The other side of the world
It’s been stormy. Have you noticed?
The week before last was a very active one for tropical storms. There were six going at once, and not small ones either; Garace at least had winds over 200 kph. You might not have heard of them, though, since they were literally on the far side of the world: two east of Australia, two off its west coast, and two menacing Madagascar and Mozambique. There was mention of only one even on the BBC website, and that was not on the front page. We noticed a similar news-parochialism in earthquakes: the BBC covered some magnitude-4 events in Greece, while a magnitude-6 tremor in Indonesia went unnoticed. (Note that the magnitude scale is logarithmic, which means the Indonesian quake was more than a hundred times as powerful as the Greek ones.)
This information comes from a website that our tutor visits regularly, covering natural disasters and related information from around the world. He uses it as a sort of balance to the highly focused local weather forecast. Since his commute involves a long section on foot outside, he has to pay more attention than most people to the latter as a practical matter.
But is it really of importance to know what’s going on in the Indian Ocean or New Guinea? In a sense, obviously so. To say the world is thoroughly interconnected and getting more so has gone beyond cliché. A scam center in Myanmar can successfully target a pastor in Kansas, and that website feeding you disinformation could be hosted anywhere. More constructively, a cyclone hitting cocoa plantations in Madagascar raised the price of chocolate and a drought in Brazil that of coffee. Well, those examples are probably more important to the companies that deal in such goods than to the ordinary household. Chocolate and coffee make up a small part of most people’s monthly budget. Bigger items, like cars and anything made from copper or steel, are also subject to worldwide events, but now those are due mostly to a set of people trying to disrupt our inter-connectedness. Typhoons and droughts are of less importance.
However, what happens overseas can have an enormous indirect effect. For instance, sustained drought can set people migrating by the hundreds of thousands, affecting countries a continent away. The chain of causation can be long and complicated. To understand why something happened is not just an intellectual game; it can keep us from coming up with the wrong remedies.
But our tutor has another reason for following the world’s weather. Like many ideas, it has already been expressed better than he can say it, by a certain John Donne:
No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: every man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved with mankind, and therefore do not send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
