Over the next week and a half or so the CSPO Soapbox will be filled with short blog postings from Dubai. Mary Jane Parmentier and I have brought a dozen ASU students to the United Arab Emirates for a study abroad program on Culture and Sustainability in Dubai. The goal is to observe and reflect on this unique city – a city that has not only survived in the desert, but grown by leaps and bounds. I will likely be writing a few of these postings, but most will come from the students involved in the program.
We haven’t been in Dubai long enough to have too much to comment on yet, but there is one technology that is very important to Dubai that I have experienced – air travel. Dubai has 300 days of sunshine a year, miles of sandy beaches, major sporting events, and countless 5 star hotels. But my suspicion is that these attractions wouldn’t be so attractive to Westerners were it not for the passenger jet.
For one thing, Dubai is pretty far away. Before I left, my mother noted that when she was a girl the other side of the world for her was the west coast of the United States. When she heard that Dubai was twelve time zones away from the west coast she marveled that I was going to the actual other side of the world – a trip that she could not even imagine as a youth. But even if it were close, getting to Dubai without a plane would be rather arduous. To get to here by land you must make your way through one of the hottest deserts in the world. By sea, you’d likely have to navigate through the Gulf of Aden, an area that has been in the news quite a bit in the last few years because of pirate activity. If you wanted to combine land and sea, you could make the ocean journey shorter, but you’d have to make your way across Afghanistan and Iran first.
The passenger jet has conquered these problems. It has made the Dubai as we know it possible, not only because it can bridge distance, but also because it can create distance.
This has never seemed more apparent to me than in the last couple hours of our flight. We were fortunate enough to have clear skies. Mary Jane, sitting next to me, pointed out some fires burning in the distance. We did a bit of calculating and realized we were likely flying over Iraq. A bit later, we thought we had spotted the lights of Baghdad and then Kuwait City. I had only ever seen these images on a television. And now… I felt like I was looking at these images through a television. I was, after all, looking through a small window, sitting in a reclining chair, eating a dinner out of a tray carefully divided into segments, and holding a remote control with access to 200 movies. Sure I was physically closer to these war torn areas than I had ever been before… but I still felt pretty safe.
As the lights faded into the distance, I clicked the button and I was transported back to the world of Harry Potter. As we landed and I stepped out of my little protected airborne cocoon onto the streets of Dubai, my suspended understanding of distance slowly returned to me. I seemed to be back in the real world. Although as I looked up at the 828-meter-high Burj Khalifa – the tallest building in the world – I wasn’t so sure.
About the Author: Jameson Wetmore is an assistant professor with CSPO and CNS-ASU, and ASU’s School of Human Evolution & Social Change.
