Is The World Courting Disaster?

LAST year a TV station in Washington D.C. ran a special report on their news show entitled "Is God Mad At Us?" The series took a look at why there seemed to be so many bad things happening in recent years--droughts, plane crashes, earthquakes. It wasn't a landmark piece of investigative journalism, no exclusive interview with the Big Guy. Instead, it consisted of asking theologians, clergy and disaster victims whether the Second Coming was about to take place. I don't know what the conclusions were.

However, in the past month there has been a lot going wrong in the world. Now, I don't worry that our world is about to end, but I am interested in the number of natural disasters that have occurred in the past few months. America was gripped by the worst heat wave and drought in decades. Hurricane Gilbert, considered the most violent storm nature can produce, has caused thousands in Texas to evacuate the Gulf coast and billions of dollars worth of damage in Jamaica and Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. In Bangladesh, some 40,000 homes have been destroyed by flooding and the stagnating flood waters may spread disease through most of the population. The forest fires in the Northwest, exacerbated by the weather, have burned an area approximately the size of Connecticut and still have not been brought under control.

THE list could be extended even further. AIDS is predicted to become an epidemic in a few years. Even though some of the initial panic about the new deadly virus has died down in this country, in Africa, where it originally developed, it is present in frighteningly large percentages and shows no sign of slowing. Also in Africa, the Ethiopian famine that prompted the LiveAid benefit concert still has a death grip on that country.

The more I hear about such natural disasters, the more helpless I feel. There hasn't been such a slew of tragedies holding the media's attention since the big disaster movie boom of the 1970s when sharks, infernos and ship wrecks covered the movie ad pages. Perhaps the fact that so many natural disasters occurred within one short time period is just some sort of bad coincidence. But the fact that so many of these disasters are considered worst-evers in their categories probably has a more real-world cause.

WHICH, of course, rules out blaming God and leaves only Mother Nature and us. with more on the way every second. The world's population, especially in underdeveloped Third World countries, is growing exponentially. It reached 4 billion just a few years ago and is expected by scientists to hit 5 billion right around the turn of the century. It took thousands of years before the world population could even approach 1 billion.

Obviously a population explosion doesn't start hurricanes to form in the Carribbean, or natural floods in Bangladesh. But it does mean that when those things happen, they affect more people who are living in more densely populated areas. The days when a huge storm could develop, blow and dissipate without affecting a soul are long since gone. This explains how we can keep hearing about "worst-ever" disasters--if Jamaica or the coast of Texas are twice the population of what they were the last time a storm the size of Gilbert hit, then twice as many people will be put out of homes.

But at the same time we terrify ourselves by classifying these disasters as increasingly horrific, we are becoming ever more expert at striking back at them. Yes, many acres of beautiful park land have been destroyed by the fires in Yellowstone, but they can grow back and very few people were physically hurt by them. There was enough warning from the rest of us to save people's lives, if not their property. The same is true in Bangladesh, where resuce teams from around the world will help to control the spread of disease. Gilbert has caused horrible property damage, but no lives have been lost.

AT times it seems we have almost created a game for ourselves. In the back of our scheming little minds, we begin to think we can actually prevent them from happening at all. With increasingly sophisticated technology, we can begin to label disasters with the tag, "worst-ever," "strongest of the decade," etc. And then we marshal our resources to slay these larger and larger dragons.

There are two types of people in the world: those who believe in God, and those who would like to prove that he doesn't exist. Maybe the Greek word hubris describes our desire to tame disasters, or even to categorize them.

After all, "worst-ever" merely means "worst-recorded." We haven't been recording these things for that long, and the carelessness with which we ignore the distinction between the two no doubt reflects our own certainty that the world was created for us only a short time ago. If there is a God, that may be a dangerous position to take with him.