by Amanda Painter
On Democracy Now! two days ago, I was struck by Amy Goodman’s summary of 2010 in terms of ‘extreme weather’ (as well as the mainstream media’s refusal to make the connection to climate change, in an interview with Dr. Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School). In fact, I almost can’t believe how many natural disasters got packed into 2010, keeping the Planet Waves team on its toes. All the activity is testament, I suppose, to an untenable confluence of intense astrology (cardinal grand cross/Aries Point activity and more) and the cumulative demands human development has placed on our home planet over the decades.
We’re about two weeks away from the one-year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti — an event Eric covered in real time here on the blog as well as in a subscriber issue. Just over a month later, an even larger quake rocked Chile, though thankfully with a lower degree of catastrophe.
And then a couple months after that, Gaia decided to shift gears to ‘expulsion mode’, with an Icelandic volcano spewing enough volcanic ash to halt European air travel for days (also here).
In late summer, Fe Bongolan began connecting the climate-change-and-media dots on this very issue with her post titled “Ohh, the water” in August. She mentions the rampant forest fires in Russia and the other disasters that marked the first half of 2010, but the article’s primary focus the massive flooding in Pakistan. She writes:
Yet it’s so odd that there isn’t the same media circus we’ve come to expect of our disaster coverage for this disaster. Is it because a flood is not as instantaneous a disaster as a volcano that disrupts international airspace or the flattening of a country by massive earthquake? Is it because we’ve reached the limit of so many disasters in one year that we’re feeling relief fatigue?