OP Rana

It's time humans heeded nature's warning

By Op Rana (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-19 07:45

Of all the moving images from Japan that shocked the world on the first couple of days, one stood out for its stark contrast. The scene, most probably from Sendai, showed a tree standing as mute witness to all man-made things - from automobiles and boats to seawalls and houses - being washed away by the tsunami. Here was nature represented by the earthquake and tsunami at its worst and by the standing tree at its best at the same time.

The quake-induced tsunami has killed thousands of people, and left many more thousands injured, traumatized and homeless. The twin natural disasters have also turned the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into Frankenstein's monster, a man-made object threatening man.

Nature has time and again reminded humans of their vulnerability and fragile existence, and the physically insignificant place they occupy in the order of things natural.

But the overpowering sense of superiority we humans have come to entertain and glorify in has turned us into one-eyed Nelsons.

We turn the blind eye to nature's warnings. The good one, we keep for self-aggrandizement.

The developed world woke up to the threat of foul air in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the ozone hole made humans sit up. By the 1980s, humans had discovered another threat: greenhouse gases. In the 1990s, they realized the threat of global warming. But before that, in the 1970s, rising oil prices made them realize fossil fuel wouldn't last forever. So the advanced countries turned to nuclear power with a vengeance; nuclear power plants had been around for two decades, though. Some not-so advanced countries followed in their footsteps slowly but certainly.

The overwhelming agreement among mainstream scientists and experts is that nuclear power is clean, cheap and safe. That they are water guzzlers, needing billions of gallons a day, and produce long-term radioactive waste (spent nuclear fuel - unconverted uranium and actinides such as uranium, plutonium and curium) is discounted.