I swear I'm not a hard-core environmentalist

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein, (attributed)US (German-born) physicist (1879 - 1955)

As I watch the devastation over the last few years from disasters like the tsunamis in Indonesia and Myanmar, to Hurricaine Katrina, to flooding of the Mississippi, to the earthquake in China, I wonder if maybe we've gotten it wrong all of these years in how we view developed nations. It's been the tendency look at our ability to build these giant structures with all of this expensive technology as a sign of advancement, and yet at the drop of a hat a natural disaster can blow all of this work (and billions of dollars) to smithereens. And so we spend billions of dollars each year to rebuilt our infrastructure, knowing another volcano, earthquake, or hurricaine can wipe it all away again. Perhaps the Native Americans and other nomadic people had it right after all: maybe we aren't meant to have so much stuff. Maybe it makes more sense to be able to move your home at a moment's notice when the winds change or the land proves infertile. Maybe in our desire to build bigger and live grander, we've lost our ability to deal with nature head-on. We look at nomadic peoples in Niger and parts of South America as backward because they don't share our needs for costly things like ipods, indoor plumbing, and petroleum-powered vehicles. Granted, many of these people are struggling to survive right now and battling deadly disease epidemics and face a deterioration of natural resources. Most of this caused by the development around them. I for one believe it's amazing that anyone can get by in life without common appliances, internet and indoor plumbing.