Vol.VI – Issue No. 22 – Mar 2011

LIVING ON THE RING OF FIRE IS ROUGH
(and the neighboring ocean is rougher still)

Unlike the Atlantic’s deserved reputation for wildly raging unexpected tantrums, the Pacific generally deserves its name, being almost benign by comparison. Except….it is surrounded by a ring of fire which, when it cuts loose somewhere, goads it to generate killer tsunami waves of great destructive force which wipes out swaths of the coastlines all around it.

The quakes and volcanic eruptions along that ring of fire are bad enough, and there have been a slew of these in the past year, all around that rim, from Chile, Central America, Mexico, our West Coast, Alaska, Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, Sumatra, the Philippines, China, New Zealand, and now Japan. It seems Mother Nature has been less than “motherly” lately.

Bad as these events are, the tsunamis reared up by these are worse, at the one that just clobbered Sendei, in northern Japan, has shown us. A double whammy event, first with the quake which was quickly followed, by a monster tsunami, one of the worst on record. But a third, and perhaps even more lethal blow hangs over those folks there, as they struggle to put their shattered homes and lives back together again. It is a potentially catastrophic nuclear disaster which would make Chernobyl look like a hiccup. Damaged by these events, three nuclear plants are in danger of a meltdown. Should that happen much of Japan would be turned into a wasteland, possibly for centuries to come. And neighboring countries, depending on wind flow etc. could be impacted with some kind of fallout. Even Alaska, British Columbia, and much of our northern West Coast, might also be affected by such a disaster.

These kinds of natural events should make us realize how fragile our environment and survival really is. Any collateral contribution our activities make to such disasters should make us very wary about their impact on our environment. It’s not exactly in robust shape as it is.

All of which makes us realize how puny and insignificant we humans really are in the face of such things, and makes us wonder if maybe the Mayan calendar thing may have something to it.

Meanwhile, all we can do is help our Japanese friends as best we can, to pick the broken pieces of their world to make it whole again.

CENTURION