Think globally – act locally

What is it about?

A very positive effect of the globalized information streams is that everybody willing to know what is going on can be very well informed. If you stick to facts rather than believe opinions, an analytic mind can infer from the information available that local actions usually have global effects. The global distribution of pollutants is quite easy to understand, since the weather is quite a global system. I remember two clear examples. When I was a student, I think it was in 1969, I saw a huge tube leaning on the side of the Institute of Physics at the University of Bern. Curious I went to the people working on it and asked them what it was for. They explained to me that the tube was supposed to melt through the ice of Antarctica and that they would take water samples at different depths. Due to the radiocarbon method, they were able to date the samples. Later I learned that with that device they could find soot that was correlated to the first industrial revolution in Europe in the late 1800’s. Another example is the worldwide distribution of nuclear isotopes.

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