Dear all. It's a very interesting discussion. There seems to be
external and internal reflection on lack of action-news-discussion.
I'm sure i'm not alone in feeling my own quietness on this forum of
late is down to being spread rather thin, and perhaps not choosing my
battles wisely. Do i write about global issues, carry on ESD research,
fight local Tescos or give more time to running a community group with
immediate effects? I'm never sure. J
On 1/14/11, Michael Northcott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Always good to be stirred by Alastair's words. I too have felt pretty stuck
> these past few weeks. I have written nothing online or in a newspaper or in
> this forum for some weeks. My students were on demos last semester being
> beaten up protesting privatisation of the universities - the same students
> who attend events I attend about climate change in the university. Next in
> line for privatisation - in England at least - is the NHS. And secondary
> schools, and then primary schools, and so on. The state will pretend it no
> longer exists and let business do it all while in reality still funnelling
> our lands, sovereignty and oh yes our money into these businesses through
> artificial user 'markets', statist audits and regulations and ponzi schemes
> like PFI all the while ramping up invasive state 'security', invading our
> institutions looking for, or trying to stir up from the inside, the next
> nonviolent resistors so they can be violently goaded into violent
> resistance. And all these services will become more expensive, less
> accountable, and no longer in a position to demonstrate an alternative to
> big business. Already the CBI are rubbing their hands with glee as they
> can't wait to get their hands on school and university curricula and stop
> them teaching people about how endless growth, and debt, might be bad for
> the environment. The future for universities is that 'productive' activities
> - such as genetically modifying chickens so they can be kept in a cage in
> their own shit while being shat on and pecked by others without succumbing
> to a bird virus (of the kind generated by such factories - not by wild birds
> - though that was not on the BBC TV news story on this I watched for the
> first time in three weeks tonight) will still be publicly funded. 'Cultural
> activities' - such as teaching people about the environmental and other
> causes of the collapse of civilisation - past and future - will not.
> Meanwhile all that came out of Cancun was an affirmation of more of the same
> neoliberal nonsense - REDD, Chinese engagement in carbon emissions trading
> and so on. We will have vouchers for schools, vouchers for universities,
> vouchers for hospitals. All will be businesses responding to consumer
> choice. And oh yes REDD vouchers for rainforests and peat bogs and EUETS
> vouchers for renewable electricity. I try to inspire people when I speak
> that an alternative is possible. But it is becoming clear to me that the
> neoliberal state in Australia, Britain, Brussells and the USA will do all it
> can - with big business and the banks - to use the peoples' earning and
> voting power to continue to prop up the existing system until the methane
> pours out of Siberia, the methyl hydrates start melting in the deep ocean
> channels, and runaway Arctic melt is upon us. And yes I know. It is like ice
> in a gin and tonic. It continues to cool things until it melts completely
> and then they warm up much faster.
>
> So I guess what I am saying is that despite having written a 300 page tirade
> in 2007 against neoliberalism and how it more than anything else can explain
> why it is the world could act together in 1987 to stop CFCs but is now
> unable to act together to stop CO2 and carried on being hopeful that people
> would get the message - all the more so after the banking collapse in 2008-9
> - I now realise we are in a worse state than ever.
>
> For me Murdoch is key. He has the White House in his craw - Pailin is his
> own personal candidate and the tea party the invention of Murdoch and his
> friends. He has No 10 in his craw. Cameron's business is PR. His right hand
> man, his PR man, is a Murdoch employee from NoW. He has nobbled virtually
> all the Australian media for decades. He has Fox, Sky, much of the UK press
> - Torygraph is now run by an ex newscorp man - and as the BBC fights back it
> fights him on his own turf and any idea of educating people about science
> has to go out of the window in that case.
>
> So I am now in apocalyptic mode. I see no prospect of change. The end is
> clear and it is just a question of time - 20 years or 30. Then they will try
> the geoengineering they say for now they won't because there will be no
> other option. And it will likely go disastrously wrong. Murdoch by then will
> have turned to genetic modification and cloned himself or replicated himself
> with software since he trusts no one with his legacy.
>
> And am I also in denial as Alastair suggests, compromised by my lifestyle.
> Well yes. I went skiing three days in Scotland last week and I drove me and
> my kids there in a car. I am doing a research trip and lectures - on
> consumption, climate change etc - in Australia and Indonesia in March/April.
> It's research on 'religion and ecology'. I am paid to do it and publish it
> and someone will be on those planes anyway.... So hell yes. I feel
> compromised but in the past I have managed to keep a bit more hopeful amidst
> my compromises, and the larger mix. But seeing Britain taken apart bit by
> bit and sold off to the lowest bidder while thousands are made forcibly
> unemployed - seeing Chilean and Russian shock therapy applied here in a way
> even Thatcher never dared while the BBC, not even the Guardian, really names
> it like it is - that is what has really got me stuck. And all this from a
> government that had - and has - one of Teddy Goldsmith's children preaching
> how green it was going to be before it was elected. The only green thing in
> this government is the puke on the streets from the violence of those street
> demos. Watching and hearing that violence on you tube was sick-making even
> for those of us who were not there.
>
> Through a glass - an Apple Mac screen not a whisky glass - darkly.
