And another thing…

“The great irony of the tsunami was that the very same process of globalisation which had stripped Phuket of its natural defences also ensured that the wealthy world felt a huge surge of empathy...” writes Martin Wright

What can we learn from the tsunami? Leaving aside some highly speculative musings about the impact of Antarctic ice melt on plate tectonics, it was widely seen as one of the few ‘natural’ disasters of recent times to be worthy of the name. An act of god, if you must, not man.

But that’s not quite accurate. The cause was natural, but the effects varied hugely, and depended a great deal on human intervention. Some of the most well publicised loss of life came in places which would once have had some natural defences against sea surges - specifically mangroves and coral reefs.

Mangroves act as vast shoreline shock absorbers, while reefs can break up the tsunami into a series of smaller, less devastating waves. The low-lying Maldives, a nation acutely vulnerable to rising tides, is thought by many scientists to have been spared greater destruction thanks to its carefully preserved belt of offshore coral. And where dense bands of mangroves remained more or less intact, as in parts of Tamil Nadu and also Burma (whose political isolation has kept tourists away), the tsunami’s impact was likewise softened.

Much of Thailand’s Andaman coastline, by contrast, has seen mangroves and other coastal buffers stripped away in favour of beachfront hotels and prawn farms. As the flickering images from tourists’ videos made clear, that left nothing between the killing seas and vulnerable people but a thin strip of sand. Tourism may have brought unprecedented prosperity to the area, and unprecedentedly cheap holidays for sun-starved Swedes, but it has come at a terrible price.

The challenge now, of course, will be to balance the rush to reconstruct lost livelihoods as quickly and cheaply as possible, with the need to design a more resilient coastline: one which will not only offer some defence against such once-in-a-lifetime horrors, but, more pertinently, against the sort of catastrophic sea level rises widely predicted as inevitable as climate change kicks in. Encouragingly, the Thai government is already talking in such terms about the Patong area.

“The Maldives government’s insistence on preserving its coral reefs may have saved thousands of lives.”

There’s much talk of speedily instituting an early warning system for the Indian Ocean, to give those few hours’ grace which could have saved all but the weakest and the most stubborn. And quite right, too. But this has also been a generalised alert to the consequences of ignoring nature’s own defence mechanisms.

If Phuket drowns for a second time, we can’t say we weren’t warned… But to depict all this as just another dreadful consequence of the evils of globalisation is to miss the most striking part of the picture. Because that very same globalisation, which replaced reefs and mangroves with ribbon development, also ensured that vast numbers of us in the wealthy world felt a personal connection with the places and people most affected.

A connection which was reinforced by the way in which today’s media bring together the immediacy of global satellite coverage with the intimacy of those grainy holiday videos and the texts and emails home. Suddenly, that ‘power of community’, which Tony Blair tried to invoke in the wake of 9/11, was taking shape before our eyes - in the cash-stuffed donation buckets on bars and at checkouts, in the flurry of emails to and from Asia. Across the rich world, the public response was way ahead of that of governments, driven by an empathy unimaginable a century ago, when Krakatoa sent even greater shockwaves across that same region.

And it’s exactly that kind of empathy, that shared sense of vulnerability, which, if set alongside the dawning recognition that ripping up natural defences can have deadly consequences, can help bring home the realities of our interdependence. Tragedies on this scale no longer happen in isolation, in faraway countries of which we know little. As we face up to the looming shockwaves of climate change, we will need that awareness more than ever: that sense that we get through this together, or we don’t get through at all. The power of community, indeed.

Martin Wright is editor-in-chief of Green Futures.

26 January 2005

Martin Wright