environment

environment / philosophy — No Comments
20
Oct 11

What kind of God are We?

Earthset

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

About 40 years ago I wore a button that said, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” Then we finally saw the pictures. What did it do for us? The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, “we are as gods, we might as well get good at it”. Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective. What I’m saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it… At a conference in Germany, Craig Venter was asked “Aren’t you playing God?”? His response: “We’re not playing”.

- Stewart Brand, We are as gods and have to get good at it

While we were coming home, the spacecraft was rotating to maintain thermal balance, and that allowed the Earth, the moon, the sun, and the stars to come into my view in a 360-degree panorama every two minutes, which is a pretty powerful sight… And suddenly it settled in, a visceral moment of knowing that the molecules in my body, the molecules in the spacecraft, and the molecules in my partners had been prototyped and manufactured in an ancient generation of stars. It was not an intellectual realization, but a deep knowing that was accompanied by a feeling of ecstasy and oneness that I had never experienced in that way before.

- Edgar Mitchell, quoted in Cosmic Conversations (Stephan Martin)

My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease… I have to tell you, as members of the Earth’s family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger. Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years.

- James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

environment / montenegro — 4 Comments
3
Sep 07

Cleaning Up in Montenegro

BBC Radio 4′s Crossing Continents went out last Thursday, on the subject of the Mediterranean coastline. I was

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by Julian Pettifer, as one of a group of expats, although tragically I didn’t make the final cut. This is a shame because I was witty and insightful – in fact if they’d kept me in, the programme would probably have had more listeners. Please feel free to write and tell them this.

The programme asked whether the Mediterranean can be saved from mass tourism. You can already see the BBC baggage that question is carrying – the environmental and social impact of “mass tourism” have been a cause of concern for the middle class, as well as basis for ridiculing the working class, since its very beginnings. The article that accompanies the broadcast ends with the question “Is the only salvation for the Med to go up-market?” without a trace of irony.

People who know me only slightly already know that I’m hardly oblivious to environmental issues, but this strikes me as being a faintly idiotic question to ask. In the case of Montenegro, tourism offers one of its few sources of income, income that’s needed to pay for environmental protection and improvement. The only salvation for the Med (in the case of Montenegro) is fairly consistent investment in the country, and if going “up-market” is the way to do it, then that’s great.

But if mass tourism is also the way to do it, then it’s hard to deny Montenegro the chance to build its economy and give people some holiday pleasure at the same time. Everybody here, locals and expats alike, is concerned about the impact of tourism, and we all wonder how the situation is going to develop – perhaps none more so than our local billionaire benefactor, Peter Munk. Munk has sunk a lot of his money into a scheme to develop Tivat Marina (or rather, the old Navy base next to Tivat Marina) into the biggest inland sea marina on the Med – a high rollers’ paradise.

Everything I’ve heard tells me that Munk is serious about his investment, and not just in terms of getting a return on his money. He’s also interested in the social and environmental development of the country, but the BBC can’t help themselves, asking “is this massive foreign investment really in the interests of the Montegrin environment and people?” The short answer is yes, since the alternative is presumably very little or no foreign investment.

Of course Montenegro is plagued by problems of corruption and lawlessness which are touched on in the programme, and which confuse these discussions. It’s hard to make the case that “Montenegro” needs to make its own choices when in reality the government isn’t particularly responsive to the wishes of the people, and it’s also hard to make the case when the people themselves are clearly going to go for the quick buck. The large number of locals complaining about the foreign invasion while driving brand-new sports cars after selling a plot of land that’s been in their family for 200 years is testament to that.

Anyway, the programme is quite an interesting pop comparison between Montenegro (will it go the same way as Spain?) and Spain (can it recapture the peasant charm that Montenegro still has?). The question of what is the “real Mediterranean” (and who owns it) also links thematically to an interesting post at A Fistful of Euros which discusses cultural uniformity in Europe, if that’s your thing (note: for some reason, that link is broken, but you’ll find it on their main site).

You can listen to the BBC broadcast

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and read the accompanying article here.

environment / life / politics — No Comments
5
Aug 07

Snakes in Eden

Via Freesteel, Cory Doctorow is roasted over hot coals for peddling techno-porn. No, not the sort of techno-porn where Bjork robots make out with each other, but the kind which

subscribe(s) to the usual techno-myth of a future in which we become immortal beings after our brains have been uploaded into computers for back-up, emulation, and pleasure-seeking downloads into other meat-puppets.

As Julian points out, this is an “interesting” future only insofar as it’s the only future that would let us avoid having to actually live in the future:

Now folks, there are two kinds of futures we can talk about; there’s the fake one which we like to imagine, where our grandfather gets cured of cancer at the hospital and lives forever, and then there’s the real one which we will all eventually be living in, whether we like it or not.

Doctorow stands accused of talking the talk but not walking the walk – touring the planet to preach the gospel of webtopia with a carbon footprint the size of Guatemala. Hell, he’s guilty as charged – but then so am I. In the pay of “humanitarian organisations”, I fly around the world on a regular basis just like Doctorow, paying into the same engine of climate change that is going to be paying out a lot of future disasters.

The irony is that the entire humanitarian sector is pretty much dependent on jetting around the world without much thought for the environmental consequences – and often without a thought for the environmental causes of the problems we’re trying to resolve. It’s not as if we can teleconference in our response to the Indian Ocean tsunami, but if we just invested more in local capacity we probably wouldn’t need to, at least not as often as we do.

Enough of my wailing and gnashing of teeth. Read the whole post for a scabrously funny flight-by-flight analysis as Cory Doctorow

does what he can to make the listener feel inferior and envious of his life, and of the way he can give the same speech over and over again which people want to hear, get passes into secret clubs in Disneyland, and generally have a cool time jet-setting around a world where everybody loves him.

I want to live in the real future, not a webtopian fantasy. Where do I sign up?