Eyjafjallajökull erupt - Disruptions teach us a hard lesson

LIVING in a temperate climate we can easily forget how powerless we are in the face of destructive nature.

We can forget that virtually every human activity depends on a benign and forgiving natural world. We may have come to imagine, if not believe, that because we can harness nature – agriculture, nuclear power, genetic modification and great feats of engineering – we can control it.

Eyjafjallajökull has shown us otherwise and reminded us that we little more than bit players in a vast, almost unfathomable construct that remains beyond our full comprehension. Iceland’s volcano has delivered timely wake up call. Its eruption – the first since 1822 – has not been brought about by human activity but it shows how helpless, how utterly irrelevant our aspirations are in the face of natural disaster.

The eruption – relatively small by volcanic standards – has brought us back to the time before Wilbur and Orville Wright invented airplanes. Over 20,000 flights have been cancelled across Europe and hundreds of thousands are stranded. It seems that will be the case for several days to come.

This will have an impact on businesses this morning as they discover that people due to return to work are unable to get home. The implications for an island economy so dependent on export revenues and tourism are significant and unless airports are reopened this week a difficult situation might deteriorate.

British business has estimated that airport closures has cost their economy at least €1.04 billion, with losses set to rise at the rate of €260 million for every day of further disruption. The airline industry has lost an estimated €740m. Economists at the Centre for Economic and Business Research say that Britain’s wider economy is expected to lose at least €115m a day.

The immediate implications are obvious enough but the bigger, far more important lesson is long term. It is that we cannot ignore the natural world and whether you believe in global warming or not is really irrelevant.

We cannot, as James Lovelock has so calmly but frighteningly pointed out to us, expect to survive in a fatally damaged, abused and polluted environment.

In the last while the energy seems to have drained from the debate around climate change. Only time will tell whether this is a victory for science or propaganda but the stakes are higher than in any bet made at any time in human history.

So why is the environment so ill served by nearly all political parties? Eyjafjallajökull’s moment of notoriety provides some hints. It is nearly 200 years since it last erupted and that glacial time scale neatly frames the long-term thinking required in environmental policy. There is no quick or easy fix. No party – or generation – will hold office long enough, not even Fianna Fáil, to reap the political benefits of long-term strategies. Politics and the environment exist in different time zones and we may all, or our children, pay the price.

Our distant ancestors might have seen Eyjafjallajökull’s stifling cloud as a bad omen or reprimand from some unknown force.

Today we, secure in our science and rational thought, would laugh at the idea. We may be wrong to do so. The cloud hanging over Europe is indeed an ill omen – an omen that too much time is slipping by without the natural world receiving proper attention and protection. It is just a glimpse of how broken ecosystems define humanity’s capacity to lead what we have come to see as normal lives.