Biggest Wake Up Call in History
This section is intended as a resource for readers of my new work The Biggest Wake Up Call in History which will soon be available as an eBook. It contains an image gallery, related resources and a number of relevant links.
There can be few places that demonstrate the widespread impacts and flow-on effects of humanity’s careless uses of its world than the oceans. Here, far away from human settlements, other creatures are paying a heavy price for the expansion of the human population, the continued pursuit of economic growth and the resulting worldwide tide of waste. Of the many images that could have chosen to illustrate this, here are two that show the impact of the ubiquitous uses of plastic. The first is a Shearwater chick from Lord Howe Island, off the east coast of Australia. Shards of plastic can be seen within the rib cage. The second is of an Albatross chick on Midway Island in the Pacific. A cigarette lighter, bottle tops and other refuse can clearly be seen. It is a shocking image. It’s worth visiting Chris Jordan’s website to view other images of this kind taken as recently as 2009 and 2010.
Image credits: Shearwater chick © Ian Hutton, Albatross chick, © Chris Jordan. Viewers can visit Jordan’s gallery, Midway: Message from the Gyre, at: http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000313%2018×24
While perhaps not to everyone’s taste, this piece of radical street commentary from Melbourne, Australia, is one of the most strikingly truthful I’ve yet come across. Its message is nothing if not stark and uncompromising:
Advertising poisons space
Money conceals the terror
Desire as engineered
Your mind is a battlefield
Underneath are seven stencilled figures with open mouths and tightly bound arms. With most of their heads obscured by some sort of covering they are reminiscent of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. A mere fifteen words and a few simple images convey a message that evokes a torrent of questions about the nature of our reality and the power of those who want to persuade us that ‘retail therapy’ is good for us. This is a rare piece of ‘raw truth’ that challenges us to respond.
This image will be a familiar sight to many, especially those who live in flats or apartments. It shows ten mailboxes outside such a building in Brisbane. All but one are stuffed full of the latest round of advertising garbage that universally clogs up mailboxes even when, as here, some people have tried to hold back the flood by putting No Junk Mail notices underneath. The underlying message is that the interests behind this flood of unwanted rubbish will use every means possible to flog the latest stuff whether we want it or not, whether it makes sense or not.
One of the many consequences of rampant commercialism is the way it has misdirected entire populations away from understanding and fulfilling their authentic needs. Instead the market projects a vast array of baubles that largely disappoint because they only tend to offer substitutes. To be constantly dissatisfied, however, means that one can be a ‘good consumer’ returning often to purchase further doses of temporary relief from the stress and pain of the ‘skin-encapsulated ego’ in the desert of contemporary life. This is one way that ‘demand’ is maintained – but at immeasurable cost. The consequences for young people in particular have been severe. They include the marginalisation of more helpful values, the sexualisation of young children and the rise of radical individualism. The two images shown here were taken on different sides of the world and yet are closely related. One is of a young man in a German city in angry denial of the social context that makes his existence possible; the other is a deliberately ironic ad from Australia. They are visual clues to the sense of negativity, lack of meaning and violated agency that so many young people continue to struggle with all around the world. Surely we can do better than this.
In Chapter two I listed a number of ‘missed signals’ from the US and Australia. When viewing Michael Moore’s film on ‘Capitalism’ I was reminded of President Jimmy Carter’s attempts to help the American people begin to appreciate the predicament they were already facing. A couple of the many sources he’d have known about are illustrated above. More than three decades later two of his speeches to the nation – one on ‘energy’ in 1977, the other dubbed the ‘crisis of confidence’ speech, in 1979 – make salutary yet instructive viewing. Both can be found at the following locations:
Address to nation on energy, April 18th, 1977
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tPePpMxJaA&feature=related
‘Crisis of confidence’ speech, July 15th, 1979
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlRVy7oZ58&feature=related
In retrospect it is very clear that Carter was on the right track. He also knew that the warnings he articulated and the issues he raised would be widely resisted. Yet he held to an ethically informed course of action. It was no surprise that his attempt to ‘tell the truth’ as he saw it also meant saying farewell to any chance of re-election. As history shows, the American people preferred their illusions over and above the chance to recognise a more demanding reality so they elected a ‘B’ movie actor who offered them the reassurance they preferred. The cracks in the ‘American way of life’ that were already visible were papered over. Now they’ve have become chasms and, as Greer and others have pointed out, the full costs involved are spiralling beyond control. Who said that ‘we get the politicians we deserve’ or that ‘man (people) cannot bear much reality?’ The timely foresight that Carter sought to encourage and support was deliberately ignored so that the ‘party’ could continue unabated.
This image was taken in Los Angeles back in 1971. Here the multiple effects of an over-commercialised culture were already clearly evident. The traffic is backed up along a much-repaired street. The forest of signs lacks any appeal and blocks out the landscape, as does the pall of smog hanging over everything. This is a poisonous environment in more than one sense and, as such, a warning that the costs of modernity were, even then, spiralling out beyond all reasonable limits. But the warnings that were clearly expressed in the Limits to Growth project (published around the same time) were widely dismissed or ignored. So were countless other warning signs and signals of distress in the global environment. This was not, and is not, viable. Long term, it means that the chickens come home to roost and the eventual mess is that much more difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. Social learning through recurrent crises is not an effective strategy.
