Causality, not unlike the concept of liability, is a funny thing. It can be slippery. That is why our world is chocked full of detectives, scientists, and lawyers. It requires finding the reasons behind an event, and then identifying the culprit or the responsible party for the outcome. And our scientific methodologies (the natural as well as the human sciences) beg us always to seek logical (i.e., causal) connections between events. But, what was the cause of the countless lives destroyed from the earthquake that rocked Port-au-Prince in Haiti? What triggered the volcanic eruption in Iceland disrupting so many travelers worldwide? What was responsible for the flood of oil unleashed deep within the Gulf of Mexico that has begun to decimate the ecosystem and destroy the livelihood of local populations? What triggered the global financial meltdown and the loss of so much equity? What unleashed the uprisings in Iran and Greece? How do we go about determining cause or assigning culpability?
I hear my critics already complaining that we must first make a distinction between natural disasters and man-made tragedies or failures. Such a complaint reminds me of the now-tired debate on global-warming. My critics continue unimpeded: the volcanic eruption in Iceland is simply a natural disaster happening without human influence... there is no culpability there. These same critics will go on to argue that scientists and engineers can cite various physical explanations for the explosion on the oil platform in the Gulf, thereby locating the cause for the disaster in a defective valve, a bad weld, methane in the tubing, or another series of events. And on that basis they can assign blame or liability for the gusher to a responsible party.
As good scientists - well prepared by our rationalistic upbringing - we all look for the appropriate causes to specific events. Natural disasters are, by definition, not manmade; manmade disasters imply human responsibility or culpability. But technology, and its handmaiden - modern science - have made it their mission to continuously enhance and increase our control over nature, to bend it to our will. So where does the manmade - the cultivated, the artificial - end, and the natural begin? Is not what's left of "nature" itself now under the direct or indirect influence of human activity? Does not Lorenz's "butterfly effect" hold true between these two realms as well as within each, as Robert Redford reminded us in the 1990's movie Havana?
A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean...
Certainly human activity is at least as far reaching in its influence as that of a butterfly. Does not a banking failure in the USA effect the financial health of the global economy? Do not our aggressive and violent interventions on the earth - beneath it, above it, and within it - have an impact upon climatological, geological and other natural events and occurrences? Of course they do, just as surely as the institutions of our political economy and culture have a controlling influence upon individual behaviors, global economies and social relations.
Does nobody see the possibility that the "spill" in the Gulf, the global financial meltdown, recent mining disasters in the USA and Russia, earthquakes, budding insurrections, and other political unrest are linked? Even causally related? We have tried hard to control the earth as much as we have worked continuously to control one another. And perhaps BP was only the delivery boy in this instance, with the real message coming directly from Mother Earth herself, as one blogger has suggested: "You want oil? Here, I'll give you some fucking oil." Is it wholly unreasonable to suppose that the earth reacts to our efforts to contain, control, and manipulate it, just as individual citizens react to similar efforts to subdue, domesticate and control them?
In truth, we are all to blame for the apocalyptic nightmare unwinding now in the Gulf. As hard as it may be to admit, it is our lifestyle - the expectations and demands we make upon nature and one another - that has caused this tragic calamity in the Gulf. We so desperately want (we even need) our cars, fishing boats, heated homes, air conditioning, new electronic toys - our comforts and distractions just to sustain ourselves in this increasingly artificial world we've collectively constructed. We ourselves have created and/or acquiesced to civilization and its self-proclaimed manifest destiny of domination... over nature and over one another. We need to take a serious look in the mirror and recognize our own culpability in these matters.
The alluvial soils of the Persian Gulf were apparently the nutritive beginnings of modern civilization; perhaps the Gulf of Mexico will herald its fast approaching, oil-choked ending. When we took those first careless steps out of the wilderness - away from the savannah, the desert, the forest, and the steppe - and began building cities to house the citizen-workers who would build our castles and other great institutions, those who would be fed with the produce from the newly cultivated fields and domesticated animals, this was the underlying, the initial cause of our spreading disasters and the madness we witness today.
Sure, volcanoes will happen, tsunamis occur; tornadoes, sinkholes, hurricanes, avalanches, earthquakes, and climate change are all events in the natural world. But who can say to what degree the manipulating, dominating, domesticating, and controlling machinations of human ingenuity do not effect, influence or trigger such "natural disasters?" We acknowledge, after all, that natural disasters often cause human suffering, including political, social, and economic turmoil. And certainly, the calamities (the death and destruction) caused by such events are directly related to the development of cities, permanent dwellings, and the many other fixed "institutions" of civilized life that stand to collapse under the weight of any such natural event. The devastation wrought is directly proportional to the concentration of populations enslaved to systems that monitor and control the human drama, the spectacle - the institutions that write and rewrite our histories, personal and collective.
We need not think long and hard about the connections, the cause of suffering brought on by disasters natural or human today. The sheer weight of civilization's assaults on the planet - technologically - is simply too much for the earth to bear, at least as much as its economic, political and social assaults on populations are too much for humanity to bear much longer. Mother earth does get the last word in this debate, and it seems to me in these last several months that she has been speaking her mind, and getting a lot off of her chest. The question is: will the rest of us also make ourselves heard and take action before it is too late?
After a ten-year career in academia, Dr. Krolick spent the next twenty years in the executive ranks of several of America's largest international firms. Sandy has spent many years traveling around the world, including parts of Asia, Africa, Western and Eastern Europe. Retiring from business at fifty, he recently returned to the USA with his wife Anna, after teaching for several years in the central Siberian Steppe, at the foot of the Altai mountains in Barnaul, Russia. His latest book, The Recovery of Ecstasy: Notebooks from Siberia, is available at http://www.amazon.com/Recovery-Ecstasy-Notebooks-Siberia/dp/1439227365/?tag=widgetsamazon-20 or visit him @ http://www.kulturcritic.com.
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