Press Action ::: Put the Future to the Back

Friday, March 20, 2009

Put the Future to the Back

By Michael Greenwell

That’s one of the great things about everything being so f*cked up, that no matter where you look there’s great work to be done. If your call, if where your heart leads you is to work for battered woman’s shelters, wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful. If it calls you to write for Arthur and to push a perspective that is anti-authoritarian or whatever: wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. If it pushes you to do a timber sales appeal: wonderful also. We need it all. - Derrick Jensen

Maybe it was all the TV, films, books and comics I was exposed to as a kid [born in the 70s but grew up in the 80s] but when I see anything in print with a year 20** I still think “Wow! How futuristic and cool.”

All those stories about the wonderful technological fantasy world we would be living left something in my brain that refuses to see that we now live in 2009.

This must be because while some of the new technologies are both good and useful, we obviously haven’t quite reached that 21st century paradise yet. Against all the evidence an annoying little voice just tells me that this is because we have just made some mistakes somewhere along the way—sooner or later in the 21st century it will all come good. That is what we were all brought up to believe. To be honest, I blame the old show Tomorrow’s World.

This is all particularly dangerous when it comes to the debate about climate change. The various reports from the scientists saying this will happen in 2030 or that country will be inundated by 2025 just don’t seem very immediate—obviously we will have it all figured it out by then and know how to fix it all. Furthermore, we don’t need to actually do anything about it now, do we?

This explains why the ‘biggest broadcasting organisation in the world’, the BBC, can print a story with information from the UK government’s chief scientist entitled “Global Crisis to Strike by 2030” and yet deem it less important than the following stories in the UK section of the site…

Is That Ms, Miss? - Women’s titles are not as simple as the EU might think

[Football/Soccer] Clubs await Champion’s League Draw

and of course, Simon Cowell being mentioned in a Barack Obama interview.

In the World section of the site it is less important than…

The sale of an admittedly expensive carpet

The Pope in Africa

Even in the ENVIRONMENT section it is less important than a pink elephant being born.

So if you haven’t scurried off to one of those stories already then here is what was actually said…

Growing world population will cause a “perfect storm” of food, energy and water shortages by 2030, the UK government chief scientist has warned.

By 2030 the demand for resources will create a crisis with dire consequences, Prof John Beddington said.

Demand for food and energy will jump 50% by 2030 and for fresh water by 30%, as the population tops 8.3 billion, he told a conference in London.

Climate change will exacerbate matters in unpredictable ways, he added.

“It’s a perfect storm,” Prof Beddington told the Sustainable Development UK 09 conference.

He also went on to say that “there won’t be a complete collapse” which seems to contradict a little of the above. He quanitifies it by saying that the UK won’t be so bad—just other places. He also suggests GM food might be an idea which I, like most of the world, am less than convinced about.

Whether I agree with his prescriptions or not is not the issue. What I am getting at here is that when it is pressure groups or environmental organisations talking about these crises [I am not going to use the word “impending” anymore because these problems are already here] then the “biggest broadcasting organisation in the world” and all the others have readymade excuses to ignore them. They say “special interest” or the information is being given to them by organisations with an agenda. I know that that excuse is beyond irony but they do occasionally use it.

In this case, however, the information is coming from the Government’s chief scientist and it is still considered a side story. The only remaining reason can be that people still believe in the future fantasy world, the technological quick fix that we have all been told is arriving this century. The Back to the Future flying cars and weather service [they should be here in less than 6 years if the film was right] are coming.

Well, they won’t be. The techno fix isn’t coming. The Utopian ideal isn’t coming. They are fantasy stories.

We needed to start a long time ago, but better late than never.

Don’t wait for the major news story that tells you “now is the time serious measures need to be taken.” When that story comes you can bet that some of those measures will be taken against YOU. If we start doing things now, then we can define how things are to change, not be told that they have changed after the decisions about how have already been made in private.

One often has to aim at objectives which one can only very dimly see. At this moment, for instance, the world is at war and wants peace. Yet the world has no experience of peace, and never has had, unless the Noble Savage once existed. The world wants something which it is dimly aware could exist, but cannot accurately define. This Christmas Day, thousands of men will be bleeding to death in the Russian snows, or drowning in icy waters, or blowing one another to pieces on swampy islands of the Pacific; homeless children will be scrabbling for food among the wreckage of German cities. To make that kind of thing impossible is a good objective. But to say in detail what a peaceful world would be like is a different matter.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness."
- George Orwell

Put the future to the back of your mind, worry about the present. You know who all the organisations are. Find one that protects something you love and go and do something.

Or do something yourself.

At various times Michael Greenwell has been a university tutor, a barman, a DJ (not a very good one) an office lackey, supermarket worker, president of a small charity, a researcher, a librarian and a few other things too tedious to mention. He worked in Nepal for a couple of months doing volunteer work as well South Korea where he met some nice people but didn’t have the best time. These days he is back home in Scotland somewhere in the Highlands and islands or otherwise in Glasgow.

Michael Greenwell blogs at http://michaelgreenwell.wordpress.com and is a member of http://www.spinwatch.org. He also maintains the animal extinction blog http://exitstageright.wordpress.com.