Excess is distress.

In Asia it’s payback time for man’s insatiable drive to push the limits of available natural resources to make things bigger, longer, and taller.

Nature has had enough and is fighting back to exact revenge for man’s abusive ways.   

The funny thing is, Asians are not learning from one another, and now we are all wallowing in a sea of misery, hunger, disease, and grief.

We all could relate to a wire service dispatch about the massive flooding across the region:

Read on , weep, and gnash your teeth:

As millions of urbanites living a modern lifestyle fear that torrents of floodwater will rage through Thailand’s capital, some in enclaves of a bygone era watch the rising waters with hardly a worry — they live in old-fashioned houses perched on stilts with boats rather than cars parked outside.

Like most of monsoon-swept Asia, the city and its environs have experienced periodic floods since it was founded more than two centuries ago. But recent decades have witnessed dramatic changes — from intense urbanization to rising waters blamed on climate change — that are turning once burdensome but bearable events into national crises.

Across Asia, areas of high population density are also those most prone to flooding and other water-related disasters, according to an Associated Press analysis of recent UN maps. When overlaid, the maps show such convergence in a wide arc from Pakistan and India, across Southeast Asia, to China, the Philippines and Indonesia.

This isn’t mere bad luck. Historically, agrarian societies settled in the continent’s great river basins, including the Ganges in India, the Mekong in Southeast Asia and the Chao Phraya in Bangkok. The gift of the rivers was fertile land, but it came at the price of almost annual flooding during the monsoon rains.

By providing sufficient food for growing populations, these rice bowls in turn spurred the rise of some of Asia’s largest cities from Bangkok to Kolkata, India. The concentration of national resources and wealth means even smaller disasters can have a big impact.

Severe flooding this year has killed more than 1,000 people across Asia this year, and economic losses are running in the tens of billions of dollars.

Thailand, suffering its worst flooding in 50 years, offers a prime example of the perils of centralization and man’s fractured bonds to the natural environment. Floodwater has spilled into outlying parts of Bangkok, and the government is scrambling to try to prevent the inundation of the city center.

Growth, outward and upward, has been stunning. Highways, suburban malls and industrial parks, many now swamped and sustaining crippling losses, create dangerous buildups of water or divert it into populated areas rather than along traditional paths.

To this add extreme and erratic weather, said to be triggered by climate change, which has increasingly buffeted Asian countries with storms, typhoons and floods.

Further, the legal and illegal pumping of underground water faster than it can be replaced has compressed water-storing aquifers, causing Bangkok to sink between 0.8 and 2 inches (2 to 5 centimeters) each year. Scientists say the rise of waters in the nearby gulf as a result of global warming could combine with the sinking land to put Bangkok under water much of the time by mid-century.

Similar subsidence and sea-water encroachment is occurring in Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, and Manila, where a typhoon last month triggered the worst flooding in the Philippine capital for decades.

What is now necessary is huge investments and long-term planning by governments to mitigate such flooding.