For the modern scholar, Gómez's treatise offers a similarly rich array of information and insights. It provides an eyewitness account of a major environmental disaster affecting one of the most developed urban landscapes in Europe and shows how contemporaries analyzed the causes and consequences of natural disasters. It also offers a rich and varied example of how contemporary scholars could mobilize their written sources; exercise skills in reading and historical interpretation honed by their studies in law, medicine, and the classics;
Professor Sunil Amrith (Yale University, author of The Burning Earth) has written that over the last 200 years, warfare for empire or other territorial domination has been disastrous for people and the environment that sustains them. Amrith suggests that a demilitarized future is necessary for our collective well being on the planet, and that warfare is related to the greater problem of humans attempting to control nature.