Praying for rain
by Julie A. Wortman

Residents of the town of Lasi in northeast Romania march through a dry field June 14, 2000 in hopes that their prayers for rain will be answered. The country was experiencing a drought, the worst in 50 years.

The idea of exploring the politics and spirituality of weather came to me a couple of summers ago through a chance encounter with our local neighborhood shamans (he is a former Jew, she's a former Christian). We had met on a forest path and, inevitably, we all remarked on the fineness of the morning. Too bad about the lack of rain, though. Both our parched gardens were suffering. That's when my shaman friends confided that they'd been drumming for rain in an attempt to reclaim the ancient practice of weather-working.

I nodded politely, concealing my surprise -- and knee-jerk inclination to immediately dismiss such New Age woo-woo. But I was hooked. The whole way back to the house I could think only of the topic's potential.

We might laugh off the claim that there are weather spirits and that they might be influenced to our benefit. But we Western people can't deny our own obsessive desire for climate control. I think of a lecture I heard years ago about retrofitting historic buildings with modern heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems. Arguing for the installation of systems that would require a minimum of damage to historic windows, ceilings and walls, the lecturer urged a radical return to the "thermal delight" of allowing the kitchen hearth to provide a home's chief source of winter warmth (cold bedrooms are better for sleeping, he said) and screened windows opening onto a shaded veranda its chief means of summer cooling. Unworkable, most in the audience said with regretful sighs of nostalgia for those halcyon days of simpler living. Who could live that way today?

We in the West give selflessly of our time and money to come to the aid of the victims of natural disaster in developing countries -- as if there were no correlation between our culture's insatiable addiction to non-renewable fuels and sprawling starter-castle developments and the escalating scale of the devastation which each new hurricane, drought or earthquake brings. We take pride in our humanitarianism, piling up sandbags against the threat of unruly forces we deem politically neutral, confident of the benevolent approval of a God who wills humanity's temperate comfort.

Both our politics and spirituality have remained indoors too long. We mark the seasons of the church year thinking to keep our heads dry and our feet out of the mud. But we do so at our peril. The Creator we seek to glorify needs a breath of fresh air and a regrounding in the creation.

My shaman friends, I know, would approve. The next time the garden begins to wither because of too many cloudless days, I'll think of them. I won't use a drum, but the prayers I offer will be a reclaiming of an ancient tradition just the same. l

Julie A. Wortman is editor and publisher of The Witness.

A 'natural' disaster?
by Daniel R. Faber

President Bush had barely had time to learn his way around the White House before he was being called upon to address a number of domestic and international emergencies, ranging from the energy crisis in California to the catastrophic earthquakes in El Salvador and India.

The Salvadoran earthquake is just one in a long line of natural disasters to have impacted Central America in recent years, among them Hurricane Mitch, which killed more than 11,000 people, destroying the homes of three million more and inflicting over $8.5 billion in damage.

Although these tragedies are commonly referred to as "natural disasters," a more careful examination of the political ecology of developing countries reveals that earthquakes, hurricanes, flash floods, landslides and forest fires are becoming more deadly not because they are more intense, but because government policy has made people increasingly vulnerable to their fury. This is particularly true in El Salvador.

In the middle-class community of Las Colinas in Santa Tecla, for instance, a landslide set off by the earthquake buried 500 houses and killed 315 people, with hundreds more currently missing and feared dead beneath the rubble. For years, residents of Santa Tecla, environmentalists and the municipal government had tried to stop a luxury housing development on the steep slopes above the community, as well as further development at the base of the hill. Their concerns were that the roads and deforestation would destabilize the hillside and create a slide in heavy rains or an earthquake. Appeals to the Salvadoran Congress and Supreme Court to stop the development were denied.

In recent years, the U.S. government has worked in concert with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to promote a "structural adjustment" and liberalization of the Salvadoran economy. In addition to cutbacks in social services in favor of servicing the external debt, the impact of these policies has been to reduce wages and increase natural resource extraction in order to boost export earnings. As a result, poverty and ecological degradation have intensified. More than 95 percent of the country has been deforested; 40 percent of the land designated as ecologically fragile has been developed. Because of such improper land uses, more than 77 percent of the country suffers serious soil erosion, and is prone to landslides and flash flooding.

More than 50 percent of the Salvadoran population now live in poverty, unable to meet basic needs of food, housing and health care. Lacking access to good agricultural lands, many are forced to live in sub-standard housing located in ecologically precarious or dangerous areas. Such homes, located atop the "soft" soil structures of steep hillsides and flood plains, are particularly vulnerable to the disintegrative effects of earthquakes and heavy rains. Yet, because a mere 2 percent of the population owns 60 percent of the land, these "disaster prone" areas are often the only lands available to the poor. As a result, the poorest segments of society are most severely impacted. In 1982, the deforestation of Monte Bello by poor family farmers outside San Salvador resulted in a massive landslide that killed more than 1,000 of their fellow villagers residing at the bottom of the mountain.

The Bush administration can play a pivotal role in assisting El Salvador during this crisis by working with Congress and the U.S. Agency for International Development to secure substantial emergency and long-term funds for the relief effort. More immediately, the administration should leverage its influence to inhibit the abuse of such assistance by corrupt government officials -- a long-standing practice by U.S.-backed Central American politicians -- which could have a destabilizing effect on the fragile peace in the country. After tropical storm Mitch devastated El Salvador in November of 1998, many of the communities most affected by the disaster did not receive aid from the ruling National Republican Alliance (ARENA) government, which instead utilized funds for party-building purposes. Today, there is fear in El Salvador that relief money will once again be used to reward ARENA supporters and punish opponents, particularly since the National Association of Private Enterprise (ANEP) is coordinating current relief efforts. Robert Murray Meza, a possible ARENA presidential candidate in 2004, is in charge of the ANEP program.

The Bush administration can help ensure that all relief aid is properly utilized by urging the Salvadoran government to create a specific Relief Fund, which would be administered in a transparant way by a commission that represents all sectors of Salvadoran civil society: labor unions, churches, non-governmental organizations, women's associations, community and business groups.

In the meantime, U.S. citizens can support the relief effort by donating resources to reputable non-governmental organizations such as U.S.- El Salvador Sister Cities, which has teamed up with 10 other non-governmental organizations to coordinate relief efforts in the wake of this national disaster.

El Salvador urgently needs our help. But in addition to the immediate requirements for humanitarian assistance, the Bush administration cannot ignore the larger structural crisis in El Salvador.

Daniel R. Faber is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University, and author of Environment Under Fire, a book on Central America's ecological crisis.