Coalition of the willing

‘Coalition of the Willing’ now has its own contributors’ blog. I’ll be posting there as well as here in the coming months.

On green imagery

The film director Werner Herzog is rarely short of something interesting to say. He didn’t disappoint in a recent interview at BFI Southbank, in which he spoke about the importance of creating new images to tackle climate change.

‘Interviewer: You once said that the creation of new images in the world was one of the most central things to sustaining human life on the planet.

Herzog: In a way, yes, because if we don’t start to adapt, through language and through images, to new and unforeseen situations, we will be somehow stunted in our growth. We will not be adaptable to challenges that are coming at us at a very rapid rate. I think it has to do with human ingenuity and human intelligence. And it ultimately translates in our language skills and how we refresh and recreate language day after day after day, and create images that are adequate and are not at a standstill for 50, 60, 70 years. There are certain images that are totally at a standstill and are just without meaning. … [I]t’s a dangerous thing. Without image and language adaptations, we will not really be able to adapt to unforeseen challenges, like global warming, which is just one problem.’

Herzog is the best kind of public philosopher. His reference to global warming got me thinking: what image adaptations do we need to tackle a problem of this order?

One possible answer is that we need more images that represent human beings as a species, as opposed to a bunch of different nationalities and ethnicities. Perhaps images too of the earth from space, evoking the fragility of life on the blue planet and our isolation in the void.

Most of all, we need images of human collaboration. The myriad problems thrown-up by climate change will not be solved by celebrities and reformers. We need new images to remind ourselves of what tremendous things we’ve accomplished through mass collaboration.

I’ve recently worked with Simon Robson on a film about how new Web 2.0 platforms could be used to muster and facilitate grassroots collaboration to tackle global warming. Over several months, I’ve had the opportunity of being able to watch, listen, discuss, and co-create with numerous artists and studios about the world, which has been a fantastic experience. What has blown me away has been the creativity and intelligence on the part of the animators and designers dealing with the visual landscapes of the film. It is as if everyone working on the film realizes that what is really at stake is the opportunity to create a new visual landscape for the war on global warming — new images for the reimagining of the struggle and its possibilities.

Swarm politics

I spoke about swarm politics at the F5 Creativity Festival in NYC in April 2009.  Simon Robson and I were there to present shots from our upcoming film, ‘Coalition of the Willing’. Popdesign captured the moment and put it  flickr. Thank you Popdesign. To see the photos of Simon and I, you can either scroll left through the photostream or follow a tag (better).

If you’d like to watch the video of our presentation at F5, you’ll find it here. Thanks very much to Justin Cone for posting this video on the F5 site.

Alternatively, you can watch the clip on the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ blog’, where you’ll also find storyboards and shots from the film.

Global warming debate heats up – or changes tone?

Dr John S. Theon, onetime supervisor of NASA scientist and originary proponent of the anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming thesis, Dr James Hansen, dropped a bombshell into the global warming debate yesterday by declaring himself a global warming sceptic. Theon (now retired) claims that Hansen was never muzzled by the US government, as he claimed to be, and asserts that the models used by climate scientists to forecast global warming are ‘useless’.

Not surprisingly, Theon’s claims have provoked a furore in the blogsphere, the ubiquity of which suggests that the global warming meme has passed out of fashion with the commentariat. How much this will slow the international march towards emissions cap and trade systems and green power strategems remains to be seen. Despite (reportedly) growing dissensus to the majority view, the climate change lobby now has the ear of government in the US, Europe, Australia and elsewhere. More significantly, President Obama is poised to unveil an innovative sets of proposals to ‘repower America’, which will have far-reaching implications for US consumers, industry and industrial innovators. Facing the prospect of the worst reccession in 60 years, many heads of state and business leaders may well surmise that a green revolution is exactly what is needed to reinvigorate markets and kick start the flagging global economy.

