21 January 2010 - last rites to first wrongs

Why are great natural disasters so deadly? We can trace backward from the last rites to the first wrongs. Consider: Almost every nation maintains a large organization, the military, whose mission is to respond to specific kinds of artificial disaster, such as the disaster of wanting to own your neighbor’s land. The corresponding organization for natural disasters often has to make do with an airplane full of blankets and a few search-and-rescue teams. The primordial mistake is that we consider ourselves more dangerous than the entire rest of the universe. We’re not quite that good yet.