NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 20, 2011
Prometheans
The sun, in his northward shift, will be shining directly on the equator today, which makes this the vernal equinox. Spring has arrived in the northern hemisphere. I say this without prejudice to my friends in the southern hemisphere, below the Tropic of Capricorn. You've had your day in the sun. You may now pray for global warming, the way we do in Canada.Though in the moments between praying for Japan. Nothing brings home to us the tenuousness of human life as such a huge natural disaster; in this case overwhelming a people who were probably better prepared for it than those in any other country. And though we have seen it only on videos, we should not forget that moving wall of water, reducing coastal towns to debris, then spreading over mile after mile of neatly tended fields and glasshouses; reversing the generations of human labour that went into making them so efficient. I mentioned "global warming" to a purpose, just above. We have all been preached to, about the risk to small coral-island nations such as Tuvalu in the Pacific or the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, that lie at most a few feet above sea level. In the cause of human engineering, our schoolchildren are indoctrinated on what will happen when the Earth's oceans inch up from the thermal expansion of water, and from the supposed melting of the polar ice caps. We may see this for the tosh it is, when we consider the effect a tsunami on the Japanese scale would have upon such islands. How much easier to cope with 20 inches over 20 decades, than with 20 feet over 20 minutes. Human settlements upon such islands -and all low coastal plains -stay at the whim of Mother Nature. And this will remain true through all foreseeable time. As we saw in Japan, the best human efforts cannot assuage nature's wrath, only compound or reduce the effects. The vanity of our technology is exposed. It was the ancient wisdom, in all sentient cultures, to stay when possible out of harm's way. While watching those videos, it suddenly occurred to me why, in the archeology of ancient Greek ports in the Aegean Islands, the houses all seem to go up the nearest hill. Noticing this years ago, I'd thought, "Why the extra walk and climb? Was it just for the lovely view?" Well, the Aegean Sea floor is earthquake prone, and all these islands are at risk of tsunamis. Perhaps from the living oral history of their own ancestors, these islanders had learned. The civilization of the Nile was built around the annual inundation of the river; the houses once again erected on higher ground. The floods brought rich new sediment to the fields. But since the building of the immense Aswan hydroelectric works, it has been piling up instead, quite counter-productively, behind the dam. At the mouth of the river, the great fertile Egyptian delta is now shrinking away: eaten by the sea without replenishment. (It is a joke when this is attributed to "global sea rise.") It never made sense to build on river floodplains, or along the drainage path of a volcano, or on the low sands of a coastal hurricane strip. Our ancestors didn't do that sort of thing from choice. They'd farm danger zones, but not build in them. We only started doing that with modern developers, and modern building codes, after modern environmental studies, etc. In each of these cases, and innumerable more, we see the modern tendency to confront nature, rather than playing along with her. There is a restlessness and impatience in our souls, which expresses itself in hubris, arrogance. This extends to grand egalitarian projects to change human nature, in variants of Stalin's ambition to be "the engineer of human souls." Nature eventually defeats every such enterprise. To paraphrase the Citizen's inimitable Dan Gardner, it takes a lot of schooling, investment, and technology, to become stupid. Or if I might twist Hillary Clinton: "It takes a big city to raise an idiot." For urban folk, raised a long way from nature, forget what we depend upon. This is not a criticism of the Japanese. Part of the genius of vernacular architecture in Japan was on view, in the ease with which the more traditional houses were swept away. They were built of wood, to sway with the earthquakes. Furnishings largely built-in. Household ceramics, when out of use, were packed in straw. Storage in strong attics, not in cellars. The houses could be built fast, and fairly cheaply. They could be quickly replaced, using the old timbers. They could even be moved. Only the problem of fire was conceded as insoluble. In some degree, all earthly life resists nature. In defiance of gravity, a bird is designed to fly. In defiance of terrible disasters, human life persists. The survivors pick up the pieces. But at each rebuilding, and each returning of the sun, we should humbly consider whether the whole direction of our project -- the direction which we call "progress" -- is comprehensively mistaken. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top