800 million and me
I know not to read the comment section. Really I do. But I did it anyway.
“How stupid do you have to be to build your city next to an active volcano?”
I know not to say anything in the comment section. Really I do. And I didn’t. I did however write this essay.
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I read a slim, illustrated account of the destruction of Pompeii when I was ten or so. The text explained how the soil along the slope of Vesuvius created incredibly rich growing conditions. Besides, there had been no hint of an eruption in living memory, thus rendering the ominous conical form of the strata into a mere mountain. Of course, the rich colors and happy bustle of those early pages gave way to the urgent dark greys of doom and stilled crisis of white ash.
From my reading nook in New England, such a reward to risk ratio of building a life in such a location still felt unfathomable. I’d take snow snow regularly falling from the sky for months on end every year, than risk ashfall even once a millennium.
However even as a kid I knew the snow and winter weather of New England I loved was hardly a benign entity. I remember the extraordinary events of the Ice Storm of ‘98 when winter imprisoned my grandmother in her farmhouse without electricity or running water for weeks. Were it not for wood stoves and well water that storm could have been her last. Even in less extreme conditions, winter weather regularly causes road fatalities. Ice dams wreck rooves. Burst pipes finish foundations. The poor, elderly, and others on fixed incomes frequently struggle to heat their houses, and plenty of homes have been destroyed by sparks escaping from poorly-tended wood stoves.
The tale of Pompeii, along with others in that series of slim volumes–apartheid South Africa, the Salem Witch Trials, a retelling of Anne Frank’s diary–were written and illustrated so evocatively for young readers, that they sank deep into my soul, remaining there to this day.
If I had been in Pompeii in 79 AD, I wondered–eyes lost in the leaves of a nearby tree as the slim volume lay open by my side–how soon after I saw smoke crest the vineyards and roll down to our city I would alert my neighbors. How much smoke til I retreated inside? How much more til I decided to re-emerge into the city lanes and flee? How would I see when the cloud of ash darkened the mid-day sun into a premature twilight? Where then would I shelter once the pumice started raining from the skies? Would I have made it out in time? Or would my body have succumbed to the gases before becoming forever encased by baked ash? Might I have made it safely to the harbor, only to be pulled out to sea by an earthquake-summoned tsunami, my body anonymized under the waves?
As I child I really did wonder these things. My problem wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine living through such an event, it was that I could imagine it all too well. The same went for all the slim volumes in the series–what would I do if my family and I had to hide from the Nazis as the Frank family had? Or if I had been accused of witchcraft or were born Black in apartheid South Africa. I contemplated how essential it was to identify the threat early, and then swiftly decide on a course of action, be it running, going into hiding, or resisting. Best of all, I reasoned, was to avoid those situations as best as possible in the first place.
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The thing with people is that they’re drawn to volcanoes. You will find that some of the most ancient population centers on earth are situated in proximity to volcanos: Kilimanjaro looms over the Great Rift Valley, the birthplace of modern humans. Ancient settlers in Java and Peru appeased their neighboring volcanic deities through human sacrifice. Mount Fuji is only the most famous of 111 active volcanoes in Japan, and
The ancient Romans may not have known that Vesuvius was an active volcano, but they an other ancient mediterranean cultures identified Mt Etna as the site of Vulcan’s mighty subterranean forge. It was so well known that the constant diet of ash rendered the fields of Sicily the richest in the region, and millennia of empires fought for control of those fields to feed their people and troops.
To early humans all over the world, volcanos must have appeared as manifestations of both the spiritual and the terrestrial. More practically, as with Etna, the volcanic process regularly endows the surrounding soil with the richest nutrients and minerals, essential to humanity’s progress from hunter-gathering to agriculture. And in some places, like Iceland, subterranean volcanic activity fuels cutting-edge clean, affordable geothermal energy.
And the thing is, even if volcanos no longer signify deities, even if chemical fertilizers have supplanted the need for deposits of ash, and even if solar power if cheaper than geothermal, we do all live in the world with volcanos. You might be surprised to know that 4 million people today live within 30 km of Vesuvius. Or maybe you’d be surprised to learn that 800 million humans live within 100 km of an active volcano. What should be less surprising is that eruptions can affect billions beyond the activity zone. Perhaps you’ll remember how in 2010 over 10 million transatlantic travellers were affected by the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland. That three-month inconvenience shrinks when compared to the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history. The force of the explosion was so immense that it could be heard over 1,500 miles away and Tambora lost 30% of its height, or about 5,000 feet, after the eruption. Over 10,000 died immediately. All vegetation on the island was lost. A further 50 to 90 thousand died in the aftermath from famine and disease. The eruption saturated the atmosphere with ash, thereby lowering global temperatures and resulting in extreme weather and crop failures globally ( which I first learned about in Tim Harford’s podcast episode “Frankenstein Versus the Volcano.”)
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“How stupid do you have to be to build your city next to an active volcano?”
I live in the city of Cholua, in the state of Puebla, in Mexico, surrounded by flat farmland, which offers unobstructed views of the volcano Popocatepetl, a Nahuatl name meaning smoking mountain.
