Bangladesh intends to plant a million trees to decrease the number of people annually killed by lightning in the low-lying and largely flat country made by the Brahmaputra and Ganges Rivers. They have a logic for their decision,* but we should all remember what we have been taught: Don’t stand under a tree during a lightning storm.
Isn’t this just like what we all have experienced? I mean the confusing advice. Buy a new car; get the old one fixed; take this burgeoning major in college; no, that major is overcrowded with people, so there won’t be jobs; you need a vacation; don’t spend your money on frivolous short-term releases; it’s good to take a break because absence makes the heart grow fonder; out of sight, out of mind—the list of seeming contradictions is variable and long. Conflicting advice and choices, many of them requiring a decision on changing the world to suit our desires and needs.
That’s the story in most lives: Conflicting advice and choices, some significant, some not. Whether or not one should stand under a tree during a lightning storm was, we all thought, a problem resolved. You get the advice from parents, teachers, public officials, and weather forecasters. The Bangladesh government thinks the trees are a good idea. They seem to have proof from other such planting programs in the region. The trees are supposed to suffer damage while thwarting a strike’s passage to the ground. I’m just thinking that maybe children, in an attempt to get out of the rain, will run under a tree’s canopy while electrons bleed toward the sky and back to the natural lightning rod. But we can’t blame the Bangladeshis for wanting to protect people from lightning. Or can we?
We can’t help ourselves from interfering in nature and in the lives of others. We think, “Oh, the sand is moving down current from Presque Isle in Lake Erie. If it all moves in the longshore transport system, then Presque Isle State Park will be no more. We should do something. Let’s build artificial headlands to capture the moving sand.” And so the Commonwealth had crane operators drop rocks to form a series of little islands just off shore. Tombolos, or connections made of sand, the officials reasoned, will form as a product of the longshore currents. Walla! New headlands and the preservation of Presque Isle.
That works for Presque Isle, but as sands remain on Presque Isle, the people down current east of the park lose the resupply sand that naturally moves their way, so saving Presque Isle means jeopardizing other beaches. Seems that every time we impose a fix, we impose it at a cost. Those trees on Bangladesh might do the same. Trees take time to grow, and sands in currents take time to move. So, the current residents along the American side of Lake Erie might not see the down stream effects of the artificial headlands off Presque Isle. And the Bangladeshis of today might not reap the benefits or ills of one million trees. If they are all palm trees, there will be a new supply of coconuts to eat, but there will also be a few children, seeking shelter, who will be zapped by lightning. Choices. Hmnn.
Every major project engenders a new problem. Take water projects, for example. Nothing like having abundant fresh water for a growing population. Dams that hold back great reservoirs of water change the character of river systems and have the potential to drown anyone down stream if they fail. After droughts the rains come, and come, and come, as the weather of California in early 2017 exemplifies. In February, county officials ordered the evacuation of 188,000 people living down stream from the 770-foot-high Oroville Dam. The dam seemed solid and stable, but the emergency spillway showed signs of collapsing. People who had benefited from the dam and who had built communities because of it, had to evacuate. Do you think any of them complained? Do you think the people who moved into down stream communities after the dam was constructed should complain?
But what’s our choice? We could just let things go as they are, meaning that Bangladeshis would continue to have high casualties from lightning strikes, Presque Isle would partly wash away, and people would not build communities where water was not abundant. Or, we could interfere, using the best guesses we can make about what would improve human existence. Here’s some food for thought: If we move to or continue to live in an area where certain inconveniences or dangers exist, should we complain when we are inconvenienced or endangered? Should we accept certain inconveniences as inevitable and some dangers as potential and real?
In Versailles Borough v. McKeesport Coal & Coke Co., 83 P.L.J. 379 the plaintiffs sought damages because hydrogen sulfide from a culm bank (gob pile of coal waste rock from mines) damaged the paint on their homes. Supreme Court Justice Musmanno (1897-1968), then a county judge, wrote, “The plaintiffs are subject to an annoyance. This we accept, but it is an annoyance they have freely assumed” [Italics mine]. The residents chose to move where they could find work, and that work was in the mines, so the residences were near the culm banks.
Now think 2017 and the Oroville Dam. The presence of the dam has made life below it rather convenient—until the deluge threatened the structure. Did the residents not know that they had chosen to live where there was a potential for a 30-foot wall of water to cascade from a broken dam? But that begs another question: Do any of us really think about the consequences of changes we effect, like planting (or chopping down) trees, stopping the movement of sands, or impounding water? And another: Do we think about how place exerts a control over us?
So, we all have to deal with the nature of place, and we all have to make choices. Do we effect a change we want that, in turn, might effect a change that we don’t want? In choosing place or in changing place we bear a personal responsibility to ourselves and to others who might be affected by our choices.
