"Who could have foreseen..."

"...that our air travel network would be brought to its knees by a volcano in Iceland??"

A refrain I have heard several times by jabbering voices on the radio lately. The answer to this question:

ANY competent vulcanologist, hell, any geologist of any subspecies, along with millions upon millions of better-informed lay people could have told you that this was not just a possibility, but an eventual inevitability! This is up there with "who knew the levees would fail?" It still boggles the mind how deep the capacity of human societies is to imagine that their infrastructure is divinely ordained, immortal, and invincible, and therefore they need not waste a passing thought on what happens if some "act of god" (i.e. entirely ordinary and fully anticipatable natural phenomenon) interferes with it. Even in the face of breakdowns, it is all viewed as freaks and special cases, without the larger picture (society ultimately is at the mercy of nature, it does not have dominion over it) and lessons (if you can't function without one of your major social subsystems, you better do something pretty f-ing quickly to change this!) ever being noticed by any but the "fringes."