ce of pestilence: inhospitable, disease-ridden and backward.
Writing some centuries after Aristotle, Pliny the Elder riffed on these themes. The Torrid Zone was full of human troglodytes who ate vipers and men who moved like serpents. Ancient Indian geographers described the Tropics as a place inhabited by evil daemons, as a gulf like that between the living and the dead.
Later literature reflected these themes as well. Consider Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Becalmed in the tropics, the sea boiled like a pot, throats were parched, and slimy things crawled upon the slimy sea.
Beyond pestilence and paradise
Yet some Iberian explorers saw the Tropics as places of great wonder. For them, the Tropics represented the completion of the world: it was the Garden of Eden, a world lost when Adam and Eve were cast out.
There is much more to the rich history of the Tropics and it is fascinating to dwell there. But given 21st century statistics, it is well past time that we rediscover the Tropics, and the power of Aristotle’s lateral conception of the world.
Mark Ziembicki, CC BY-NC-ND
To do so means charting the Tropics, not in ships, but through data on the region’s power and potential.
And we need to understand it not through an outdated Western lens that lurched between pestilence and paradise, but to consider it as a vitally important place where most of the world’s children will be living by 2050.
The trends we have identified in this State of the Tropics report demand the attention of global policy makers, as they show how the Tropics will, to a large extent, determine our global future.
The world is changing: we all know that. The news is it is changing in ways that defy current conceptions of our world. There is every good reason to be gripped by the power and potential of the Tropics, and what it means for global development.
The Tropics was lost, but now is found.
About The Author
Sandra Harding, Vice-Chancellor, James Cook University
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