* https://phys.org/news/2017-01-bangladesh-million-trees-lightning-toll.html
Isn’t this just like what we all have experienced? I mean the confusing advice. Buy a new car; get the old one fixed; take this burgeoning major in college; no, that major is overcrowded with people, so there won’t be jobs; you need a vacation; don’t spend your money on frivolous short-term releases; it’s good to take a break because absence makes the heart grow fonder; out of sight, out of mind—the list of seeming contradictions is variable and long. Conflicting advice and choices, many of them requiring a decision on changing the world to suit our desires and needs.
That’s the story in most lives: Conflicting advice and choices, some significant, some not. Whether or not one should stand under a tree during a lightning storm was, we all thought, a problem resolved. You get the advice from parents, teachers, public officials, and weather forecasters. The Bangladesh government thinks the trees are a good idea. They seem to have proof from other such planting programs in the region. The trees are supposed to suffer damage while thwarting a strike’s passage to the ground. I’m just thinking that maybe children, in an attempt to get out of the rain, will run under a tree’s canopy while electrons bleed toward the sky and back to the natural lightning rod. But we can’t blame the Bangladeshis for wanting to protect people from lightning. Or can we?
We can’t help ourselves from interfering in nature and in the lives of others. We think, “Oh, the sand is moving down current from Presque Isle in Lake Erie. If it all moves in the longshore transport system, then Presque Isle State Park will be no more. We should do something. Let’s build artificial headlands to capture the moving sand.” And so the Commonwealth had crane operators drop rocks to form a series of little islands just off shore. Tombolos, or connections made of sand, the officials reasoned, will form as a product of the longshore currents. Walla! New headlands and the preservation of Presque Isle.
That works for Presque Isle, but as sands remain on Presque Isle, the people down current east of the park lose the resupply sand that naturally moves their way, so saving Presque Isle means jeopardizing other beaches. Seems that every time we impose a fix, we impose it at a cost. Those trees on Bangladesh might do the same. Trees take time to grow, and sands in currents take time to move. So, the current residents along the American side of Lake Erie might not see the down stream effects of the artificial headlands off Presque Isle. And the Bangladeshis of today might not reap the benefits or ills of one million trees. If they are all palm trees, there will be a new supply of coconuts to eat, but there will also be a few children, seeking shelter, who will be zapped by lightning. Choices. Hmnn.
Every major project engenders a new problem. Take water projects, for example. Nothing like having abundant fresh water for a growing population. Dams that hold back great reservoirs of water change the character of river systems and have the potential to drown anyone down stream if they fail. After droughts the rains come, and come, and come, as the weather of California in early 2017 exemplifies. In February, county officials ordered the evacuation of 188,000 people living down stream from the 770-foot-high Oroville Dam. The dam seemed solid and stable, but the emergency spillway showed signs of collapsing. People who had benefited from the dam and who had built communities because of it, had to evacuate. Do you think any of them complained? Do you think the people who moved into down stream communities after the dam was constructed should complain?
But what’s our choice? We could just let things go as they are, meaning that Bangladeshis would continue to have high casualties from lightning strikes, Presque Isle would partly wash away, and people would not build communities where water was not abundant. Or, we could interfere, using the best guesses we can make about what would improve human existence. Here’s some food for thought: If we move to or continue to live in an area where certain inconveniences or dangers exist, should we complain when we are inconvenienced or endangered? Should we accept certain inconveniences as inevitable and some dangers as potential and real?
In Versailles Borough v. McKeesport Coal & Coke Co., 83 P.L.J. 379 the plaintiffs sought damages because hydrogen sulfide from a culm bank (gob pile of coal waste rock from mines) damaged the paint on their homes. Supreme Court Justice Musmanno (1897-1968), then a county judge, wrote, “The plaintiffs are subject to an annoyance. This we accept, but it is an annoyance they have freely assumed” [Italics mine]. The residents chose to move where they could find work, and that work was in the mines, so the residences were near the culm banks.
Now think 2017 and the Oroville Dam. The presence of the dam has made life below it rather convenient—until the deluge threatened the structure. Did the residents not know that they had chosen to live where there was a potential for a 30-foot wall of water to cascade from a broken dam? But that begs another question: Do any of us really think about the consequences of changes we effect, like planting (or chopping down) trees, stopping the movement of sands, or impounding water? And another: Do we think about how place exerts a control over us?
So, we all have to deal with the nature of place, and we all have to make choices. Do we effect a change we want that, in turn, might effect a change that we don’t want? In choosing place or in changing place we bear a personal responsibility to ourselves and to others who might be affected by our choices.
* https://phys.org/news/2017-01-bangladesh-million-trees-lightning-toll.html
RSS Feed