The tsunami disaster is generating a confusing cacaphony of voices from both the Left and the Right asserting what seem to be contradictory positions. Man caused the disaster say the environmentalists. Man is small compared to the awesome power of nature say voices on both the Left and the Right. Which is it? And how do we reconcile the two positions?
The Left says the tsunami disaster shows man is puny compared to the power of nature. From the New York Times of December 29, 2004,
“The underlying story of this tragedy is the overpowering, amoral mechanics of the earth’s surface, the movement of plates that grind and shift and slide against each other with profound indifference to anything but the pressures that drive them. Whenever those forces punctuate human history, they do so tragically. They demonstrate, geologically speaking, how ephemeral our presence is.”
In another quote from the other side of the world, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Dec. 29, commented, “Human knowledge and science seem completely helpless in mitigating the destructive capacity of a tsunami.”
The religious Right agrees: A guest host on the Rush Limbaugh show read the New York Times quote admiringly, marveling that “even the New York Times gets it”.
Meanwhile, a Muslim cleric has declared that the tsunami is the work of Allah, and by the way, America better watch out because He will soon be sending another one our way to punish us for our sins.
At the same time that these commentators of both the secular and religious varieties claim that nature or God is more powerful than man, the environmentalist Left asserts that man is responsible for the crisis. The executive director of Greenpeace UK, in reacting to the disaster, told a British newspaper that “No one can ignore the relentless increase in extreme weather events and so-called natural disasters, which in reality are no more natural than a plastic Christmas tree.”
Well, which is it? Is man puny compared to nature or is he so powerful that he can be the cause of a tsunami? The answer in their twisted logic is: both. The environmentalists do not mean by blaming man that he is capable of controlling nature. Man may cause the tsunami, but unintentionally, out of neglect and the unintended consequences of self-serving actions. Nature may be powerful in this mythology but evil industrialists, drunk for dominance and money, are even more powerful in a destructive way. By invoking the Frankensteinian image of man as an evil, powerful force
