The Terror of Volcanoes

If you follow the news, you’d think that the volcanic eruption under Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull glacier is nothing but a story about an enormous travel headache that happens to come with some nasty economic repercussions. Thousands of flights to and from cities all over Europe have been cancelled. Poor John Cleese, for example. Stranded in Norway because planes can’t fly in skies that have been made dangerous by spreading volcanic ash, Cleese managed to return to England by taking a $5,000 cab ride to Brussels, and then catching a train back to London.

In a letter to a friend written a few years after Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E., Pliny the Younger, who managed to escape Pompeii, recorded the terror of those days. He writes that on the second day of the disaster, “Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.” But the human story has no bearing on the bigger story. A volcanic eruption is a geologic event, and as such, it occurs blankly—supremely oblivious to the trials and tribulations of the mice and men who live on the planet.  Where earthquakes tend to be over rather rapidly, volcanic eruptions, such as Vesuvius, or the more recent Krakatoa eruption in 1883, often last for a long time and can lead to changes in topography and even the climate.

Civilization effectively propels itself forward by guiding people to join in and contribute to a human-constructed world. It blinds us to the majestic indifference of nature, protecting us, making us forget that we are, in the scheme of things, as insignificant as ants. Whenever we truly face the meaning of the moiling and toiling rumblings and explosions deep within the earth—or, heaven forbid, far out in the universe itself—we gasp in terror.

Because we don’t like these moments of realization, we’ve learned to do things to prevent them from occurring. We follow our daily routines, we tend to our appetites, we make the best-laid plans, and we willingly commit ourselves to irrational belief systems—mercifully forgetting, most of the time, anyway, that in geologic time all of this is pointless. The volcano lying under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier had lain dormant for 200 years. That’s nothing in geologic terms, but it was plenty of time for human beings to forget it was dangerous and turn the whole area into hiking trails for tourists.

Long ago, I was persuaded of the truth of evolution. But unlike a lot of people, I’m not a happy camper about it. Add together volcanoes and Darwin, and you arrive at a world where we are nothing but an accident perched precariously on the surface of the planet. It’s no wonder that so many religious people, for whom human beings exist purposefully in relation to a God who created them, reject both evolution and geologic time. How can a God who acts in history—who demands obedience and asks for honor, who responds to individual and group prayers, who feels our woes with us, who loves us—fit in with volcanoes and the slow, geologic ticking of evolution? And to add insult to injury, the principles of evolution do not lead to an end-game. Who knows how long, or even if, the branch of Homo sapiens will endure?

This morning, the countryside around the Icelandic volcano was rocked by strong tremors. There’s no consensus among volcano experts (a term that’s a bit of an oxymoron, don’t you think, given that volcanic experts don’t seem to know much about predicting volcanic behavior) on how long the Icelandic volcanic eruption will last. This much is certain: Anyone who thinks that the Icelandic volcano eruption is only about travel disruption, or human health, or the economy, understands little about either nature or civilization. Or, for that matter, the disinterest of God.