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Castle
Kaneloon
A change in Attitude and the awakening of a collective conscience."You
see the world at it's best when it responds to disasters" Man's progression through the 20th century to technological superiority was meteoric and without a doubt, and generally speaking , beneficial. The race engaged by certain emerging or "02nd world" nations, such as Brazil, India or even China, to close the divide on leading nations was just as impressive but strewn with problems and failures. Certain judged these problems and failures unavoidable saying that any resulting changes to the biodiversity of certain regions of the planet, was acceptable if it meant an improvement in the quality of life for the populations concerned. Some benevolent western thinkers even said that it was unreasonable to expect emerging countries to apply the same ecological regulations and standards as leading nations. It was tantamount to asking them to stop their economical growth dead because the carbonic gases they were expelling was adding to the volumes already being rejected by certain countries, signatory, or not, to the Kyoto protocol, and who had astutely found a loophole in the protocol and were busy buying unused or surplus quotas from less industrialized signatory countries. A change in attitude was needed and the result was the awakening of a collective ecological conscience at the dawn of the 21st Century. Mankind was becoming aware of the serious need for a cohesive world body to set the regulatory standards needed to monitor the Earth. Programs such as the ESA's Envisat program and the Nasa's Terra program where set up to study the effects of mans actions on the climate. But however scientifically important these programs are they can do nothing to stop the desertification of large areas of north west China or avoid the decimation of millions of square kilometres of tropical forests, in favour of vast fields of monoculture crops used for the production of Bio carburants, supposedly the answer to the fossil fuel crisis in certain emerging countries. The
Dec 26th 2004 Tsunami disaster had at least one positive result. After
numerous global meetings, from Kyoto to Cancun, via Montreal, and back
again, the world's mighty started mulling over what would happen to
their economies if such disasters happened at home (the best laid schemes
of mice and men often go awry).
Fortunately,
as never before in mankind's history, the planetary wave of solidarity
following the Dec 2004 disaster helped accelerate the subsequent awakening
of a global conscience and brought back into the spotlight some of the
region's long-standing environmental problems*. The fact that
a lot of western victims counted among the dead and injured may, or
may not, have made a difference. The fact also that several billions
of dollars were raised or promised to help reconstruct the region, most
of it apparently arriving at destination may also have helped. The problem
was then to make sure that the countries actually used all these billions.
But there we hit upon another problem that illustrates the divide between
leading western countries and 03rd world countries, or even certain
emerging countries: 03rd world country governments often prefer to dedicate
their time, energy and money on military projects or regional political
strategies rather than dedicating it to constructing or even consolidating
internal infrastructures. So. Having accomplished the feat of crossing
oceans to get all that aid to the country you couldn't actually get
it 300 kilometres further up the road because there was no road... and
I won't even start to talk of the tower of Babel of a situation with
all the aid agencies in the world claiming priority over funds, material
and local infrastructures! Hopefully it won't need another Natural disaster
to see if the N.G.Os have made any progress in cross organization communications! Utopia
lost
© N.Richards - Nov2007 |
