In a world that seems to teeter perpetually on the brink—gripped by war, conflict, division, and environmental degradation—perhaps the greatest reckoning won’t come from diplomacy or force, but from nature itself. We often forget how small we are until nature reminds us. And when the world misbehaves, there comes a moment when the earth, sea, and sky conspire to put smacht on us all.
Storm Éowyn recently lashed Ireland with hurricane-force winds, snapping power lines like thread, silencing phones, darkening homes, and grinding modern life to a halt. Even in Galway, far from the battlefields of global conflict, we were not immune. Without electricity, transport or communication, we were suddenly stripped of the illusion of control—reduced, perhaps, to a third of what we are.
It is a lesson history has taught before. On November 1, in 1755, Galway felt the echo of the Great Lisbon Earthquake. While Portugal bore the brunt—with churches crumbling onto the faithful gathered for All Saints' Day Mass—a tsunami surged across the Atlantic. When it reached the Irish coast, a two-metre wave slammed into Galway Bay, battering the Spanish Arch, damaging what had stood since 1584 as a fortified guardian of the quays. The quake, estimated between 8.5 and 9.2 on the Richter scale, shook Europe to its spiritual and political core. It was as if the planet itself had judged the age—and found it wanting.
And it happens still. Yesterday morning (Wednesday ) a massive 8.8 earthquake struck Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Tsunami waves surged across the Pacific, crashing into Japan, Hawaii, and the remote towns of eastern Russia. Eyewitnesses described walls trembling and buildings buckling. Doctors carried on surgeries mid-tremor. Coastlines vanished under water, then reappeared, scarred and broken. For all our satellite warnings and evacuation protocols, we remain vulnerable, humbled by earth's unrelenting might.
Storm Éowyn nearly delivered the same lesson closer to home. At Galway Port, a storm surge of 2.6 metres was recorded—the highest since measurements began. Had that surge coincided with a spring tide just days earlier, Galway would have faced flooding on a near-biblical scale. Limerick and Shannon Airport were similarly spared by the narrowest of margins. Experts now warn that climate change, driven by human activity, will ensure that next time, we may not be so lucky.
Nature, it seems, has grown weary of our defiance. While we wage war on each other and the planet—ripping up forests, heating the seas, and polluting the air—nature watches. Not with malice, but with patience. And when the scales tip, she acts not out of vengeance, but balance.
Galway’s Spanish Arch, built centuries ago to protect the city from human threats, was no match for the sea in 1755. And no fortification, no military power, no wall high enough will shield us from storms yet to come. These events aren’t merely freaks of weather or quirks of geology—they are reminders, perhaps even corrections.
There is a strange clarity in disaster. When the lights go out and the wi-fi dies, we rediscover the basics: community, resilience, interdependence. Maybe that is nature’s harsh but necessary gift. In the face of devastation, our priorities shift from profit to protection, from consumption to conservation, from ego to empathy.
So perhaps now, as the world spins more furiously into division and destruction, it is time we stop, look up—and listen. Not to the politicians or generals, but to the wind in the trees, the rising tide, the tremble beneath our feet. Because when nature speaks, it does not whisper.
It roars.
And in that roar, we might just find the discipline—the smacht—we so badly need.
