The Year Of Nature's Fury

I'm a big fan of the Forgotten Realms D&D world as anyone who has read my numerous book reviews on this blog will have likely picked up by now. In that world there are numerous calendars in use, but the common people of the world don't tend to use them. Historians, scribes and scholars use dates, the common folk use what is called The Roll Of Years. This is a long list of years in which every year has a name. The current year in the campaign is 1374DR or The Year of Lightning Storms as most people know it. The names were set down centuries past by a mad seer who wrote out thousands of years worth of them in a long list. Each name suppossedly carries some portent of an event that will happen in that year.

Were we on Earth to use a similiar system I think 2005 would likely have earned the name The Year of Nature's Fury, because in the past 12 months this planet has lashed out at those who live upon it as never before. A pair of major earthquakes, resulting in two tsunami's in the area of North-West Indonesia (and affecting Indonesia itself, plus Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, the Seychelles and as far away as the African east coast!) and another quake in the Kashmir region of Pakistan, which have killed over 600,000 people, left millions homeless and devastated the region. We get big earthquakes come along now and then, not that long back one flattened a city in southern Iran, before that it was Armenia. But we have never before had three 7+ point quakes in the same year.

And it doesn't stop there. As if that weren't enough for the worlds relief agencies to cope with, we've had 15 hurricanes, two of which hit category 5. For a hurricane in a year to hit that power is rare, for a pair less than a month apart to do so is unprecedented. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita laid waste to the US southern coast, flooding the city of New Orleans and wiping Gulfport off the map, as well as devastating great swathes of the Central American & Caribbean states, the destruction of which was not as well covered on television.

In Britain we like to console ourselves that the extreme weather other countries get doesn't happen here. We sit in the middle of a tectonic plate, so when we get an earthquake, it is never higher than 3 points on the Richter scale. The worst weather we've had in my lifetime was the Hurricane back in the 80's, and I cycled home through that from school! But we've had tornados start to appear in the past few years, little ones mostly off the coast. This year we got an F2 tornado tear a 600 yard wide path of destruction through the suburbs of Brimingham over 7 miles long!

Portugal's forests burned, the Swiss capital drowned, Taiwan was lashed by Cyclones, the volcano of Mount St. Helens in the US is on red alert for an eruption, and icebergs the size of small nations are breaking off the ice shelves of Antartica. I'm not a scientist, so I can't say that this is the start of something, or that it is an aberration. But my gut feeling is that this is only the beginning. We take our planet for granted, but nature governs itself, and when there is an imbalance, it rights itself, and that process is usually violent.

All told more than half a million people lost their lives to natural disasters in the past twelve months, the highest death toll on record. Millions more have been injured, and/or have lost their homes and in many cases everything they own. If things get better, I think it will only be after they get a lot worse. I'd like to hope for 2006 to be free of the chaos and death that has marked the past year, but I think old Gaia is plenty pissed at us, and she's just getting started!