End of the world
Out of context: Reply #27
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Furthermore.
Disasters are ambivalent
In January 1999, King Taufa'ahau Tupou the Fifth's kingdom began to grow. Fifty kilometres from Tonga's capital, a 300 metre long and 40 metre wide volcanic island emerged out of the South Sea. In many places on earth, such an eruption would have been a terrible catastrophe, but in this case the monarch and his subjects were delighted about this unexpected gift from Mother Nature.
So as we see, strokes of fate can be perceived in highly diverse ways. Some people are devastated, some start again from scratch and successfully re-build their lives, and still others learn a valuable lesson and change their lifestyle for the better. One and the same visitation may have a totally different impact on different people. Collective destiny-changing events are no exception. Even disasters are ambivalent.
It is not the wind-strength of a hurricane, the water level of a flood or the intensity of an earthquake that determines the extent of the terror it causes. It is much more the scale of the damage the storm, flood or quake wreaks, whether the people were prepared for it, and how they cope with the disaster when it occurs. It is the number of victims and the size of the economic loss that define the calamity.
Our Blue Planet is a risk-filled home. But still it is more life-supporting than any other heavenly body known to man. Many a natural event is undoubtedly formidable, but without being disastrous. When rivers burst their banks in the Amazon jungle or Siberia is blasted snowstorms, flora and fauna are tormented, admittedly, but it is not until people are affected, or feel affected, that an occurrence is seen as a disaster. It doesn't always have to be a question of life and death either. When a fire raged through the Yellowstone National Park in 1988, the loss of a revered landscape sufficed to make Americans bemoan a national disaster.
Whether or not something goes down in the annals as a disaster is decided spontaneously and intuitively. There are no set criteria, not even for professionals in relief organisations and insurance companies.
Insurance experts speak of a disaster when a certain level of insurance claims or a certain number of deaths or injuries is exceeded. For a UN helper, the decisive criterion is whether the smitten region is able to recover on its own or whether it has to request external assistance.
Nature is not known for distributing suffering equitably. As in war, there are nearly always winners and losers. During the Great Fire of London in 1666, boat owners on the Thames earned a small fortune by selling wealthy Londoners refuge from the flames on their vessels. In the wake of an earthquake, the building industry booms. In ancient Egypt, mud from floods of the Nile served the farmers as a welcome fertiliser for their fields.
"The beauty of the Californian landscape, the wild coast and the charming valleys are largely the work of the San Andreas Fault. In actual fact we should be grateful to it", says Allan Lindh, geologist at the United States Geological Survey in California's Menlo Park. He has drawn an economic balance of the curses and blessings of the seismic unrest in California and comes to the conclusion that the fissure generates five to ten times as much benefit than it causes detriment. The advantages include not only the beautiful landscape that attracts tourists; shifts in the Earth's crust also create propitious conditions for agriculture, winemaking and even oil extraction. Lindh values these assets at between 10 and 20 billion dollars a year. The damage caused by a major quake, he says, would amount to around 100 billion dollars; but tremblers of this magnitude occur only every 50 to 100 years.
It is not only human society that draws benefit from disasters: nature too, has its opportunists. Many plants and animals exploit the results of widespread destruction. After the River Oder flooded in 1997, ecologists observed an astonishing increase in the number of rare fish such as dace, chub and ide. Dyke breaks and washed-up sand had suddenly provided these species with new habitats and improved spawning conditions.
In the early seventies the alarm bells went off in the ears of conservationists in the USA. A little bird, the Kirtland's Warbler, was threatened by extinction. Ecologists went about trying to find out why. The result was a mighty blow to contemporary beliefs about conservation. The Warbler suffered badly from a lack of forest fires because it only nests in young saplings of the Jack Pine tree that only grows when fire destroys old trees.
Disasters are the motor of evolution. "It has always been the short, sharp phases of massive, often catastrophic change that have allowed the new to emerge", says biologist Josef H. Reichholf. The great disasters in the Earth's history, in which numerous species of plants and animals were lost forever, made way for other types of flora and fauna.
After one of the most violent natural phenomena in recent history, scientists were able to observe just how quickly this can happen. On 27th August, 1883 the island of Krakatoa between Sumatra and Java was torn apart by a series of tremendous volcanic eruptions. The noise of the explosion was heard 2,200 miles away in Australia. A small piece of the island called Rakata remained above sea level, but the lava had destroyed every vestige of life on it. Nine months later a French expedition discovered the first new living creature on the island: a tiny spider - blown over from a neighbouring island - had begun spinning its delicate web. Just one year later the scientists counted thirty species of bird, ten types of mammal and nine different reptile species living on the island. 45 years later Rakata was completely covered with luscious tropical rainforest. Natural disasters destroy and create. They are a constant provocation for all living things.
But what is a natural disaster? And what is a man-made one? There is often but a fine dividing line between the two. When in 1997 the rains failed to arrive in Indonesia because of the ocean current known as El Niño, this wasn't really a cause for alarm. The forests did dry up badly, but they would have recovered again at the first rainfall. Oil palm farmers, however, decided to take advantage of the drought to burn-clear new land for planting. The fires got out of control, darkening the skies all over South East Asia with billowing smoke. El Niño provided the kindling, but it was the farmers who lit the fire.
Likewise, the flooding of the Yangtse to which 3,600 people fell victim in 1998 was not purely a natural disaster, but also the work of man. After the flooding had subsided, the Chinese government was forced to admit that large-scale land-clearing work in the upper reaches of the Yangtse was largely responsible for the magnitude of the catastrophe: due to the lack of vegetation, the rain that fell could not be absorbed and instead flowed straight into the river. Similar activities also aggravated the flooding of the Rhine and Oder rivers in recent years. Since the 17th century, riverside woodlands that used to soak up the excess water had been cut down to gain arable land. This had deprived the rivers of their natural catchment areas.
Beyond the bounds of floods and fires, man himself is the biggest threat to man. The consequences of his conduct can be much more deadly than those of the worst natural disaster. The totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century cost more human lives than all elemental forces put together. Even the beneficial achievements of technological progress, such as the automobile, or apparently harmless drugs (tobacco, alcohol) have catastrophic side effects. However, these only become visible when one adds up the fates of their innumerable solitary victims. Although man-made, these individual (mis-)fortunes take on "a trait of fatefulness, that previously would have been interpretable only as a work of the gods", wrote philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. The Germans have grown accustomed to around 8,000 traffic fatalities, almost 10,000 alcohol-related deaths and around 100,000 deaths through nicotine abuse per year. No storm, fire, flood or major technical disaster has ever taken so many victims.