Nature’s Fury and Human Resistance

Vasu Reddy from Chicago
vasureddy@aol.com

I love Florida. Although I only spent very few years in South Florida, I still am very fond of my old place, friends and associates and everything I could see, visit and explore in Florida.  Just mind your own business and enjoy the place, and you would be just fine.  For someone who likes the water, beach, great food (not expensive) and people, it’s a wonderful place.  Things were quiet, and everyone minded their own business.

It is a quiet and peaceful place.  While the tourists flock form all over the place, the locals like the weather, locality and peace.  While I also appreciate many places on earth with similar weather and conditions, Florida is a place for 6 million people, and it is wonderful.

The keys are my favorite part of Florida, along with Miami beach and Everglades, Disneyland, shopping and just about everything.  Just driving in Florida is relaxing, and often adventurous.  I don’t know how to swim, but my home pool was good enough for me to enjoy the water.  While the life itself is quaint and relaxing, it is also not that expensive, and all said stress free.  The very rich to people with limited resources still have the same beautiful ocean, sand and views.

As the water, sand, sun, smiles, style and people (food is included) all get used to each other rather quickly, Florida is also in the zone of sea levels that are precarious.  The eco system is precarious.  Even a little bit of sea surge will overtake much of the beautiful and enjoyable space of Florida coast, and this is something no scientist must provide any evidence to support.  It is simply that people love the sea and sand and the pleasant weather, and they will build as close to this is as possible to enjoy the nature’s goodness as possible.  No one stops us, and no one worries about the eventual fury of nature, and no one thinks in their life time any massive natural disruptions in their community.  Florida and its cities have had some massive natural disasters, and as they escaped catastrophe last week, they have done so many times.  It’s only natural for human beings to hope for the best, and riding out hurricanes is one of those things we seem to believe that we will escape, unscathed.  We have from the beginning of time, both respected and ignored nature’s ability to do what it pleases, and we have well recorded instances of populations getting wiped out.  We still try to ride out the natural disasters (despite the warning, including some who suggest ignoring the warnings) with bear bones of our homes.  One thing to ponder is what good is a single home, if the whole neighborhood is wiped out?

There is no science or politics involved, only perhaps the profit.  When you keep suggesting that human interference into nature will cause more natural disasters, and the bigger and bigger natural disasters will become a normalcy.  Whether we like it or not, any major change to any life style has consequences, and the whole human population makes every effort to add their part to the earth’s constitution.  With 13 billion making small adjustments (corporations make huge adjustments) there is bound to be a huge overall impact on how Earth handles the change.  So, we can think of a hurricane or two or three, every year and the damage done to our state, or start combining the effects of severe weather around the world to accept our contribution to the changes to the weather.

We only have one Earth, and its ability to sustain and reestablish the natural balance for all of us is limited, and time consuming.  We really are not allowing for sustainability nor replenishing the natural abilities.  We can think of what next with severe weather (while continuing to argue) or come up with the ingenuity to sustain our earth.  The choice is clearly ours.