At lunch we talked about the earthquake and the tsunami. And we talked about the power plants and the explosions and the evacuation zones.
“Imagine if,” he said. “Imagine if it was thousands of years ago and they cut a tree down in the forest—a log to cross a gorge.”
“And imagine if the log broke and people fell and died.”
“Imagine if because of that broken log all such logs were banned in the future, and they rejected any other kinds of ingenious ways of crossing the gorge. Imagine if because people died thousands of years ago, they rejected all efforts to build bridges, rejected any effort to improve the technology, to find a better and safer solution.”
“Imagine where we would be today if that’s the way it was back then.”
He sat there staring at us over his glass of iced tea. There was silence at the table.
I sat there for a moment waiting for someone to respond. No one did.
“And imagine,” I said. “Imagine if when that log hit the bottom of the gorge it rendered that place uninhabitable for tens and tens of thousands of years.”
More silence at the table.
It’s hard to find solid information about Fukushima. It’s hard to know what is really going on over there. But it looks like things might not be going particularly well [Japan May Have Lost Race/The Guardian].
This is no mere tree falling in a forest.