These apalling natural disasters keep on happening, don't they? Floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, landslides, tsunamis and forest fires. Of course they've always happened - but now there are thousands/millions of people in the path of each one. And, of course, it often turns out that many of those people have 'amplified' the effects of the disasters by drastically modifying and degrading the local environment. For example the 'Boxing Day' tsunami in the Indian Ocean was far more destructive than it ought to have been because many of the coastal mangrove forests had been destroyed (a 2 or 3 mile strip of mangrove blunts the effect of a tsunami by acting as a buffer). Similarly it said on the BBC news tonight that thousands of people had moved into the area of Brazil affected by the floods and landslides, cut down forests on steep hillsides and built flimsy houses in their place - a landslide disaster waiting to happen!

As long as we have contempt for Nature, Nature will go on killing us!