Disbelief that blinds us to the end Richard Fortey, The New York Times, December 26, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/26/opinion/edfortey.php LONDON A year ago we stared aghast at images of the Southeast Asian tsunami. Video cameras taken on vacation to record the everyday pleasures of the beach were suddenly turned to quivering utility as they documented the panic and mayhem of a natural disaster. Who can forget the disbelief in the recorded voices? This can't be happening to us. Human beings are never prepared for natural disasters. There is a kind of optimism built into our species that seems to prefer to live in the comfortable present rather than confront the possibility of destruction. It may happen, but not now, and not to us. There is nothing new in this attitude. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 both destroyed Pompeii and preserved it for posterity. Pliny the Younger starkly recorded the details in prose that can still be read as a scientific account; to him, the plume resembled a pine tree: "It rose into the sky on a very long 'trunk' from which spread some 'branches."' Yet houses are still being erected today at vulnerable sites around Vesuvius, in the face of the geological inevitability of further eruptions. In Naples, St. Januarius (better known as San Gennaro) is regarded as protector of the vulnerable city. After all, did he not miraculously intervene to save Naples from destruction in the eruptions of 1631 and 1707? His relics are revered almost as much today as they were 400 years ago. It seems that a saint's relics have not lost their potency, even in an age when we have a rational explanation for the convulsions of the earth. Disasters are still described as "acts of God." Whenever a natural catastrophe occurs, old questions resurface. How can we reconcile tragedy with the idea of a beneficent deity? And with that question, the notion of punishment is never far behind. Disasters are heaped on mankind as a mark of our sinfulness. In a curious way, such explanations act as palliatives. They permit an intimate connection with nature that seems preferable to the brutal acceptance of an indifferent earth meting out random destruction upon its inhabitants, like a boot crushing an ant's nest. To a geologist, there is nothing remarkable about the seismic events that caused last year's tsunami. The inexorable 52-millimeter-a-year movement of the tectonic plate underlying the Indian Ocean, and its inevitable subduction off the western edge of Sumatra, is bound to entail periodic quakes, and some of these will set off tsunamis. Tension builds, and the earth's lithosphere briefly shrugs to remove an irritation. As if to heap Pelion on Ossa, a second great tectonic convulsion, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake, devastated Pakistan on Oct. 8. It was accompanied by landslides which made rapid deployment of aid impossible. If the gods really had wished to signal punishment for our species, no more exquisite scenario could have been devised. The fact that this is just one of thousands of earthquakes which have occurred during the elevation of the Himalayas offers scant comfort. The Indian subcontinent continues its inexorable progress northwards, butting into Asia. The grandest mountain range on earth is the result; everything else is "collateral damage." But the magisterial scale of the tectonics offers no consolation for the suffering on the ground. The time- scale is our conceptual problem. Tectonic events happen on a scale of hundreds to millions of years. Most humans find it hard to think beyond the life spans of their grandchildren. There is a psychological fault line between the human and the natural calibration of the world. Incomprehension fosters a kind of rose- tinted amnesia. If anything, the comparative comfort of modern (at least Western) life makes disasters the more unthinkable. We don't want to know. It may not always have been so. It has been reported that before the tsunami elephants somehow knew how to read the signs and broke free to head for higher ground. Some of the Andaman Islanders had protocols handed down by oral tradition through the generations that knew how to recognize the approach of disaster. One of the saddest things about the tsunami was the incomprehension of the meaning of that withdrawal of the sea that preceded the big wave: a 10-year-old British girl saved many lives because she happened to have learned about such harbingers of disaster in the schoolroom. If we've lost instinctive knowledge, education must be the key. But there is another kind of disaster. Many scientists think that the Gulf Coast hurricanes may be a symptom of climate change. Carbon emissions have been accelerating more rapidly within a generation or two: this is not the result of some creeping plate indifferent to the fate of humans; this is our responsibility. However, there is still the same, almost willful blindness to the dangers of climate change; after all, the sun still rises, the crops still ripen - why worry? Geology tells us that there have been "greenhouse worlds" in the distant past. These have been times when seas flooded over continents. Even modest sea-level rises would spell the end of densely populated areas of the world like Bangladesh. These are not "acts of God" but acts of man. We can grieve for the human consequences of plate tectonics, but we should be ashamed of the consequences of our own willing blindness. (Richard Fortey, the senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, is the author of ''Earth: An Intimate History.'') ------------------------ Yahoo! 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