Empathy.
The September Moroccan earthquake created an outpouring of grief around the world. There were dozens of major fundraisers,to which people gave generously.
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The extent of the devastation,grief for the more than 3000 deaths,and the outpouring of sorrow for a society left with nothing,meant that people found it easy to dig deeply to help the Atlas communities rebuild their lives.
Morocco has long been a top tourist destination and many people have travelled there,including visiting the mountains,where they’ve experienced the legendary Berber hospitality.
But consider Libya. Inthe floods of September 11,three days after the Moroccan earthquake,more than 15,000 people lost their lives and 34,000 were displaced when two dams collapsed after “superstorm” Daniel,the intersection of catastrophic climate change,geopolitics and corruption.
How many tourists have been there in recent decades? Smartraveller continues to advise that Australians “do not travel to Libya due to ongoing fighting,unstable security,and the high threat of terrorism and kidnapping”.
With no first-hand knowledge of Libyan people,we can comprehend the horror of the floods,but we don’t have a personal compass to truly understand the loss. And from what I saw,the tragedy garnered far less attention than what happened in Morocco.
In some ways,I think there’s a parallel with this and next weekend’s Voice referendum.
It’s notoriously difficult to get a referendum passed in the affirmative but the marriage equality plebiscite was convincingly approved in 2017. One of the reasons,I believe,was that people understood the fairness of the proposal because everyone knew someone who was gay or in a same sex relationship.
It is more difficult to get next weekend’s referendum over the line because so few Australians,especially in the cities,have had the experience of getting to know on a personal level any of the 3.8 per ent of First Nations people that make up our population.
That makes it easier to run a campaign on fear of the “other”,even though their ancestors have been here 65,000 years.
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The best way to create empathy is to walk on country and sit down and yarn with people - bake bread with Bedouins,have a cuppa with a community of women in the Torres Strait. There’s so much commonality to discover.
Tourism isn’t just about jobs and providing income streams for underprivileged communities,it’s about nurturing something more essential to our existence as human beings,our ability to be compassionate.
I worry that it’s humanity,not nature,that’s most in danger from climate collapse. The Earth will do fine without us. We’ve got to figure out a way to change human behaviour while preserving what’s best about us.