On Our Ability To Adapt To Our Environment

A very powerful earthquake in Peru, 7.9 on the Richter scale, killed at least 337 people yesterday.  The exact death toll won't be known for months, but hidden in the death toll, whatever it may finally be, is a telling and extremely important fact that no one ever mentions.  Now of course what follows is callous and offers no solace to those who lost loved ones in this particular earthquake, but I would like to think that it would offer hope for the future.  You see, a probable death toll in the low hundreds should be cause for celebration, not despair.  More than anything, that number reflects just how far Peru, and indeed the world in general, has come in the last few decades. 

In fact, just under four decades ago, in May 1970, an earthquake, also measuring 7.9, struck the Cordillera Blanca in northern Peru and triggered a landslide and avalanche off of Huascarán, the sixth highest mountain in the world.  Sitting at the base of Huascarán was a small town called Yungay.  That town no longer exists as the landslide and avalanche buried the town's 20,000 inhabitants.  Today, when you walk around the area of the disaster, you are quite literally walking on the rooftops of houses, stores, restaurants, and churches.  The only visible relics of the old town are two church steeples that protrude slightly from the earth.

Read that paragraph again.  Just a little over 35 years ago, an earthquake in northern Peru killed 20,000 people.  Yesterday, an earthquake of the same magnitude hit a far more populated area and will likely result in less than a thousand deaths.  Now of course it is difficult to make a direct comparison as the previous earthquake caused an avalanche and landslide.  However, we should not diminish nor ignore the fact that economic growth, development, and human ingenuity have each assisted in reducing the death toll by at least an order of magnitude.  That is phenomenal progress.  And it tells a story that more often than not goes untold.  Whatever the consequences of our explosive economic progress and development, as a species, we have used them to so radically alter our environment and our ability to adapt to that environment that even Mother Nature's worst can only set us back slightly.

It is impossible to understate how important of an observation that is.  Not only does it reduce the death and injury tolls from natural disasters, but it also makes recoveries faster and more efficient.  It reduces the human cost of suffering by increasing the speed with which victims receive assistance.  And, most importantly, it is an observation that must, must, be mentioned in any intelligent debate about global climate change.  Because regardless of whether or not you believe that humans are responsible for the rise in global temperatures, you cannot deny that we can, as a species, due to our nature and recent technological and economic developments, adjust our lifestlyes and continue to alter our environment in order to mitigate the effects of climate change.  Any policy proposal that explicitly aims to reduce temperatures must be weighed against policies that consider ways in which we could adapt to a warmer planet.  If we fail to do that, then we betray not only our planet, but also the logic and intelligence that have allowed our species to develop to this point.

Comments

[~R.]

Exactly. However, the larger realm of the problem of climate change is species extinction. Mother Jones magazine recently did a feature in which there is a growing fear among biologists and zoologists that at least half of all living organic species on the planet may die by the end of the century. They just built a storage pod in the upper reaches of Norway to store seeds (which is as much for protection against GM foods as against nuclear holocaust and global warming, but whatev). Can we adjust to a warmer planet? Of course. But that's not all we'd have to adapt to. The loss of half of all genetic life on earth would be a blow to every existing ecosystem, if not lead to their immediate collapse. The question is, just how many scenarios and changes will we have to adjust to?