New technology is often presented as a solution to some sort of ‘problem.’ But in recent times early expectations are frustrated as experience shows how it often creates more difficulties than it solves. Think of missile ‘defences,’ pesticides, asbestos and cheap oil for a start (to say nothing of nuclear energy and ‘clean’ coal). Edward Tenner explored this issue in his book Why Things Bite Back (London, Fourth Estate, 1996). He argued that for every significant advance there was what he called a corresponding ‘revenge effect.’ New technology demands more human care to function well, not less. It therefore tends to increase the need for vigilance, which also comes with a price attached. Yet for every major problem allegedly ‘solved’ another often springs up in its place. As technologies become more complex and penetrate ever deeper into the social world such concerns will increase. Here are some examples: identity theft, body scans at airports (and, in time, elsewhere), CCTV cameras in every city street and remote tracking of vehicles – just to catch crooks, of course.
The view of a settled and productive Earth can be traced back, in part, through the history of Cornucopia, or the ‘horn of plenty.’ It can be found on Roman coins such as the example here from the third century B.C.E. A Seventeenth Century version was painted by Jacob Jordaens, student of the great Rubens. Like Rubens himself, he often set well-fed human forms in a faux-natural setting, with trees, animals, fruit and so on representing the productivity of the Earth and that of human beings. The third image shows this ancient myth re-animated to attract colonists to California in the Nineteenth Century. Finally, a degraded version of cornucopian plenty can still be found today in the name of a café in Darwin, Australia. Overall, the presence of such myths deep in the collective subconscious helps to explain why we find it so hard to come to terms with the fact that the Earth actually has real limits that we are currently transgressing at our peril. We’ll very soon have to collectively set aside such notions if we are to manage the complex transition from ‘growth’ to a world in which humanity lives in balance with its life support system.
Government and big business are widely believed to take risk assessment seriously. But beyond the cabinet or boardroom walls a number of very real social risks have been mounting steadily for some time. Sadly they’ve been widely ignored, as have many of the signals indicating their presence. One of the most useful sources dealing with this subject is Ulrich Beck’s book World Risk Society (Policy Press, Cambridge, 1999). In chapter two of BWCH I briefly discuss the issue, suggesting that all societies need to improve their ability to read signals of risk and of change, take them much more seriously and then act accordingly. Currently, however, we can still see multiple examples of risks continuing to be ignored in favour of short-term, mostly economic, benefits. Two examples are illustrated here. The August 2010 mudslide in northwestern Gansu province, China, which killed nearly 2,000 people was not unexpected. Researchers had warned decades ago that the area was too dangerous for permanent settlement and, from the image, you can see why. The valley shown here was created by vast natural forces that were bound to return periodically. As in previous disasters in that country, nothing was done and the price in human suffering was severe. The second picture was taken from the top of the tallest building in Surfers Paradise, Queensland, Australia. It shows how the narrow coastal strip (comprised mostly of sand) between the Pacific Ocean and the mainland has been overrun by development. The latter area, in fact, stretches well inland across the flat coastal plain to the hills beyond. As in so many other low-lying places around the world this is another disaster waiting to happen. As Brian Aldiss once wittily remarked of one of the main themes of science fiction, ‘hubris is clobbered by nemesis.’
A similar type of hubris can be seen in those places where human beings have employed the temporary subsidy provided by ‘cheap’ fossil fuels (that is, fuels whose long term social and environmental costs have never been factored into market prices) to impose their will on extreme desert landscapes. The two examples I discuss in BWCH are Las Vegas and Dubai. A combination of hubris, ‘cheap’ energy and technological prowess have made it possible to erect monuments to human power and dominance in these places. You really have to visit them to understand this Faustian bargain. Both feed off of value and worldview commitments that are questionable to say the least. They project cornucopian myths that I believe are way past their ‘use by’ date and they aggressively display a misplaced confidence in the ability of human works to prevail over the forces of nature. Yet to know anything of the history of these places and the cataclysms that created them over millennia is to begin to expose the fallacies involved. In our rush to ‘conquer the world’ and expand without limit we’ve conveniently set aside the folk knowledge of past history and the contemporary meaning of disasters that so often fell upon our forebears. This is not, however, about religion, ‘punishment for sins’, divine retribution or the like. It’s about our inability to see when that when we confront forces greater than us in these ways we can only ever be the eventual loses. Respect for natural forces is not a ‘green myth’ but a necessary component of a future civilisation that seeks to live in balance with nature. Las Vegas and Dubai still promote themselves as desirable places, especially for holidays. But they are best seen as carry-overs from the past that need to be retrofitted for a different era or simply avoided.
Chapter three takes a careful look at the notion of ‘overshoot and collapse’ and asks – is it is credible? It draws on a number of sources, three of which are shown here. The book Global Change and the Earth System edited by Will Steffen and others helps us to ‘connect the dots’ as it were and to begin to understand how the Earth system is changing and why. The 30-year update of the Limits to Growth provides an authoritative perspective on how this project has developed over that time. It also up-dates insights that are crucial to our ability to ‘get a handle’ on current trends. Yet the book was widely ignored by mainstream media. New Scientist, however, is a credible source that is worth watching. It is occasionally prepared to ‘think the unthinkable’ and question taken-for-granted notions of growth that lie at the heart of our predicament.
Other images to follow….
Other resources
Overviews of Climate Change Literature: Threshold_Overviews