Coping with Natural Disasters the Natural Way: Roger del Moral @ Town Hall

This Tuesday, at 7:30pm, UW professor Roger del Moral visits Town Hall to discuss his findings in natural disasterology. Tickets are $5 at the door, and if we know Seattle, people will gladly pay that much for an evening of science and, hopefully, slides of volcano eruptions or or hurricanes or whatnot.

The thesis of his talk, as we understand it, is that thanks to the ever-greater numbers of people around, natural disasters kill more and destroy more "property." Del Moral’s research leads him to believe that there are restorative shortcuts to helping the environment come back after explosions, floods, fires, and combinations thereof -- and that we need to start taking these shortcuts if we don't want, for instance, people to starve for years in the wake of disasters.

Del Moral has been studying vegetation responses to natural disasters, especially on Mt. St. Helens, and noting how the usual theories about ecological succession, where things have to happen in order, step by step, don't always hold true. His new book, Environmental Disasters, Natural Recovery and Human Responses (with co-author Lawrence Walker), makes the case that a huge human population, shrinking resources, and subsequently greater consequences to natural disasters have produced a crisis situation that we'll need to adapt our thinking to, and quickly.