Systemic seismic risks: How extractive economies amplify earthquake devastation globally
Original framing: “Earthquakes - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Marginalized voices—women in post-disaster contexts (e.g., 2005 Kashmir), Dalit communities in India’s Bihar quakes, or Afro-Colombian miners in Cauca—are systematically excluded from policy discussions despite bearing disproportionate risks. Their knowledge of local geology (e.g., recognizing 'earthquake clouds') is dismissed as superstition. Grassroots networks like the *Red de Mujeres de la Tierra* in Mexico link seismic resilience to land rights and anti-mining struggles.
The 2015 Nepal earthquake killed 9,000 people not because of tectonic forces alone, but due to a century of British colonial land grabs displacing Indigenous *Newar* communities onto unstable slopes, followed by IMF-mandated austerity that gutted Nepal’s building safety bureau.
This pattern repeats globally: from Turkey’s 2023 quake (where construction amnesties for developers enabled deadly collapses) to Haiti’s 2010 disaster (where debt-driven deforestation and U.S.-backed coups dismantled local governance). The systemic solution lies in dismantling the extractive economy’s grip on land and knowledge—whether through Māori *kaitiakitanga* (guardianship) over geological risks, Andean *ayni* labor systems for communal retrofitting, or decolonial urban planning that treats earthquakes as political, not just geological, events. The trickster’s laughter at this absurdity—profit from peril—reveals the absurdity of a world where seismic risks are 'managed' by the same forces that created them, while the true experts—Indigenous seers, women builders, and marginalized geologists—remain unheard. The path forward demands a Copernican shift: from seeing earthquakes as acts of God or nature to recognizing them as the Earth’s response to centuries of human extraction and exclusion.