Our Improved Place in Nature
Writing in an as-yet unlinked opinion piece in today's Orange County Register, Carlo Stagnaro of the Intituto Bruno Leoni documents the obvious: Human endeavor to tame nature is a good thing.
Our planet is savage, uncomfortable for human beings, he writes. This is why we still have to struggle against it, in order to make it less harmful. Human ingenuity is a powerful tool against the natural forces' challenge.
How are we doing in this struggle? Quite well indeed, Stanaro says:
Thanks to scientific progress and a stronger control over nature, the number of victims of natural disasters is declining. The death rate due to natural disasters has fallen by 98 percent in the last century, from an average of 66 killed for every 100,000 population yearly in 1900, to 1.4 every 100,000, in the 1990s.
In absolute terms, this means that -- despite the demographic boom that occurred in the meantime -- the number of people killed in natural disasters has fallen from 1.2 million casualties annually at the beginning of the century to 77,000 at the end of it.
Our planet is savage, uncomfortable for human beings, he writes. This is why we still have to struggle against it, in order to make it less harmful. Human ingenuity is a powerful tool against the natural forces' challenge.
How are we doing in this struggle? Quite well indeed, Stanaro says:
Thanks to scientific progress and a stronger control over nature, the number of victims of natural disasters is declining. The death rate due to natural disasters has fallen by 98 percent in the last century, from an average of 66 killed for every 100,000 population yearly in 1900, to 1.4 every 100,000, in the 1990s.
In absolute terms, this means that -- despite the demographic boom that occurred in the meantime -- the number of people killed in natural disasters has fallen from 1.2 million casualties annually at the beginning of the century to 77,000 at the end of it.
posted by Laer at 9:22 PM
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