The earthquake which happened yesterday in Turkey with its disastrous consequences led us think ‘ Is geography destiny’ The question is not limited to Turkey and can be applied to many places places in the world; mass shootings in the US, the war in Ukraine, violation of womens’ rights in Afghanistan… Are we really simply victims of our circumstances? In his article, I will try to answer whether or not geography is destiny and the dynamics between our fate and what we make out of it.
More often than not, ‘destiny’ is associated with a sense of helplessness and surrender. We have a tendency to label situations we cannot control, consequences we cannot foresee or problems we are unwilling to solve, as ‘destiny’. In that sense, natural disasters are surely a part of our ‘destiny ‘despite the advancement in science and technology, we feel small and vulnerable in front of natural calamities…. However, it is important to note that while exposure to earthquakes may be our destiny, loosing thousands of people or suffering huge amounts of damage is not about our destiny. It simply is about our fear.
At this point it helps to share a very interesting study we conducted for AKUT (the main search and rescue NGO in Turkey) in 2019 for remembering the 20th year of Marmara Earthquake which took place in 1999 and claimed 30,000 lives. Our representative sample indicated that in Turkey, the public was most afraid of earthquakes among all other natural disasters; no surprise there… However, what was most surprising about the results is that 55% of all citizens indicated that they had made no preparations for a potential earthquake. Looking more closely at the data, we discovered a reverse correlation between the intensity of the fear from earthquake and the likelihood of being prepared for it. In other words, those who were fearing the earthquake the most, were less likely to take any precautions against it. We could literarily see that fear was useless to prevent death on the data, statistically laid out.
As the survey above shows fear results in denial or unresponsiveness. Once we deny the situation we are in or we refuse to respond to it, it becomes impossible to take actions towards protecting our selves from negative consequences. For instance, we fear the earthquakes but deny the fact that we live in an earthquake zone and repress our fear… So we end up, easing regulations, building tall buildings by the river beds, put bridges in the most unlikely points or convert disaster assembly zones into luxurious developments. Once we repress our fear and pretend as if everything is fine, we start thinking ‘nothing bad will happen to me/us’ and do not even take couple of hours to learn the most basic life skills to protect ourselves during an earthquake or prepare a little earthquake bag for emergencies. And the destiny as we know it, finds us once our fear becomes bigger than our minds… Deceived by a toxic positivity, we found ourselves in a situation with no other option than to accept our unfavorable ‘fate’ , without even thinking what we could have done differently.
In order to stop being a victim of fate, or explain our destiny with geography; we should all stop pretending, accept our circumstances without fear and then take appropriate actions. I hope this earthquake in Turkey will help to prompt us to accept our infrastructural shortcomings, our lack of consideration for academic predictions, our lack of emergency preparedness, our poor urban planning as they are and act with our mind instead of our fear to create concrete positive change.
On this occasion, I would like to offer my condolences to all those who lost their lives in the earthquake and to their families. In case you would like to donate for Turkish Earthquake Relief, please find couple of useful links:
https://www.icrc.org/en/where-we-work/europe-central-asia/turkiye