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Jewish World Review Sept. 26, 2005 / 22 Elul, 5765 The Wrath of Mother Nature By Tom Purcell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
She's trying to kill us.
I speak of Mother Nature, an erratic creature whose origins can be found in Greek mythology. At her whim, this earth mother either nurtures us with plentiful harvests or destroys everything in our path, including us.
She's mighty creative in her choice of destruction. Over the years, she's given us droughts, pestilence and famine. Her plagues have wiped out half our population. She's just as likely to nurture little organisms — germs and viruses — as she is us. She used one of those bugs to take my grandfather in 1937 when he was only 34 years old.
She can be mighty temperamental, too. Every 40,000 years she freezes and kills everything on earth. Sometimes, for no particular reason, she warms things up.
She likes to shift the earth's plates now and then, causing massive quakes that knock over buildings and squash helpless creatures. Her December, 2004 quake caused a giant Tsunami to form in the Indian Ocean. The raging waters killed more than 300,000 people along thousands of miles of coastline.
She loves volcanic eruptions, too. She's still smiling over the 1980 Mt. Saint Helen's eruption, the most destructive volcanic blast in the history of the United States. She's toying with setting it loose again.
And, boy, does she love hurricanes. A hurricane is a powerful cyclone that forms in the tropics. Mother Nature uses them to move heat from the region near the Equator toward higher altitudes. She doesn't much care that her cyclones visit death and destruction on large human populations.
She hit us hard in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. She just whipped up some mighty winds with Hurricane Rita, too, but, thankfully, not so bad as she did in 1900, when she killed more than 8,000 people in Galveston, Texas.
Max Mayfield, director of the federal government's National Hurricane Center, told a Senate committee last Tuesday that he believes the Atlantic Ocean is in a cycle of increased hurricane activity. He said the recent increase parallels one that began in the 1940's before ending in the 1960's.
"It's like somebody threw a switch," he said. Yeah, and I know who that somebody is.
Mayfield said the increasing frequency and power of hurricanes is not the fault of human activity, but the result of a natural cycle that fluctuates every 25 to 40 years — one that fluctuates at the whim of one very powerful mother.
He said that in addition to the Gulf Coast, lots of other areas will be vulnerable to damage, including New York and New England, where the "Great Hurricane" touched down in 1938 causing massive damage.
And there's little we can do about most of it.
Sure, we can deploy the world's most sophisticated computer modeling to predict a hurricane's path, but we're less successful at gauging its intensity, rainfall distribution and surge in water levels.
Sure, we can develop detailed contingency plans. Local, state and federal government organizations clearly need to do better than they did in New Orleans.
But that's about all we can do. Outside of monitoring, preparing, evacuating and rebuilding, there's nothing we can to do stop Mother Nature when she decides to visit one of her tantrums on us.
We like to pretend we can. We like to pretend we have the means, technology and smarts to fend off every one of life's ills. When we fail, we immediately seek out somebody to blame.
Mother Nature laughs hard when we do that. She knows we're not really so advanced as we think we are — that where she is concerned, we're of no more concern to her than a tree or a bug or a microorganism.
That she's just as likely to bless us with a cool breeze on a summer night as she is to sweep our home and family into the sea. It's nothing personal and, when you put it all in perspective, it's nobody's fault.
It's just that Mother Nature is trying to kill us.
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© 2005, Tom Purcell |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
