Must failure be the only learning experience?

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
― Otto von Bismarck

A relatively short story appeared in the LA Times this week following the magnitude 6.0 earthquake that rocked Northern California this past weekend. It has two items of note in it: First, that several property owners in Napa still had not completed retrofit work to improve the resiliency of their buildings in the event of an earthquake (missing a 2009 deadline), and second, that it took the city government until 2006 to pass an ordinance about this. What remains uninteresting, because it is so expected, is that the government did not have the resources to enforce the requirement, and that property owners ignored it.

As a civilization, and maybe even a species, it takes acts of great catastrophe to move us to action, even in the face of the most common sense issues. In Chicago, we needed young people to die before the City would establish and enforce structural standards for attached porches. It took an otherwise relatively easy-to-contain fire in a high-rise building that did not have sprinklers to finally push the City and State to end the grandfathering of buildings and force all high-rise building owners to install sprinklers. The city of West, Texas experienced tragedy and death when a poorly-regulated fertilizer factory exploded...with the double impact that zoning officials had allowed a school, a nursing home, and a 50-unit apartment building to sit adjacent to the factory.

We do incredibly stupid things.

Even though we know smoking is horrible for our health, almost four decades after getting confirmation from health professionals, and three decades after finding out those who sold them to us knew it. It often takes a heart attack before a person considers the necessary life-altering changes to remain healthy (and even then, it does not always work). Even when we completely understand the risks, and know something can harm or kill us, we still do not always make the right choice...heaven help us when we either do not have the facts or ignore them.

We have seen macro and micro-scale incidents over the last decade that should bring us to put an as-immediate-as-possible end to the use of fossil fuels. From the Deepwater Horizons oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the increasing frequency of heavy-oil-laden railcar crashes to the withdrawal of water for bottling from drought-plagued areas to the increasingly costly weather events linked to the changing climate...do we really need more or greater catastrophe to convince us that we need a complete change in our relationship with energy? Especially when we have the knowledge, capacity, and even the economic ability to make these changes happen, there really is no excuse.

Except of course, that we are human.