WORLD history can be written from almost any perspective: wars, finance, trade, conquests, inventions, discoveries, medical advances, and so on.
It can also be chronicled from the point of view of warnings not heeded.
One can go as far back as Rome on 24 August of the year 79AD, when Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered the city of Pompeii in lava.
The mountain itself had given plenty of warnings – all of which were pretty obvious but ignored nevertheless.
Like the loud rumbling noises, and the sea that started boiling, wells that dried up and the ground that became so hot that creatures were scampering away.
It didn’t help that the superstitious citizens attributed all this to the angry gods or to apparitions.
There are many such examples of people ignoring warnings, such as the tsunami disaster the day after Christmas, 2004.
It had been predicted at least seven years prior that undersea earthquakes would occur, with devastating results; it left nearly two million people homeless and more than 230 000 dead.
I guess governments, as well as individuals, ignore warnings or procrastinate for many reasons:
They hope it will go away (like that lump on your body); ‘Someone else will take care of it’ (wishful thinking); Denounce or discredit the source (if you can’t beat the argument, attack the person); ‘It costs too much to fix’ (it will cost much more if you don’t); ‘We’ll just pray about it’ (and angels will arrive to do the job?).
And so it goes on – warnings on army invasions, bad weather, health pandemics, casual gun ownership, domestic violence dangers… and global warming’s rising oceans guzzling our coastline.
Last week, as predicted by yours truly– and by a number of authorities including the CSIR over 10 years ago, the sea broke through into the car park at Palm Beach, Alkantstrand during a high tide storm surge.
It was a tiny foretaste of what happened to the city of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.
It had been spoken about for years. The city’s outdated levee system was unable to cope with today’s climate change consequences.
I’m not sure how many years it will take before our highly vulnerable coastal dune defence is totally breached and below-sea-level Meerensee is swallowed.
Of course, seeing a problem and solving it are two different things.
There is no quick fix.
But hastily extending the Alkantstrand geobag wall northwards would be a good start.
A long-term solution might entail the construction of more piers.
In the meantime, I talk to the trees… the ones floating in the ocean.
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