Every disaster comes with two sides of the story. We’re all thinking about disasters these days after the Nepal earthquake, and when people suggest that a catastrophic event like that might come with a silver lining (Build back better!), that sounds foolishly optimistic. Especially after the somewhat dismal rebuild efforts in Haiti. I’ve had a personal look at the aftermath of one of these disasters, as I’ve spent the last year living in Christchurch, a city still very much in the process of rebuilding following its 2011 earthquakes. While the death toll was much lower in Christchurch than in Nepal or Haiti, a huge number of buildings were completely demolished, changing the face of the city forever.
But what does the California drought have to do with earthquakes?
That’s the other side of the story.
If we look at them the right way, these disasters remind us that we can’t just focus on our lives in the here and now–there are consequences to our choices that will affect us in the future.
It’s so easy to forget about the larger consequences of our actions–not just as individuals, but as a race. Who wants to conserve water for some future drought when an abundance of clean water still runs out of their taps every day? Who will choose to go vegetarian–or to avoid pesticide-heavy foods–in an effort to conserve water, when that water use happens so far away it seems inconsequential?
For many years, the answer to that was: very few people.
But now, with the major drought showing no signs of letting up in California, people are starting to talk about these long-ignored issues. They are changing their habits–abandoning water-hungry lawns, passing regulations to limit the heavy industrial use of water, and choosing foods that require less water to produce.
Humans are a very narrow-minded race in many ways, though. We are prone to think about ourselves as an exclusive unit, not as part of the global ecosystem. Our economic models prove this–we treat the economy as a closed system with a series of inputs and outputs, not as something that exists within a closed world, where the inputs are inevitably dwindling and the outputs (pollutants in all their forms) are building up to the extent that they have come back to bite us.
But we should take note from the disasters we witness, and see them as what many of them are: symptoms of a growing problem, not random events. Even earthquakes show us the danger of building cities so quickly that we ignore structural safety. And regardless of how we respond to these disasters, there are a few things we ought to be reminded of.
A shoddily-built house in an earthquake-prone area will not stand forever.
Diminishing water tables will eventually run dry.
Cities built in the face of the ocean will eventually succumb to the sea.
And throughout the world, we are becoming a species living on borrowed time.
As environmentalist Murray Grimwood has put it, “We are a species in what is known as ‘overshoot.’ We have overshot more in proportion to our sustainable numbers than most species could ever achieve.” (Check out Murray’s powerful, thought-provoking writing at his blog, https://powerdownkiwi.wordpress.com/ )
Here in New Zealand, we are experiencing a smaller version of this ‘species overshoot’ in the mice and rats in our forests. Last year was a year of prolific seeding for the beech tree forests, which caused rodent populations to boom. You can see mice everywhere in the forest, scampering over logs and gnawing at backpacks in an attempt to steal food. As soon as the food source is gone, the mice will search for whatever supplemental nourishment they can find (devastating bird populations in the process), and when that is gone their population will collapse. It is a tidy cycle, a process that repeats itself throughout history on larger and smaller scales.
As Murray Grimwood puts it, our own “food source” is fossil-fueled energy…except once that is gone, it will never be replenished. We are reaching the point where, like the mice, our primary “food source” is beginning to falter, and we’re growing desperate in search of something new. The problem is, anything we find will only postpone the inevitable.
So, as we ponder how best to respond to the California drought or the Nepal earthquake, we ought to ask ourselves: are we treating the symptoms…or targeting the problem itself?
I have, however, just put up the Author Q&A page–check it out! It contains info about The Natural Order and about my writing process, plus a few random questions.
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