Amanda Coletti 09/09/2014

          When reading Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal I found it interesting how Diaz brought up the point that the level of destruction that is wrought by natural disasters has actually been caused by humans themselves. Of course, the Haitian earthquake was a natural event, but the reason why it had the effect of a full-scale apocalypse was because of the ill-equipped buildings and slums that the majority of the population lived in at the time of the earthquake. The disparity between the rich and the poor was the biggest problem for Haiti. If the buildings were built with contemporary plans, many more lives could have been saved. In this way, the earthquake revealed what had been done wrong in the past to the country of Haiti, but it also revealed what will happen in the future if the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen. It is scary to envision the future that Diaz described, a future  "...where the super-rich will live in walled-up plantations of impossible privilege and the rest of us will wallow in unimaginable extremity...". But this thought is so scary because it is so easily imaginable. In a future of this kind, the destitute majority would not last a chance against a natural disaster. There are already so many examples of “apocalypses” that Diaz talked about- hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, the tsunami in India, and the earthquake in Haiti- that were so disastrous purely because of our human ability to look past the poor. We must change our ways so that in the future, every society has sufficient technology to minimize the effect of natural disasters.