Unlike Winter Storm Q, which brought windswept pellet snow to our region and left behind a scenic landscape, its successor dropped heavy wet snow on Missouri, producing slushy roads and taking down tree limbs and power lines; we lost several large branches from our beloved magnolia, among other damage.
Yet, this has always been nature's way of molding the landscape; she may consist of uncountable fragile components but her means of rearranging the planet can be dramatic and heavy-handed. We marvel at her canyons, mountains, plains, wetlands and seascapes without giving much consideration to the floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards, glaciers, wildfires and tectonic forces that were instrumental in their creation. Though these natural forces have been molding Earth's landscapes for 4.6 billion years, it has only been during the last few thousand years, when they have impacted human ecosystems, that they have come to be known as natural disasters.
We humans have learned to monitor and predict some aspects of nature's fury but we are powerless to prevent them from impacting our lives. What we can do is to avoid putting ourselves in harms way by heeding the forecasts of meteorologists and climatologists, stop building homes in high risk areas, adopt technologies that are shown to be protective and, most importantly, learn to respect nature's power and acknowledge its essential role in the ongoing evolution of our magnificent planet.
