China's elderly care conundrum

China's elderly care conundrum
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6222586.stm

Jie Jie Cai is four months old. He sits in a green chair by the balcony, and gets plenty of attention.

Attention from his mother Jia Rui, his father Wen Kang, grandfather number one Wang Jun, grandmother number one Chun Hong, grandfather number two Zi Jin, and grandmother number two Chun Ping.

They each follow everything that Jie Jie does - which, at the age of four months, is not all that much.

Right now Jie Jie has absolutely no idea how much his family is counting on him.

When he gets older, he will have to support them all. Six adults - and just one child. This is the effect of China's one-child policy.

This isn't the only part of the world where this is happening. Aging population is happening worldwide. The issue of social time bombs ticking to their last was eliminated by effective family planning solutions. However, they seemed to have backfired, at least in this particular case. Having gotten too carried away, now there are too few young people to maintain the older population. Factories are beginning to have difficulty hiring workers.

Nevertheless, there are countries still having too little to feed too much, and likely having this problem exacerbated in the future. The population of Earth is increasing (regardless of aging population), and more people are taking more resources. More people are liable to take up more room on Earth, and no more new land is popping out of the sea (All right, maybe Surtsey did, but the next one off the coast of Hawaii's going to appear in 60,000 years time. There'll likely be more than 10-11 billion people on Earth by then.)

The fact of the matter is, there are more people. It is impossible to prevent people from procreating, and impossible still to prevent people from consuming resources, short of nuclear warfare, which is even worse for the Earth. One solution is to ensure that we all use less resources. "Live Earth" attempted to give us some small suggestions to try this. Campaigns still go on, some to prevent overfishing, some to eat less meat.

Nonetheless, there are still too many people for the Earth to sustain long. We may try to control what we can, but no amount of campaigning will prevent people from eating and from drinking and from switching on the television. Maybe in the future we'll invent some wonderful new technology to prevent us from using so much. Either that, or humanity will destroy itself in one all-damning act. Until then, we will just have to wait and see.

Hurricane Dean strikes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/caribbean/news/story/2007/08/070817_deanstrikes.shtml

In St Lucia, Martinique, and Dominica, the authorities are counting the cost of the damage inflicted by Hurricane Dean.

The storm strengthened into a Category 4 Hurricane after roaring through the eastern Caribbean.

Parts of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, were on hurricane watch on Saturday.

A weekend hurricane watch also remains in place for Jamaica and parts of Cuba.

The British Virgin Islands, US Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico were on tropical storm watch. The US National Hurricane Centre expected this to be discontinued later on Saturday.

Several cataclysms have wrought much damage to this Earth, and rather recently too. Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir, the Leyte landslide and the recent Peruvian earthquake stand as testimony to this. Some of these, in fact, have been affected by human interference, or given slow relief.

For example, the response to Hurricane Katrina was shown to be severely slow, with federal aid only coming 5 days after the incident. Preparation was also shown to be lacking, as the main emphasis was placed on evacuation, a plan which did not account for those who could not leave under their own power, such as the elderly or disabled.

It has been theorized that the impact of Hurricane Katrina was multiplied by global warming generating ideal conditions for hurricanes. Mining activities may have caused the Leyte landslide. To be brief, it is not paranoid to say that human activity is responsible for the growing impact of natural disasters. Unpreparedness and global warming are not the only factors.

In the wake of Hurricane Dean, police were forced to step in to stop looting in Mexico. After a disaster, the opportunists will naturally turn up to get what they can. Why do I raise these points? These are to show that the natural disaster is significant, but the human disaster is never to be overlooked.

In my opinion, whenever people see a new disaster on the horizon, preparation for the disaster is as key as the preparation of the aftermath. When disasters strike and preparation is wanting, we have to learn to better avoid such things. When looting is abound, a police task force is sent promptly. However, this is merely attacking the symptoms of a problem and not the cause.

Areas likely to be hit, or to cause problems must be found, and the problems rectified. If global warming is indeed likely to cause future problems with hurricanes and tornadoes, we should try to avoid this bleak future. While many elements of a natural disaster are out of our control, we should aim to prevent them as par as possible, and to deal with the consequences effectively and quickly.