The following essay was published as a brochure by Swiss RE Germany in 2000
Life on a risky planet
People live on the slopes of volcanoes, on storm-blown coasts and even
on the known fault lines of the continental plates. Large cities thrive
and flourish in the middle of risk zones: Tokyo on an earthquake line,
Winnipeg in a bleak blizzard area and Amsterdam below the waterline of
the North Sea.
Are the inhabitants of such risky regions totally mad, utterly naive or driven by some kind of grim death-wish? Why are notorious disaster areas among the most popular residential areas and holiday destinations in the world?
There are a few considerations that make living in high-risk areas more readily comprehensible.
Without natural disasters there would be no people
65 million years ago, the globe was shaken to its core. That much is certain. What the experts don't agree on is what kind of catastrophe really occurred. Was it a meteorite ten, twenty kilometres in diameter that crashed into the Earth? Or was it a series of violent volcanic eruptions that darkened the heavens for a lengthy period? Whatever the reason, the world turned cold and thus pretty inhospitable for the dinosaurs which inhabited it at the time.
But the little, warm-blooded mammals, that until then had eked out a wretched existence in the shadow of the giant lizards, were suddenly given their chance. This was the first major geo-historical crossroads that pointed evolution in the direction of the human race. Among the smaller mammals that now came into their own was the tree shrew family. It was from this species that prosimians, apes and, finally, human beings evolved.
Without this cold catastrophe the world might still be ruled by Tyrannosaurus Rex. Frustrated tree shrews would still be choking in the dust thrown up by his feet. Indeed, that is the way things were for a very long time; after all, mammals were already around 220 million years ago. The first true mammal, the eozostrodon, was already in existence when the dinosaurs began their impressive career.
Then, when it went cold and dark, the mammals were able to move into the fast lane. They had a constant body temperature. Their most important sense was that of smell, which they used to find insects at night. Weasel-like creatures were armed and ready for the new climate, while the likes of Tyrannosaurus Rex were in their final throes. Without the global disaster, the evolutionary path that led to homo sapiens would never have been blazed. In this way, drastic environmental changes guide destiny and accelerate evolution.
After this big bang came the tertiary period, the heyday of the mammals. The subsequent Pleistocene epoch then began with a warm period that, on a geological time scale, set in like lightning. The ensuing abundant precipitation brought forth opulent vegetation. In eastern Africa - the birthplace of mankind - yet another natural phenomenon took place: rampant volcanic activity sprayed the region with ash which acted as a fertiliser. Plants, and plant-eaters, multiplied, and the apes left the primaeval forest to partake of the fantastic range of food that the steppe now offered. Now living at ground level, they learned to walk upright and became increasingly intelligent. With his superior brain, our forefather, Australopithecus, was able to hold his own against lions and hyenas. When the next climatic catastrophe caused the temperature to drop again, the humid forests to shrink and the steppe regions to expand, Australopithecus was already ideally suited to the new landscape. As anthropologist Jared Diamond explains, it was interaction with the environment that shaped the course of human evolution. And disasters reshaped the environment time and again.
Primaeval man later emigrated from the African continent in three waves, initially inhabiting only the Old World. If disastrous cold spells during the Pleistocene epoch hadn't covered half of Europe with glaciers, America would have remained untouched by human foot (at least until the arrival of Columbus). Because the swelling of the continental ice sheets dried out the Baring Straight and turned it to tundra. This enabled man to cross from Asia to America by foot 12,000 years ago. And conveniently enough, there were sufficient mammoths on hand to provide him with food and clothing during this trek.
Disasters are ambivalent
In January 1999, King Taufa'ahau Tupou the Fifth's kingdom began to grow. Fifty kilometres from Tonga's capital, a 300 metre long and 40 metre wide volcanic island emerged out of the South Sea. In many places on earth, such an eruption would have been a terrible catastrophe, but in this case the monarch and his subjects were delighted about this unexpected gift from Mother Nature.
