ABSTRACT
The mainstream western news media, like Hollywood, are addicted to natural disaster scenarios. In the late summer of 2010 came an unprecedented boon of apocalyptic footage from vastly different geographic contexts and opposite ends of the spectrum of human misery: a biblical flood in north Pakistan, and hellish heat and fires in Russia. A monsoonal system of historic intensity, amplified by a prevailing La Niña, delivered sustained, extreme rainfall to Pakistan’s main riverine artery, the Indus River Basin. The heaviest rains in 80 years overwhelmed Pakistan’s degraded irrigation infrastructure, resulting in the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history. With up to 20 million homes destroyed, the economic cost of the weeks-long deluge to struggling Pakistan was more than $40 billion (World Meteorological Organization 5). Meanwhile, at the other end of the Euro-Asian landmass, western Russia lay crippled by a multi-year drought. From mid-July, an unprecedented “mega-heatwave” saw temperatures rise 10°C above their seasonal mean. Operating on already moisture-depleted soils, the weeks-long heatwave sparked forest and peat fires across more than a million hectares of the vast grainproducing regions of Russia and the Ukraine. Woefully unadapted to such extreme wildfire danger, Russian emergency services floundered in the crisis. 25 percent of the nation’s harvest was lost, the death toll topped 55,000, and economic losses from the disaster reached US$15 billion (Barriopedro et al. 220-24).1
