Global Green News
DRM Syndrome
GreenerBuildings News. Feb 12, 2009. By Rob Watson
I'm afraid we are currently suffering from DRM Syndrome, a nonfatal but almost always non-curative disorder that inevitably follows a calamity. Disaster-Recovery Mentality Syndrome is a natural, and completely understandable, reaction to severe dislocation that serves to filter out any activity or thinking that does not get things Back To Normal as quickly as possible. DRM is a handy excuse to suspend critical thought and almost always results in lost opportunities. If suffered on a sufficiently large scale, DRM Syndrome actually might invite a relapse of the conditions that triggered the disaster in the first place.
My first run-in with DRM was after the Hanshin earthquake in Kobe in 1995. Architect Margaret Howard (now my wife) and I went to Kobe with the support of the U.S. Department of Energy to prepare the way for a team of green architects that had volunteered their time to develop a green post-earthquake rebuilding program. Everyone in Japan was exceedingly gracious and delighted that the Americans would come to Japan on their own dime with this new idea. But, they explained, with thousands of people living in plastic tents there really wasn't time to figure out things like how to build more green.
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is perhaps the best example of acute DRM Syndrome. While FEMA was wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on 11,000 unused and unwanted trailers, homegrown efforts to craft sustainable rebuilding plans were almost purely volunteer or private efforts led by the likes of Global Green, Congress for a New Urbanism and the U.S. Green Building Council. With essentially zero resources, these volunteer groups engaged the local community to come up with a series of affordable and green alternative housing designs and sustainable urban planning principles and models. Imagine if those hundreds of millions of FEMA dollars had instead been used to support these resource-starved efforts? A new model of disaster recovery might have been born and New Orleans might have regained its original vitality. Sadly, we'll never know.