Settled in the 12th century before the common era, and urbanized a millennium later, the Choluteca positioned the settlement precisely equidistant between two volcanic outcrops: La Malinche to the north and to the south Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl.
Having grown rich from agriculture, textile production, and trade, the residents began constructing a great temple pyramid, shorter than the pyramids at Giza but significantly broader, with a total volume greater than any other pyramid in the world. Around the same time that Vesuvius erupted, nearby Popocatepetl discharged meters of ash upon Cholula, burying centuries of progress on the temple. A few generations later, construction resumed on what the local language called “the hand-made mountain.” However, around the 8th century of the common era the temple was abandoned, and quickly became overgrown.
Meanwhile, the work of their ancestors turned to legend and the Spanish recorded a story told of a giant named Xelhua, also known as the Architect, who went to Cholula and built a pyramid. Fearing the pyramid would soon reach the clouds, the gods “hurled fire on the pyramid” causing Xelhua to abandon it. I guess he was stupid to build his temple next to an active volcano.
Ironically, the Spanish didn’t seem to connect the legend of Xelhua’s pyramid in Cholula with the conveniently located and flat surfaced mound they found in the middle of Cholula which they mistook for a hill, perfectly situated to build a church. The pyramid structure was only rediscovered in the early 20th century and while much remains to be excavated the temple’s burial in volcanic ash has been firmly established.
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“How stupid do you have to be to build your city next to an active volcano?”
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Never read the comments, I knew that. For that matter, never go searching for news you mostly already know and makes you so stressed you could puke.
But there I was, searching for news I mostly already know and stressing myself out to the point of spewing chunks.
This was last May. I was 300 km away from Cholula in the humid, costal city of Veracruz, sitting in a mildewy AirBNB bedroom and cursing their shitty slow Wifi. I needed to find out what was happening in Cholula, what I’d missed in the previous four hours as we drove out of the Central Highland Valley to the coast in search of air clear of ash. I knew of course what was happening, broadly. Popo was erupting, just 34 km from my home.
You would think it would be hard to hide 3,300 meters of volcano from view, but somehow Popo had managed to do it for the last few days.
It had begun slowly at first, the ash. Across my car’s windscreen it cast the sheerest shadow, a pall so light its presence was only observable in the first moment of acceleration, when fine particles puffed out into bursts, momentarily aloft in my rearview mirror.
A New Englander forever and always, I adapted the adage I’d learned to greet anything coming from the sky: “well it’ll be good for the plants at least!”
I asked my local friends what they thought of the recent increase in ash, but no one seemed too worried. Then one day, my children’s school recommended sending them in with face masks to use during outdoor play. The ash was so fine in the air I could barely perceive it with my eyes, but sure enough after any time outside my lungs would register the persistent contamination I was drawing in with every breath. I bought an air purifier and joined the chorus complaining of the annoyance.
When I woke on Saturday morning the sky was dark, a rarity that I almost welcomed since I’d come to crave cool rainy days the way I’d used to crave hot, dry sunny ones. But the grey of that morning wasn’t cool mist, it was ash. I stepped out onto the brick driveway. The orange hue of the bricks was completely obscured by the thin, pallid grey of ash. Likewise my white car was shrouded by the grey talc color of the ash. Beyond the gate stretched the newly planted corn field, which normally spread its deep brown of rich soil across hundres of meters; it too lay cloaked by a thick mantle of snow-like ash. Unable to stay out of doors any longer without a mask or shield for my eyes, I turned back, swiftly retracing my own footprints back to the house. I slammed the door and observed the familiar puff of particules burst, this time on the inside of the house, suspended in my kitchen. I watched it settle on the floor, and then realized how much more lay on the floor along the seam of every window and door.
I had once wondered idly if I had been in Pompeii in 79 AD how long after I saw the first smoke crest the ridge would I act and how I would determine if I needed to shelter or flee.
I felt a child brush past me, running to the door: “It’s snowing!” she shouted with glee as she reached to open the door. Lord knows how disappointed she would be to open her mouth to the sky expecting a cold burst of ice only to feel the gritty cinder particles burst into the crevices of her teeth. I held the door shut.
“We need to leave, now.”
“Right now?”
“As soon as possible. I need to get some things. Then yes, we’re going.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet. We just need to get to the other side of the mountains,” and I started pulling things out of cupboards. “Go get dressed, and tell your siblings to get ready to leave too.”
I remember the zipper on the suitcase was broken. We only had a few days of ADHD pills left. I remember calling my husband asking for his help to book a hotel. For how long? he asked. I don’t know, I said. Where? he asked. Anywhere, I said. Somewhere with wind, I can’t breathe here.
The neighbors came out as they heard us loading into the car. I’d rather have not stood out in the ash-snow talking how it’ll blow over. “Probably yeah,” I’d said. But maybe not, I was thinking.
What would I have said, if I were back home in Maine and I saw my neighbors flee ahead of their first snow storm. If I’d known it were just a snow storm maybe I would have laughed at them, and then offered to help them prep for the next one when (or if) they returned.
