Hell and High Water

The last few years have been the worst period on record for environment disasters and experts are predicting far worse to come. Tim Redford reports.

Here is how to become a disaster statistic. Move to a shantytown on an unstable hillside near a tropical coast. Crowd together as more and more people arrive. Wait for the world to get a little warmer. More evaporation means more rain, which means the slopes will get progressively more waterlogged. One day, the land will turn to mud and the neighbourhood will begin to go downhill. Literally. And if the slope is steep enough, the landslide will accelerate to more than 200 miles an hour. Peter Walker, of the international federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, has seen it all too often. “First, your house has been washed away. Second, the land that you farmed has disappeared. (1) _____________”

In the last decade, floods, droughts, windstorms, earthquakes, avalanches, volcanic eruptions and forest fires have become increasingly common. There has been disastrous flooding in Asia, Africa, Central and South America and

Oceania. (2) Storms have been getting worse everywhere too, with a growing number of hurricanes hitting the US, the Caribbean and Central America. Drought has affected large areas of Sub-Saharan Africa for years and many other zones are becoming drier. (3) A number of nations have already been in armed conflict over water, and drought in the West of the US has resulted in enormous forest fires.

Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have always been a threat in certain parts of the world. A volcanic eruption virtually wiped out the small Caribbean island of Montserrat in 1997 and there have been serious earthquakes in Greece, Turkey and El Salvador. The quake that rockedthe small Central American country of El Salvador in 2001 came as the people were still rebuilding their houses and recovering from 1998's Hurricane Mitch. So why is nature beginning to turn on us? (4) Population of the world is growing at the rate of 10,000 people an hour, 240,000 every day, nearly 90 million a year, with most of the growth in the developing world.

People in agricultural areas, unemployed and sometimes undernourished, move to the cities, and then set up homes on poor soil, crowded into substandard buildings. (5) This has mainly been caused by the mismanagement of the world's resources: carbon emissions from rich countries; the activities of the big multinational companies; the deforestation of the world's forests. As a result, a hotter ocean breeds fiercer cyclones and hurricanes. It surrenders greater quantities of water as evaporation, and more powerful winds dumpthis water against mountainsides with increasing fury. Atlantic hurricanes, for instance, are 40 percent more intense now than they were 30 years ago.

Volcanoes and earthquakes are even more dangerous than in the past as around half the world's population now lives in cities. There are more than 500 active and semi-active volcanoes, about fifty of which erupt each year, and more than 500 million people now live within range of a volcanic eruption. An even greater number live at risk, in some degree, from earthquakes which have taken a toll of more than 1.6 million lives in the last hundred years.

All the betting from the disaster professionals is that things will get worse.

Professor McGuire, of University College London, is a volcanologist who has been warning for years that the world has not seen the worst nature can do. The worst eruption in human history was probably Mt Tambora in 1815, in Indonesia. It pumped so much dust into the stratosphere that it effectively cancelled the following summer in Europe and America.

6) "It reduced temperatures by maybe 6°C in some places and the whole planet was plunged into winter for years. And there are about two of these events every 100,000 years ..."

Exercise 11 Answer these questions.

1.What is the attitude of the journalist towards the future?

2.Why are there now more hurricanes, floods and droughts?

3.What could be the biggest threat to the planet in the future?

Exercise 12 Read the poem.

From a distance the world looks blue and green,
and the snow-capped mountains white.
From a distance the ocean meets the stream,
and the eagle takes to flight.
From a distance, there is harmony,
and it echoes through the land.
It's the voice of hope, it's the voice of peace,
it's the voice of every man.

- from the lyrics for 'From A Distance' Bette Midler

1.Choose the right variant. avalanche means…

a) windstorm

b) a mass of snow, ice and rock that falls down the side of a mountain

c) flood

d) cyclone

2.Choose the right variant. Why is nature beginning to ________ us?

a) turn round

b) turn on

c) split up

d) take after

3. Choose the right variant.

a) Who live in this house?

b) Who lives in this house?

c) Who does live in this house?

d) Who living in this house?

4.Choose the right variant. __________ organizations do you know that provide aid after disasters?

a) What kind

b) Whose

c) Why

d) What

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Exercise 8 Change partners and talk about what you wrote. Change again and share what you heard.	\|	References

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