Steve and Cathy's Blog

“There are more people living inside this circle than living outside of it.”

Today is a pretty quiet day, but it is also a day when Cathy must say goodbye to a couple of good friends that she has made at Coffee Chat and Needlepoint. Their names are Dorothy and Doreen, and they are from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

[I was so fortunate to meet these two ladies. They have been best friends and lived in Vancouver for many years. BUT they were both born in South Africa! And they consider themselves South Africans of Chinese heritage. The amazing thing about that is how that happened: each of their grandfathers had moved to SA to take advantage of the chance to work in the gold mines near Johannesburg! They raised their families there. Dorothy married a fellow Chinese there, had four children, then moved to Vancouver so her husband could work at his brother’s (very successful) Chinese restaurant there. Doreen was raised in a wealthy family and when she was 21 wanted to leave SA. The Chinese were considered “non-white” and had some restrictions on their opportunities. She was very anti-apartheid and wanted to leave the country. Fortunately her brother was studying at Oxford so her parents allowed her to move to England to live with him. She met and married a man from Kuala Lumpur, moved to Singapore for several years with him, then moved to Vancouver. I said “Wow. I’ve lived in the same place, Connecticut, all my life.” Doreen said, “Be glad.” I had a great time with them and was so sorry when they got off! ]

Of course, there was the full list of activities to be enjoyed on board Insignia, all of which we passed on except for Peter Croyle’s excellent introduction to Singapore. That he has entitled it Singapore: The Shining City-State can give you an idea of what his opinion is of this amazing city/state/nation. He cannot stop with the superlatives, and the history of the place, especially since independence, makes the story almost unique among governments.

When Peter began his lecture, he put up a slide that is the picture at the beginning of this post. It may be hard to see details, but here is the gist of it: you see the map of the entire planet, right? And then you see a lighter circle within that map. Within the borders of the small circle lie many – but not all- of the countries of Asia. The statistic that this slide illustrates is this: of the entire 7.5 billion human population of the entire planet Earth, more than 50% of those people reside in the area highlighted.

As we have traveled from Mangalore, India to Cochin, India, to Yangon, Myanmar and are about to set foot in Malaysia, the impact of this figure is beginning to sink in. From March 3^rd until April 30^th, we will be traveling in this area. Already we have seen both the phenomenal economic potential and also, conversely, the unfortunate consequences of this population density. The people themselves are the potential and the environmental impact of their numbers are the downside. Neither Cathy nor I are tree-huggers by any means, but the sheer number of people involved create a trash problem of titanic proportions.

Peter Croyle tells us that, even now, there is a huge floating sea of plastic detritus estimated at the low end as being the size of Texas moving within the North Pacific Gyre (A gyre is the circular system of ocean currents in a particular area. There are five gyres identified, the North Pacific being the largest). We in North America certainly contribute to this Great Pacific garbage patch (aka the Pacific trash vortex), but it is the countries of East Asia that have become the problem. It is not only a result of economic expansion, but also of having to make choices between environmental concerns and basic human needs that leaves these countries struggling to get their waste stream under control. Given their vast resources and burgeoning middle class, there is great optimism that that will happen, but in the meantime the problem grows. This is not a knock on these countries. Far from it. This is not a function of culture whatsoever. It is a function of population growth outrunning even their tremendous economic growth. But it is something about which we have been unaware in the U. S. of A., and it needs to be noted. In America, we put our manufacturing industries and waste disposal industry through a perpetual proctology exam. Meanwhile, half the planet doesn’t yet have enough infrastructure to deal with what they have already produced, let alone what their growing industrial base and population will be producing. Just sayin’.

This is yet another lesson we are learning on this journey: we should all hope that the standard of living for all of this booming Asian region rises fast, because that’s the only way they can come up with the resources to address this problem. Okay, enough of my alarmist rhetoric for now.

At this point (four days later), we can’t even remember where we ate dinner, let alone what we ate. For us to becoming so accustomed to five-star food that we fail to note what it was that we ate a scant four days later is a sacrilege. Be that as it may, we will be in Port Klang, Malaysia tomorrow, and we have another opportunity to see more of the Asian Tiger for ourselves.