Complicating Our Lives
Weather events, they're always with us. Complicating our lives in small, irritating ways that we have to put up with since we have no other alternative; we're no match in strength and power to Mother Nature.Here in this neck of the global woods we've experienced almost daily rain events throughout the month of May and now as well right through to June and beyond. Daily rain events, running the gamut from sprinkles to cloudbursts; night-time rains, and all-day rain.
We may not appreciate the constant wet status but it seems that other growing things, the green type, our local flora, do. Green everywhere is running amok. We can complain, and we do complain, but our kvetching merely serves to allow us to vent a little, to share with others the tedium associated with too-wet, too-damp, too-humid conditions.
Considering that places like Australia have seen too little rain for the past several years, visiting on that country agricultural tribulations that have seen their farming communities decimated. Severe drought conditions, somewhat like the South-Eastern United States and elsewhere in the world, severely impacting on crop yields and further exacerbating an already serious food shortage.
We've obviously nothing at all to complain about. Which doesn't stop us from ventilating our irritation and mewling complaints about Mother Nature.
Then there's China, already in dire straits as a result of the earthquake that struck there, and the resulting landslides and threatening floods as a result of both devastating events where thousands of people lost their lives and millions have been left homeless. On top of that seasonal rain has also resulted in flood conditions in the industrialized south of the country, killing several hundred people, and producing additional strains on the country, adding to its internal refugees, bereft of their homes because of flood conditions.
We've just returned from a climbing holiday in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and it rained there too, incessantly, but that's kind of expected in early and late spring in mountainous areas. America too has been severely impacted by those ubiquitous rain events, day after day, relentlessly pouring. In the process creating another situation of dire emergencies as there too hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless, their homes inundated by flood waters.
In Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana, towns and cities built on floodplains, hoping that their levees will hold against the rushing tide of swollen rivers like the Cedar River and the great Mississippi, have had their hopes dashed. Flooding across the American corn belt will have its additional impact, felt world-wide, as crops wash out and food shortages continue their spiral. Twenty-four deaths have been attributed to those floods in these heartland states, with tens of thousands of people left without shelter.
That foot of rain that dumped on the region early in the month had its monumental results with the breaching of more than 28 levees on the Mississippi River on its north-south route alone. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with tending to the nation's waterways and constructing their countless dams and levees announced that over 113,000 acres of cropland were overflowing or at high flood risk as a result of the breach of some 48 levees.
In our neck of the woods, we tend to the gargantuan overgrowth of our tangled gardens, drunk with an excess of water, and grumble about the rampant mess. Little do we recognize our good fortune.
Labels: Nature, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Friday, June 20, 2008
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