06th March 2010
Mama Nature’s Revenge

Is Mother Nature taking revenge on Mankind? Is she making us pay for the past by changing the climate to cause earthquakes and tsunamis, hurricanes and floods, droughts and tornados? Last year, Martinique and St. Lucia shared the feelings of the shifting of the tectonic plates miles below the sea bed. Cuba was hit by three hurricanes in succession. China saw its share of earthquakes last year too, while Taiwan was devastated by yet another major natural disaster. But it was not only water. In Australia and Greece, bush fires raged out of control. And in several parts of Africa, drought conditions worsened more than ever before.
Haiti was crashed by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands, followed soon by others in Costa Rica and other Caribbean and Latin American nations. Then came Chile with its recent 8.8 magnitude quake that killed hundreds and sent tsunami waves all across the Pacific to Japan.
But it’s not only the Caribbean and Latin America feeling the wrath of Mother Nature. In France last week, eight-foot waves crushed sea defenses. The heavy rains also hit Germany. In another place (I can’t quite remember exactly where in the world) the news reported earlier this week that 15 days of rain fell in just one hour. And just this past Thursday Taiwan – which hasn’t recovered from the earlier destruction, registered a 6-point-something quake that sent the nation quivering.
So, what’s causing Mama Nature to turn on us like that?
In Haiti, it was suggested – very early in the day -- that the quake might have been the result of a US military experiment gone wrong. Now they are speculating it might be the Americans’ greedy search for oil. Who or what to believe? We’re still wondering…
It will take time before we really fully understand the extent to which our everyday actions determine our future on this island, on this planet. We still don’t fully understand that what we do today will come back to haunt us tomorrow, that what we fail do today we will wish we did yesterday when tomorrow comes. We still believe that because it is not us who’ll face tomorrow, we can do what we want to today. We are simply hard-headed. We hear, but we don’t listen. We see, but we don’t notice. We thank God that what happened to others didn’t happen to us -- but we don’t learn our lessons.
Take the way we behave. Most of us know nothing about disasters in decades past. But we saw what happened at Black Mallet and Maynard Hill the other day. Yet we still build the same way – house upon house, no drainage, little foundation, much erosion.