The power of climate ..
.. and geography
Maybe some of you have read one of the amazing books by Tim Marshall [1,2,3] where he reasons about how the history of mankind and its people was strongly shaped by the geography of our planet. If you didn’t, I can highly recommend you doing so. Why? Because reading through books of history is often a chain of subsequent “Heurika” moments.
Have you caught yourself sometimes thinking “Why are things like that?, it doesn’t make sense at all!”. Well, it turns out, more often than not, the answer is: History. Stuff that doesn’t make sense to us right now, did make sense at some point in time to the people living in those times. Many things were not intentionally designed to be crappy, they were just the most reasonable solutions to the problems that people faced back then. Could they anticipate all the dynamics and possible negative consequences of their solutions? Of course not, neither can we – or would you have predicted that computing would be responsible for 20 % of the world’s energy consumption by 2030 when buying your first Mac or PC in 1999?
The geography of our planet is what hindered the free movement of people for many millennia and a major reason why different cultures developed on the north and the south side of the Mediterranean Sea or the north or the south of the Himalaya mountains.
Today, modern transportation technology, enabled mass migration that brings people and their customs into all parts of the world. Outside of the original geographical and climatological area, the customs of these cultures may appear alien, weird and distant and one may ask the question “Why do they do that? It doesn’t make sense at all!”
And if that happens to you, you might want to apply some “agile principles” – in this case the principle of “go and see”; and the chances are quite good that if you are open minded, you will be able to connect the dots between what is “an alien custom” to you and its purposefulness given the climatological and geographical constraints of its origin.
While there are many examples that could be shared, one sticks particularly to me: Some time ago I had the pleasure to visit and go around Morocco for a bit. It has been a Muslim country since the Muslim conquests in the late 7th century. I often asked myself why the Hijab, Burqa, Niqad etc. is such a dominant thing in Islam while it is not that typical for other religions. My interpretation might be a bit too 0-th orderish but if you spend a couple of days in or just close to the Sahara dessert, using such type of clothing that protects your skin from the sun and your eye from the sand, appears to be just the most reasonable thing to do; especially if you live most or all of your life in or around the dessert.
Now, the question of how a “reasonable, practical habit” transforms itself into a “religious dogma” is on a whole different page, so that this issue is studied both by historians and theologians alike; and it would certainly help to resolve the question if we could travel “in the time dimension” of the space-time continuum and ask the people back then directly.
However, it is not possible to us (until now) to travel back in time and experience the complete context of “alien customs”. But in comparison to ancient times, it is very well possible to travel “in the space dimension”. Even if this does not provide the full context, it might still be enough to give us the particular experiences and insights needed, to understand why people feel as they feel and act as they act. Think of it as an opportunity to experience yourself the immense power that climate and geography has on us today just as it had throughout our history.
I feel grateful and humble when I remember how blessed and lucky we are to be able to move almost freely within the two spatial dimensions on our planet and the tremendous work that previous generations have put into making this possible.
[1] Tim Marshall: Prisoners of Geography (2015)
[2] Tim Marshall: The Power of Geography - Ten Maps That Reveal The Future Of Our World (2021)
[3] Tim Marshall: The Future of Geography - How Power and Politics in Space will Change our World (2023)