Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all – no one's around to write horror stories.
I was 15 when Chernobyl happened, I've been vaguely thinking about it for most of my life. But somewhere around 2015, it occurred to me that I didn't know how it happened, which seemed like a pretty bizarre lapse in my understanding of the world and how it functions.
I sometimes wish we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening-you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth-that would get people very concerned about climate change.
The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster.
When we have a disaster in Japan, I wonder, how can we prevent our lives and traditions and history from the disaster?
Americans do not have a good track record when it comes to preparing for disasters, unless they see a clear possibility of personally being in harms way.
We cannot prevent hurricanes or earthquakes, floods or volcanic eruptions. But we can ensure that both people and communities are better prepared and more resilient.
Even though I now know that it's likely the Earth will suffer through mega-volcanoes or meteor strikes that could take out millions or billions of people, I feel less anxious about it because I actually understand what the threats are. There's nothing like researching something exhaustively to make it less terrifying.
My anxiety about disasters is lower. The more you know, the less scary any of this stuff is. And that's my hope for the book. I want to get people's attention and tell them very valuable and ultimately hopeful information, and you find out nothing is as scary as your imagination.