The thing is we never know which time is the big time. When is it just a snow storm, and when is it the capital I capital S Ice Storm? When is it a puff of steam and a couple of tremors, and when is it Mount Tambora blowing 5,000 feet off its summit and sending a “dry fog” as far as New England.
But as much as we never know which time is the big time, we should know that no matter where we live we do live with risk. That risk may look different depending on where you are. It could come from the land and the climate, whether snow or heat, earthquakes or volcanos, tornados or tsunamis. It could also come from your government or your neighbors, where you’re subjected to authoritarianism or anarchy, to the violence of gun culture or the environmental catastrophe of unmitigated pollution.
The people in the Trans-Mexican volcanic belt are not stupid to have spent millennia surrounded by active volcanos, any more than the people are stupid to have made their lives anywhere on this planet. We all make our lives as best we can, and try our best to know how to keep our families safe.
Popocatepetl died down again a few days after we left for Veracruz and we returned home, grateful to be out of the humidity of the Gulf Coast. We still see the occasional plume of ash or steam emerge from his crater, but now we’re prepared. I’ve packed a go-bag, so if we need to leave again we can.
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It’s taken me six months to write this piece. Sometimes it takes a while to write about a painful event. Sometimes I need to start and stop and start up again. Sometimes I get most of it down but then feel…somehow…the piece isn’t resolved. I’ve learned to listen to that feeling and to put it aside until I sense it’s time to return to it. Recently I reopened this piece. The volcano hasn’t come for Puebla or Mexico City (yet). Instead something far more mundane sounding: a storm.
Two weeks ago, forecasters predicted a tropical storm would pass along the Pacific coast of Mexico. “Twelve hours later,” the New York Times wrote in a stunned analysis, “it had metastasized into Hurricane Otis, a Category 5 storm that slammed into the coast yesterday with winds of 165 miles per hour. Hurricane experts were shocked.” It was the first Category 5 hurricane to make landfall on the Pacific Coast of North or South America. Ever. It made a direct hit on Acapulco, a city we’ve visited a number of times and which I featured in my episode “The Switchback.” The next day, the Times’s podcast The Daily featured an episode entitled “A New Threat: Surprise Hurricanes” and David Wallace-Wells published a piece “Acapulco Saw the Future of Hurricanes: More Sudden and Furious.”
As I record this some two weeks later, the extend of descruction Hurrican Otis rendered on Acapulco remains only partially assessed. Though the images I see from Acapulco are photographs, I cannot help but think of the grey watercolored illustrations of Pompeii after Vesuvius. Like the ancient population of Pompeii, the city of Acapulco effectively had no warning and watched their world collapse within a single day. In that episode of The Daily, my ear caught on a stray comment made by host Michael Barbaro in conversation with his guest about the need for cities to provide options to safely shelter in case there isn’t time to leave. He said: “Right, options that increasingly, perhaps, need to acknowledge that there might not be time to get in your car and drive for hours and hours, but are contingency plans that, perhaps, recognize that you may end up needing to stay in your community when one of these storms very rapidly becomes something super dangerous.” Did you catch on what I caught on? You, like he, probably missed it, but what I heard was a baseline assumption that people have cars to get in to drive away.
I had no shame of driving away from Cholula when Popocateptl was erupting, nonewhatsoever. But I am ashamed that intelligent, thoughtful people at an internationally-minded news organization as the Times think getting in your car and away is a baseline option, if only there is time. Access to a car, passable roads, and having a destination are privileges that we cannot assume are held by millions of people in this world. This is true in Mexico, this is true in the US. And this is especially true for residents of poor countries like Bangladesh, Haiti, and Chad, who are facing the highest impact of climate changes.
Humans have always found a way, despite the inevitable risks they face. We are a species that excels in surviving, exploring, not to mention adapting. However, we have our blindspots, especially when it comes to others facing emergencies. How many news reports on YouTube now have how many comments saying how many versions of “How stupid do you have to be to live…?”
I’m now one of the 800 million people stupid enough to live within 100km of an active volcano. But there are 8 billion people on the planet, so maybe 800 million doesn’t sound like a lot. But what if I were to tell you that I am also one of the 800 million people lucky enough to own a car. That’s right. While there are almost 1.5 billion cars right now in the world, they are owned by only 800 million people, or about 10% of the global population. How small, or big, does 800 million people now seem to you?
Now let’s scale up these numbers. In 2021 the Washington Post reported that 85% of the global population has already been impacted by climate change. So that’s about 6.8 billion of us stupid enough to live somewhere affected by drought, famine, soil erosion, aridity, flooding, sea level rise, ocean acidification, extreme storms, you name it. If you think somehow you’ve managed to get a spot on the list of the remaining 1.2 billion people, remember you share this planet with the other 6.8 billion, and some large proportion of them will need to seek safety and opportunity elsewhere.
So maybe there won’t be another Mount Tambora scale eruption for another millennium. But maybe–and my neighbors would rightfully be rolling their eyes if they heard me say this– but maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about volcanoes and we should remember the West African proverb: “Rain does not fall on one roof alone.”
