Earthly powers

This article was published in The Economist 22 April 2010

Disasters are about people and planning, not nature’s pomp

It is a peculiar, if blessed, sort of natural disaster in which nobody dies. The Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull produced a thrilling show—and may continue to do so—but did most of its damage simply by shutting down air traffic in and out of large parts of Europe for nearly a week. Rather than bereavement, it brought the eeriness, and sometimes the joy, of displacement. Colleagues were absent from their desks, and teachers and pupils from their classrooms; the clear blue skies were bereft of the silver needles that sew the world together. Birdsong made loud the silence of the jets, florists’ vases missed the bright blooms of far-off fields, and far-off farmers missed the cash those blooms would have brought. But, this time, almost all that went missing will be returned.

Two arguments spout up from this demonstration of earthly power. The first is immediate and practical: was all this chaos man-made—an immense and costly overreaction by regulators to a spectacle that posed only a minor and manageable risk? The second is more philosophical: what does this say about man’s apparent inability to control nature?