If you’ve been watching the news in the last month or so, you could be forgiven for thinking the Earth has gone a bit crazy. Devastating earthquakes have hit Haiti, Chile, Turkey and then Chile again.

But in fact, the recent spate of earthquakes is not in any way unusual. In any given year, we can expect on average one richer-scale 8 earthquake, 17 quakes between 7 and 7.9, and roughly 132 with a magnitude between 6 and 6.9.

So why does it seem like 2010 has already been such a terrible year for earthquakes? In this case, it’s not the Earth which is changing, but human society.

Human society on Earth has recently entered an unprecedented new phase: for the first time ever, more people live in cities than in the countryside, on the land. The vast majority of these people live in recently built slums. These slums go by many names-favela, township, ghetto; they all add up to the same thing. Migrants from around the world, torn from the land by capitalist economic policies, pour into cities in search of a living. Faced with the failure of municipal governments to accommodate them with decent housing, they build their own homes with whatever they can find.

This process has been going on since the beginning of the capitalist era. The Highland Clearances were one of the first examples of poor people being chucked off the land, as wealthy landowners prepare to use intensive methods to extract the maximum profit they can from their land. Today’s clearances are taking place in rural China, India and Africa. They’re driven by the policies of the international financial institutions like the World Bank or the IMF, who force governments to make their agricultural sector only produce profitable commodities for export.

But at the time of the Highland Clearances, there was at least an industrial revolution that provided work for the mass of landless people flooding into cities like Glasgow, Manchester or Birmingham. Today, factories work differently, with more automation and advanced machinery than was possible in the 19th century. So although countries like China are rapidly industrialising, there will never be enough work to provide for all the people migrating to the coastal cities. The result is that those workers who do find a job labour in near-slavery conditions fro absolute pittance wages.

A favela in Brazil

Meanwhile, the majority are forced to try and survive in what’s been called the “informal sector”, or the black economy. They peddle goods on the street, they scavenge rubbish dumps for anything valuable, or they become involved in crime and the one profitable industry within reach-the drug trade.

Left wing sociologist Mike Davis has chronicled what he calls ‘The Planet of Slums,’ in a book of the same name. It started out life as an article which is well worth a read, and is available for download here.

Many of these third world cities are built close to geological fault lines, making them prone to earthquakes. But the really devastating thing is that so many people now live in poorly built housing, which is extremely vulnerable to collapse. This means that the numbers dying from earthquakes on average is increasing. Therefore, more media coverage.

There’s pretty much nothing we can do to predict or prevent the occurrence of earthquakes. But what we could do is start a major global programme to make sure everyone on Earth has a properly built home that could better withstand one, which would drastically reduce the numbers that die.

More than that, we could start looking at how to change our global agricultural system. In global capitalist agriculture, production isn’t geared to providing people with an opportunity for meaningful work, or feeding the vast majority. What most agricultural production in the third world is geared towards is to producing the products wanted on the supermarket shelves of the rich countries. A different kind of agriculture worldwide could give most of the world meaningful work and feed the world’s population without

People scavenging a rubbish dump for survival in Cambodia

harming the environment.

Ordinary working people on the land have fed humanity for centuries. What we need isn’t a return to some kind of medieval idyll that never existed. It’s the right of people to live and work where they choose, without being forced to move to survive, leading to a more equal distribution of the population across the land. This would also be safer, because it wouldn’t cram so many millions of people into megacities vulnerable to natural disasters. It’s what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meant when they called for “the abolition of the distinction between town and country” in The Communist Manifesto.