Volcano, Earthquakes Show Nature's True Colors

While the Washington Nuclear Summit earlier this week considered how mankind could act so as not to blow itself to bits with fission or fusion weapons, Mother Nature was busy reminding homo sapiens just how fragile it is as a species. Hundreds are dead due to an earthquake in China and Chinese-occupied Tibet. Meanwhile, British and Irish airspace is closed to all but emergency air traffic due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland that has spread a cloud of ash over northwestern Europe.

Unfortunately, the people of Planet Earth have seen more earthquake damage in 2010 than was previously imaginable. Haiti lost its capitol city, Chile lost a decade's worth of economic growth, and now China has lost huge parts of the province of Qinghai. Much of the damage stems less from the earthquake itself and more from the poor building standards that made each building a deathtrap when the temblors hit.

What makes earthquakes like these so demoralizing is the amount of time and money reconstruction will require. Chile, which appears to be best positioned for a recovery, expects to need 5 years or so to put everything right. The Qinghai-Tibet mess may get cleared up because China is a big country with loads of cash to spend and it benefits from an authoritarian government that won't worry about what the locals want (China would have had the World Trade Center rebuilt in 3 years, and no survivors' groups could have stopped it with pleas for memorials and claims of sacred ground). Haiti was a basket case before the quake; now, the basket is just bigger and less well-made.

As for Iceland's volcanic eruption, it is tempting to see it as revenge for the way the British and Dutch have handled the banking losses connected to Iceland's banks. Perhaps, that is why the UK has dealt with the Icelandic banks under UK terrorism laws. Iceland's 5,500-foot, Eyjafjöll volcano has erupted for the second time in four weeks. Over 800 people have been evacuated as river levels rose a meter. Now, there is a cloud of volcanic ash twice the size of Great Britain moving east and south from Iceland.

The ash isn't lethal, and the people who live around the volcano are all safe. However, jet engines don't do too well when they have to fly through ash as it tends to clog the air intake. So, for several hours today, there is no air travel through Irish, British, and Norwegian airspace, and countless flights have been canceled from as far away as Atlanta. Japan Airlines even turned planes headed to Britain from Tokyo back to Japan in mid-flight.

The lesson here is that nature is ambivalent to human existence, let alone convenience. Despite what the arch-Greens would have one believe, nature is not benign. Humanity has evolved on a planet with certain temperature conditions, with certain amounts of water available, with a thin skin of an atmosphere just a few miles thick composed of a certain mix of gases. And it takes very little to alter those conditions. The human race is not in the driver's seat. It never was, and it never will be.

© Copyright 2010 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.

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