So as we see, strokes of fate can be perceived in highly diverse ways. Some people are devastated, some start again from scratch and successfully re-build their lives, and still others learn a valuable lesson and change their lifestyle for the better. One and the same visitation may have a totally different impact on different people. Collective destiny-changing events are no exception. Even disasters are ambivalent.
It is not the wind-strength of a hurricane, the water level of a flood or the intensity of an earthquake that determines the extent of the terror it causes. It is much more the scale of the damage the storm, flood or quake wreaks, whether the people were prepared for it, and how they cope with the disaster when it occurs. It is the number of victims and the size of the economic loss that define the calamity.
Our Blue Planet is a risk-filled home. But still it is more life-supporting than any other heavenly body known to man. Many a natural event is undoubtedly formidable, but without being disastrous. When rivers burst their banks in the Amazon jungle or Siberia is blasted snowstorms, flora and fauna are tormented, admittedly, but it is not until people are affected, or feel affected, that an occurrence is seen as a disaster. It doesn't always have to be a question of life and death either. When a fire raged through the Yellowstone National Park in 1988, the loss of a revered landscape sufficed to make Americans bemoan a national disaster.
Whether or not something goes down in the annals as a disaster is decided spontaneously and intuitively. There are no set criteria, not even for professionals in relief organisations and insurance companies.
Insurance experts speak of a disaster when a certain level of insurance claims or a certain number of deaths or injuries is exceeded. For a UN helper, the decisive criterion is whether the smitten region is able to recover on its own or whether it has to request external assistance.
Nature is not known for distributing suffering equitably. As in war, there are nearly always winners and losers. During the Great Fire of London in 1666, boat owners on the Thames earned a small fortune by selling wealthy Londoners refuge from the flames on their vessels. In the wake of an earthquake, the building industry booms. In ancient Egypt, mud from floods of the Nile served the farmers as a welcome fertiliser for their fields.
"The beauty of the Californian landscape, the wild coast and the charming valleys are largely the work of the San Andreas Fault. In actual fact we should be grateful to it", says Allan Lindh, geologist at the United States Geological Survey in California's Menlo Park. He has drawn an economic balance of the curses and blessings of the seismic unrest in California and comes to the conclusion that the fissure generates five to ten times as much benefit than it causes detriment. The advantages include not only the beautiful landscape that attracts tourists; shifts in the Earth's crust also create propitious conditions for agriculture, winemaking and even oil extraction. Lindh values these assets at between 10 and 20 billion dollars a year. The damage caused by a major quake, he says, would amount to around 100 billion dollars; but tremblers of this magnitude occur only every 50 to 100 years.
It is not only human society that draws benefit from disasters: nature too, has its opportunists. Many plants and animals exploit the results of widespread destruction. After the River Oder flooded in 1997, ecologists observed an astonishing increase in the number of rare fish such as dace, chub and ide. Dyke breaks and washed-up sand had suddenly provided these species with new habitats and improved spawning conditions.
In the early seventies the alarm bells went off in the ears of conservationists in the USA. A little bird, the Kirtland's Warbler, was threatened by extinction. Ecologists went about trying to find out why. The result was a mighty blow to contemporary beliefs about conservation. The Warbler suffered badly from a lack of forest fires because it only nests in young saplings of the Jack Pine tree that only grows when fire destroys old trees.
Disasters are the motor of evolution. "It has always been the short, sharp phases of massive, often catastrophic change that have allowed the new to emerge", says biologist Josef H. Reichholf. The great disasters in the Earth's history, in which numerous species of plants and animals were lost forever, made way for other types of flora and fauna.
