I'm writing this with 4 hours to go till 2008. My musings about the passing of another year tend to occur twice a year, on Rosh Hashanah and on Jan 31st. The former I devote to my own personal inner life situation (sounds terribly Californian I know) and the latter for wordly things like my career and the state of the world.
In that spirit, I approach 2008 in an odd frame of mind. 2007 has been a good year to me and my family: reasonable health, interesting and productive work, lovely kids. I'm optimistic and excited about all those things for 2008, but in terms of the world situation I can't shake a terrible feeling of foreboding.
In that gloomy spirit I contributed to a piece on The World in 2008 for Open Democracy. Here's what I wrote:
A climate of failure
In thinking about 2008, it is instructive to think back to 2001. In September of that year an event that no one (at least among political commentators) had foreseen had, by the end of the year, caused dramatic changes to the global political environment.
What is interesting is to compare the kinds of cataclysmic events that engender far-reaching reforms, policies and responses, with those that do not. Terrorist attacks, at least in the western world, evidently do have the capacity to radically and speedily affect change. Whether or not you agree with the “war on terror” there is no question that its launch in the months after 11 September 2001 has caused far-reaching global social and political change. In contrast, “natural” disasters appear to have a much weaker capacity to change the world. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 generated (highly imperfect) localised responses and (according to Naomi Klein) its aftermath may have served as a test-bed for long-term changes in global capitalism; but in the end its consequences were limited.
Despite the progressively high profile of global warming as a political issue, there has yet to be an environmental 9/11. The problem is fourfold:
* no individual environmental catastrophe can be conclusively linked to man-made climate change
* even the largest environmental disasters only affect a relatively small proportion of the earth
* the idea of “the natural” as a realm independent of human activity is dying incredibly hard
* those who deny that manmade climate change is occurring have done an effective job of nurturing widespread doubts.
Climate change may well mean that 2008 will be another year of deadly and extreme weather events. The frequency of such events is likely to increase but the chances of a concomitantly dramatic increase in political action to combat climate change are slim. True, climate change will remain a major political issue in 2008; indeed, after the Bali conference of December 2007, international negotiations are likely to be frenetic. The problem is that such discussions are unlikely to translate into any dramatic short-term concerted action of the kind that will be effective in the window of opportunity we are likely to have left.
2008 is likely to be a year of sound and fury that may well signify very little in the long term. There will be no shortage of political battles and controversies, no shortage of shocking disasters, no shortage of war and bloodshed. Yet action against the most fundamental problem that human beings face will be patchy, uncoordinated and largely ineffective.
To sugar the pill, I leave you with one discovery that gave me a hige amount of pleasure in 2007 - videos of Hi NRG diva Divine on youtube:
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