16 - 22 August 2001
Issue No.547
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 August 2001 Issue No.547 |
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Warm thoughts
In recent years summer has become both longer and hotter, usurping more and more of the time allotted to autumn and spring and breaking records of temperature and humidity every year. Subjectively, the stifling humidity exacerbates the feeling of being hot, increasing drowsiness and suffocation. Air-conditioning may provide pre-packaged relief for those who can afford it, but it is a health risk for many. Its pleasures, besides, are but short-lived and incomplete: soon the steady buzzing will induce a peculiar numbness in the body, asserting the need for fresh air at any cost. Indeed there is no respite: however much one extends the duration of one's summer vacation (when one flees the heat of the city to the shore), each year the summer is longer and the atmosphere of the city more asphyxiated.
Scientists agree that the climate has undergone significant changes due to various human activities that raise the temperature of the earth: industrial waste, power generation, the burning of rubbish as a means of disposing of it, increases in the emission of heat-trapping gases and the consumption of fuels like coal, gas and oil. Recently published studies indicate that world temperatures are expected to rise by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius during the present century alone. Throughout that period and beyond, it is the poor and the dispossessed who will experience the worst suffering: millions could be forced out of their homes by either drought or flooding caused by the melting of the ice caps and the consequent rise in sea level.
One need not wait for catastrophe to strike to demonstrate how the poor will bear the brunt of the misfortune. For the past decade or two in Egypt, the state has invested only in the infrastructure of North Coast recreational compounds and "tourist villages" accessible to the rich and powerful alone. Formerly popular beaches in Alexandria and elsewhere are no longer affordable to middle-class and low-income families; and much of the shore of Alexandria itself -- a former stronghold of low-income holiday makers -- is now the exclusive property of private-sector hotels. One result of this is that pedestrians, alas, can no longer stroll along certain parts of the Corniche. With few exceptions -- members of trade unions and professional syndicates that provide for summer vacations, offering affordable holiday accommodation -- Egyptian families are deprived of any opportunity to escape the summer heat.
Those who may be able to afford the new North Coast resorts but do not have access to them free of charge, moreover, very often prefer to leave the country altogether: certainly a vacation in a radically colder part of the world affords an even more convenient escape. And since the cost of spending one's vacation on the Mediterranean shore equals or exceeds the cost of a vacation abroad, many sensibly opt for the latter. Despite the popularity of tourism as Egypt's foremost latter-day trade, we have yet to learn how to build summer resorts suitable for the full range of budgets, making the summer vacation a right enjoyed by all irrespective of class, wealth and connections.
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