tsunami – 350orbust

Five days after the devastating earthquake and tsunami off the northeastern coast of Japan, the country and its citizens are still reeling from those natural disasters while alarm continues to rise over a looming man-made nuclear disaster.

Japan is a country lauded for its emergency preparedness, yet although the Japanese government and people are responding as quickly as possible in an extremely difficult situation (compare the U.S. response to the comparatively smaller disaster of Hurricane Katrina), there are still countless people without access to food, clean water, and shelter. The death toll continues to rise, with more than 15,000 people unaccounted for.

All of us in the industrialized world should sit up and take note of the Japanese crisis. One lesson we should take to heart is that there’s no avoiding nature. People who live in the developing world, who are generally less cushioned from the day-to-day impacts of nature than those of us with air-conditioned houses and cars and well-stocked refrigerators, already know that. Those of us in the industrialized part of the world, who burn a disproportionate amount of the world’s fossil fuels, need to absorb this lesson before we have pulled the rest of the world with us into climate chaos.

Once we hit the climate tipping point, the cumulative effects of global climate instability will be unstoppable, like Friday’s tsunami wave that took out everything in its path. Scientists have been warning us for decades about the effects of our continued warming of the earth’s atmosphere by unrestrained burning of fossil fuels. Why wouldn’t we all be working together now, while we still have time, to stop the climate change “earthquake” from happening?

From Al Jazeera, a summary of how a nuclear meltdown could happen at the Fukushima power plant:

More links:

For comprehensive information on how to reach out to the Japanese people, to go CBC’s Japan Relief page.

Peter Sinclair over at Climate Crock of the Week has been providing excellent and frequent updates on the Japanese nuclear situation: ClimateCrocks.com

Special Rep0rt: Disaster In Japan

Lesson From Japan: There’s No Avoiding Nature

Compilation: Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, Nuclear Emergency 2011

Much of the world’s attention, and thoughts and prayers, are focused on the people of Japan, who are suffering from the deadly effects of last Friday’s earthquake and tsunami, and are now facing a nuclear emergency. The devastation to one of the world’s most industrialized countries is unbelievable, yet it is undeniable. It is clear that the death toll will be much higher than the current official one of 2,800. The survivors are struggling to deal with lack of food and clean water, and the loss of their shelter.

Many of us living in the industrialized world of the 21st century feel that we are we are separate from our environment. Many of us believe that “environmental” issues like water pollution, ocean acidification, and climate change are issues that we can choose to ignore without any consequence to ourselves or our families. We don’t realize that what we do to our surroundings, we also do to ourselves. We, in our hubris, have also come to feel that we are in control of nature, not the other way around. That is the only explanation for our unabated abuse of the gift of fossil fuels, and our ongoing pollution of our water and air. If we are going to have a future without ever-increasing pictures on our t.v. screens like what we saw from Japan this weekend, and Australia in January, and Bangladesh last August, we need to all agree that what we do to our environment, we do to ourselves, and to our children and their children. Because, of course, it will eventually be us and our communities who are featured in the news headlines.

Derrick Jensen offers a different way of approaching environmental accountability, in a recent article in Orion magazine entitled “Age of Ooops”, where he proposes that environmental risks should be considered through the lens of the precautionary principle:

The solution I dreamed up to this lack of accountability is a robustly enforced legislative version of the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle suggests that if an action, or policy, has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, the burden of proof that this action is not harmful falls on those proposing to take the action. They can’t act if they can’t prove no harm will come. So, for example, instead of presuming that deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is safe, and only suspending drilling when there is proof of harm, we should presume that this action is harmful until it has been proven otherwise. The same logic should apply to the emission of greenhouse gases. In fact, there are thousands of examples of harmful actions that would be stopped by any reasonable application of the precautionary principle.

Click here to read the full article. (thanks to Curtis for sending it my way).

More links:

Japanese Disaster Teams Search For Bodies

Nuclear Plants Threatened by Earthquake

Japan Nuclear Plant Rocked By Second Blast

Japan’s Chernobyl: Fukishama Marks the End of the Nuclear Era

Fire and Ice: Melting Glaciers Trigger Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes