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COMMENTARY
November 5, 2011
Unnatural disaster
Water flows downhill, according to at least one scientific expert I've consulted, though he was eager to qualify such a broad generalization. It pools when it is prevented from running, but to be perfectly Aristotelian about this, it wants to run downhill. (I allude to that admirable philosopher, who guessed that an account of gravity must pair with an account of levity.)This is all relevant to the situation in Thailand, which I have been following from personal interest, having lived in that country on three occasions, each for more than a year, and having many friends there. Also, it strikes me that the slow-motion "natural" catastrophe the Thais have been enduring provides a nice metaphor for the fix we are in around the rest of the planet. The "biggest flood in 50 years" takes me back nearly to the Siamese part of my childhood, when indeed there were floods every rainy season; and as late in the day as 1980 (when I last lived there), parts of the city of Bangkok would be under as much water as I have seen in the press photographs. This is because the city was built on a floodplain, barely above sea level, along a wide river not far from the coast. So, when the monsoon rains draining down the river meet up with high tide, you get a very large outdoor swimming pool. Or did. Thanks to miracles of modern technology, combined with massive central government public works, this "problem" - once an annual source of pleasure to children and adults alike - was "solved" by 1990 or so. The clever idea was to create networks of impoundments, so that when the monsoon waters drained from upcountry, they might cover all the paddy fields in the Central Plain, only a few feet deeper than they were already covered. And hey, the farmers wouldn't mind, for they lived in traditional teak houses, up on stilts. Since time immemorial their motto had been, "Rice in the fields and fish in the stream." (Or during monsoon, "Rice in the stream and fish in the fields.") Indeed, fish-capturing from the rice fields had always provided a significant source of protein. The whole idea was to prevent the inundation of Bangkok; to hold the flood waters back until they had ... evaporated. For of course, all these impoundments prevent the water from doing what it had always done before, and still wanted to do: that is, wash out to sea. Now, the tropical sun is a powerful evaporator, but it still requires time to dry the deepest puddles. And meanwhile, the rains might just happen to continue falling, in defiance of meteorological predictions. The Bangkok of my childhood was "the Venice of the East." Some districts still had more canals than roads, and the majority of people still lived in those traditional houses (which become houseboats if the water gets high enough). By 1980, almost all the ancient "klongs" (canals) had been filled and paved with multi-lane expressways to accommodate traffic jams in a city that had quadrupled in population since my childhood (it has since tripled again); and in which car ownership has gone from about one in 200 persons, to near parity with the human population. (On the other hand, rowboat ownership has gone way down.) So, instead of overflowing canals, for the day or two it took them to drain the city, into the Menam and then out to sea, you now had popping manhole covers. But even that was fun: sitting calf-deep in a noodle shop, sipping "Beer Singh," while watching beautiful passing waders in sarongs advance through the opaque brown water. Then suddenly, slipping down the invisible manholes, themselves out of sight. They usually resurfaced, and then it was giggles all round. The Thai are a kindly, mild-tempered people, who smile upon such trivial adversity ("the Land of Smiles" in the tourist brochures), and continue to joke and say "maipen-lai" ("it doesn't matter") in their singsong tonal language, until anxieties rise to insupportable levels, whenupon, like people in any other country, they go murderously insane. Indeed, the whole country was designed for a nice cooling bath, then quick drainage, since time out of mind. The whole of the low-lying plains were a water world, knit together by canals, offering a way of life that anyone still sane could envy. Today however, the city of Bangkok is built of heavy concrete and glass, yet mostly without the deep pilings of medieval Venice - so that it is, more rapidly than Venice, sinking below sea level. And similar "improvements" are being made all over the country under the guidance of government development programs and new building codes. I think it is out of her own feline sense of humour, that Nature gives everyone a few decades, before tiring of a Promethean spectacle and taking her revenge. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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