After one of the most violent natural phenomena in recent history, scientists were able to observe just how quickly this can happen. On 27th August, 1883 the island of Krakatoa between Sumatra and Java was torn apart by a series of tremendous volcanic eruptions. The noise of the explosion was heard 2,200 miles away in Australia. A small piece of the island called Rakata remained above sea level, but the lava had destroyed every vestige of life on it. Nine months later a French expedition discovered the first new living creature on the island: a tiny spider - blown over from a neighbouring island - had begun spinning its delicate web. Just one year later the scientists counted thirty species of bird, ten types of mammal and nine different reptile species living on the island. 45 years later Rakata was completely covered with luscious tropical rainforest. Natural disasters destroy and create. They are a constant provocation for all living things.
But what is a natural disaster? And what is a man-made one? There is often but a fine dividing line between the two. When in 1997 the rains failed to arrive in Indonesia because of the ocean current known as El Niño, this wasn't really a cause for alarm. The forests did dry up badly, but they would have recovered again at the first rainfall. Oil palm farmers, however, decided to take advantage of the drought to burn-clear new land for planting. The fires got out of control, darkening the skies all over South East Asia with billowing smoke. El Niño provided the kindling, but it was the farmers who lit the fire.
Likewise, the flooding of the Yangtse to which 3,600 people fell victim in 1998 was not purely a natural disaster, but also the work of man. After the flooding had subsided, the Chinese government was forced to admit that large-scale land-clearing work in the upper reaches of the Yangtse was largely responsible for the magnitude of the catastrophe: due to the lack of vegetation, the rain that fell could not be absorbed and instead flowed straight into the river. Similar activities also aggravated the flooding of the Rhine and Oder rivers in recent years. Since the 17th century, riverside woodlands that used to soak up the excess water had been cut down to gain arable land. This had deprived the rivers of their natural catchment areas.
Beyond the bounds of floods and fires, man himself is the biggest threat to man. The consequences of his conduct can be much more deadly than those of the worst natural disaster. The totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century cost more human lives than all elemental forces put together. Even the beneficial achievements of technological progress, such as the automobile, or apparently harmless drugs (tobacco, alcohol) have catastrophic side effects. However, these only become visible when one adds up the fates of their innumerable solitary victims. Although man-made, these individual (mis-)fortunes take on "a trait of fatefulness, that previously would have been interpretable only as a work of the gods", wrote philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. The Germans have grown accustomed to around 8,000 traffic fatalities, almost 10,000 alcohol-related deaths and around 100,000 deaths through nicotine abuse per year. No storm, fire, flood or major technical disaster has ever taken so many victims.
Human Beings are not lemmings
"The future," wrote sociologist Niklas Luhmann, "is and remains unknown, because with each present that comes about, the future moves further away again, renewing itself as the future." Wilhelm Busch said it a little more light-heartedly: "Oh that man is so oft wrong, and ne'er knows what will come along!" And yet the future is not totally unpredictable. Statistics tell us that certain events are more or less likely to happen. Thus, one can say with some certainty that snowstorms and avalanches will not pose a great danger to children in Kenya.
Natural disasters, too, are statistical entities. However, most people's estimate of the threat of flooding, earthquake or hurricane is lower than the mathematical reality, because, as Heiko Ernst, editor in chief of the magazine "Psychologie heute" points out: "People are bad statisticians." In Germany, natural disasters are way down the list of fears. According to an EMNID survey, only three percent of the population are afraid of being affected by a natural catastrophe. "The risk of natural disasters happening, for example earthquakes or floods, is under-estimated", writes psychologist and science author Rolf Degen. This illusion of invulnerability acts as a kind of endogenous anti-depressant to ward off depressing cognitive realisations. The belief that one is personally immune to such events gives rise to a fundamental feeling of being safe, a sort of perverted primitive faith in our own security that allows us to pursue our everyday goals without being paralysed by fears about the future."
