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New Orleans disaster serves tough lessons Anonymous
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/enviro/EnviroRepublish_1453141.htm

Twice in eight months, nature has given us a brutal lesson about the cost of disrespect.

Last 26 December, beachfront resorts in Thailand were swept away by a tsunami that could have been tamed if developers had not destroyed coral reefs and ripped up mangroves, a natural bulwark against killer waves.

On 29 August, Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, a city built below sea level, sustained by a complex system of dams and whose buffer against storm surges, the wetlands of the Mississippi Delta, has been eroded by reckless development.

New Orleans may be the most blatant example in the US of unsustainable development, human activities that eventually carry a huge cost because of environmental damage. But it is certainly not the only one.

Other specialists point to coastline cities built on reclaimed wetlands in southern Florida, the most hurricane-prone part of the US, as well as Los Angeles and cities built in Nevada and Arizona, which need air-conditioning and a long supply line of water to survive.

These problems are not, of course, exclusive to the US.
>> Anonymous
Disrespect? In comparing Los Angeles or Phoenix or Las Vegas?

We've been colonizing the roughest and shittiest parts of the earth since we started settling down. The Irrigations of Iran and Central Asia, the Nile's own, and realize the reprocussions that could develop.

If we settled only in areas where nature would not require much tweaking to settle there, we'd lose a lot of limited land.