Prometheus 6

I realized yesterday that in 5-10 years there willl be a lot more American-style economic systems in southeast Asia because adopting such a system will be a prerequisite for redevelopment funding (as opposed to emergency response funding).

Anyway...

How Nature Changes History
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

WHAT follows in the wake of a tsunami? The death of a nation? Secessionist warfare or, conversely, the unexpected drift of warring parties toward a peace table? A surge in Islamic fundamentalism?

If the past is any guide, the response to the shock of Dec. 26 will loom larger in history than the wave itself. Disasters rip away social moorings as harshly as they tear children from their mothers' hands, and while faceless nature may be to blame for the first blow, governments may reap the political whirlwind that follows it.

In this case, the wave that rose out of the Andaman Sea broke over some remarkably fragile societies:

Indonesia's Aceh province had been under virtual martial law, largely closed to the outside world as 40,000 troops hunted separatists.

Sri Lanka was cut in two by civil war, and new killings had raised fears that a two-year cease-fire was collapsing.

In Thailand, fighting between the government and Muslim rebels not far from its beach resorts claimed at least 500 lives last year.

And the Maldives, a nation of 1,190 coral islands averaging three feet above sea level, already feared the slow rise in the surrounding waters caused by global warming.

Disasters have often deflected the course of history. Three whole civilizations that met watery dooms occurred to Dr. Brian M. Fagan, an archaeologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The least-studied of these cataclysms took place in 5500 B.C., when the Mediterranean, rising as the last Ice Age melted, burst through the hills surrounding a brackish lake to the northeast, and created the Black Sea. Seawater probably poured for weeks through what is now the Bosporus, covering human settlements ringing the lake.

In about 1600 B.C., roughly three centuries before the Trojan War, the Santorini volcano, 200 times as powerful as the Mount St. Helens explosion, sent waves hundreds of feet high across the Mediterranean, devastating Crete, capital of the Minoan empire, its fleet and its coastal cities. Fatally weakened, the empire was later conquered by the Mycenaeans of the Greek mainland, who established the model for Western culture. (For example, Minoan doors had no locks, while Mycenaeans built citadels.)

And in the sixth century A.D., the Moche civilization, based in desert valleys in coastal Peru, may have been fatally weakened by a combination of earthquakes and El Niño storms that washed away hundreds of miles of irrigation canals from the Andes. A tsunami may also have flung their washed-away hillsides back ashore, forming dunes that blew over the valley farmland.

Sudden and shocking as they are, earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves are not the biggest forces in human history. Tiny microbes are more powerful. Plague undermined the medieval social order by killing a third of Europe in the 14th century, and the New World fell to the poxes and sniffles of conquistadors and Puritans, not to their muskets. Then there are political assassinations: a Serbian bullet precipitated World War I.

But winds and waves, even from average storms, can topple empires if timed perfectly - usually catching a navy at sea or an army on the march. As Bryn Barnard, the author of "Dangerous Planet: Natural Disasters That Changed History" (Random House), noted, typhoons in 1274 and 1281 (later dubbed the "kamikaze" or divine wind) saved Japan by sinking Mongol amphibious assault fleets. In 1360, an English army was marching on Reims to crown Edward III the king of France when hail the size of pigeons' eggs stormed down, killing men and horses and taking the fight out of the superstitious Edward. Invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler bogged down in harsh winters.