Volcanoes- Do we need them?

Volcanoes- Do we need them?


It's been a good five months since Iceland's answer to Vesuvius started vomiting her guts up over mother earth, but the issue of volcanoes has not gone away. It's high time a journalist stood up and said what the rest of the nation is thinking. Why do we put up with volcanoes? What have they ever done for us?


Volcanoes have been long in the public consciousness, from the Beatles' song "Oh-bla-di, Oh Lava" to the Tommy Lee Jones film "Oh Dear, this Molten Rock Seems to be Dissolving Me in a Macabre Manner". It is rather difficult to find a positive reference to them in popular culture though, Tom Stoppard's "Kilimanjaro and Krakatoa are Kool, Yeah?" notwithstanding, and most literary minds agree that this is an ironical piece. There are liberal apologists for these foreign bodies out there, though, and thank God that they are foreign. The Britons had the good sense to settle down away from continental ridges where volcanoes become rather chummy with their bastard cousin, the earthquake. But soft, lest we be distracted from the current point, which is ignorant lefties. Anyway, these wishy washy socialist commie loving liberals might say a dormant volcano is essentially a mountain with the top cut off. I don't know about you, but I think it's bad enough that you can fall down a mountain. The added hazard of plummeting into one doesn't bear thinking about. These uncouth Bolshies will also have it said that would say that the land near active volcanoes is particularly fertile, and on this score they are right. I tend to find this somewhat tempered by the tendency for active volcanoes to chunder lava all over the opportunistic farmers nearby, or choke them with poisonous ash if in a particularly playful mood.


It isn't just people within a fifty mile radius of these odious lumps that are in danger either, so the view that leave them alone and they will leave us alone is ignorant at best. If an eruption is serious, it could cause tsunamis up to 100 feet tall. In fact, volcanoes actually utilise all the classical elements to make us more aware of our mortality- the quaking of the Earth, the Firing of the rock, the poisoning of the Air and the aforementioned tidal waving of the Water. These things are angry, but you simply can't reason with them. It took one improbably spelt Icelandic volcano to bring complete chaos to European air traffic. But here's the thing. Eyjafjallajökull is actually near it's bigger brother, Katla, and every time Eyjafjallajökull has decided to remind the world it exists, Katla has soon followed suit. The fallout from Katla would make Eyjafjallajökull's efforts seem like ash being tapped from a cigarette. We must take action now. Seeing as we have a Government with the balls to admit it's fun having a nuclear arsenal, we should surely unite with the other nuclear powers of the world and end this threat. America, Russia, India, Pakistan, North Korea and perhaps Israel could join us in the atomic obliteration of these monstrosities. And we'd let the nearby inhabitants have some prior warning, just one more courtesy that the volcano wouldn't extend. I hate volcanoes, and so should you.