Something is seriously off in 2025. It feels as though the natural world has ripped up the old rulebook and gone rogue. We're living through the "year of the fire" and the "year of the flood" simultaneously, while earthquakes and volcanoes pound away in the background. For most of history, disasters came one at a time, like unwanted guests. This year, they've all shown up together, and they're drunk.
Take California's almond industry. Once upon a time, rat problems were an occasional nuisance. Now, farmers are facing a rodent blitzkrieg. Vast swarms of rats are chewing through orchards and equipment, causing hundreds of millions in losses. Nobody really knows why they've arrived in such numbers, but when 75 percent of the world's almond supply is on the line, suddenly a rat becomes a geopolitical problem.
Meanwhile, over in Nevada, mosquitoes have decided that the desert is their new holiday resort. Las Vegas, built on a mirage of fountains, golf courses, and pools, is now mosquito paradise. Not only are they thriving, they're carrying West Nile virus at record levels. When your neon-lit city of excess doubles as a testing ground for tropical diseases, you know something's upside down.
The animal kingdom isn't faring much better. In Colorado, diseased rabbits with tentacle-like growths, look like escapees from a horror movie. Across the U.S. and Canada, "zombie squirrels" covered in pus-filled tumours stagger through neighbourhoods. These aren't cute woodland creatures anymore; they're walking warnings about how fragile animal health can be once something tips the balance.
And then there are the floods. Pakistan just suffered a deluge that survivors described as "a doomsday scenario," killing hundreds and leaving thousands too terrified to return home. While that was happening, Queensland was rattled by its strongest earthquake in half a century, and Indonesia blasted volcanic ash 10 kilometres into the sky. Any one of these events would be newsworthy in a normal year. In 2025, they're just another week's headlines.
So has nature gone mad? Or is this merely Darwinian business as usual?
The sober answer is that nature hasn't changed its rules. Rats multiply when food is abundant. Mosquitoes thrive wherever humans create water-filled niches. Viruses have always stalked animal populations. Mountains flood, volcanoes erupt, tectonic plates shift, always have, always will.
What's different is the stacking. Disasters aren't politely taking turns anymore. They're overlapping, amplifying, and hammering societies already stretched thin. Human systems, agriculture, cities, global supply chains, assumed a stable backdrop. That backdrop is wobbling. The stage itself is shaking, and we're the ones who feel like the actors in a play gone wrong.
Maybe this isn't nature gone mad after all? Maybe this is nature running its ancient program, while we're the ones who built a civilization too fragile to withstand the storm?
https://michaeltsnyder.substack.com/p/nature-in-chaos-a-massive-invasion