Ancient people already knew everything.
Ancient cultures in Greece, India, Egypt and Tibet amongst others proposed to explain the nature and the complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances.
According to them, the world around us is made of four basic elements: earth, water, air and fire. They thought that the combination of these four elements constituted everything we can touch, smell, hear and experience in this world.
As risk management professional, what I really hear is an irrefutable truth: that the perils of earthquake, flood, windstorm and fire are inherent hazards that are impossible to eliminate as they form the very tissue of reality and are intrinsic parts of the physical world as we know it.
And since we can’t avoid them, we need to learn how to control them, mitigate them and shape and mould them in our favour.
“The perils of earthquake, flood, windstorm and fire are inherent hazards that are impossible to eliminate”
Another way to interpret the ancient wisdom is that every material, building, equipment or natural manifestation, no matter how complex, tends by its nature to go back to one or more of these basic elements or reoccupy a…
