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A natural disaster is not a disaster until it becomes a human disaster; otherwise, in the minds of most people, it is mere spectacle.
Before 1980, income disparities in the United States were narrowing; since then, incomes have become steadily more unequal.
The eruption of Mount St. Helens marked the dividing line between the old Northwest and the new, between the decline of the countryside and the rise of the cities, between an economy based on resources and one based on ideas.
The loss of life at Mount St. Helens occurred because people were unable to see a risk that in retrospect was obvious. They thought that the risk was small, or that they were smart enough to get out of the way if something happened. Most of us go through life this way. We ignore the risks we face so we are not paralyzed by dread. Only in retrospect does the extent of our willful ignorance become clear.
Volcanologists have a tendency to drift westward in the United States because that’s where the action is tectonically.
Anyone who has worked as a logger can remember that moment, the fading buzz of the chainsaw, and the sudden slackening as the tree begins to fall, the astonishing sense that something so large could succumb to the efforts of a single handheld tool, followed by that sound, the crackling of a falling tree, like a bolt of lightning at close range, as the moment grew to the inevitable explosion.
Weyerhaeuser had joined a uniquely American enterprise. With the exception of agriculture, no industry has had a greater influence on the physical appearance, the economic prosperity, and the moral economy of America than logging.
Americans have reduced the volume of the wood in their forests by about two-thirds, or 5 trillion board feet, since the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth.
At today’s retail prices, the value of the wood products extracted from America’s forests would be about $2.5 trillion dollars. That’s at least five times the value of all the gold extracted from the United States since its founding.
As Hill is reported to have said, “Give me enough Swedes and whisky and I’ll build a railroad through Hell.”
The legislation meant that the railroad’s property extended for twenty miles on either side of the tracks in states and for forty miles on either side in the territories. The summit of Mount St. Helens was thirty-five miles from the Northern Pacific line built from the Columbia River to Tacoma in the 1870s, when Washington was still a territory. That’s why, when the mountain began to shake in 1980, the top of the volcano was owned by the Burlington Northern Railroad.
Harmonic tremor is generally associated with the movement of fluids like molten magma or volcanic gases through channels inside the earth. That had never happened at Mount Baker. But starting on March 31 and continuing for the next several days, harmonic tremor suggested that magma was on the move beneath Mount St. Helens.
He was a tough boss but fair, with a streak of sympathy for the men who were doing the jobs that he used to do.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid
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BECAUSE THE BLAST CLOUD CONSISTED LARGELY OF CRUSHED PUMice and pulverized lava, it was initially much heavier than the surrounding air. As a result, it moved more like a fluid than a gas. It hugged the ground as it flowed away from the volcano.
But Spellman was the type of politician who knew that everyone would be at least somewhat unhappy with a good compromise.
Today the area surrounding Mount St. Helens has much more biological diversity than it did before the eruption. For that reason, ecologists prefer to call the reestablishment of life around the volcano a renewal rather than a recovery
