Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen Paperback - 2002

Politics is not the art of the possible.
It consists in choosing between
the disastrous and the unpalatable.
--John Kenneth Galbraith

History is the science
of things which are never repeated.
--Paul Valéry

It was 11 a.m. on a fine summer morning in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, when the driver of an automobile carrying two passengers made a wrong turn. The car was not supposed to leave the main street, and yet it did, pulling up into a narrow passageway with no escape. It was an unremarkable mistake, easy enough to make in the crowded, dusty streets. But this mistake, made on this day and by this driver, would disrupt hundreds of millions of lives, and alter the course of world history.

The automobile stopped directly in front of a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb student, Gavrilo Princip. A member of the Serbian terrorist organization Black Hand, Princip couldn't believe his luck. Striding forward, he reached the carriage. He drew a small pistol from his pocket. Pointed it. Pulled the trigger twice. Within thirty minutes, the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, the carriage's passengers, were dead. Within hours, the political fabric of Europe had begun to unravel.

In the days that followed, Austria used the assassination as an excuse to begin planning an invasion of Serbia. Russia guaranteed protection to the Serbs, while Germany, in turn, offered to intercede on Austria's behalf should Russia become involved. Within just thirty days, this chain reaction of international threats and promises had mobilized vast armies and tied Austria, Russia, Germany, France, Britain, and Turkey into a deadly knot. When the First World War ended five years later, ten million lay dead. Europe fell into an uncomfortable quiet that lasted twenty years, and then the Second World War claimed another thirty million. In just three decades, the world had suffered two engulfing cataclysms. Why? Was it all due to a chauffeur's mistake?

On the matter of the causes and origins of the First World War, of course, almost nothing has been left unsaid. If Princip touched things off, to the British historian A.J.P. Taylor the war was really the consequence of railway timetables, which locked nations into a sequence of military preparations and war declarations from which there was no escape. The belligerent states, as he saw it, "were trapped by the ingenuity of their preparations." Other historians point simply to German aggression and national desire for expansion, and suggest that the war was inevitable once Germany had become unified under Bismarck a half century earlier. The number of specific causes proposed is not much smaller than the number of historians who have considered the issue, and even today major new works on the topic appear frequently. It is worth keeping in mind, of course, that all this historical "explanation" has arrived well after the fact.

In considering how well we understand the natural rhythms of human history, and in judging how able we are nowadays to perceive even the rough outlines of the future, it is also worth remembering that the century preceding 1914 had been like a long peaceful afternoon in European history, and that to historians of the time the wars seemed to erupt like terrifying and inexplicable storms in a cloudless sky. "All the spawn of hell," the American historian Clarence Alvord wrote after the First World War, "roamed at will over the world and made of it a shambles. . . . The pretty edifice of . . . history, which had been designed and built by my contemporaries, was rent asunder. . . . The meaning we historians had read into history was false, cruelly false." Alvord and other historians thought they had discerned legitimate patterns in the past, and had convinced themselves that modern human history would unfold gradually along more or less rational lines. Instead, the future seemed to lie in the hands of bewildering, even malicious forces, preparing unimaginable catastrophes in the dark.

The First World War, the war sparked by "the most famous wrong turning in history," is the archetypal example of an unanticipated upheaval in world history, and one might optimistically suppose that such an exceptional case is never likely to be repeated. With the aid of hindsight, many historians now believe they understand the larger forces that caused the world wars of the twentieth century, and that we can once again see ahead with clear vision. But Alvord and his colleagues had similar confidence a century ago. What's more, few of us--professional historians included--seem any wiser when it comes to the present.

In the mid-1980s, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had existed for nearly three-quarters of a century, and it stood as a seemingly permanent fixture on the world stage. At that time, there were palpable fears in the United States that the U.S.S.R. was way ahead militarily, and that only with a concerted effort could the United States even stay competitive. In 1987, one would have had to scour the journals of history and political science to find even a tentative suggestion that the U.S.S.R. might collapse within half a century, let alone in the coming decade. Then, to everyone's amazement, the unthinkable became a reality--in just a few years.

