"Numbers of Note" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Numbers of Note

One wouldn’t want to make light of the Boxing Day tsunami that took some 150,000 lives, but let’s put the matter into some perspective. For instance, isn’t it curious that we respond much more compassionately when it is Nature rather than man that does the killing. The death toll in Iraq is close to the same number and while most of those deaths were also accidental -- in war we refer to them sterilely as collateral damage -- they were still people who would likely still be alive were not for our government’s policy.

A second point is that the number of dead pales in comparison with prior war crimes. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each by a single atomic device -- another sterile word -- saw as many deaths, immediate and from injuries. The firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden were also cataclysms in this range. A pittance, however, compared to the six million people Hitler had slaughtered in concentration camps. And Stalin murdered 20 million of his own people.

Earlier natural disasters have claimed many times more lives. An earthquake in Tangshan, China in 1976 killed 655,000.

What made the tsunami so instantly and globally tragic was, it being natural and not political, there was no restraint in the news coverage. Also, that coverage -- live shots of massive numbers of dead -- spread through the Internet, faster even than did the waves.

With numbers so large, it is impossible to imagine the scope of the suffering. Families and villages wiped out in seconds. Most of the casualties died where they had lived, eking out an impoverished existence on the shore. But a considerable number were the well-heeled who had deliberately put themselves, albeit unknowingly, in the path of the deadly waves; some were even among the rich and famous.

Many of those shoreline vacationers, and the locals, died because developers had wiped out coastal mangrove swamps to build resorts and shrimp farms, and because fishermen had dynamited vast tracts of coral reefs, both of which would have offered a natural barrier to the tsunamis.

In the midst of the grief, let us humbly observe this Malthusian fact: our Earth is grossly over-populated, with probably five billion more denizens than is ecologically viable, and on average 170,000 die every day.

Finally, in truly human terms, this question: why does it take a natural disaster to organize the world to do good?

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.