Natural

Today is the first anniversary of the Boxing Day Tsunami (so called, I presume, only in the half a dozen countries that mark Boxing Day - I wonder what everyone else calls it?)

I don't have much to say about the event itself, what can you say?

But there is one point I want to make about 'natural' disasters. We can't stop earthquakes, Tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes, floods, and the like (although we can make some of them more likely), but the effect they have on people isn't inevitable it depends on how we organise society. The Tsunami took hours to cross the Indian ocean; in that time people in India and Sri Lanka could have been warned of the danger and gone inland. We have the technology and the resources, we just don't use them that way.

According to Oxfam many more women than men died in the Tsunami. That's not 'natural' that's the result of a sexist and misogynist society.