In the wake of the U.S.S.R.'s unraveling, some historians leaped to another conclusion. Democracy seemed to be spreading over the globe, binding it up into one peaceful and lasting New World Order--the phrase favored, at least, by politicians in the West, who happily proclaimed the final victory of democracy (and capitalism) over communism. Some writers even speculated that we might be approaching "the end of history," as the world seemed to be settling into some ultimate equilibrium of global democracy, the end result of a centuries-long struggle for the realization of a deep human longing for individual dignity. Just a few years later, in what was then Yugoslavia, war and terrible inhumanity once again visited Europe. A momentary setback? Or the first ominous sign of things to come?

No doubt historians can also explain quite convincingly--though in retrospect, of course--why these events unfolded as they did. And there is nothing wrong with this kind of explanation; it is in the very nature of history that thinking and explanation must always proceed backwards. "Life is understood backwards," as Søren Kierkegaard once expressed the dilemma, "but must be lived forwards." And yet this need to resort always to explanations after the fact also underlines the seeming lack of any simple and understandable patterns in human affairs. In human history, the next dramatic episode, the next great upheaval, seems always to be lurking just around the corner. So despite their aim to find at least some meaningful patterns in history, it is probably true that many historians sympathize with the historian H. A. L. Fisher, who in 1935 concluded:

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another . . . and only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen. . . . The ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next.

Having read this far, you may be surprised to learn that this book is about ideas that find their origin not in history but in theoretical physics. It may seem decidedly odd that I have begun by recounting the beginning of the last century's major wars, and by trumpeting the capricious and convulsive character of human history. There is nothing new in the recognition that history follows tortuous paths, and that it has forever made a mockery of attempts to predict its course. My aim, however, is to convince you that we live in a special time, and that new ideas with a very unusual origin are beginning to make it possible to see why history is like it is; to see why it is and even must be punctuated by dramatic, unpredictable upheavals; and to see why all past efforts to perceive cycles, progressions, and understandable patterns of change in history have necessarily been doomed to failure.

A Faulty Peace

One may suspect that human history defies understanding because it depends on the unfathomable actions of human beings. Multiply individual unpredictability a billion times, and it is little wonder that there are no simple laws for history--nothing like Newton's laws, for instance, that might permit the historian to predict the course of the future. This conclusion seems plausible, and yet one should think carefully before leaping to it. If human history is subject to unpredictable upheavals, if its course is routinely and drastically altered by even the least significant of events, this does not make it unique as a process. In our world, these characteristics are ubiquitous, and it is just dawning on a few minds that there are very deep reasons for this.

The city of Kobe is one of the gems of modern Japan. It lies along the southern edge of the largest Japanese island of Honshu, and from there its seaport--the world's sixth largest--handles each year nearly a third of all Japan's import and export trade. Kobe has excellent schools, and its residents bask in what seems to be a haven of environmental stability. The city has good reason to call itself an "urban resort":peaceful sunrises have for centuries given way to bright, warm afternoons, which have in turn slipped into cool, tranquil evenings. If visiting Kobe, you would never guess that just beneath your feet invisible forces were preparing to unleash unimaginable violence. Unless, of course, you happened to be there at 5:45 a.m., January 17, 1995, when the calm suddenly fell to pieces.

At that moment, at a location just off the Japanese mainland, twenty kilometers southwest of Kobe, a few small pieces of rock in the ocean floor suddenly crumbled. In itself, this was unremarkable; minor rearrangements of the Earth's crust happen every day in response to the stresses that build up slowly as continental plates, creeping over the planet's surface, rub against one another. But this time, what started as a minor rearrangement did not end up that way. The crumbling of those first few rocks altered the stresses on others nearby, causing them also to break apart. Farther down the line, still others followed suit, and in just fifteen seconds the earth ripped apart along a line some fifty kilometers long. The resulting earthquake shook the ground with the energy of a hundred nuclear bombs, ruining every major road or rail link near Kobe and, in the city itself, causing more than a hundred thousand buildings to tilt or collapse. It sparked raging fires that took a week to control, and rendered inoperable all but 9 of the 186 berths in Kobe's port. Ultimately, the devastation killed five thousand people, injured thirty thousand, and left three hundred thousand homeless.

