Naturally Unnatural

“Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster.”

–Jim Wallis

The word ‘natural’ is self-explanatory: derived from nature. But coming to disasters, it is a ‘sudden accident that causes great damage.’ This combination of words (natural disaster) is used to justify a number of casualties, but that’s the catch: casualties are caused by man, not nature.

While hazards can be considered a play of nature, catastrophes occur when a community isn’t prepared to cope with the impacts of a hazard. Consider this example: an earthquake of magnitude 8.8 struck Chile in February 2010, killing 562 people. Only a month earlier in Haiti, over 220,000 beings were wiped out, with another one and a half million being left homeless, from an earth tremor measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale. Same continent, same year, but vastly different results. Why, you ask? Because the former country was much better prepared to face such a ‘disaster.’

Poor infrastructure, lack of awareness and carelessness are the knives, but earthquakes, droughts, floods, cyclones aren’t the murderers- humans are.

Some may agree to disagree- you can’t do anything about floods washing away your house in the South Pacific Islands. A small territory surrounded by an endless ocean is undoubtedly at risk of being overcome by the vast water body. However, you can’t cut the head from the snake, so what causes inundation? It is crystal clear in the Antarctic- literally- that polar caps are melting, indeed questioning its title of the ‘land of eternal winter.’ Hence, it is the industrial carbon emissions that are leading to this global phenomenon. Ergo, isn’t it us homo sapiens who are ultimately responsible? Climate change is man-made, and while natural disasters aren’t, their impact definitely is.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects climate change to disrupt weather patters, leading to more refugees. It has been suggested that a one meter rise in sea level could mean 150 million people will be displaced. Agreed, there’s no panacea to the conundrum of this situation, but a multi-causal issue can only have an exponentially larger number of solutions. Natural disasters may not always be controllable, but our reaction to them needs to be.

In conclusion, to tackle the issue of climate refuge we need to cut the weed at its root. Climate change can’t be taken down like a terrorist, but we need to wage a war against it; we need to wage a war against, indeed, our own creation- before it’s too late.