originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
And lots of people talk about volcano eruptions, but those are hard to predict.
Earthquakes happen all the time, generally along known fault lines, so California has strict building codes for new construction and protocols for disaster response.
In all of these cases, our preparations involve emergency response.
But there is one disaster we could and should try to prevent, and that’s the damage caused by drought (and its surprising side-effect: flooding).
Water management, agricultural practices, community planning, regulation of mining practices, and careful planning of road construction can all impact soil conditions.
Drought is a climate issue, so the idea of Climate Change is raised, and that provokes a political backlash (especially in election years).
So at this point, individuals (like the farmers with their cover crops) are doing more to mitigate the effects of drought that anyone is doing on a state or national level.
Until we can put the argument about climate change aside and find some common ground, it’s all about the mop-up, rather than the prevention.
This question originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.