I’ve been watching videos of tsunamis this week. I just can’t seem to stop watching them. It’s fascinating how they mostly feel like massive swelling under the surface of the sea, as the displacement of water moves from earthquakes to shorelines. There’s something really uncanny about it, rather than a big crashing 50 foot wave. I’ve been watching and watching because there’s something in me that wanted to see huge waves rising up and engulfing land dramatically, but the tsunami films aren’t doing that, they’re showing the crushing inevitability as it creeps up. There’s a phenomenon where the water on a beach actually recedes before the tsunami reaches the shore, and it goes out fast, leaving areas of rock and so on exposed where they’re usually underwater. This and other phenomenon are known as natural warnings (as opposed to human monitoring). Another is that the sea looks foamy near the shore, like its filled with bubbles – because there is so much energy been created by the earthquake. It’s this energy which fascinates me, because its effects are inevitable once it has been unleashed.

I think this is a good way of thinking , of conceptualising what humans do on the planet, as if we can produce and produce and be busy busy busy and keep releasing more and more gasses into the atmosphere without realising consequence. The principle of ignoring this I’ve noticed in many areas of life. I think its a human flaw, a heuristic. For example if we pump lots of fuel or sewage into the ocean, there’s a tendency to think that the ocean is huge so our little amount doesn’t matter, it will be dissipated, but we do this over and over again until it can’t be absorbed any more. Or that if we destroy some area of biodiversity to create sterile housing estates, the nature will somehow ‘move’ to another area and survive, but we fail to realise that we’re doing this over and over again for generations, squeezing these areas more and more into non-existence, even if the nature could somehow ‘recover’ each time, which it can’t, the cumulative effect is large scale destruction.