Whenever there is some major expression of nature—hurricane, earthquake, volcano—the humans decry it as a disaster, something unrelievedly bad. I wondered, t'other night, if that was actually true. And so, I went to the tubes. And there I learned that the planet actually wants, needs, these things. That's. Why they're here.

Without volcanoes, for instance, all the humans would have to grow gills and live in the water, like Mr. Limpet. Because volcanoes make the land. More than eighty percent of the terra is there because some volcano told it to be. Even the sea floor is a volcano invention. Also, volcano burps made the atmosphere. So, if you don't want volcanoes, you can't have any of the breathing.

Earthquakes, they retard boringness. Without earthquakes, everywhere would be like Kansas: flat, no mountains, little water. Earthquakes boost land, renew beaches. Also, plants seem to like them (for reasons the plants are not yet ready to share with the Lab Coats).

Without hurricanes, no one would go to Tahiti. Because the sun is always building up heat along the equator, and if that heat were not periodically carried off, all the equator places would soon be as unlivable as Arizona. The poles, meanwhile, would start blubbering they are too cold. So Gaia recurrently whips up some hurricanes, an efficient method of redistributing the heat. Spores and seeds also hitch rides aboard the hurricanes, so they can go to new places; soil and nutrients travel too, which the plants like.

So, this is why the planet wants you to have volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes.

Now, back to the regularly scheduled, Complaining.