Seeking solitude? You could do worse than to head to these far corners of the globe.
Australia: Yes, there are less populated places — the South Pole is perhaps the most extreme option. But for secluded locations you might actually want to live in, Australia is full of possibilities. Consider, for starters, the state of the Northern Territory. With a land mass of around 1,424,493 square kilometers, it is more than three times the size of California but has a population of 227,000 (about the same as Birmingham, Alabama). It gets better: More than half (54 percent) of the state’s residents live in the capital, Darwin. That leaves the other 1,424,389 square kilometers to around 100,000 people. Average it out, and each outback loner gets 3,520 acres all to him or herself.
Greenland: The world’s largest island that is not a continent, it makes rural Australia look like Hong Kong. At around 2,165,230 square kilometers, it contains only 57,600 people (more people go to Ohio State University). Such a combination earns Greenland the distinction of having the world’s lowest average population density. If the bustling capital of Nuuk (population 15,100) is too cosmopolitan for your tastes, you could head north toward the settlement of Nord. At around 925km from the North Pole, it has nothing more than a weather station and a handful of people to keep it running.
Pitcairn Islands: Three of these islands, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, are devoid of people; the fourth, Pitcairn itself, has 50 people living on it. Does the name ring a bell? Pitcairn is where nine mutineers from the HMS Bounty, along with the 18 Tahitians who traveled with them, settled in 1790. Most Pitcairnians are descended from these 27 people. Interested real-estate shoppers might take a look at Henderson Island; at around 37 square kilometers, it is the only other habitable land mass in the Pitcairn archipelago.
Svalbard: It is widely agreed that Norway is pretty quiet, as far as countries go (this is meant as a compliment). Svalbard, a Norwegian island territory, goes one step further by being located approximately 640km north of Norway. The 62,160-square-kilometer island is above the Arctic Circle, and residents can look forward to months of either continuous daylight or continuous darkness. About 2,000 of Svalbard’s 2,700 residents live in the town of Longyearbyen. The other 700? Mostly coal miners and scientists. In spite of the land’s glacial austerity, Svalbardians will not necessarily go hungry — the island is also the home of the Global Seed Vault, an underground store of the world’s plant seeds kept safe in case of global catastrophe.
Tristan da Cunha: There is some subjectivity about which place is the most isolated, but the islands of Tristan da Cunha have one inarguable distinction. They are the most remote inhabited place in the world, about 2,736km from Cape Town, the nearest inhabited land mass. The South Atlantic group consists of four islands — Tristan, Nightingale, Gough and Inaccessible — but all 271 Tristanians live on Tristan (perhaps owing to the island’s remoteness, there are only seven surnames among them). Visitors are welcome to Tristan, but new residents have to be approved by the Island Council.
“Given that are no spare houses here,” David Morley, Tristan da Cunha’s administrator, said in an e-mail message, “very little private sector activity/industry and very few available jobs, it would not be a straightforward matter for someone to come here to settle.”
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers