management
Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century
Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century
This is a must-read article by Michael Crichton. His basic premise: we can make statistics say about anything, and so the trend is that the media and other organizations will try to build a big fear of a crisis. In reality, the environmental cycles are fairly normal. His conclusion:
Is this really the end of the world? Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods?
No, we simply live on an active planet. Earthquakes are continuous, a million and a half of them every year, or three every minute. A Richter 5 quake every six hours, a major quake every 3 weeks. A quake as destructive as the one in Pakistan every 8 months. It’s nothing new, it’s right on schedule.
At any moment there are 1,500 electrical storms on the planet. A tornado touches down every six hours. We have ninety hurricanes a year, or one every four days. Again, right on schedule. Violent, disruptive, chaotic activity is a constant feature of our globe.
Is this the end of the world? No: this is the world.
It’s time we knew it.