Nature's Ways

After Vic Fischer's birthday party yesterday we went a little further south to Potter's Marsh.  It was cold and windy with errant raindrops thrown in.  While the birches on the hillside above were showing green, the grasses at the marsh weren't.

Below the end of the boardwalk was a moose carcass.  Don't know who took it down - bear, wolves?  Hunger?  Old age?  But it's the natural cycle when humans are not part of the picture.

I started thinking about this when I read a story in the ADN about the aftermath of the Hawaii volcano eruption last year.  The article talks about the volcano as a  'disaster.'   And sure, it was for the people who lost their houses either to the lava or the toxic gases that make the other houses inhabitable.

But back in 1970 when I worked at a Peace Corps training program in Hilo, Volcano National Park was already there and people nearby lost their houses in an eruption a few years later.  The volcanic eruption is different from other natural disasters the earth is experiencing because it's not, to the best of my knowledge, related to climate change.  This is a natural process that has been happening for millennia.  

Kīlauea started as a submarine volcano, gradually building itself up through underwater eruptions of alkali basalt lava before emerging from the sea with a series of explosive eruptions[20] about 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. Since then, the volcano's activity has likely been as it is now, a continual stream of effusive and explosive eruptions of roughly the same pattern as its activity in the last 200 or 300 years.[21]

The people who bought houses there knew about Pele, it was part of the beauty of the area.

[I've just deleted the rest of this post because it was wandering thoughts and needed more editing.  This is enough for now. Maybe I'll do a Part 2 of this post.  The basic idea was that human existence is hardly necessary for the earth.  In fact humans are wantonly destructive of the paradise they were given.]