We are bloodsucking leeches.

I am not usually this pessimistic, but I can't shake the idea that Mother Earth is doing her best to rid herself of us.  I am of the opinion that the Earth is a living, breathing thing.  Not in an exact literal sense, but alive non the less.  She is living and we are mere parasites living off her blood and slowly eating away at her body.  At first, she didn't mind.  Originally we were part of a symbiotic relationship with our planet, as are the rest of the animals and plants that we share our home with.  Mother Earth was not bothered by us because we did not bother her.  The more our civilization developed and our technology and needs grew, the more irritated she became with us.  I look at past natural disasters, Pompeii for example, as her way of scratching at the itch we were giving her, as a dog bites at fleas.  She really started getting pissed off during the industrial revolution.  In April of 1815 a massive volcanic eruption occurred in Indonesia.  Mount Tambora exlpoded shrouding the atmosphere in a blanket of ash causing a change in the global climate.  The lack of crops in "the year without summer" killed hundreds of thousends. 

The 2006 tsunami in the Indian ocean, the cyclone in Myanmar, tornadoes all over the mid western United States, the devastating earthquake in China are just the lastest attempts by our "host" to cure herself of a deadly infestation.