Writing amid flooding — Ermita, where this column is produced, is partly knee-deep in floodwaters — settles the topic for the week. For Metro Manila residents, the monsoon-cum-typhoon waters prompt annual meditations on everything that has been wrong for hundreds of years in this benighted archipelago.

And then there is Nepal. The floodwaters there were cataclysmic, stretching language to find an appropriate lexicon of doom to match the moment.

This past week, the words for angry waters were in full use for Nepal: apocalyptic, boulder-rushing, shock-and-awe, cataclysmic, catastrophic — such is the drift. Or, indeed, such is the bolt, not drift, of horror.

As for Metro Manila, the yearly reminder of national failure calls for the opposite vocabulary. In great currency this week are words for slow-motion decay and outrage fatigue.

When the sun shines again, the multitudes clean up, pray that leptospirosis has not wormed into sodden foot soles, and, for some, forage for useful debris to resell. The bacterial disease, spread through water contaminated by animal urine, reliably surges in the Philippines after each major flood, which is why it has long been a fixture of post-typhoon public-health warnings.

The microeconomics of survival in the Philippines and the macroeconomics of big-nation rivalry — in the case of Nepal, literally framed by India and China — demand attention that ordinary people can ill afford. But this is the human condition, simply put.

This is what the current flood of writing on floods comes home to: the drone of misfortune shared across vast geographies.

Inadequate Words

The despair Filipinos cannot help but yield to, in the face of recurrent and ever-larger-scale flooding, is intensified this year by the outing of scams involving flood control projects. (Again, the word "scam" does not begin to describe the incredible scale of the plunder. Yes, the word is "incredible," and it is not hyperbolic.)

Accounts of nefarious maneuvers shadow the impeachment proceedings against Vice-President Sara Duterte, even though she faces a different set of charges. National leaders siphoning off millions of dollars intended for pseudo-projects to arrest flooding effectively consign the general population, intermittently but always inevitably, to watery purgatory.

Moral voices and the punditry (not necessarily moral) have not been remiss in linking climate change maladaptation to pretend solutions costing kings' ransoms. In the work of getting to ultimate truths, it emerges that the manipulations to pocket the ransoms expanded exponentially during the Duterte administration.

Again, "exponentially" — a cool algebraic term — does not quite convey the staggering scale that detonates fury.

But there is a silver lining, albeit elusive. Two hitherto separate topics are now inextricable in the public mind: climate change and plunder.

It is no longer possible for Filipinos to gloss over evidence that "natural" catastrophes are anything but natural. They owe to too many leaders feigning intelligent response to the climate crisis while in fact driven by greed for secretly repurposed monies. Actually, the word "avarice" hits the mark better.

Territory of Bigness

The stretch to encompass bigness in language comes up in quite different ways in the case of the ongoing apocalypse in Nepal.

There was no rain at the border between Nepal and Tibet on the day the big flood happened. The unexpected deluge was not only different in form from rain-driven flooding; it was set off by quickened glacial meltdown. Scientists have long warned that warming in the high Himalayas — often called the "Third Pole" for its vast store of frozen water — is increasing the frequency of such events, known as glacial lake outburst floods and ice avalanches, which can strike valleys with little or no warning and no rain to herald them.

The New York Times on Aug. 26 writes that "…initial assessments by geologists and glaciologists indicated that an enormous chunk of ice — possibly 2,000 feet wide — had snapped off a glacier at an altitude of 17,000 feet and tumbled thousands of feet into a river valley below. Along the way, the avalanche pulverized itself into a fast-moving barrage of ice and rock that crushed everything in its path."

"The bottom looks like a bomb exploded — it's just deposits from the broken-up glacier," according to a geologist cited by the NYT.

The dimensions are dumbfounding. The word "titanic" is suddenly useful.

That chunk of ice is as big as a village. The height of the fall of such a huge mass would have accelerated the downward momentum to staggering levels. That the whole thing exploded like a bomb is unlikely to be an exaggeration.

And literally on top of it all — a lake formed by this glacial collapse threatens to also crash down the same valley complex. Possibly soon. Nepal has for years operated a glacial-lake risk-reduction program, including past drainage interventions on lakes judged dangerous, precisely because this category of secondary flooding is a recognized hazard in the region.

But the bigness of it all is likely made smaller by the bigness of the plans being realized in the region by China and India. News agencies are already inquiring, for instance, whether China-Nepal Highway construction is subverting the Himalayan ecosystem.

Premature conclusions are of course dangerous. There is currently no evidence that Chinese infrastructure projects — which currently include a $169 billion mega-dam — can cause glacier collapse.

Meanwhile, CNN writes today that "…India's largest state-backed hydropower firm is pushing forward its own high-altitude hydropower megaproject –– an 11,200-megawatt dam, downstream from China's. In recent years, New Delhi has debuted ambitious new tunnels and railways cutting through mountain passes that too could enable Himalayan deployment of military and other resources."

Big thinking would seem to warrant enough commodious brainpower to recognize, not just the imminence of another disaster, but of ecosystem collapse — the result of avaricious regard for this seismically and climatologically hyper-sensitive region.

Avarice will trigger ecosystem collapse.

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.