Man The Gambler

Man the Gambler

Some of the most densely populated places on earth are either close to, or even below sea-level, and the seas are rising.

Many people cluster in places they know are high risk: of earthquake, flood, or volcanic eruption. These places happen to be some of the most fertile in the world, like the Nile Delta, and the Tigris and Euphrates in the ancient world, places like Java and the deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra in India and Bangladesh, or of the Mississippi delta in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Why do they have high populations? They are highly fertile, the basis for Empires like Egypt and Sumer. Adaptable humans are gamblers. Every farmer or peasant bets their crops will flourish; they don't always. A Javanese farmer can expect bumper crops because of benign climate and rich soil, but he might be ruined by a volcanic eruption. So, he cultivates crops, right up the slope of Mount Lurus, or any of the 33 other volcanoes on the island, and if it erupts, he could be wiped out. If not, for this season, he's golden.

Women are probably less gamblers than enablers. Their first priority is to protect their children by ensuring that a man supports them. If he insists that their land on the volcano is the best, they aren't going to demand that the family move--until it's too late.

Romans took another kind of gamble, when forests were cut down for Roman baths with the bet that nothing would change: as I describe on my Ephesus page, everything did: Ephesus, Rome's Asian capital before Constantinople, has been a ruin for two thousand years.

Which leads us to dangerous climate change (a label preferable to 'global warming'): aren't the deniers, like EXXON, Senator Inhofe and Rush, gambling with all our lives? They're gambling that dangerous climate change isn't going to happen, even though all the know-it-alls say it is. Everyone who denies climate change, or our part in it, is gambling that it just ain't so.

What happens to people who lose their gamble?

In places like Java or Bangladesh, farms, even farmers get burned out or washed away. Some who gambled don't survive.

In the case of dangerous climate change, we may all lose, eventually. However, the people who suffer first, are those least at fault, in poor, under-developed countries. Therefore, high stakes gamblers can keep on gambling, denying and "winning" through short-term "investments." Yet, even the winners lose if warming is unchecked, if we pass tipping points like the arctic tundra melting to release huge methane deposits.

Can't we gamble that preventative measures could work; instead of gambling that they aren't needed?