>
> Michael
>
>
>
> On 13 Jan 2011, at 22:58, P Mac wrote:
>
>> Nothing heard also in Spain.
>>
>> I think they are afraid we can react, compared with Americans?.
>>
>> Regards.
>>
>> 2011/1/13, Alastair McIntosh <[log in to unmask]>:
>>> David ... just picked this up ... trapped in my spam box, otherwise I'd
>>> have
>>> responded in my previous message.
>>>
>>> I have been struck recently by how quiet this forum has been. It's not
>>> that
>>> there's not some interesting people on it or that, for a "crisis forum",
>>> there's not interesting stuff to discuss.
>>>
>>> My sense is that a helluva lot of us are stuck as to what we can
>>> meaningfully say that doesn't just sound like the virtual equivalent of
>>> speaking into the wastepaper bin. I've been working quite a bit recently
>>> in
>>> writing stuff for a forthcoming Ashgrove book on human ecology about
>>> postmodernism, and it does seem to me that during the 20th C we've seen a
>>> progressive drift away from grounding, at various levels - both physical
>>> and
>>> psychological (I would add spiritual, but we can leave that aside for
>>> now) -
>>> in reality.
>>>
>>> The people who form and moderate opinion are all living so comfortably,
>>> relatively speaking, that they don't want to lift the lid. I had a
>>> disturbing exchange recently with a good friend of mine and his wife.
>>> He's a
>>> serving army general. We expect to disagree, but not as much as you'd
>>> think,
>>> on war. What really surprised me was how animated he became about climate
>>> change, his wife too, playing out all the Christopher Brooker type of
>>> arguments and basically, a very intelligent scientifically literate man
>>> just
>>> not wanting to know.
>>>
>>> My sense in both this exchange and others similar is that most people
>>> can't
>>> face the contradiction of their lives. Festinger summed it all up in the
>>> 1950s with his study of cults ("When Prophecy Fails") - and how, the more
>>> that the cult failed the more the believers believed. You'll be familiar
>>> with his whole cognitive dissonance theory that came out of that. My
>>> sense
>>> is that we have to create space for people to live with their
>>> contradictions. The poet Alice Walker says, and I quote from memory,
>>> "take
>>> the contradictions of your life/ to wrap around you like a shawl/ to
>>> parry
>>> stones/ and keep you warm."
>>>
>>> If we can't do this with ourselves and others we force denial, and the
>>> problem with denial is that it's worse than hypocrisy because it blind
>>> people to truth. At least if you're not blinded to the truth you have the
>>> possibility of getting your bearings.
>>>
>>> I'd better go ... my wife's just back and it's late ... but I'm concerned
>>> about this stuckness - in the media, even, I sense, on this forum, and I
>>> wonder if you or others have reflection on this, or is there nothing else
>>> that can be done but to sit with heads in the sand? Is that where we're
>>> at
>>> in the human condition?
>>>
>>> Alastair.
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Discussion list for the Crisis Forum
>>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Cromwell
>>> Sent: 13 January 2011 18:30
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Re: Record warming isn't news
>>>
>>> Alastair asks of the BBC:
>>>
>>> " What is going on in their science journalism?"
>>>
>>> I'd remove the word "science" and just ask:
>>>
>>> "What is going on in their journalism?"
>>>
>>> Please forgive the plug, but see:
>>>
>>> http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93&Ite
>>> mid=51
>>>
>>> And it's not just the BBC. It's the Guardian, the Independent, C4 News
>>> and
>>> all the other news media we're supposed to regard as the most
>>> responsible.
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Discussion list for the Crisis Forum
>>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alastair McIntosh
>>> Sent: 13 January 2011 18:20
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Re: Record warming isn't news
>>>
>>> You beat me to it, Bob. I had been watching out and was about to make the
>>> same observation. What makes it all the stranger is that early today the
>>> BBC
>>> had as the lead item on its science website evidence of climate change in
>>> rainfall in the English uplands -
>>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12151866 They've since
>>> substituted a story about the Sun. Astonishing that they can miss out
>>> that
>>> the last year was the world's warmest equal, and the world's wettest
>>> ever.
>>> What is going on in their science journalism?
>>>
>>> A
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Discussion list for the Crisis Forum
>>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bob Ward
>>> Sent: 13 January 2011 18:06
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Record warming isn't news
>>>
>>> Apart from a small brief at the bottom of page 25 of today's edition of
>>> 'The Guardian', the UK media ignored the announcements yesterday by both
>>> NASA and the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration that 2010
>>> was tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record.
>>>
>>> But it was picked up by the media in most of the rest of the world, even
>>> in the United States, where 49 of the 50 states are currently under
>>> snow.
>>>
>>> So what's up with our media? I've had a whinge about it here:
>>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/13/uk-media-ignore-climat
>>> e-change
>>>
>>>
>>> Bob Ward
>>>
>>> Policy and Communications Director
>>> Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment
>>> London School of Economics and Political Science
>>> Houghton Street
>>> London WC2A 2AE
>>>
>>> http://www.lse.ac.uk/grantham
>>>
>>> Tel. +44 (0) 20 7106 1236
>>> Mob. +44 (0) 7811 320346
>>>
>>>
>>> Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic
>>> communications disclaimer: http://lse.ac.uk/emailDisclaimer
>>>
>>
>>
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