Tsunami Devastation

I wanted to write a really meaningful post about the tsunami in Asia. But I am pretty much speechless about it all. I just shudder to think what it must have been like. In some places, one in four people are dead or missing. And now those who survived have a difficult battle in front of them. The feeling of helplessness that one is faced with, trying to grasp and understand how this happened, the immesity of the devastation and how this couldn't have been avoided - only the blow lessened - is so foreign to our everyday dealings. Humans are so used to conquering Nature, that it is a sobering slap in the face to see what happens when Nature fights back.

I was marveling a few weeks ago, that the world’s population has doubled in the last 40 years, from about 3 billion to 6 billion. We have a yearly increase of approx. 75 million people, which represents about a 1.14% population increase every year. (This is projected to decrease over time, so that in 2050 the world population will be just over 9 billion.) It’s pretty humbling to see that while we can overcome many of Mother Nature’s hindrances in populating this world, she sometimes asserts herself with a devastating show of power.