If the human race needs a wake-up call, then it is regularly being delivered to us in many areas of the world.

Suddenly a smaller alarm bell is ringing in the UK and it only serves to highlight how lucky we have been for many years to live in a part of our blue planet that has not been prey to the storms, floods, famines or earthquakes that regularly blight large chunks of the world.

But the Earth, Nature, Gaia – call it what you will – only needs to flex its muscles very slightly for our toehold on this planet to become very precarious. During the planet’s existence there have already been at least four cataclysmic ‘back to square one’ events that have required life to reassert itself every time.

Most of us are aware that if the planet’s history were to be represented by, say, a monopoly board, the time that we have been strutting our stuff on the planet would be represented by the thickness of the line that separates Mayfair from ‘Go’. And in that comparatively short time we have made a very significant and possibly irreversible impact.

Now we are seeing the effects of the planet’s power in the southwest and southeast of England, a country that until now has never endured the depredations of nature to the same extent as what we choose the call The Third World.

There have been floods before but certainly not of this impact or duration. The Prime Minster has very properly suggested that the government spend whatever it takes to help the afflicted – and hopefully to take robust action that perhaps could have been taken before – but now is frankly not the time to play the blame game, but to act.

It will be expensive just to restore the pre-storm status quo. It will be even more expensive to take the pro-active measures that reduce the risk of further flooding. The money that is needed is our money.

It comes from our taxes. Maybe we should consider the possibility of a one year only increase in income tax to help the thousands of people for whom insurance will no longer be in option in the future and all the businesses whose livelihoods have been terminally affected?

Maybe too builders who build on flood plains should be compelled to provide a lifetime flood insurance for those who buy their houses? Or to build on stilts?