They are beautiful places to live, we pay dearly for them, and that investment is hard to walk away from. When bad things happen, we quickly forget. A geologist in Santa Cruz, California, where dozens of people perished in debris flows in 1982, says our collective disaster memory goes back only two years. The most obvious one is that the Earth is a more dangerous place than we realize. But we have some sense of those risks.
Most people have no sense of the landslide risk.
And surely we can find the money to allow science to help us learn to live with them. Cities and communities need laser altimetry topographic maps to show exactly where landslide hazards are and where land-use restrictions are needed. Perhaps we make a mistake when we approach any natural hazard strictly from the standpoint of risk or economic loss. Natural hazards aren' t unsettling events that happen every now and then. They're always happening, somewhere, all the time.