A Global Age Catastrophe

With the death toll from the Indian Ocean tsunami at about 150,000 and climbing, the news is bad indeed. Certainly no earthquake has been so remarked upon since Lisbon’s in 1755, and that was because it occurred on All Saints’ Day -- and was immortalized by Voltaire in “Candide.”

But why has this disaster so completely captivated public attention? Is it simply because of the staggering numbers, or is there something else? The previous magnitude 9-plus earthquake, in Alaska in 1964, and subsequent tsunami killed only 125 people and left the landscape looking pretty much as it did before. Others in Iran (1990), Peru (1970) and China (1976), where deaths exceeded 50,000, all occurred inside a single country.

There have been natural disasters that have killed more people than this one. The Tangshan earthquake of 1976 in China, for instance, was the second deadliest on record -- officially 240,000 dead, with estimates as high as 655,000 -- but the larger and more lethal drama of Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution dwarfed that seismic twist. Nor was CNN on hand in Tangshan.

This latest tsunami occurred between sunrise and sunset. People who might hardly know where the Indian Ocean was awoke all over the world to see waves rolling through whole towns. And the media were quick to grasp its scale. So it is perhaps the first and most emblematic catastrophe of the Age of Globalization.

Tony Blair interrupted his vacation to call frequently for huge disaster relief contributions -- and to ascertain the number of British casualties. (And he was widely criticized for not ending his vacation altogether and coming back to direct the response from London.) Stockholm said more than 20,000 Swedes were vacationing in Thailand -- and thousands are still unaccounted for. Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, vacationing in Sri Lanka, had to be evacuated from his hotel by helicopter.

At all the resorts, wealth enhanced exposure to the disaster rather than impeded it -- most of the poor were farther inland, the richest were right on the sand.

In my peaceful part of Indonesia, away from the wave’s trajectory, we escaped unscathed. In fact, the disaster hit most squarely at two regions encapsulating civil wars -- at the tip of Sumatra, Indonesia, where an Acehnese independence movement has struggled against all-out Indonesian military power; and all of Sri Lanka, whose government’s peace with Tamil revolutionaries in the island’s north is still fragile. Will the scale of the damage in these two hardest-hit areas render their previous conflicts meaningless? Perhaps. The magnitude of Aceh’s devastation has produced enormous sympathy for the province throughout Indonesia, and one can hope that, in the tragedy, reconciliation can emerge as a small victory.

The disaster is a form of Nietzschean method: a kind of “philosophizing with a hammer.” The whole world has been brutally reminded of nature’s indifference. “Things” happen, even on Christmas weekend.

But listen carefully to the hammer, to the many signs of learned lessons. Despite advances in technology, can anyone ever again blithely assume mankind’s ability to tame the larger forces of nature?

What we can do is anticipate and take defensive action against every natural hazard. The Philippines is rightly awash in accusations against the illegal loggers whose devastation of its northern watershed resulted in thousands of deaths during recent typhoons. Geologists everywhere are finding new support for installing earthquake and tsunami warning and response systems wherever vulnerable populations live.

There has been a dreadful majesty to the catastrophe. And it looks as if an appropriate response is occurring, not just in terms of the food, medicine and supplies coming now by the planeload but in the realization of new levels of interdependence in the world.

An earthquake equal in power, by one report, to 600 nuclear bombs exploding reminds us forever how petty our earthly efforts are. Looked at from my vantage point in Indonesia, all the upheavals of recent years made by human hands seem modest by comparison.