Populations at Risk in the Philippines

The big story internationally this weekend was the monster typhoon that swept through a section of the Philippines and then headed on to Vietnam. In the Philippines it apparently leveled everything in its path, as reported by the BBC:

The head of the Red Cross in the Philippines has described the devastation caused by Typhoon Haiyan as "absolute bedlam".

Up to 10,000 people are believed to have died in Tacloban city and hundreds elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands of people are displaced.

Four million people have been affected in the Philippines, and many are now struggling to survive without food, shelter or clean drinking water.

A huge international relief effort is underway, but rescue workers have struggled to reach some towns and villages cut off since the storm.

"There's an awful lot of casualties, a lot of people dead all over the place, a lot of destruction," Richard Gordon, head of the Philippine Red Cross, told the BBC.

These kinds of events are a constant reminder of the fragility of both human life and human social organization. Despite the popularity on American TV of "extreme" events, human society revolves around stability, including that in the weather and other aspects of the environment.