The combination of a massive human tragedy and the first days of a new year should prompt a pause for reflection. I don’t mean the usual New Year’s resolution type reflection, but something a bit deeper about our relationship with one another and our collective relationship with the planet on which we live.
My own reflections were prompted by two links from the invariably intriguing 3quarksdaily. The first was to a report from Reuters about how officials at a National Park in Sri Lanka found no dead wild animals despite several human beings being killed by the wall of water. The second was a piece by Jared Diamond, promoting his book “Collapse”, where he examines what caused the societies such as those of Angkor Wat, Easter Island and Norse Greenland to disappear.
The first link led got me to pay attention to an article in Slate, which looked at what it was that could have alerted the animals to the potential danger that faced them and caused them to flee. The author identified two possible mechanisms. The first is that many animals can hear infrasound, so that they would have heard the sound of the quake and its after effects. The second is that they can also sense vibrations, in this case Raleigh waves, again prompting alarming and causing them to move away from the source.
What is, perhaps, still more interesting, as author Christine Kenneally explains, is that we have similar capabilities:
“What about humans- where were our red flags? Humans feel infrasound. But we dont necessarily know that thats what were feeling. Some people experience sensations of being spooked or even feeling religious in the presence of infrasound. We also experience Rayleigh waves via special sensors in our joints (called pacinian corpuscles), which exist just for that purpose. Sadly, it seems we dont pay attention to the information when we get it. Maybe we screen it out because theres so much going on before our eyes and in our ears. Humans have a lot of things on their minds, and usually that works out OK.”
The human capacity to ignore useful information is, in one sense, what Jared Diamond is talking about:
“Today, ecocide has come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as a major threat to global civilization, and it will become acute within the next few decades. We are faced with even more environmental problems than past societies–specifically, human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earths photosynthetic capacity–and the risk of such collapses is now a matter of increasing concern. Indeed, collapses have already materialized for Somalia, Rwanda, and some other Third World countries. Much more likely than a doomsday scenario involving human extinction or an apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization would be just a future of significantly lower living standards, chronically higher risks, and the undermining of what we now consider some of our key values. Such a collapse could assume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or of wars, triggered ultimately by a scarcity of environmental resources. Our efforts today will determine the state of the world in which the current generations live out their years: Either we solve these impending problems now, or they will totally undermine us.”
The animals in Yala National Wildlife Park survived because they perceived impending danger and acted on what they sensed. The question that concerns me is can we? In Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Diamonds book he notes:
“The Norse colonies in Greenland were law-abiding, economicall viable, fully integrated communities numbering at their peak five thousand people They lasted for four hundred and fifty years -and then they vanished.”
What we often forget is that our taken for granted world is an experiment that has been running for much less time than the Norse Colonies in Greenland. No doubt for much of the time the Norse thought things were going pretty well for them and ignored the signals that things might not be as they seem.
The Tsunami was a natural disaster, but its impact on human life and well-being was as much to do with the patterns of life we have adopted as it was to do with a wall of water hitting coastlines in Asia. It was also a reminder of how fragile human life can be and, perhaps, if we are wise, a signal to be less arrogant and to pay more attention to what is going on around us.