STONE COLD HAVEN

I could have sworn it was only the other day that thousands of tree hugging, Guardian reading, bike riding, fair trade consuming mercenaries for the cause of mother nature got together in Portugal. It can’t have been that long ago (I’m talking a matter of weeks or at the extreme, a few months).

The reason why this is pricking my stone cold conscience is that I distinctly remember the environmental doomsayers breathing fire and brimstone down our throats that if we don’t do something about the environment pronto, the world is inevitably going to suffer the worst death of its kind (speaking of which – I’d like someone to validate this claim with a plausible comparison of any other kind of bad death of human kind).

I note that over 2000 of our beloved tree hugging friends of the earth are meeting again this week in Copenhagen. See, I’m one to be cynical about these types of events. 2000 people in one event are way way too many to get anything of substance done. I’m talking here from the experience of attending a couple of conferences of this magnitude for my sins.

Such events are notorious for the difficulty of locating a clean toilet where you don’t have to tip toe while pulling up your trousers to avoid a disturbing cocktail of water and bodily fluids of all manner taking residence on the floor (you get the picture) before executing a fine acrobatic act of peeing without soiling your immaculate suit – speaking of which, at one such event, I had to force my female colleague to take a taxi back to the hotel to use the toilet in her room. The girl was clearly suffering and her bladder was in distress, but her martyrdom for the cause of clean toilets around the world was clearly putting the long term health of her internal wiring at risk. In more familiar surroundings, she is the sort of hard nosed girl who is comfortable in desperate times to look for an alley while shouting back “Darius just keep watch while I take care of business here” – but clearly, some locations don’t give you the option of an alley conducive for squatting in times of emergency….but I digress.

My point is that it’s difficult to see how to get anything decent done at such an event following hot on the coat tails of another similar event weeks ago. In fact, most productivity is normally achieved at breakfast get-togethers in the hotel or in the evening at the hotel bar. Roll call is impossible and you’ll be surprised at the number of joy riders to such events who just go for shopping and spend the whole day down town, some even still wearing their event name tags and carrying the paper bags of exhibitors crap that they’re pretending to take back home and put in the staff common room as if it were evidence to justify the cost of their attending of the event.

So when I see that there’s another environmental get-together not so long after the Portugal one, where supposedly scientific experts, environmental lobbyists, professional event attendees (aka joy riders) and any number of so called environmental NGOs are again hooking up to shove the perils of our disregard to the environment down our throats, several questions start disturbing me.

1. What has changed since a few weeks ago when the same number of environmental mercenaries got together in Portugal?
2. For folks who preach about carbon footprints and unnecessary air travelling, why isn’t anyone bitch slapping them for this sort of nonsensical travel for information that can be posted on the internet?

It would be even cheaper for Al gore to make a sequel of his Inconvenient truth power point presentation and post it on YouTube.

This constant mantra of ”You will perish and die if you don’t stop polluting the earth” smacks of more arrogance than fundamentalist right wing movements that operate unsavoury tactics to get their ideologies across. Folks are not stupid and shouldn’t be treated as if they are with the constant bombardment of the same information laced in different ways.

So I ask again – What has changed since the last meeting a few weeks ago in Portugal so as to warrant scaring the living shit out of folks about the world coming to an end faster than we thought?

If there’s one thing Abraham Maslow did, its injecting a reality check with his theory of the hierarchy of human needs. I suspect that for most folks around the world who are being credit crunched at the moment, and for the majority of the world’s population who were economically screwed anyway before the credit crunch, global warming and the need to worry about the environment is kicked into touch for a while. Folks are more concerned with the small matter of putting food on the table for their families.

As a side note, one of my clients does a lot of environmental work. I have spent a lot of time working with them and if there’s one thing I’ve come to understand (and something that acts as another contributor to my cynicism), it boils down to the ability to pay salaries and pay mortgages for their staff. All the focus and enthusiasm and passion and whatever you can call it about the cause for environmentalism, is simply a cover for a direct route to government funding and donor funding for the environment. The environment and lobbying about global warming is a fashion statement for the next decade. In the 70’s women’s liberation was fashionable, in the 80’s race relations was fashionable, in the 90’s it was all about the gay and lesbian movement, this decade disability rights has become the new gay, and next decade, watch out for the fair trade consuming tree huggers.

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Tags: Environmental lobby, Global warming

Posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 7:40 am
Filed underGeneral, Stone Cold Thoughts.
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