight. Several minutes later a pool of pedestrians had formed around me- all of us wondering how we might make it across the road to tell the tale. After five minutes, I was fed up (perhaps not realizing that East Coasters weren’t accustomed to post-hurricane driving etiquette). I took a bold step into the highway, jabbed the palm of my hand at the windshield of an oncoming car, and stared the driver in the eyes. I felt like Moses parting the waters, and I got my people across. Why did I choose to tell this story?
For a second time I recognized that modern society’s resiliency is diminishing while nature’s propensity for destruction burgeons.
I was very upset after Sandy (and a little insane in the membrane), and to get some of these intense emotions off my chest, I wrote a letter to the American people:
3. New Orleans
4. I ♥ Science
academic background
- major: physics
- minor: Environmental Analysis
research experience
- organic photovoltaics— here’s my senior thesis
- chemical and environmental engineering research at the University of Arizona
- studied lithium-ion battery technology for electric vehicles in the Advanced Technologies Division of Southern California Edison- one of the largest utility companies in the nation
5. Hot Music Festivals
I’ll keep this section short. I’ve had the same eye-opening experience at two very hot (>95° F) music festivals— Electric Zoo in NYC and Coachella in CA. It’s blazing hot, lots of kids are on drugs, lots of kids are sweaty, and lots of kids need water. And here’s the problem: these stupid effing music fests have 1 or 2 watering holes for thousands of people. The lines in the middle of the day are insanely long- about a 40 minute wait to get to a hose.
Let me say this again: it’s 100°F. Lots of kids on drugs. Lots of sweating. HUGE WATER LINE. Everyone’s a little bit afraid that the waters going to run out (probably irrational fear, but it’s damn hot and the line’s damn long), and eventually the bros get tired of waiting. So what do they do? Cut the line. Then guess what happens…fights.
In the water lines at hot music festivals I have witnessed the devolution of humanity, precipitated by the scarcity of a basic necessity: water.
Climate change means more frequent droughts and food shortages. Droughts and food shortages lead to unrest. Period.
6. BP Oil Spill
As a Gulf Coast resident who grew up fishing, hunting, and camping in the Louisiana marshes, BP oil spill, “considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry” (wiki), was a heart-wrenching, maddening reminder of dirty energy’s detrimental impacts on our region.
The negative implications of the oil spill on Gulf Coast wildlife and communities were overwhelming. I immediately recognized the need to internalize the environmental and health costs of fossil fuels, which are enormous in accidents like this, and when considered, render renewables dirt cheap. So I’ll conclude with one poignant question:
Why are we putting the very existence of civilization at risk for a filthy, finite, deleterious, and ultimately, uneconomic form of energy?
