In light (so to speak) of the wildfires currently incinerating parts of California, time.com has an article up, "Why Californians Don't Leave." I'll save you a few minutes of reading. The article lays the blame on our brains' faulty risk assessment. Apparently, we believe that, even though an obvious hazard for major disaster is right outside our doors, we convince ourselves that disaster will never actually befall us personally. Our neighbors, sure, but not us.
Hooey. The real reason we live in disaster-prone places is that we have to live somewhere.
I was born in California: drought, wildfire and earthquake territory. When I was young, we moved briefly to Washington and lived for a few months within view of a very-recently-erupted (at the time) volcano. I spent most of my growing-up years in Oregon, where I got to experience floods and a very memorable earthquake, plus the periodic warnings that the volcanoes may be waking up. Oh, and the nuclear power plant was just on the other side of the hills, although that got shut down eventually. In college, I moved to Nebraska, where the two basic seasons are "blizzard" and "tornado." Now we live in Ohio, where, in addition to the occasional tornado, I'm back to flooding. Though I haven't experienced it yet, I understand earthquakes are not unheard of.
Nowhere on the planet is completely immune to natural and not-so-natural disasters. Some locations are more prone to more predictable disasters than other locations, but every spot has it's own buffet of potential catastrophe. The reason we choose to live in the paths of wildfire, earthquake, drought, and flood is not that we underestimate the threat; we just have an inertial preference for the devil we know.
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