Emotionally unable to accept a rational set of statistics on danger, human beings are like lemmings. Blind to the threat of mortal danger, they settle on the slopes of volcanoes, on the banks of treacherous rivers or in earthquake zones. But this analysis is itself too short-sighted, because this supposedly unrealistic optimism is a source of vital energy. It can be traced as an anthropological constant throughout the entire history of mankind. The earliest civilisations evolved in the floodplains of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Holland, a land painstakingly reclaimed from the sea and constantly under threat of flooding, was once a world power whose influence extended as far as East Asia and South America. Two of the world's most successful technological and economic regions of recent years are built on the fault lines of tectonic plates: California and Japan. On the other hand, the statistics identify bitterly poor countries such as the Congo and Surinam as veritable safe havens that are only extremely seldom plagued by natural disasters.
Even in ancient times cities were built on coasts, on broad rivers or at the crossroads of major trade routes. Possible natural disasters played only a very subordinate role in the choice of these locations. That is why one of the first major settlements in the history of mankind, the city of Ur in Mesopotamia, was buried in mud after a flood 6,000 years ago. When gold was discovered in California in 1849, San Francisco grew to the proportions of a major city within the space of just five years. But to this day the notorious San Andreas Fault has no great deterrent effect on anybody who wants to try his luck in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara or Silicon Valley. Many people see the natural seismicity simply as the price you have to pay if you want to live in the most popular city on the west coast. And some scientists, like Allan Lindh, the geologist who calculated the economic advantages of continental shift, prove them right.
After the Northridge quake in January 1994, one Californian victim told the journalists: "Disasters like this only happen once every ten years, but the sun shines here nearly every day."
People have many reasons for settling in one place and avoiding another. They often weigh up the pros and cons intuitively. The threat of natural disasters is just one of many components, especially since, even when one looks at it quite rationally, the risk is not dramatically high when compared to other mortal dangers. The probability of a US citizen being killed by an earthquake or volcanic eruption is 1 to 11 million. The risk of being murdered within the next year is significantly higher.
Not all societies are equally willing to accept the risk of natural disasters. Pioneer cultures such as the North Americans appear to have a more carefree attitude to natural perils. What a safety-conscious German or Scandinavian might consider to be criminal foolishness may be accepted with a shrug of the shoulders in other countries. When asked by a German reporter why he lives at the foot of Mount Etna, a street vendor answered: "Why does the Eskimo stay at the North Pole? He'd probably like to swap with us. You can grow more on a volcano than on an iceberg." 40,000 Sicilians who live on the potentially dangerous slopes of Mount Etna apparently see things the same way. And economy proves them right: theirs is one of the highest-yielding regions in all of Italy. Ash and lava fertilise the soil with phosphates and potassium. Clouds drop their moisture burden on the slopes, watering orange trees, date palms, banana plants, sugar cane, corn and many other fruits of the earth. Like today's Etna settlers, the citizens of ancient Pompeii saw Vesuvius not as a fire-breathing gate to hell, but rather as a well-meaning guarantor of God-given prosperity. Stamps on amphorae praise the local volcanic-soil-grown wine. A fresco portrays the grapevine-covered mountain as the home of Dionysos.
Is this all just suppression of reality or an optimistic instinct with a rational core? In California there are hundreds of signs pointing tourists to the San Andreas faultline. Many inhabitants of Florida have experienced half a dozen devastating hurricanes, and still they stay. Every one of us has a statistics office of our own in our heads. We all know that we are going to die one day, but we don't know when and we don't know how. What is more important: sunshine or safety? Career or potential catastrophe? Fruitful land or flooded fields? Human beings are not lemmings that leap blindly to their own death. People deliberate, consciously or unconsciously. Often they are wiser in their deliberations than the specialist who places the risk on which he is the expert above all others.
And by the way: not even lemmings are "lemmings". Biologists have found that the little Nordic rodents are not bent on suicide when they jump into rivers or Fjords in the course of their migrations. If their population density increases too quickly, it is only a matter of time before all the meadows are grazed bare. Then the only way to avoid starving to death is to emigrate. During their wanderings the lemmings come up against watery obstacles. If they can't go around them, they jump into them, but not with the aim of killing themselves, only because, like the famous chicken, they want to reach the other side.