This indicates a salient point that is mostly overlooked in the continuing global warming debate, on the internet at least. Defenders of the anthropogenic global warming thesis who claim that the debate is over are dead wrong insofar as they mean the scientific debate. Science is never settled – argument stops only when interlocutors lose interest in the topic and move on to other themes. This is unlikely to happen with respect to global warming anytime soon. Having said this, it would appear that the debate concerning global warming has changed in both tone and substance in recent months, to the point that questions of climate science are less the central issue. Increasingly, debate is taking a positive and pragmatic turn, as political leaders and opinion makers consider the problem of global warming (whatever its provenance) in the context of associated problems such as energy dependence and economic crisis. Only months ago, Al Gore, for example, was ratcheting-up anxiety levels by presenting anthropogenic global warming as an existential crisis threatening human civilization. While Gore has lost none of his conviction, since Obama’s election he has taken to framing the problem as a positive challenge to repower and reinvent the US. Here is an excerpt from Gore’s address to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 28, 2009:

‘For years our efforts to address the growing climate crisis have been undermined by the idea that we must choose between our planet and our way of life; between our moral duty and our economic well being. These are false choices. In fact, the solutions to the climate crisis are the very same solutions that will address our economic and national security crises as well.’

The productive tone of this new discourse is to be welcomed. For too long, our talk of global warming has been cast in quasi-religious, apocalyptic tones, in which an immense range of scenarios and possibilities are reduced to the simple of option of damnation or salvation. By casting the problem in a positive, constructive light, we place the greater burden of our salvation on our own shoulders, which is precisely where it should lie. God will not save us from global warming – nor will Obama and Gore. It is we – meaning each and every one of us – who must take on this responsibility, each in our own small way.

The problem is not one of stopping global warming, or of simply learning to adjust. The problem concerns how to recreate (and repower) society for the 21st century, so that we leave a greener, happier, and healthier world for the century after that.

Demographic change

Check this out for shifts in the US electoral map between 2004 and 2008.

Rudd addresses UN

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s address to the UN climate change conference in Bali, December 12, 2007.

Building bridges

Two towns sat on opposite sides of a river in the shadow of some mountains. The glaciers set into the mountains glistened in the morning sun.

For years, traffic had passed between the towns by way of small boats. But one day, a consortium of men built a low toll-bridge across the river. It soon absorbed all the traffic from the boats. The toll was expensive, but the bridge was safer than the boats, so people used it. Before long, a continuous stream of people crossed the bridge from one town to the other. The consortium of men became rich, the economies of both towns expanded, and everyone was happier as a result.

For a while it seemed the good life would go on forever. Then the glaciers began to melt. The river rose higher in its bed.

Empedocles was a citizen of one of the towns. When he heard that the glaciers were melting, he went to the consortium of men.

‘Look’, he said. ‘The glaciers are melting. Soon the river will rise above the toll-bridge and no one will be able to cross the river. What will happen to the markets then? We must phase out the bridge and build a new fleet of boats to ferry traffic across the river. This is our crisis today. We must rise up like the river to meet it!’

The rich men laughed at Empedocles.

‘Do you know how much it costs to build a fleet of boats?’ they said. ‘Where will all this money for this come from? From the taxpayer, of course! And who will want to live by the river when the taxes are so high? You talk about saving economies, Empedocles, but you don’t know the first thing about economics. We do. We shall stick with the toll-bridge and preserve the status quo. Who would believe that the river would rise above the bridge in any case?’

Undefeated, Empedocles went away and built a boat. Soon he’d launched a small business ferrying people back and forth across the river.

The sun shone and the glaciers melted and river rose higher in its bed. Before long, it was overflowing the bridge. More people were using Empedocles’s ferry service across the river, worried about losing stock in the water as they carted it across.

The rich men said to themselves: ‘Empedocles was right. The river is going to overflow the bridge. We must diversify our business in order to capture other markets. We must invest in boats, not bridges – the future is in boats!’

The rich men changed their thinking. They built a whole fleet of ferry boats. Empedocles’s small, reasonably priced and reliable ferry service could not compete with them. Soon the consortium had monopolized the ferry-boat system, and Empedocles was driven out of business.

