I have to go along with Chris' nomination of overpopulation. Just because a disaster occurs slowly and insidiously doesn't relieve it of its status as a disaster. And the indictment stands even without including global warming. In order to accommodate a population of now over 300,000,000 people, and to help provide food and goods for a global population of nearly 7B (!!!), enormous tracts of land have been given over to agriculture, mining, paving and other forms of destruction and pollution. Virtually all natural river systems have been dammed and otherwise interfered with. Cattle graze everywhere, trampling the riparian environment horribly (I observed this along virtually every remote stream-bed I came across during my firefighting years), lakes and estuaries are polluted, and habitats for animals of all sizes are being divided and subdivided.

To me, the scale of the disaster juxtaposed with the subliminal nature of our awareness of it (primarily due to its slow, steady, neigh, inexorable nature), is a parallel with the disaster that Israel has wrought on the Palestinians. When a suicide bomber kills 8 Israelis at a coffee-shop it's all over the news. When Israel steadily grinds the Palestinians into poverty, every day, taking over their land acre by acre, bulldozing down their orchards, stealing their water supplies, subjecting them to constant demoralizing, degrading and dehumanizing denials of work permits, free travel, decent hospitals, electrical power, and all that, and when these conditions lead to an infant mortality rate that far surpasses Israeli deaths at Palestinian hands, it all happens so slowly that we in the U.S. tend to remain oblivious to it. Besides, they're ragheads anyway.

But - Barbara! How can you claim that a chemical/biological/nuclear attack by a terrorist group would be worse than Katrina, the Dust Bowl, the Ogallala and the others COMBINED? I find that difficult to believe. Just about the worst-case scenario that they could pull-off would be a nuclear "dirty bomb." This would kill, over varying periods of time, perhaps 10,000 people, and make a several square-mile section of a major city uninhabitable for a decade or so. The deaths would be a few percent of our yearly deaths due to heart attack, or a few months worth of traffic fatalities. The environment would shrug it off like we would a flea-bite.

For a tiny fraction of what our invasion of Iraq costs per year, we could so greatly improve our port and border security, and our intelligence gathering, that the likelihood of such an attack being successful would be very low. And, if it occurred, we would simply absorb it physically, financially and otherwise. Why are Americans so terrified of terrorism? In the entire history of the United States it has killed so few of our citizens that it does not even appear anywhere in the top several hundred items on actuarial risk! And we have the power to stop it anytime by simply taking a more even-handed and rational approach to international affairs. The Arab world used to admire and respect us.

Michael Williams
Arroyo Grande, CA USA