It's a small world after all, as recession pounds world

There is the old joke about the marvels of jet travel: breakfast in New York, dinner in Paris, luggage in Tokyo. This past week many people stranded at airports across Europe, Africa, Asia, South America and North America might have wished for the luggage problem if only they could have gotten home.

But I wonder if they stopped and thought about the interconnectedness of the world, just for a moment. There, in a tiny remote corner of Iceland, a volcano, no wider than a mile or so, blew its top and immediately affected the whole world. It was almost as if the world stopped spinning.

Yes, the cloud was huge and spread wide, but it only occupied less than 22 percent of the European airspace. Yet, for good safety reasons, all planes were grounded. Forget what gung-ho pilots are now saying... flying glass particles and engines do not mix in the dark, at night, at 500 mph, 35,000 feet over the frigid expanse of ocean.

Something relatively small had an effect that rippled around the world. Nature is like that. A tidal wave in Malaysia, locally devastating though it may be, seemed to be unrelated to anything here. And yet fish prices went up 12 percent for months because of the drop in fishing catches in that region; supply and demand. People starved.

An earthquake devastated Haiti and all we know about are the humanitarian efforts needed to aid those suffering on the ground. And yet, the whole Caribbean is worried about policing the criminal activity of some of those displaced Haitians at the same time they are pouring in relief dollars to assist families in need. Local government budgets are being strained, the United States cannot pick up the whole tab.

Wall Street had a melt down a year ago. OK, that is an American problem, right? But was it only? Across the whole world, financial ripple effects hammered economies, savings and jobs. The U.N. estimates that maybe as many as 250,000,000 people lost their jobs or income all over the planet because of Wall Street’s fiasco.

So we bailed Wall Street out, helped them recover. But did they help others recover or did they cut off the little losers in developing nations as if they were deadbeats and, thereby, set us up for longer-term international problems? Somebody will have to come to the rescue of these failed economies unless we want more desperate people causing more foreign wars. Wars are more expensive than aid. Marshall proved that.

Environmentalists worry all the time about global consequences. A little iceberg melting here and an island nation sinks beneath the waves. Who is going to take in their citizens? Or do we expect them to simply drown and, as Scrooge said, “Help decrease the surplus population?� The next surplus population could be us: 30 percent of America lives within 50 feet of high tide, matched only by 28 percent of industrial product.

The point is, we are all in this together. Twenty years ago at the U.N. I co-negotiated the world’s first global environmental treaty between the United States and the USSR. Called the “Only One Earth Treaty� it consisted of three words. Yes, you guessed it, “Only One Earth.�

There is one boat, we are all in it. Some may live in the bow, some in the stern, some to port and some to starboard. But if one sinks, we all sink. And that is the message from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon this week: “Quite simply, we are in this together.�

Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.