I've been glued to the news - along with the rest of the world - as the situation at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan spirals from bad to worse. There's not a lot more that I can do for the people of Japan. I've already donated what I can to Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross. But as I've grappled with the feeling of utter helplessness I'm sure many of you share, I've also begun to grapple with a very disturbing notion - humankind really had this coming.
I don't mean to say that Japan in particular deserves this nuclear nightmare - of course they don't. And I don't believe that any supernatural force sent the earthquake or the tsunami to punish anyone for anything. What I mean is that humanity is living out of alignment with nature, and the very planet we live on. And the consequences are going to become still more devastating if we don't do something about it now.
It is colossal arrogance to assume that we can keep radioactive material under control at all - let alone indefinitely. We fly in the face of the natural order of things when we build waterfront nuclear reactors such as Daiichi in the very region that coined the term "tsunami" without even adequate flood protection for backup cooling systems.
And atomic disaster is only one of several kinds of meltdowns brought about by our shortsightedness around energy. One need look no further than the protests bubbling over throughout the Middle East to know that the United States' habit of propping up petro-dictatorships in order to keep a predictable flow of oil coming our way is finally catching up with us. And one need only look at the changing weather patterns and the melting ice caps to know that the result of burning all that petroleum is very soon going to catch up with us as well.
The Daiichi nuclear plant is one of more than 50 such plants in Japan designed to provide this technologically advanced society with the electricity it needs to move through daily life. But the earthquake that set off this chain reaction was rated a 9.0 on the Richter scale. The energy from that earthquake alone - if harnessed - could power a city the size of Los Angeles for a year.
The earth below our feet is the greatest power plant we could ever ask for. Used properly, the same energy source that wrought such destruction can be harnessed to power human innovation and society planetwide.
So maybe instead of building nuclear reactors, pumping carbon into our atmosphere at alarming rates, and propping up despots, we could start innovating on ways to work in harmony with the planet we live on. It may not prevent another Sendai, but it will prevent another Fukushima Daiichi - and perhaps another Muammar Gaddafi as well.
