Only together will we be able to reduce our vulnerability to disasters.

In view of the Soviet system, it was indeed easy to overlook our own weakness and fallibilities.

It has been proven time and again how vulnerable we all are to the violent and destructive forces of nature.

We are all struck with humility before these forces of nature that are beyond human scale.

In this universe without gravity, all we can hold on to is our vulnerability.

It demonstrates once again our vulnerability to natural phenomena and reminds us that we must incorporate disaster prevention and disaster risk reduction into our development policies.

Will technology and learning prevail, or will our susceptible, long evolved weaknesses overcome us?

The increased frequency and severity of natural disasters affecting nearly all parts of the globe during the past year, in particular, has demonstrated our continued vulnerability to the vicissitudes of nature.

China today is increasingly becoming for Europe what the United States was yesterday a mirror reflecting our weaknesses and our strengths.

Martin Rees has recently written a book about our vulnerability to all sorts of things, from astrophysics, to scientific experiments gone wrong, and most importantly to terrorism with weapons of mass destruction.

It is therefore highly significant that in a world where we talk about developed and developing, the undiscriminating forces of nature render us all equal and point to our common fragility and humanity.

Only through a collaborative effort can we hope to create a world that will accept each of us with our diverse abilities, our weaknesses and strengths, and to exercise that diversity in creating such a world.

But even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed the carelessness, the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean up.

Nothing pulls people together like a common threat or a common attack, especially an attack from a foreign enemy, unless of course that threat hits on our polarized psychology, in which case, as I said before, it can actually pull us apart.

But as we straddle the top of this energy mountain, at this stage, we move from a time where our economic success, our sense of individual prowess and well being is directly linked to how much of this we consume, to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability.