 |
 |
Is anarchy now the morally right thing to do?
As John Papworth says, in order to topple the giant organisations, you need to become one of them, and then you find yourself part of the problem. Tom
Hello,
The latest media alert from Media Lens, out today, might be of interest.
Best wishes
David (Cromwell)
Game Over For The Climate?
Whatever happened to the green movement? It’s been 50 years since the publication of Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring, a powerful book about the environmental devastation wreaked by chemical pesticides. Since then we’ve had the rise and fall - or at least the compromised assimilation - of green groups such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Forum For the Future.
Last week, the Independent marked the half-century with a well-meaning but frankly insipid ‘landmark series’ titled ‘The Green Movement at 50’. But there’s a glaring hole in such coverage; and, indeed, in the ‘green movement’ itself: the insidious role of the corporate media, a key component of corporate globalisation, in driving humanity and ecosystems towards the brink of destruction.
The acclaimed biologist and conservationist Edward O. Wilson puts the scale of the crisis bluntly:
‘We’re destroying the rest of life in one century. We’ll be down to half the species of plants and animals by the end of the century if we keep at this rate.’
And yet ‘very few people are paying attention’ to this disaster. Wilson, who is 82, directed his warning to the young in particular:
‘Why aren’t you young people out protesting the mess that’s being made of the planet? Why are you not repeating what was done in the ‘60s? Why aren’t you in the streets? And what in the world has happened to the green movement that used to be on our minds and accompanied by outrage and high hopes? What went wrong?’
The trouble is that most of what the public hears about politics, including environmental issues, comes from the corporate media. This is a disaster for genuine democracy. As discussed in a recent alert, the media industry is made up of large profit-seeking corporations whose main task is to sell audiences to wealthy advertisers – also corporations, of course - on whom the media depend for a huge slice of their revenues. It’s blindingly obvious that the corporate media is literally not in the business of alerting humanity to the real risk of climate catastrophe and what needs to be done to avert it.
Last month, leading climate scientist James Hansen, who was the first to warn the US Congress about global warming in 1988, observed that:
‘President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course.’
Hansen added:
‘The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. [...] Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.’
If adequate action doesn’t happen soon, says Hansen, it’s ‘game over for the climate’.