Fire, water, and evolution in action
In the aftermath of the Palisades fire, it red-dawned
that approximately 10 per cent of the 1.6 million homes in Los Angeles are uninsured, for many private insurers opt out of covering catastrophes in California.
Obviously, insurance-attuned way of life is destined to transform, as the entire American system of the world should, be it via Greenland Purchase or Kiribati’s. (That being said, I’m a foreigner, not the US citizen, albeit my second cousin lives in LA, therefore my outlook may be biased.) On the other way, FAIR last-resort insurer has the meagre $377 million available last week for paying claimants. Maybe it is connected somehow to the fact that the budget deficit in sight of the Biden-Blinken-Harris administration pushout toppled records (yes, again), surpassing last year’s numbers by 40 %. Meanwhile the state debt costs now ca. $308 billion to maintain, i.e., about 1/6 of the total federal spending projected in 2025. It almost looks like the US, not Russia, were the victim of crippling sanctions.
In the greater scheme of things, inevitable remake of the Great Cascadia earthquake will inflict much greater damage than all fires like Palisades/Malibu and global warming of the recent times, combined.
But let’s look at the side of positive. In a way, the entire history of humankind since the Toba supereruption, which unleashed a millenium-long winter on the Garden of Eden, could be seen as a chronicle of adaptation to changing policies of the natural disasters insurance.
For example, China civilization as we know it may have emerged in response to catastrophic alluvial events and rapidly changing conditions on the North China Plain.
Look at the historical demographic maps of China depicting the Han dynasty era: you’ll observe entire regions, densely populated nowadays but devoid of cities and hamlets then. This is because Bohai Bay coastline and Yangtze estuary in these places were then inundated.
Wuhan, the city of Central China where the current Quarantine Era in world politics started, sits on Jianghan Plain, that was once a large wetland, not especially generous to agriculture, but gradually, from the Spring and Autumn era till the Sui and Tang dynasties, colossal dikes and dams were built, and lo, Jianghan has been a very important food grain region for China ever since.
This is an example of sociotechnological evolution in action, substituting natural mechanisms stifled by our current status as apex sentient superpredators.