For centuries the area around Kobe had been geologically quiet. Then, in just a few seconds, it exploded. Why?

Japan is known for its earthquakes. A quake releasing ten times as much energy leveled the city of Nobi in central Japan in 1891, and others struck in 1927, 1943, and 1948 at other locations. The intervals between these great earthquakes--thirty-five, sixteen, and five years--hardly form a simple, predictable sequence, as is typical of earthquakes everywhere. If the historian H. A. L. Fisher failed to see in history "a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern," then so too have geophysicists failed utterly, despite immense effort, to discern any simple pattern in the Earth's seismic activity.

Modern scientists can chart the motions of distant comets or asteroids with stunning precision, yet something about the workings of the Earth makes predicting earthquakes extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible. Like the fabric of international politics, the Earth's crust is subject to sporadic and seemingly inexplicable cataclysms.

The Great Burnout

Not far to the west of Wyoming's vast Bighorn Basin, the wild and unrestrained landscape of Yellowstone National Park climbs into the Rockies. Immense forests of aspen and lodgepole pine clothe the mountains like a soft fabric, hiding black bears and grizzlies, moose, elk, deer, and innumerable species of birds and squirrels, all thriving in the seemingly pristine wilderness. Here and there a great rocky dome bursts out of the pines and towers over the park like a timeless sentinel. This is America's most beautiful natural park, set aside for protection back in 1872, and now the holiday destination of more than a million visitors each year.

But if Yellowstone is a place of almost unfathomable peace, it is also, sporadically, a place of terrific, incendiary violence.

Lightning sparks several hundred fires within the park every year. Most burn less than an acre, or maybe a few acres before dying out, while others carry on to destroy a few hundred or, far more rarely, a few thousand. As of 1988, even the largest fire ever recorded, in 1886, had burned only twenty-five thousand acres. So late in June of 1988, when a lightning bolt from a summer thunderstorm sparked a small fire near Yellowstone's southern boundary, no one was unduly alarmed. The fire was named the Shoshone, and the Forest Service began monitoring its progression. Within a week, storms had ignited a couple of other fires elsewhere in the park, and yet there was still no cause for concern. On July 10, when a brief rain fell, there were a handful of fires still smoldering, but all seemed well in hand and likely to burn out in the coming weeks. It didn't happen that way.

Whether it was the unusually dry conditions or the persistent winds, no one can really say, but by the middle of July the fires had only become bigger. "Up until then, with the fires," a National Park Service spokeswoman later recalled, "it was business as usual." But on July 14, a fire given the name Clover spread to forty-seven hundred acres, and another called the Fan grew to cover twenty-nine hundred acres. Four days later yet another fire, sparked in an area known as Mink Creek, had exploded to cover thirteen thousand acres, and forest managers were beginning to see things that no expert had envisaged. The Shoshone fire suddenly gathered new life, racing to consume more than thirty thousand acres in just a few days, and by August some two hundred thousand acres of the park either had burned or were burning; on all fronts flames were advancing five to ten miles each day under a smothering blanket of smoke ten miles high.

Over the next two months, more than ten thousand firefighters from across the country, using 117 aircraft and more than a hundred fire engines, struggled ineffectually as the blaze swept through the park. Eventually the flames consumed 1.5 million acres and more than $120 million in federal firefighting money, and lost momentum and dwindled only with the coming of the first snow in autumn. Somehow, from one or several insignificant bolts of lightning an unstoppable inferno had emerged that made the previous worst fire in the history of Yellowstone look like a backyard barbecue. What made this one so bad? And why didn't anyone see it coming?


From the Hardcover edition.

MARK BUCHANAN is a science writer who has worked on the editorial staff of Nature and as a features editor for New Scientist. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Virginia. He is also the author of Nexus, The Social Atom and Forecast.