Intense tropical storms, originating in the heat of the Sahara Desert and tracking across the Atlantic, are bad enough, but what happens when they combine with another major natural event? In the US the answer came in 2012 when, in the space of three stressful weeks, an earthquake, a hurricane, intense rain and severe flooding piled on top of one another with only a few days between each in which to catch our collective breath.
It is difficult to plan for events that one does not want to imagine happening but these are precisely the events that must be taken into account in a realistic assessment of risk. The Richter Scale is geometric in its progression, not arithmetic, which means that the Japanese earthquake of March 2011 was 3300 times more powerful than the Californian earthquake of 2010. Yet in the US we assume that our nuclear plants are safe and so far we have gotten away with it. The Japanese have not. The Fukushima Daiichi power station was designed to withstand a powerful earthquake and to resist a tsunami, but not to have to cope with a combination of the two, even though it is earthquakes that cause tsunamis.
The American agricultural model is based on an immense industrial chemical monocultures that presume the continued presence of major pollinators, whether they be bees, birds and butterflies, or the wind. We pretend that we are not facing a major food crisis in coming years as our prime source of pollination for fruit and vegetables, the honey bee, declines. I
The movie, Vanishing of the Bees, stresses that honey bees are symptomatic of a bigger challenge, but if we study the bees in isolation we are missing the big picture. Other major species are in decline (frogs, fish, butterflies, birds, bats …) and there is the potential for further crises to hasten their demise. We like to pretend that our future food sources are safe because we cannot imagine an alternative nor do we want to change the behaviors that caused the potential crisis in the first place. So far we have gotten away with that too. Ultimately we may not.
Rebuilding after major disasters is possible. When an earthquake leveled the city of Kobe in Japan, which at the time was the sixth largest trading port in the world, 6400 people died, 300 000 were homeless, the damage was estimated at $100 billion and the prediction was that it would take decades for Japan to recover. Yet within fifteen months manufacturing was at 98% of pre-quake levels. Similarly after the Northridge earthquake in 1994, the economy of southern California grew faster than it had before the disaster, and after Hurricane Hugo in 1989, Charleston outpaced growth predictions in seven of the following ten quarters. Initial reckoning suggested that Fukushima in Japan recovered faster than did New Orleans after Katrina. Indeed the Japanese Prime Minister resigned under mounting public criticism for not having done enough and not having done it more quickly.
So recovery is possible even if the toll on human life is enormous. And in those recoveries huge amounts of capital are either lost or redistributed. In earthquakes, for example, money is redistributed from taxpayers to construction workers, from insurance companies to homeowners, from those one once lived in a destroyed city to those who replace them.
No one changes because it’s Tuesday. Sometimes it takes a life-threatening occurrence to change abusive or self-destructive behavior, although none of us would argue in favor of a disaster on the basis of the potential for a favorable long term outcome, especially a disaster that, unlike an earthquake or a tsunami, we have the power to prevent.
But what is it going to take to mount a sense of outrage at what is happening in our own backyards? How many setbacks do we have to experience before we begin to accept responsibility not only for the causes but also for the solutions? How many cataclysmic events will it take before we act proactively rather than reactively?
Sadly the history of responses to increased gun violence in the US is not encouraging. The British journalist, Dan Hodges wrote in 2015, three years after twenty children and six adults were shot and killed by a twenty year old male at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.” The students in Parkwood, Florida, who have marshaled national, perhaps even international, attention after seventeen of their colleagues were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February, 2018, might change that. As one of the student banners held aloft during the March on Washington said, “We are not anti-gun; we are pro-life.”
Beekeeping offers some reprise to the confusion and despair. One of the challenges of the beekeeper is unveiling the order behind the apparent chaos of a hive. Every bee in a hive has a purpose and what initially appears to be confusion is in fact highly organized and purposeful activity. After a while one feels like Napoleon surveying the battlefield of Austerlitz, or Peyton Manning looking downfield as the New England Patriots advance, Kevin de Bruyne making one of those incisive passes for Manchester City that splits the defense wide open (I confess to being a City fan,) or Lionel Messi sliding gracefully through the French defense in the final of the World Cup in Qatar in 2022. Each has the ability to read the play (or in the beekeeper’s case, a frame) to see patterns in the disorder and to make the appropriate calls.
Is there a pattern behind the increasing number of global natural disasters and are we the honey bee, caught up in the action and focused on one specific task, or the experienced beekeeper, standing back and see the bigger picture? And if the latter, where do we move our troops or to whom do we pass the ball so that we can emerge victorious?
Our Green Cathedral 