Global Warming, Economy, Lifestyles and Quality of Life

Max Bound

GLOBAL warming is real. Al Gore’s widely acclaimed film “An Inconvenient Truth” makes the point that the major threat to human life and people’s security is Global Warming. In making this point Gore is courageously stepping outside the misrepresentation of reality that the Bush, Blair, Howard group is deliberately using to frighten, beguile, and divide people.
Scientific opinion is now overwhelming in acknowledging that Global Warming is resulting from current human activities. Before Gore’s film, in November 2002, the Wentworth Group of Australian Scientists wrote of the situation in Australia: “We are taking more resources from our continent than its natural systems can replenish. That, by any definition, is unsustainable”

Reversing current unsustainable economic and social practices is critical to a human future. Production of armaments and other forms of destruction of scarce resources, modern war and, advertisement induced, civilian consumerist mania, are major stimulants of the human activities which are causing Global Warming.

Modern societies are dominated by privately owned corporations controlled by a few very rich and powerful people. As the most influential economist in mid to later twentieth century North America put it “… When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state, power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in form and degree but not in kind from the state itself.” John Kenneth Galbraith, Presidential address to the American Economic Association on Dec. 29th 1972.

A decreasing number of ultra rich and powerful people control, and or dominate what is published in the various arms of the mass media. Hard won democratic rights are being eroded and fear has become a political weapon as the so called war on terrorism fuels ever more terrorist activities.

In consequence there is deep seated world wide concern for the future. In America Al Gore has made the above mentioned film about Global Warming. In the United Kingdom the “Good Society”, publicised the first part of the group’s Programme for Renewal of society including the following comment: “If people want to shape the world around them, in their community and at work, it can only be as active citizens working collectively through a democratised state and civil society to create a different and better world. … The good society must now come before the free market.”

This extract reads as a clear call for a combination of large scale public policy development with people action The process of enabling the election to Parliaments and Councils of sufficient numbers of people with the will, skills, backbone and popular support necessary to change the status quo will not be easy, or happen overnight, but it is urgent.

We need constructive and workable alternatives to current economic, social and political directions. As the above quoted “Good Society” suggests we need to strengthen democratic procedures and collectively develop conditions for a more cooperative and peaceful society and world” We are not inescapably dependent on this flood of commodities which our economic system is designed to produce..” {Coombs H. C. “THE RETURN OF SCARCITY” Pub. Cambridge University Press 1990)

After this statement Coombs, effectively, went on to call on people to develop and work through ideas for alternatives. As Professor Ian Lowe has put it: “For a society to be sustainable, it must be a just society”(1 The above issues, along with other matters relevant to meeting the challenges Global warming is increasingly confronting us with are the subject of a discussion now beginning on www.nowwethepeople.org/tasmania/ These discussions are part of the preparation for a seminar/conference on Global warming being organised by Now We The People (NWTP) in Hobart in Feb 10&11. 2007

Max Bound is an Octogenarian with life long experience as a social–political activist including over 30 (thirty) years as an environmental activist. He is retired from a working life as a labourer, coal miner, organiser, building worker — and after mature age tertiary studies and receiving a B A in Environmental Design and Graduate Diploma in Urban planning —work as a planner, Research Officer and Coordinator.