Solidarity is strength
"Some of them laugh; then the reporters, who are not from the region, speak of humour, of the carnival wit of the Cologne locals. No hysteria, no lamenting." This is how the essayist Libuse Moniková, a native of Prague, described her impressions of the Rhine flood in 1995. When the Oder burst its banks in 1997, the Polish author Adam Krzeminski welcomed it as a historical incentive. He expressed the hope that the disaster, that cost the lives of more than a hundred people, would lead to a closer feeling of community between Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland. The title of his commentary: "Why the flood gives us hope."
Is it right to seek the good sides of a catastrophe? Is optimism not cynical when thousands of people are suffering? Fair questions, but the fact of the matter is, there are other sides to adversity. Just as strokes of misfortune in the life of an individual can spur her on to greater things, natural disasters often bring out the best in people: compassion, solidarity, helpfulness. Many disasters are followed by a wave of positive emotions, from local community aid to donation campaigns that transcend continental barriers. Heroes are born in the hour of need, for example Tomás Daniel Díaz Castillo, a.k.a. El Enano, The Dwarf. After hurricane Mitch devastated numerous Honduran coastal towns, many villagers sank into apathy. Little Tomás, however, started the motor on his fishing boat and chugged off to save 300 people's lives. "He plucked them from out of palm trees that they had been clinging to for the last two days, weakened and dying of thirst", commented one reporter.
Where disasters are part of life in a region, a culture of risk solidarity develops. Standing together against the powers of nature, salvaging as much normality as possible in unity, just like the seafarers of old who could only be a match for the oceans if they stuck together as a team. "The lava is a social thing. It welds people together", explains a teacher who lives on Mount Etna. "People who live in the constant threat of danger eventually evolve into their own breed. They are tougher, because they don't just live, they survive."
In this way a mental mixture of defiance and loyalty to one's homeland, dogged tenacity and esprit de corps develops. After earthquakes in Italy and Armenia, the survivors pitched their tents directly next to their destroyed houses, although they could have left the danger zone. They were better able to bear their own misery surrounded by others who had suffered the same fate.
After a disaster (unlike before a disaster!) it can be very helpful to suppress reality a little, because if one fully appreciates the magnitude of the reconstruction work to be done, it is all too tempting to give up. In the hurricane regions of the Caribbean, most of the people, armed with defiant optimism, simply rebuild their houses and huts undaunted, even though they all know that the latest storm certainly wasn't the last of its kind. One reporter who visited the Caribbean islands shortly after hurricane "Opal" noted, full of admiration, how apparently light-heartedly the people there accepted their fate. Some had no roof over their heads, no water and no electricity, and they still said "Oh I'm fine."
People can learn from adversity
In the night of 1st November 1998 the Main and Tauber rivers burst their banks. By morning the muddy water had turned the centre of the city into a lake. But Wertheim was prepared. Most of the inhabitants simply donned their wellingtons and waded off to work. Some rode to work on rubber dinghies manoeuvred through the flooded alleyways by relief workers, others balanced their way across narrow, makeshift catwalks. Boats and boards were all available. The houses were barricaded behind sandbags, the shelves of the shops were empty. Experts with computers had predicted the swelling of the rivers and warned the population two days in advance using a police bullhorn. One helper's comment was as follows: "Floods are exciting but in fact they are quite a normal occurrence." With each flood the planning gets better and better.
In the very same month, hurricane Mitch raged over Honduras and Nicaragua. Hardly anybody was prepared. 9,200 people lost their lives; most of them not until after the storm, because of contaminated drinking water and inadequate medical care. A well-planned evacuation and a better infrastructure could have saved a lot of suffering. But most of the people in Honduras and Nicaragua cannot even imagine conditions such as those in Wertheim. "The country is quite simply too poor to cope with such a disaster", commented a Honduran journalist. "If we were at the same level of development as the USA, those who died would still be alive."
