EDITORIAL – Angry earth: There is a limit to a mother's patience

Had the landslide that killed hundreds of people in Southern Leyte last Friday been an isolated incident, it would have been easier to attribute the disaster to man-made causes like illegal logging and expect to be believed.

But while illegal logging is nevertheless a valid angle to look into, the fact that the landslide came on the heels of other environmental disasters worldwide suggests that, more than just isolated occurences, we could be seeing a sustained manifestation of an angry earth.

As news of the landslide became major news on CNN, the global television network was also underpinning it with other environmental stories worthy of immediate concern. One such story on the same day was about the unusually rapid melting of glaciers in Greenland.

A few months ago, one of the most savage earthquakes in history ravaged the heavily populated mountain regions of Pakistan, killing people by the tens of thousands, with the death toll continuing to rise even to this day.

And who could ever forget those stark video footages of the horrendous tsunami that swamped and wiped out many coastal villages and resorts in South and Southeast Asia just the year before.

While much of the toll was caused by the surprising lack of preparedness by the vaunted American emergency and rescue services, still the destruction wrought by hurricans Katrina on the Florida panhandle and Gulf Coast was simply mind-boggling.

And then there is the perennially battered continent of Africa where many countries are not only reeling from diseases like AIDS but seem to have become permanent hosts to droughts and and resulting famines.

Right now, in our part of the world, in the southern Pacific, the tiny island nation of Nauru continues to sink into the ocean because of rising sea levels, caused in part by such phenomena as the melting of glaciers mentioned earlier.

All of these disturbing incidents point to one direction, an earth that is giving back what we have long been dishing it. The earth can't take it no more. There is, after all, a limit to a mother's patience.