Just hours before the devastating Typhoon Haiyan hit Tacloban, 18-year-old Boulder-native Simon Kurzban was out drinking, enjoying the Philippine city with other teenage volunteers and locals. They joked that the incoming storm they had been warned about would just be a little rain, and after a long night they went to sleep in the homes that were on the verge of annihilation.
Simon awoke to the windows shattering across the bedroom and ran downstairs to his host family, who were cowering in a huddle as they watched the typhoon ravage their house.
Simon Kurzban described, “water rose six feet in ten minutes. We got on the main roof and watched the world around us get destroyed. Afterwards was basically like living in post-apocalypse; there were truckloads of dead bodies…hundreds. My parents didn’t know I was alive for five days, until I got on a U.S. marine flight to Manila.”
Unbelievably, the last few months for Kurzban have involved three natural disasters, each one causing greater destruction than the last. The high school graduate was in north Boulder, Colorado when his house was mildly damaged from the eight-day flood in September.
Subsequently, Kurzban started his gap-year adventure in Tacloban, Philippines, just in time for the 7.2 magnitude earthquake to strike the island of Bohol on October 14th, killing 93 people, according to Floyd Whaley of the New York Times. 120 miles away, Kurzban said that, “I was taking a shower and the bathroom started rocking back and forth, but I had no idea what it was so I just kept showering.”
Typhoon Haiyan, the most devastating of his experiences, not to mention the largest storm to hit land ever recorded, struck the Philippines just shy of a month later. Resembling a ‘storm-chased’ rather than a storm chaser, Kurzban has been the victim of the increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters.
The last few years have brought records in natural disasters in respect to frequency, intensity and damages, resulting in huge devastation from the 1,322 fatalities and 125,000 million dollars in economic losses due to 2005 Hurricane Katrina (history.com) to the 19,300 fatalities and billions in economic losses of the Japanese tsunami in 2011 (Kenneth Pletcherm, www.britannica.com).
For three CC students, it didn’t take personal experiences of the recent storms to recognize the severity of the worsening natural disasters and the damage they left behind. On behalf of EnAct, an environmental awareness student group on campus, Erica Jamieson, Jarod Rutledge and Charlotte Cadow organized a fast and potluck event on Tuesday, December 3rd.
“The fast was inspired by Mr. Yep Sano, the delegate from the Philippines for the November Climate Summit in Warsaw, Poland” Erica explained, “[he] pledged to fast in solidarity with his countrymen,” in solidarity with the 13 million people affected: 5,719 killed, 3 million displaced and 2.5 in need of food assistance, as stated by World News on nbcnews.com.
On the Facebook event page, it states that the reasons they were interested in hosting the event were, “both to demonstrate our support and solidarity with those who are suffering from Typhoon Haiyan, and to build a conversation on campus around the catastrophic events of climate change.”
The event not only recognized the ‘impacted’ of the super typhoon but also the ‘impacting’; how climate change has heightened the extremity of storms and the human role in the exacerbation.
“These aren’t ‘natural disasters’, they’re disasters with a very legitimate background of human impact. So that’s something people should be educated on…making this connection between the environmental movement and human life,” Jamieson explains.
Of the 54 attendees of the potluck event, most had fasted for the day, alongside the three student coordinators and President Jill Tiefenthaler.
The three students spoke about their interest in the recent typhoon, the growing effect of climate change, and why they wanted to raise the conversation at CC, hoping for more involvement in environmental issues on campus.
Ian Johnson, the Colorado College Sustainability Manager, also spoke, reiterating that “The best available science out there tells us that the climate is warming, largely due to human activity beyond any shadow of a doubt,” and urging more environmental sustainability action on campus.
President Tiefenthaler closed the talk by congratulating students’ efforts and outlining the school’s seven to ten-year sustainability plan which further incorporates environmental impact education into the curriculum and student programming.
She expressed, “I am really thrilled and inspired to see all of you here tonight, and that you’re willing to fast and take time out to think about how we can change the world, and how you can make an impact.”
Everyone in the room hurried into line for a tasty assortment of Greek and Indian food, many breaking their day’s fast. Those who fasted posed for photos of recognition, as seen in this photo of Ximena Buller, a first-year, international student from Peru, (photo by Niyanta Khatri).
As the event was wrapping up, Jarod Rutledge mentioned, “One of my personal hopes it to keep the idea of the fast in solidarity for climate justice going as something that we can build into a semesterly or yearly event with community support.”
The necessity for public awareness is pressingly immediate for relief efforts in the Philippines, while it is also ongoing due to the perpetually worsening human impact on the environment.
Simon is now in Vietnam but said he wishes to go back to Tacloban and be a part of the disaster relief effort. He emphasized the vital need of money to rebuild shelters and supply food, especially to the millions of displaced children.
On campus, EnAct continues to raise environmental awareness, launching events that make a difference in current sustainability issues. The student group meets every Wednesday at 7pm in Worner.
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