In actual fact, comparable storms in the US are seldom responsible for more than 200 lives. But it is not poverty alone that determines the magnitude of the disaster. "The technology needed to prevent such disasters exists", wrote the British scientific journal New Scientist after the Mitch catastrophe. And the best thing about it is that the technology is simple and cheap.
In Andhra Pradesh, one of the most poverty-stricken Indian states, a cyclone killed almost 1,000 people in 1991. A storm of the same strength in 1976 had caused ten times as many deaths. The difference: in the time between the two storms the government had drawn up a civil emergency plan. In less than 40 hours 690,000 people were evacuated from the area. Similarly successful were disaster plans in the Philippines. The key is to ensure that people know what has to be done during and in the aftermath of a natural disaster, says a textbook published by the World Health Organisation. If the community is well prepared, many lives can be saved. But, as one WHO expert explains: "It is difficult to convince people that they have to be prepared for disasters." It works best when the last catastrophe is still fresh in their memories. During the two Rhine floods in 1993 and 1995, the water levels in Cologne were virtually the same, but the damage caused by the first flood amounted to 120 million deutschmarks, whereas the second flood cost only half this figure.
At the University of Geneva, geophysicists are working on information systems which, it is hoped, will improve our ability to forecast such disasters all over the world. One of their subjects of research is the Guatemalan volcano Fuego, near the country's capital. Seismic instruments have been posted on its slopes since 1991. In addition to this early-warning system, the scientists have developed a computer program that can calculate in advance the various different possible courses an eruption could take. The Swiss researchers are distributing a simplified version of this system in the neighbouring villages. This software will enable local officials to simulate on their computers what the ash and hot lava flows would do in the case of an eruption, and they will then know in advance where residential areas, hospitals or electric cables are in danger.
Scientific forecasts of volcanic activity passed an acid test in 1997 on the island of Montserrat. Together with experts from the UK, the Swiss geophysicists had examined the hazard potential of the Soufriere Hills volcano. When the peak began to spew ash and lava in August, the population had long been evacuated from all endangered areas. The eruption and its consequences corroborated the calculations. Soufriere Hills killed twenty people. Without the computer simulation the figure would have been much higher.
Research and technology make it possible for people to be prepared. Storms, floods and volcanic eruptions can nowadays be predicted to within days or even hours. Preventive measures and escape plans save thousands of lives. Engineers at the University of South Carolina have developed a program with which the inhabitants of the south-east coast of North America can find out the speed of storm winds from the Internet, 48 hours before the storm reaches them. Only earthquakes still come as a total surprise. But even here, technical progress can protect people. In 1995 around 5,000 Japanese died in a quake that shook the region between Kobe and Osaka. This earthquake was twice as strong as the one that hit Tokyo in 1923, killing 140,000 people. Buildings constructed with modern safety technology survived the 1995 quake. Only the traditionally built houses collapsed.
In the great earthquake of 1755 in Lisbon, that was considered by the people of the time as the disaster to end all disasters, it was the primitive technology that led to 30,000 people dying and the destruction of 60% of all buildings. The open cooking hearths customary at the time caused fires to break out all over the city. The building density and narrow alleys made it easy for the fire to run rampage. The damage amounted to the unimaginable sum of 570 million Thalers. For the sake of comparison: the Seven Years' War cost the Prussians a quarter of this amount, even including reparation payments by way of compensation for damage caused to others.
On the other hand it is apparent that technological progress can also make natural disasters worse. Even minor natural events can turn into major calamities, for instance if nuclear power plants are situated in earthquake zones, chemicals factories in flood-prone areas or holiday centres in the path of potential avalanches. In the past it was often the insurance companies that put this technological hubris back within its bounds. Plans for even larger oil tankers and drilling platforms could not be implemented, because no-one was willing to insure them. The safety requirements that insurers specify for factory buildings often go far beyond those prescribed by law. But sadly, it sometimes takes a major accident before the obvious conclusions are drawn. The serious chemical accident in Basle that contaminated the Rhine in 1986 led to insurance claims totalling 60 million Swiss francs. Frightened into action by the enormity of the harm caused, the chemicals industry pumped 5 billion deutschmarks into damage-control measures along the length of the Rhine in order to ensure that technological disasters of this magnitude could not occur again in the future. This kind of risk management has since developed into a flourishing business. Reinsurance companies nowadays have computer models that can even calculate the spread of toxic gas clouds at various wind speeds in different directions. With this knowledge they can perform an important advisory service for chemicals factories. Formerly, the physics of gas clouds was the preserve only of meteorologists and military experts.
