Quoth The Raven

"Whereas what we see in the newspaper, 'Man Killed By Falling Tree' for example, is not a tragedy."
"It is for the poor sod under the tree."

Yesterday I spoke of making good things come from the awfulness inflicted and intended upon us. It seems that when someone manages to bring good out of something generally seen as negative, everyone is surprised that such a thing is possible. "How marvelous that lady is," we say "who has lost her child to violence/disease/disaster, and now runs a charity to help others thusly affected." What we are seeing in cases like this, though, is not the defeat of something negative but a human expression of one of the main principles of the natural world.
Chaos theory states that the pattern will be identical regardless of the scale at which we look at it. The mother of the murdered child starts a charity supporting other families of murder victims. A gardener spreads the rotten remains of dead plants onto his garden to make new plants grow. A forest gets dry in the summer heat and a forest fire starts, clearing the dead wood and leaving space and sunlight and fertile ash for the new growth to begin. Tectonic plates push up against each other and create mountains on one side, and trenches on the other. At every level of reality what we see as destruction is the world providing the fuel and substance for change and new creation.
Human beings find it hard to see these workings of the world as part of how life must and should be. When people see forest fires they think of the damage to property or the little burning animals (who are very often far too fly to get caught up in it, and frequently are only thwarted in their attempts to hop it in time by intrusions such as roads where there oughtn't be one), when they see a volcanic eruption or an earthquake they feel for those who lose their lives or families and homes. We try to 'manage' forests to keep them how they were in the days of Robin Hood or other daftness. We panic when the predominate species in a forest changes, or a group of animals changes its feeding grounds, or a species becomes extinct. But looked at in terms of the planet, these things are natural. Do you think we'd have had much joy in becoming the dominant species if the dinosaurs hadn't died out? They'd have eaten us for breakfast, opposable thumbs and all.
It may be hard for us with at best eighty years of hindsight, and really no reliable record of the history of the last hundred years, let alone the last hundred million, to see what seems to be massive change as anything other than worrying. However what we do know tells us that the temperature of the planet has fluctuated massively within even the time humans have walked the planet. We know that countless species failed to keep up the evolutionary pace and were Darwinned into the fossil record. We know the amount of the surface of the planet covered by water or ice or land has changed to and fro. We also know about the water cycle and the nitrogen cycle. We know that there are some species of tree whose seed pods need fire to crack them open. But somehow, because we're here we think it must mean something.
It doesn't. It's just the earth carrying on. Species are becoming extinct, yes, but others are evolving. And some of these species are becoming extinct because of what we do. This is no different than one species becoming extinct because another is better adapted at exploiting the same habitat. Some species are becoming extinct because of the usual non-human factors, like a predator getting that bit faster or smarter, or because increasing biodiversity has cut into their share of the pie.
We also don't seem to grasp that we are a species. If there is no food for a bird in one area, it moves on to another. For is it not written "Why should the bird swoop to earth where there is no gin for him?" The same is true of humans. Within your lifetime you will look for different things in a place to live. Early on you want whatever you can afford, preferably with a pub nearby. Later on if you have a family you want to be in a safe area with good schools. Later still you go for areas with as few drunken young people and screaming kids as possible. I myself have tired of the pubs and clubs and general scrum in London, and now feel more at home in the small towns of the West Country, where there is more gin for me. Society works the same way. The London Docklands were a centre of commerce, then a run down grimy wasteland, and now they're very very expensive property.
So what am I saying? Sod Greenpeace, buy an SUV? Nope, sorry. I'm saying there is nothing new on earth, just matter and energy recycling and taking new forms. That is true in physics, biology, geology, geography, society, personality, all things, as above, so below. And it is true that over many things, especially the large scale 'disaster' stuff, we have little or no control. But in some things, we do. The view on dealing with forest fires is moving away from preventing them and putting them out as soon as possible, through controlled burns to the far saner approach of having small localised fire defenses for property, then getting as far as possible out of the way and just leaving it to it. If you choose to live in an area prone to forest fires, you have accept large fire insurance premiums and the possibility of being evacuated for three weeks at a time, or go and live somewhere else. The planet needs to regenerate, so it will.
The lesson here is that if we try to stop the natural rhythm of the planet, or try to be outside the rest of the world controlling it, or believe ourselves to be an exception to the rules that make the planet work, one of two things will happen: either we get the evolution we deserve, or we fail entirely and go the way of the T-Rex. Human beings can adapt, the conditions our forebears have lived through prove that. We can survive breathing air we can see, we can take higher levels of UV than we're currently used to etc. etc., but would we want to? Do you feel better standing at a bus stop next to a row of traffic, or on a clifftop breathing sea air? Do you want to be whatever we'd have to evolve into to deal with a planet where the systems that used to recycle water and energy are pumping poisons round and round the systems?
Our adaptability is meant to carry us through the natural fluctuations of the biosphere. It is there precisely because the planet needs to freeze, thaw, flood, burn and rearrange its crust in order for it to provide what we need to live. What we need to do is to try our best to learn about and understand the natural behavior of the planet, and seek to adapt ourselves to working with it, not trying to work against it. Most importantly we need to learn when to back off and leave nature to it. The planet has ways of cleaning and purifying itself, and if we allow it to, it will heal from the damage we have done to it. If there was a nuclear holocaust and all the humans died the ants and cockroaches would get fat off our bodies, mutate, evolve, and eventually make a movie where bold earth insectoids fight a galactic war with evil unthinking bipeds from another planet.
So don't cry for the natural disasters that are natural but not really disasters. Care, yes, for the people affected, and help in the regeneration that follows, but it's not a tragedy, it's not an omen, it's not the end of the world, it's just a continuity thing. Do not worry if the farmed fields of corn encourage a species that pushes out one that was there before. If we were not here the temperature and climate of the planet would fluctuate, in certain times the conditions would cause one plant to flourish, which would cause the population of one or two insects to expand, which would allow certain birds to raise more chicks to adulthood and so on. It is acceptable for us as a species to change the world, for us to expand our numbers and move into a variety of new habitats. Every species changes the dynamic of the world around it. That's the way the web of connections between predator and prey, plant and animal, soil and that which lives in it, have always worked. So our choice as a species is get good at being part of that, or risk not being part of it any more.
That's planet earth for you. If I hear of any more desirable real estate, I'll let you know.