Warnings

The New York Times editorial page waxes existential:

It's instinctive in humans to search for the meaning of an event like this, once shock and grief have begun to subside. And there will be plenty of meanings to find in the ways that humans reacted as this disaster struck and in its aftermath as the relief effort begins. But except for our obligations to help the victims in any way we can, the underlying story of this tragedy is the overpowering, amoral mechanics of the earth's surface, the movement of plates that grind and shift and slide against each other with profound indifference to anything but the pressures that drive them. Whenever those forces punctuate human history, they do so tragically. They demonstrate, geologically speaking, how ephemeral our presence is.

I sort of agree. There's no "larger meaning" here. At the same time, it's worth learning some policy lessons. Like everyone else, I've been learning to day that many, many lives could have been saved if some sort of technologically feasible warning system had been built. Tsunamis move fast, as far as these things go, but not so fast that many people could have gotten out of the way had they been warned. More broadly, disaster relief isn't one of my areas of speciality (as readers have no doubt noticed) but thinking about this brings some thoughts to mind. It seems to me that catastrophic natural disasters actually occur rather more frequently than it instinctively seems. Before this tsunami was the huge earthquake in Iran, and I recall that just a few months ago many poorer Carribbean countries were devastated by hurricanes, etc.

Each time something like that happens, there's always this rather heartening response where people -- and governments -- from all over the world pitch in a bit to try and help the victims. But it always seems very ad hoc. People scramble around to see which charities are active in the relevant area, and potential aiding governments don't quite know what resources they have at their disposal, etc., etc. In light of the fact that there evidently is a widespread and pretty deep commitment to global disaster relief, this makes me wonder if there isn't a politically feasible opportunity to make all this work better by establishing a reasonably well-funded and well-resourced permanent international agency to step in and do this work rather than having everyone scramble around ad hoc after something happens. This -- unlike some other stuff people would like to see it do -- seems like the kind of task that the UN is pretty well-suited to do, since various governments have a pretty good record of cooperating with each other on these kinds of issues so you wouldn't see the usual paralysis. Obviously, the UN already has a substantial aid component, but unless I'm mistaken there's isn't the sort of body I have in mind -- a kind of global FEMA ("GEMA," I suppose you would call it).

UPDATE: I see my roommate Kriston Capps has put up some similar thoughts from his late-December base of operations in Texas. He also raises the point that in light of the Greek-Turkish earthquake-related reconciliation, this might help resolve the outstanding conflicts in Sri Lanka and Indonesia's Aceh province. A word of caution would be that pre-earthquake Greek and Turkish elites were already pretty clearly interested in ratcheting-down tensions, but felt themselves to be somewhat trapped by history and circumstance. The disaster was a good motivator for people to do things they were already inclined to do and provided opportunities to do so without loss of face. I'm not really current on the status of either the Sri Lanka or the Aceh conflicts, but the situations may be different in relevant ways.