Over 50,000 dead in the wake of Asia’s killer wave, and the toll keeps rising as the missing are found. On the devastated coastlines the living have lost everything but their lives: their homes, their livelihoods, their loved ones…their children…

And we thought Florida’s hurricane season was bad. It’s difficult to comprehend such loss. The news on TV shows us swaddled bodies, crumpled boats and floating cars, women overwhelmed with grief. I hate how television makes voyeurism of tragedy having sex with your dog. You can’t help but watch, and try to imagine what it might be like to have your own world shattered like that, without warning, by a force that can neither be predicted or turned aside.

But the greater, hidden tragedy is that this catastrophe could have been mitigated. Fifty years ago, the damage done would have been far less extensive. Then, the coasts of India, Bangladesh, Thailand, and other tropical areas were protected from the full fury of tsunamis and cyclones, even without the benefit of advanced predictive science or international early warning systems or any technology human industry could dream up to outsmart Mother Nature.

Time was, Nature herself protected the coastlines and their people erotic stories with animals. Dense stands of mangrove trees lined the shores, providing a buffer against wind and wave; by the time a tsunami hit land, much of its power would have been absorbed by the trees and offshore coral reefs, which coexist in a kind of symbiosis: the mangroves protect the reefs from runoff contamination, while the reefs shield the forests from erosion and storms.

Today, the fast growth of modern fisheries, especially industrial shrimp farms, has resulted in the deforestation of coastlines throughout East Asia and the destruction of the reefs. According to one source, “the life cycle of the [shrimp] farms is a maximum of two to five years, the ponds are then abandoned leaving behind toxic waste, destroyed ecosystems and displaced communities. The whole cycle is then repeated in another pristine coastal area. Economic losses due to the shrimp farms are approximately 5 times the potential earnings… gorilla beastiality.A typical Indian paddy field employs 50 people, a shrimp farm occupying the same land employs five.” Ironically, this clear-cutting actually reduces the shrimp population; the root system of the trees provides a protected nursery for the fry, as well as for other crustaceans, mollusks, and reef fish…important links in the fragile coral reef ecosystem.

Global warming also makes coastal areas more vulnerable to disaster. Climate destabilization creates more intense storm systems; more powerful storms cause more erosion, which means more damage to coral reefs, natural sand bars and mangrove forests, which means ultimately more destruction during future storms.

I don’t mean to say that this tragedy was somehow deserved, or demean the loss of so many free horse sucking galleries. There’s no way of telling how many lives would have been saved if it weren’t for the shrimp-fishing industry. But it strikes me that there is a lesson here for the world, a lesson in interconnectivity and sustainability. The tragedy did not begin with the shifting of tectonic plates beneath the Indian Ocean, the Earth’s great shrug. It began years ago with the displacement of traditional fishermen and rice-paddy farmers by corporate strip-fishing; with the proliferation of resorts as the tourism industry rushed to fill the economic gap, bringing more people to occupy coastal areas now laid open by deforestation. The ocean waters became more polluted with runoff and industrial pesticides; the coral reefs started to die; and when the sea came, and there was nothing to stop it, and no warning…

In India, government scientists acknowledge that if existing environmental regulations had been better enforced, there would have been fewer people in the path of the tsunami on Sunday morning as well as a better “natural line of defense horse cum sex penetration.” They hope to reintroduce the forests and strengthen protective laws. Hopefully other nations will follow the lead of the world’s largest democracy: not just in replanting mangroves and rehabilitating their coasts, but in recognizing that human beings are not somehow above natural law, that we do not somehow live and die independent of the ecosystems we inhabit or invade. How intimately the health and survival of a thousand other species…of even tiny creatures like the architects of coral reefs…is linked to our own survival. How environmentalism is in our own self-interest.

Environmentalism is humanism.