Of course there remain nay sayers to any argument, those with heads in sand – business as usual, prophets of gloom, and pragmatic scientists with mounting evidences pointing to instability in the Earth’s systems which ever way you want to look at it.

The question of tectonics as related to human activity is considered a little here: http://www.niksnexus.net/weblog/2008/06/oil/

But what I find more curious than anything, is that the areas afflicted by major earthquakes and tsunamis in the last decade or so, appear to be of the same peoples that remain marginalized or left behind in the “progressive” world, whether poorer areas of New Orleans, SE Asia, or Haiti. Sure California is on the fault line with the sands of time sifting…. but I haven’t seen a rich city hit yet in recent history.
There’s the radical, fascinating if ludicrous idea (perhaps requiring a quantum leap of faith) of the power of human thought/belief – you feel impoverished or victimized collectively and the idea as above, so below – or like attracts like could conceivably play a role in physical reality. Or you feel powerful, wealthy, protected… and so it is manifest in form! I know, I know, hard for us privileged, consumptive consumerists to even consider such an esoteric question… just throwing it out there.

But of course there remains the fact that the kind of devastating plundering of resources, massive hydraulic engineering, abject neglect or dumping of global industrial excreta in those same areas to benefit people far above those communities might have an impact too?