I’ve been thinking really long and hard about what to say about the earthquake in Japan. I want to say something that counts, without being insensitive to the unimaginable pain and suffering the Japanese must be going through right now. Somehow, “Stay strong, Japan” just doesn’t quite seem to cut it.
I’m glancing through Twitter now, and the main trending topic is #prayforjapan, which is a sweet gesture I suppose. I’m not a religious person. Many helpless people will pray if they can do nothing else, and we can’t hold it against them for doing that. If you can’t do anything, at least say something nice, surely? Perhaps the Japanese people will be comforted upon seeing millions of strangers around the world praying for them. Perhaps. I cannot be certain. Somewhere out there, somebody will be preaching that Japan deserved what they got. Others will say that natural disasters are God’s way of teaching us a lesson, or the Earth’s way of fighting back against the vermin of human existence. A kaleidescope of responses. I think now would be a pretty distasteful and inappropriate time to discuss this, so I’ll skip that for today. I do want to say that I think it’s beautiful that most people on Twitter are being really thoughtful and sensitive. Some people might say that it’s because of anonymous authority and social pressure- and I to that I say AWESOME, because anonymous authority and social pressure is here to stay for a long, long time, so we might as well have positive elements being shared.
What can we be certain of, though? What can we do to help them?
Right now, immediately, they don’t need our prayers nearly as much as they need disaster relief. I hope and trust that our militaries and governments are already doing the right thing.
What could we have done better? Could we have had better warning, or could we have prevented the earthquake from happening altogether? It’s great to know that we’ve managed to put together an international tsunami warning system, of which the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center is a part of. That’s really, really great. That saves lives.
Where do we go from here? I can’t help but wonder how long it will take until we are able to predict earthquakes with greater precision and accuracy, and whether we might even be able to divert, ameliorate or even nullify earthquakes altogether some day.
Of course, right now we can’t. But perhaps some day we will be able to. The only thing that stands in our way is research.
How much do we spend on earthquake research? To quote PlateTectonics.com
Those who still have faith have gone from mainstream to minority. “Even the term ‘prediction’ is taboo these days,” laments Megumi Mizoue, head of the Meteorological Agency’s Earthquake Disaster Prevention Council. “Just because the Kobe quake couldn’t be predicted, doesn’t mean we won’t be able to forecast a ‘big one’ in the future.” Mizoue and others say the government should actually be spending more. “We need to promote all types of earthquake research, including prediction,” says Tsuneo Katayama, director of the National Research Center for Disaster Prevention. “Considering how quake-prone Japan is, the government hasn’t spent very much.”
Since 1965, when Tokyo designated prediction a national project, Japan has invested about $1.4 billion in prediction while downplaying other areas of earthquake research. It was then that the theory of plate tectonics–the shifting of continent-size slabs of the earth’s crust–came into acceptance, raising hope that it was possible to detect an upheaval by catching the warning signs. For a country like Japan, crisscrossed by faults and situated over four converging plates, prediction research seemed a good investment. In fact, it was a cheap alternative: quake-proofing bridges, buildings and expressways would run in the trillions of dollars.
The quake warning program may have been economical, but it was hardly a success. After 32 years, it has failed to forecast the time or place of a single major quake. Despite that, Japan still allocates about $100 million of its $180 million earthquake budget for prediction research. Such spending is excessive, argues Geller, the American geophysicist. Like many others, he believes earthquakes are chaotic, nonlinear phenomena. “Scientists said they could predict earthquakes, and the government dumped lots of money at their door,” he says. “In the long term this has damaged the credibility of the scientific community.”
I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this. I have many questions, and hardly any answers. Perhaps prediction research might deliver, perhaps it will not. I personally think that there may be something we can do to fault lines that we have not yet explored, that might be able to diminish earthquakes altogether. That’s just a thought. I don’t know. Still, I’ve always felt that it’s a crazy world we live in where we spend far more on militaries. According to GlobalIssues.org, military spending globally hits $1.5 trillion dollars. We really should be spending far more money on research- on health, on disaster relief, on construction, what have you. We can, objectively speaking, quantitatively and qualitatively save lives. I’m not saying that we should, or even could, cut military spending, or change anything at all. I don’t know anything. I’m ignorant.
But please, think about it. Just think about it. Read up a little, if it’s not too much trouble. Try to find out about the options and alternatives. We are all somehow collectively a part of this, even if it might be negligible at the individual level. Be aware. It’s great that we have a growing global network of empathy and emotional support, and it’ll be great if in time we will be able to collectively figure out how we can solve these problems, and save lives. We have to seriously work out our priorities, as a species. I’m not sure how we’re going to do this, but I hope me talking about it gets you thinking about it, because if we all think about it then I believe we have a better chance than if nobody does. I’m not sure of very much, but I’m pretty sure that we can do more than just pray, if not for the Japanese right now, then at least for the billions of people who will be affected by earthquakes in the future.
Hang in there, Japan.
Pingback: Poseidōn the Earthshaker « A Young Flemish Hellenist