The fabled butterfly effect is usually thought of in negative terms, with tiny wing-beats triggering devastation a world away.
The majority travel to work from a wider area, so the Daw Mill closure is unlikely to trigger the devastation of a single community, as happened to so many pit villages across Britain after 1985.
The National Federation of Independent Businesses, the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, the California Small Business Association, the California Grocers Association, the California Restaurant Association and their corporate cohorts created a "job killer" message machine warning that, if enacted, the family leave law would trigger economic devastation.
A year after Martin's birth in 1962, Beeching published his report calling for a third of the network to go, triggering a devastation from which we will never recover.
In Kuwait 12 years ago, Iraqi forces lighted 700 oil fires, triggering environmental devastation.
But my heart-strings are always triggered by devastation, whether by Nature or Man.
Renewed military action against the Lord's Resistance Army LRAA) risks triggering further devastation for local people in DR of Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan unless more is done to protect civilians and prevent LRA's retaliations.
This falls well short of the criterion of supreme emergency in Walzer's later writings where the trigger is the devastation of whole peoples and/or their ways of life.
The devastation triggers rebirth and new growth, making the storms a vital catalyst in the biological bigger picture.
While Tuesday's earthquake struck with a magnitude of 7.3, toppling buildings and triggering landslides, the devastation did not equal that wrought by the magnitude 7.8 event that preceded it.
This would--and should--have been painful for all those directly exposed, but would not have triggered widespread economic devastation had the so-called shadow banking system not seized up.
