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I saw a few articles in the news about an upcoming Aurora Borealis show for the northern latitudes, which we know is upcoming because scientists watched a solar flare erupt a few days ago, and they know how long it takes to reach Earth, and it struck me that sometimes (but not always) the ratio of nature's beauty to nature's danger is pretty even. We admire Nature's beauty, but we also suffer through natural disasters.

For example, if we see auroras down in this latitude (I'm writing from 42.85N), we may suffer the loss of some or all of our electric grid. We just don't want nature's beauty to get that close.

Same goes for an erupting volcano. Beautiful, oh yeah. But I have no desire to get any closer than the photo below.

I grew up not far from two of the Great Lakes, so our winters were especially wet--Lake Ontario releases a lot of moisture into the air that flows east over it. We had many a beautiful ice storm, and from the idyllic vantage of a kid who got to stay home from school, all we could see was extended sledding. But the rest of the region had to deal with power outages, trees falling on their houses, and dangerous road conditions.

I remember when my older brother got a new camera and gave me his old one, how excited I was to be able to play with all the manual features of the SLR. One button in particular--the B setting--gave me my first chance to experiment with long exposures.

One stormy night, I put the camera on a tripod and pointed it out over the valley, capturing several lightning strikes in each shot. I couldn't wait until I developed that film! There was one photo in particular that turned out so amazing--I got lucky and captured three lightning strikes in one--that I had to send that negative away and get a poster-size print made from it.

I got going on a tangent, but the photos above remind me how localized most of our natural disasters are here in the USA. When there's an ice storm that takes down a few thousand power lines, power companies from adjacent regions of the US send repair trucks and crews to help restore power to the affected area. Most of us in the US don't live close enough to a volcano to be threatened by an eruption, but it happens often enough that there are warning systems in place to get people evacuated in time and stay safe. And the danger of lightning strikes is present everywhere in our country, but one lightning strike has very localized effects, and it is pretty rare that lightning causes massive damage (such as wildfires).

The way we deal with natural disasters tends to be pretty consistent across the US, and we have disaster plans for just about everything. But we don't have a disaster plan for what happens when the entire electric grid goes down after an electromagnetic pulse. As beautiful as Nature is, it's also dangerous.