We need to stop treating the planet like shit.
No one was supposed to be living here. The village is located in an area marked as uninhabited, a forest reserve, on the government map used by aid agencies. But field workers have discovered about 12,000 survivors in 60 villages across the area, all of them almost entirely wiped out. An estimated 20,000 people died.
The region was among the worst-hit because it lay directly along the path of the cyclone. But environmental experts say a more significant reason for the high death toll, here and elsewhere in the delta, was the systematic destruction of mangrove forests. In the December 2004 tsunami that devastated South Asia, dense mangrove coverage in Sri Lanka was shown to have helped save lives.
According to a study published last month by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, decades of illegal encroachment and government-sanctioned neglect had seriously degraded the mangrove forests in the Irrawaddy Delta. “If there had been decent mangrove on the shorelines, the death toll would have been cut in half,” said Lucas Riegger, a U.N. vulnerability analyst and mapping specialist.