Once again, the rich men laughed at him.

‘You changed to boats while we stayed with bridges’, they observed. ‘Thus we became richer while you struggled to open up this new market. It was only when we no longer saw money in bridges that we shifted to boats – and now your ferry-boat system has made us richer than ever. You should have followed our example, Empedocles. You should have invested in bridges while the waters rose’.

Empedocles smiled in return. ‘I have always invested in bridges’, he said. ‘While you were protecting your investments, I built a bridge to the future’.

Towards a Stoic revivalism

The 20th century was an age of ideologies. People lived and died for their beliefs about human nature and the nature of society, its destiny and future. ‘Capitalism’ and ‘communism’ were totemic code words for opposing visions of the good life.

The 21st century is unlikely to witness the same ideological fervor. This is not because people have outgrown the need for ideas expressing the truth about human nature. It is because climate change has placed the destiny and future of our societies in question.

Rather than a new ideology, our century needs a Stoic revivalism. Like us, the Greek and Roman Stoic’s lived in an age of crisis. The ancient city-states had yielded to war and empire. The old gods had survived, but failed to inspire a living faith. Political leaders bickered and fought without any social vision. Anxiety was the order of the day.

Stoic philosophy was shaped by all this. In a world of constant change, the Stoics sought to develop a philosophical account of the challenges presented by change. This is what makes the Stoics relevant to us today.

The Stoic thinker is beset by a world beyond their control. Like a sailor on a stormy sea, they must find out what is within their control, and tie themselves to that mast for the sake of their survival. Here is the crux of it: according to the Stoics, the only thing you and I have any real power to control is the way that we respond to the world, our emotional and intellectual responses.

The Stoic philosophy-as-life hinges on cultivating the power within.

The Stoics may have been optimistic about the extent of control that is granted by reason (significantly, they don’t have a concept of the unconscious, as we’ve had since Nietzsche and Freud). But their influence on medieval and modern thought is decisive. To cope and endure in a world of change, the inner life of reason must become a sanctum against the world, sealed off against storms and upheavals, sheltered from the blows of fate. To negotiate and even flourish in a world of change, we must become guardians of our inner world, champions of our rational tranquility.

The Stoic rule is:

‘There is one thing I know I can control, and that is how I respond to events’.

The Stoic lesson is:

‘To find tranquility in the midst of change, and fulfillment in relation to the challenges of fate, cultivate the power within’.

Responses to climate change: an argument

This is a risk analysis of the potential costs of action and inaction on climate change. On YouTube, it is billed as the most terrifying video you’ll ever see.

On the fictive and futures

Why are characters in children’s books forever getting lost in the woods? Why can they never stick to the path, or at least carry a map? The simplest answer is the most unexpected: it is because crisis breaks open paths into the future.

Children are keenly aware of this fact. They approach adulthood with due caution; every step along the way of life is fraught with crisis, and each crisis presents new, strange and forbidding futures. Such is the significance of the darkened wood. To be lost in a wood is to be presented with the challenge of finding a way out. Is it a new way, rarely traveled? So much the better. Does it lead to a babbling brook, a mountaintop or a sheltered glade? Let’s follow it and find out!

Children know what as adults we all-too-readily forget: that crisis can be a moment of opportunity. We need crisis in order to change and evolve – to become something more than we are today, and to escape everything that we have already become.

The most fearsome crises occur when the darkened wood is within. When the soul lacks a way, the future ceases to exist, and we are condemned to what the past has made us. Ask your children: is this living? They will tell you it is intolerable. It is here that the word ‘redemption’ acquires its spiritual meaning. Redemption in the religious sense requires that the seeker find the light that leads through the darkness; that they follow this light, perceiving it as the way towards a new and mysterious future. The light is never more than the opportunity of redemption. It is a curious feature of the human heart that this sense of opportunity is often just as valuable as the redemption itself.