Can we conquer nature?

On March 8, 2012, the Washington post published an article about the triple disaster in Japan on 3/11 "A year after the disaster of 3/11, Japan looks inward "

Fred Hiatt starts out very interesting with "the reaction of the two countries" , Japan, America after Hurricane Katrina, and a quote from some well-known people.

With that he points out a good question : can we conquer nature?. Really, "Can we conquer nature?".

It's easy to think that man has conquered nature. We have risen from subsistence nomads to a mass of billions, settled for the most part in cities of glass, steel and air-conditioned bliss, writes Mark Wilson in this week's Mate. We have crossed oceans, bridged them and even hold them back around us as they threaten to drown our homes. It's easy to think we can do whatever we please and that man and his many inventions can conquer all.

A few years back as the oceans streamed relentlessly inland across Asia, washing away hundreds of years of development and many of the individuals responsible for it, we all lamented the force of nature and our powerlessness to stop her in full flight. Then we watched in shock and awe as Hurricane Katrina pounded New Orleans, a proud city in the most powerful nation of Earth. Despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a state-of-the-art military and millions more on flood protection, early warning systems and civil defence infrastructure, man was comprehensively defeated.

While I agree we can't completely defeat Nature, we can, with good planning and engineering, mitigate natures effects.

It's time we learnt a valuable lesson: nature always wins and we must adapt and if that means moving our towns away from these focal points of nature's wrath then, as hard as it is, we probably should. Our role is to grow with nature and learn from nature not to defeat and do better than nature