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Story of the month ...

April 2010: "No one knows how to deal with this situation" said Helmut Malewski, a meteorologist at the German Weather Service, concerning the ash cloud that resulted from the eruption of Eyjafjalljokul in Iceland (see NYT, April 18, 2010). He was referring to the conflict between the German government, which closed down all airports in Germany, and Lufthansa, which thought that was too precautionary.

A key aspect of resilience is modularity. Despite that knowledge, we have built a global society that assumes the absence of disturbances. In the same NYT article referenced above, it was reported that Peter Westaway, chief economist for Europe at the Nomura investment bank said ''We don’t understand how interconnected we are until you can’t do it anymore." As a consequence of this connectedness, the level of resilience is extremely low - as was illustrated by the huge, global impact of the relatively small volcano eruption: Farmers in Africa can't sell their product, people far away from the impacted area loss their jobs, many people are stranded, and the decision makers are not prepared. It is as if we had no knowledge of planet Earth and have to base all our actions on experience during the last few years.

Seeing the reactions in Europe and worldwide concerning the impact of the volcano eruption, I can only wonder how little humanity has learned to adopt to the context we live in: planet Earth. In The Age Of The Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo reports of studies showing that people in Western cultures do not pay much attention to the context of a picture. Likewise, decision makers in western cultures constantly seem to ignore the context: we live on a finite, highly variable planet, where conditions keep changing on a wide range of time scales. Thus, a large volcano eruption like the Krakatau explosion on August 26–27, 1883, or the Santorini eruption some 3,500 years ago could happen any day and close down airports not for days but months and years. We are not prepared for that, not even mentally. Sea level could rise rapidly over a few decades, as it has done many time over the last 20,000 years, with devastating consequences through flooding of coastal infrastructure, including toxic landfills and polluting industrial complexes. We are not prepared for that.

Ramo in his book also reports that people from Asian culture pay far more attention to the context. The NYT article seems to confirm this: As reported there, Leo Liao, a Hong Kong businessman who was stranded at the Frankfurt airport, was cheerful and philosophical. "It’s a natural issue," he said. "Never complain. You can’t change this." But we could be better prepared and ready for the "natural issues." We could plan and organize our global society in a way that would not falter whenever a small (natural) disturbance challenges us. And since we have re-engineered the planet, changed more than half of the ice-free land surface, extinct a large number of species, changed the chemical composition of atmosphere and ocean, modified the water cycle, attention to the context would tell us that the Earth system is good for some unexpected surprises. Maybe, if we would take a kind of an Asian approach, we'd spend some time to look at the "background" and try to understand what these surprises might entail. And then we should prepare for these new disturbance. Isn't that what resilience is about?


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.