There has never been more prevention than there is today. But none of it helps if the individual ignores the danger. "Will prevention ever reach our hearts?" asked National Geographic Magazine in 1988, and quoted a Californian with extensive disaster experience: "If food and water are taken care of and the family has a plan, you can still think straight. If not, you get into a panic and you don't even know where your kids are."
Not only nature, statistics, too, are tricky
In the early nineties, United Nations experts warned: "The frequency and magnitude of natural disasters are increasing dramatically." A wave of media reports carried this message all around the globe. Now, a decade later, most people are thoroughly convinced that "natural disasters are on the rise" (Die Welt) and are "becoming ever more ominous" (Süddeutsche Zeitung). But is that really the case?
What certainly is true is that insurance claims are rising rapidly. But there can be many reasons for this. All over the world, people are becoming more affluent, although, of course, affluence is always relative. More and more people are insuring their belongings. And more people are living in high-risk zones. This is especially true of poor countries with rapidly growing populations, such as the coastal regions of Bangladesh. In other parts of the world, poverty is not a major factor in the popularity of dangerous areas as a place to live. For example, more and more Americans are moving to California (earthquakes, bush fires) or Florida (hurricanes).
The population density on the coasts of the United States has doubled over the last 20 years. The number of cities in the world with more than a million inhabitants has increased fourfold in the last thirty years. 1999 became the first year in which more people lived in cities than in the countryside. All of this would suffice to explain the rise in insurance claims, even if the number of storms, earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions were to remain the same.
There is another factor that causes uncertainty: Information from the past is often unreliable. It is usually based on newspaper reports. But the media coverage depends on the news-worthy occurrences of the day. A landslide that buries a village in South America only finds its way into European public attention if there was not much going on in Berlin, London, Paris, Moscow and Washington. 100 years ago, this egocentricity of the industrialised nations was even more pronounced. Newspaper readers back then were hardly interested at all in the death of a few hundred natives in some remote colony. The best illustration of this fluctuating interest is the disaster curve of the last 100 years, which exhibits a dramatic dip between 1936 and 1945. This is hardly because Mother Nature was behaving particularly benevolently at the time, but rather because the Second World War was overshadowing all the other disasters that were happening.
Finally, yet another source of uncertainty: it is very seldom for a final balance to be drawn up of the damage suffered. Often, for understandable reasons, figures are tossed around very early on that are then snapped up by reporters, regurgitated over and over again and never checked as to their validity. For example, the true cost of the Northridge earthquake that shook the region around Los Angeles in 1994 has not been positively established to this day. So it is no wonder that the catastrophe damage estimates published by the major reinsurance companies seldom agree. Even official government figures can not always be trusted. In dictatorships, for example, it is quite normal to play down natural disasters so that nobody gets the idea of questioning the "perfect" system's ability to cope. Conversely, it is in the interests of poverty-stricken developing countries to exaggerate reports of catastrophes to attract as much foreign aid as possible.
As a result, disaster statistics have to be taken with a grain of salt. Any attempt to extrapolate an increase or decrease in the occurrence and intensity of natural disasters is in for a surprise. The Austrian economists Josef Nussbaumer and Helmut Winkler investigated 1,422 natural disasters that each cost more than 100 human lives between 1986 and 1995. They could not identify a clear trend.
