(soft flute music)
- [Diane] Most of the
suffering in the world
is a result of our wrong choices.
But not all of it.
What about the suffering that's
caused by natural disasters
like volcanoes, and
floods, and earthquakes?
Bob White is professor of Geophysics
at Cambridge University.
His job is to study natural disasters
like volcanic eruptions.
We asked him what kind of
disasters cause the most harm?
- Amazingly, the most
disastrous of disasters
that affect most people isn't
earthquakes or volcanoes
or those headline-grabbing
things, it's floods.
And you'd think that floods
are very mundane things,
but actually they kill more people
every year than any other disaster.
And there have been individual floods,
such as one in 1970 in East Pakistan,
which on one single night
killed more than half a million people.
It's astonishing, isn't it?
And even in England, within
the last couple of years
there's been floods that
have killed a few people.
So floods are really dangerous things
and it's reckoned that now about
half the world's population
is at risk of floods, athat's
because we build our houses
in river valleys and by the sea and so on,
and they're inherently
more liable to get flooded.
I wrote a book on natural
disasters recently,
and I didn't actually
call it natural disasters,
I called it, "Who is to Blame:
"Disasters, Nature, and Acts of God."
Because, in many ways,
there's no such thing
as a natural disaster
although we talk about those all the time.
What there are is natural
processes on the earth,
earthquakes, volcanoes,
floods, that sort of thing,
which human agency often
turns into disasters.
Things like earthquakes,
volcanoes, floods,
are actually essential to make
this world a fertile place
where we can live.
For instance without floods,
floods were what enabled
the Egyptians, for instance,
to grow crops, because
every year the floods
would deposit alluvium
over the river bank,
and then that would make a fertile field.
And if the floods failed,
often people starved the next year.
Now that's not the case today
because we have irrigation
but floods in that
context were a good thing.
Volcanoes bring nutrients
to the surface of the earth
from the deep mantle of the earth,
and practically all
our nutrients have come
through to the surface of
the earth through volcanoes.
So volcanic islands are
some of the most fertile
bio-diverse areas on earth.
I was in Hawaii recently,
and that is one of the most
bio-diverse areas of the world,
and yet it's one big volcano.
So volcanoes are essential for that.
Interestingly, volcanoes have
also rescued us, probably,
from living in a world that's
covered by ice completely,
where humans couldn't
exist, because naturally,
the world would be about
30 degrees C colder,
so it would be sub-zero all the time
if it weren't for some
natural global warming
from water vapor and carbon dioxide,
and volcanoes have brought
a lot of those gases
to the surface.
Even earthquakes, which
you think have no real use,
you wouldn't get the Himalayas
or big mountain chains
without earthquakes,
'cause that's how they
get pushed up in the air.
And of course mountain
belts, like the Himalayas,
provide water for a billion people.
As they get eroded the
erosion products are deposited
as soils in the river valleys,
and we grow our crops,
so even earthquakes are essential
to making the world fertile.
If it was a flat world we
wouldn't have the weather
and we wouldn't have that soil.
So these natural processes
are intrinsically good.
I think that's why, when
God had made the world,
He saw everything He'd made,
He said it was very good.
This was very good.
In 1969 there was a
magnitude-seven earthquake
in California, a place called Loma Prieta.
Technically, it was 10 kilometers deep,
it's what's called a strike slip fault,
and it killed 57 people.
Those people were killed when
a two-story bridge collapsed,
the top story on the bottom story,
and most of the people died
when they were squashed in their cars.
And they were in the process
of strengthening that bridge,
but they hadn't got to that section.
Now, several decades
later, in Haiti in 2010,
there was an identical sized
earthquake, magnitude seven,
10 kilometers deep strike slip fault,
and that killed 230,000 people.
And so why was that the case?
They were identical earthquakes.
Now the reason was that in Haiti,
which is the poorest nation
in the northern hemisphere,
there'd been decades of
corruption and misrule
by Papa Doc Duvalier and his son.
There was huge corruption,
people were living on landslide slopes,
where nobody should live, in
very cheaply constructed houses
made of concrete which fell on
top of them and killed them.
Now it wasn't their fault that
they died in the earthquake,
but there was human agency involved
because we know how to build
houses that don't fall down.
In fact, there was a mobile
telecoms building in Haiti
at the time, 13 story,
plate glass windows,
and not a single plate
glass window was broken.
And yet right next door to
it, I've got a photo of this,
there was a three-story hostel
built just the year before
in 2009 which collapsed
and killed many people.
So that is human agency, in that respect,
that these deaths were
caused by human actions
interacting with the natural processes.
And nowadays we have
enough know-how to prevent
most of this, and sadly that
wasn't the case in Haiti.
- So according to Professor
White, it's often what we do
that turns a natural
process into a disaster.
It seems that most of the
suffering from natural disasters
is caused by our selfishness, greed,
corruption, and laziness.
We know enough to stop this suffering,
but we don't seem to bother.
But this still leaves some suffering
that isn't caused by what we do.
Why would a good God let that happen?
We'll come back to this next time.
(soft flute music)
