2025-09-22
46 分钟This is The Guardian.
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The storm that moved a mountain by Jonah Goodman, read by Evelyn Miller.
In the wake of a natural disaster, certain metrics are used to categorize the event.
The buildings destroyed, the cost of repair to the nearest million,
a single number for the loss of human life.
Yet these figures obscure the truth of such events.
They make the outcome seem fixed, somehow proportionate.
But disasters are chaotic.
Their extreme violence magnifies the consequences of every decision,
to stay or to move, to run or to hide.
Things could have turned out another way.
And how would we talk about them then?
In Locano, Switzerland, on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore lies the mouth of the Maggiore River.
Follow it northwest and it winds past sandy,
tree-shaded beaches through rocky gorges and into a broad,
glacial valley where, for much of the year, long waterfalls drop down forested mountainsides.
Just over 20 kilometres upstream,