This resilient spirit will be put to the test more and more in the days ahead, as so-called "natural disasters" escalate in their frequency and intensity.
When 100,000 people were killed in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, he was inspired to write Candide, the story of a young aristocrat and his tutor, Pangloss, who set off around the world determined to prove – as the evidence of human cruelty and natural disaster escalates – that "everything is for the best".
The cost of these disasters is escalating.
Children unfortunately continue to bear the biggest burden of one of the most protracted man-made disasters.... Escalating violence in the Gaza Strip and Israel threatens devastating harm for children - UNICEF Khartoum – January 21 , 2016 The last weeks have once again seen an escalation in violence in the Blue Nile, Darfur region and Nuba Mountains.
"Dealing with a row of disasters that escalate one by one is not something you can prepare for," Mr. Stringer said.
Prior work, underway since 2011, had sketched the outline of a potential accord; the Rana Plaza disaster massively escalated the pressure to act on it.
The novel is set in the early 1970s, during the turbulent years of soaring oil prices, economic disaster and the escalating threat of IRA terrorism.
The international president of Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), Dr Joanne Liu, told member states that although alarm bells had been ringing for six months, the response had been too little, too late and no amount of vaccinations and new drugs would be able to prevent the escalating disaster.
That billions of its dollars are at stake if the Fukushima event causes the "nuclear renaissance" to slow down appears to be evident from the industry's attacks on its critics, even in the face of an unresolved and escalating disaster at the reactor complex at Fukushima.
The liberals who built the Great Society also derived some political capital from a darker source: the escalating disaster in Vietnam.
