Natural Disasters

By Samantha Gleissner

I’d like to take a little step outside the fire zone and bring up something that may be relevant not only to how we perceive wildfires but global climactic events and natural disasters in general. In this growing age of human impact awareness we are beginning to understand more and more about how we humans are impacting our environment. As a student of environmental sciences, it has been a prominent point in my education to learn to see how our actions influence changes in the natural environment, and now I’d like to share with you a few things that I have come to understand about human impacts.

It is important when evaluating wildlife populations to understand how they fit into their environment and how they can impact other species in their community, but there are few if any creatures that influence their environment as much as humans do. As one of very few exponentially increasing species, humans tend to adjust the environment to fit their needs as opposed to dwelling only in environments that already fit their needs like most other species on the planet do. We tend to alter landscapes and species compositions by removing plants or animals that we find to be “out of place”. For some purposes this is a helpful practice (i.e. invasive species removal to promote native species health), but humans are also uniquely capable of removing thousands of hectares of natural habitats in a mater of a few weeks or months. We alter landscapes from forested to clear-cut, or from desert to tropical in some cases (California). Such drastic landscape alterations change the way the ecosystem functions in those areas and can bring on more frequent natural disasters and even worsen their effects.

Pollutants increase the toxicity of the air we breathe and influence the measurements the earth “takes” to reduce damage to its ecosystems and balance. I want people to think about the earth sort of like the human body, earth tends to keep a homeorhetic state, meaning that the earth maintains a stable flow similar to the human body. When something is altered in an unnatural way the earth will respond to correct the change, much like a human body. Global climate change is the earths “immune system” kicking into gear to remove the damaging or threatening alterations. Rains increase when high amounts of pollutants are released into the air, this helps trap the pollutants and remove them from the atmosphere. Similarly any climactic event or natural disaster can be better understood by evaluating the earth’s health. Often disasters occur in highly populated regions, often due to landscape alterations that change how the air, water, and other components flow thru the topography. Alterations such as the changes made to sagebrush habitat here in Idaho, for agriculture and industry, can lead to soil erosion, stronger wind effects, changes to soil nutrients, and other issues that can intensify future disaster effects.

When you begin to consider the impacts we have on the earth and the increasing human population, it is not really all that surprising to hear that natural disasters and climatic changes have increased over the years as well. Increased alteration of the land to accommodate our infinitely growing populations of humans and industry make it clear that our impacts do effect the way the earth functions. If an area is clear-cut to make way for industry or human habitation, we are changing the natural flow of the land and the way climactic patterns influence it and natural disaster affect it.

While many people understand that the earth is a functioning organism, very few people in contrast understand how our impacts on the earth no matter how minute affect the balance and even bring on “natural events” sooner or more strongly than they would normally occur.

Since I’m explaining this in a way that humanizes the earth, I would like to point out that humans as a species are far closer to being an invasive species, or even virus like in our interactions with this planet, but that doesn’t mean that we are not nor can be a natural part of the world. On occasion in the human body a functional cell such as an immune cell becomes “confused” and attacks the body, but this does not mean that it is a foreign cell to the body. I believe that humans are much like a confused immune cell; we are here to be a part of the world, to function in a capacity that facilitates the stable flow of the world’s climate and ecology. We just need to learn how to function more appropriately with the rest of the system of which we are a part so we can help restore and maintain our planet for future generations.