You can stand at the rim of an erupting volcano. Most people don’t know this is allowed.
Mount Yasur is on Tanna Island, in the southern part of Vanuatu — a chain of 83 islands strung along a 1,300-kilometre arc in the South Pacific. The volcano has been active continuously for at least 800 years, possibly longer. It is what volcanologists call a Strombolian volcano — one that produces frequent, low-intensity eruptions, throwing up incandescent material every few minutes from a vent inside a circular crater. From the rim, at night, you watch the earth do something the earth has been doing for as long as there has been an earth.
The communities at the base of Yasur have lived with the volcano for centuries. They are not protected from it by distance, infrastructure, or evacuation routes. They are not unaware of the danger — Yasur has killed people, including foreign visitors who got too close. But the relationship between the people of Tanna and the mountain is not the relationship between modern urban populations and the natural disasters they fear. It is something older. The volcano is, in a meaningful sense, a presence in the community. Children grow up with it. Custom stories explain it. Spiritual practice incorporates it.
What is striking, having spent time on Tanna, is how thoroughly this differs from how the rest of the world has come to think about natural hazards. The Western framework treats volcanoes as problems to be modelled, distanced, and evacuated from. The Tannese framework treats Yasur as a feature of the place, like a river or a mountain range. You don’t evacuate from it. You live with it. You teach your children which directions the ash falls when the wind comes from the south.
I am not suggesting this is universally translatable. Yasur is unusually predictable as volcanoes go. Most volcanoes that have killed large numbers of people in the modern era — Tambora, Krakatoa, Mount St Helens, Mount Pinatubo — gave less warning and produced more catastrophic eruptions than Yasur ever has. But there is something in the Tannese model worth attending to: the idea that the natural world is something to be in relationship with, rather than protected from.
The drive to the volcano is rough. The hike from the parking area to the rim takes twenty minutes. The wait for the next eruption usually takes less than five.
If you are passing through Vanuatu — and almost no one is, which is part of the point — Tanna and Yasur are worth the detour.
— Emerald