The bad news first: the number of minor disasters rose considerably. But - and this is the good news - the frequency of very large disasters (more than 10,000 deaths) declined in the 20th century. Major catastrophes of this kind (mostly droughts) had a huge impact on the mortality statistics. 98 percent of all deaths were attributable to just 140 major disasters. The reduction in the number of such catastrophes leads to the next piece of good news: natural disasters were killing less people at the end of the century than at its beginning. In affluent countries the number of deaths sank dramatically, and even in the developing countries the number of disaster fatalities fell slightly - despite the constantly expanding population.
This gives rise to all kinds of questions: is the number of disasters increasing, or is it just the number of media reports about them? Are natural disasters becoming less catastrophic (because there are less deaths), or are people just protecting themselves better? At least one conclusion would appear to be plausible: the poor suffer more than the rich.
Nussbaumer and Winkler are cautious about making any interpretations and emphasise that "both the availability and the reliability of the data are subject to a geographical and temporal shift". Their answer to the question of whether the forces of nature are on the increase: "The current status of research does not permit a clear answer to be given."
Disasters as a revelation
"And impetuous waters shall rise and submerge the kingdom of evil", proclaimed a pamphlet circulated in the early 16th century. At that time such apocalyptic tracts could be bought on every street corner in German cities, and those who could read were able to choose between some 150 doomsday leaflets. But they all agreed on one thing: the disaster that was going to put an end to the world was on its way. The authors disagreed only on why it was going to happen. Did God want to punish the heretic activities of the Reformers, the decadence of the Pope or the sin and depravity of the plebes? Should people pray, do penance, build boats or just abandon all hope?
The preachers of doom based their dire predictions on the Revelation to John, the last book of the Bible. St. John, himself a Roman, wrote this book while in exile on the island of Patmos, presumably between 90 and 95 AD. It was intended for his fellow believers, who were suffering religious persecution at the time. In Revelation, St. John prophesied the imminent return of the Saviour, depicting in detail the disasters and wars that would precede His second coming.
Ever since ancient times and right up to the beginnings of the modern age, sects and religious orders have interpreted every major calamity as a sign of the impending inferno. The forces of nature were converted by way of cultural transformation into symbolic events, and reports about them became condemnations of society and a means of spiritual edification. In those times, disasters were seen as Divine punishments and a test of perseverance for the God-fearing.
Even today things aren't much different. "Mother Nature is striking back" is one popular way of interpreting natural disasters. Mankind has provoked the disasters himself and it is only fair that he now has to pay the price. The patterns are the same, except that God has gone out of fashion and nature itself is credited with Godlike wrath and castigatory strategies. In 1998 Umberto Ecco wrote: "The concept of an end to all time is today more typical of non-believers than of Christians." Intellectual Europe is, in his view, deeply obsessed by the apocalypse and is reliving the "the end is nigh" feeling that, at the turn of the last millennium, was chiefly the domain of the Christian religion.
"At the turn of this century, concern about the environment takes on the function of a new religion that has a good chance of becoming the main religion of our time", says trend researcher Matthias Horx. The choice of large-scale disasters that are going to occur because of mankind's iniquity is hardly smaller than it was in the early 16th century. A German magazine displayed Cologne cathedral under water on its front page ("Global Warming Disaster"), another showed Munich cathedral against the background of a glacier ("New Ice Age). The range on offer in the apocalyptic supermarket is constantly expanding. Every hurricane, every flood, every avalanche can be traced back to human failings. But this non-stop false alarm is counterproductive, because the message that its audience receives is: it's already too late. Consequently, any and every effort to improve the world appears futile. All too many people are all too willing to believe in nature as an avenging goddess who is out to punish humankind. There seems to be a profound yearning for just such a higher instance. But nature is an open system without a set strategy, and we humans are capable neither of mastering nature nor destroying it. This isn't easy to accept. Natural disasters - themselves a revelation - offend our vanity, because they reveal to us how powerless we really are.
Copyright © 1996-2011 Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch.
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