My middle name is Radioactive.
When I was 11 years old, I learned that since the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, background radiation on Earth had risen by 500%.
The phrase "ecologically unsustainable" entered my life along with the unshakeable feeling that I really should do something about this.
That point in my life marked the beginning of my awareness of the human impact on nature. I used my confirmation in the Anglican church to add my name, making it legal by deed poll as soon as I was 18.
When I was fifteen I came across a fact in my biology textbook – each year, industry extracts 20% of the world’s available oxygen. Sure, it’s replenished, the chapter continued, and then spelled out the biological means which exist for this to happen. Trees it turns out are important, but way down the scale. Oxygen is created by mostly
ocean-based lifeforms. Pollution and man’s greedy, short-sighted exploitation of this vast but limited natural resource are the biggest threats to our being able to continue breathing.
So, I supported the ecological cause before the bandwagon, from knowledge and conscience and because it was obviously a good idea. I learned, and I let the subject infuse my thinking.
In 1983, I was in the New Contemporaries art exhibition, wallpapering trees, a piece called "Camouflaging Trees from Further Attack" – it was effective, I was on BBC news. My first record, a 1987 song called "Save the Planet" raised money for Greenpeace and the Women’s Environmental Network. And, I did more, in my way, to spread the word for two decades, during a time it was low on the public agenda.
Since then, knowledge about the fragility of life, an understanding of how profligate humanity may yet destroy our collective home has permeated the UK, and also to varying degrees educated populations across the world; living less wastefully, conserving energy, recycling are now quite rightly philosophies de rigeur.
So, we looked hopefully to our politicians to achieve consensus in the groundbreaking Copenhagen talks on climate, in December 2009.
What happened in Copenhagen is best described by one of my favourite eco-campaigners – who must be effective because he attracts such hatred from his opposers – George Monbiot.
Watching this stupid summit via webcam (I wasn’t allowed in either), it struck me that the treaty-making system has scarcely changed in 130 years. There’s a wider range of faces, fewer handlebar moustaches, frock coats or pickelhaubes, but otherwise, when the world’s governments try to decide how to carve up the atmosphere, they might have been attending the conference of Berlin in 1884. It’s as if democratisation and the flowering of civil society, advocacy and self-determination had never happened. Governments, whether elected or not, without reference to their own citizens let alone those of other nations, assert their right to draw lines across the global commons and decide who gets what. This is a scramble for the atmosphere comparable in style and intent to the scramble for Africa.
Even before the farce in Copenhagen began it was looking like it might be too late to prevent two or more degrees of global warming. The nation states, pursuing their own interests, have each been passing the parcel of responsibility since they decided to take action in 1992. We have now lost 17 precious years, possibly the only years in which climate breakdown could have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the result of a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and promoted by the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted by the nations characterised, until now, as the good guys: those that have made firm commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false accounting and outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has trumped the long-term welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and political expediency have proved more urgent considerations than either the natural world or human civilisation. Our political systems are incapable of discharging the main function of government: to protect us from each other.
Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns. (Guardian)
After 36 years of observing the snail’s pace adoption of "green", I didn’t expect this political fix to work, but I really didn’t think it would turn out to be the disastrous failure it has proved to be. No amount of dressing up will convince anyone – they blew it, all of them, appallingly.
I can hear climate deniers, industrialists and bankers the world over crowing with delight at the license this gives them to short-term profit, regardless of the immediacy of
mass extinction and the likelihood of massive human catastrophe.
I can hear anarchists and violent extremists saying, told you so, the system will never give us what we need, we must destroy it. I can hear babies screaming in the street, sitting in an evaporating pool of bathwater.
For a second, forget global warming. Forget carbon. Just focus on this failure to agree.
Who in this world has the power to create consensus, fairness and a functioning, equitable system of self-aware governance? Not peace-prize Obama, whose political stature has been seriously damaged. We watched the big countries cabal while the poor ones were sidelined, as always. It was a farce, a tragedy, with all our futures disappearing as as result.
So now what? We hold them account, those of us lucky enough to have functioning democracies? We try again? How? When?
The fringe Green movement in the UK has little political presence – a small 2% or 3% of the vote, which puts them marginally ahead of the far right in the UK. 20 years after their first showing in the Euro elections of 1989, they have yet to organise themselves against the vested interests and muscle their way to into political power. They claim to have influenced the major political parties. Perhaps this is true. My problem is that I do not believe in the abilty of any of the political parties once in power to deal successfully with vested interests.
I have no interest in rioting.
All I can think of doing right now is refusing to let the nay-sayers and the exploiters crush my optimism, because somehow we still have to find a way forward.
Posted via email from Dean Whitbread
You might want to read
- One Good Turn A friend sent me a link to this kind-of-cool-ish project, life.turns. It's OK - seen it, done it, but you know, I didn't yawn. I recognised the music was by Travis (splendidly credited […]
- Unio and Petitio : ‘Blue-Brown Gown’ The most expressive face in home cinema as performed by Sir Kevin Goldsborough, with guitar by Petitio , and the unmistakable Tony Castro sitting on the right. More stuff: […]
- Digital Impressionism These images are taken from shots of my brother's wedding. Using the ever-useful VLC I was scrolling through video captured as AVCHD format .MTS files when I noticed that the effort to […]
One Comment
I agree 100%. This post as with everything else, shows me that your middle name suits you quite well. People are generally too greedy to give up things that might make life greener and don't get me started on corporate greed. Do just what you are doing – move forward into the light with or without the nay-sayers. That is the only way.