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Ethiopia: "The 11th Hour" Documentary - Uncomfortable Truths
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The Daily Monitor (Addis Ababa)
COLUMN
12 December 2007
Posted to the web 12 December 2007
B. Mezgebu
Addis Ababa
As the actor DiCaprio said in the new environmental documentary, The 11th Hour, "We are in the Environmental Age, whether we like it or not." But unlike the other "ages" that took place at various times, like the Stone Age or Industrial Age, etc. this one maybe the most time constrained.
DiCaprio the artist and others, mainly of the academic type, have spoken in the documentary film. Here below are some glimpses of what they said.
The Environmental Age, if indeed it is here with us, is in a race with time to create a sustainable world, before it is too late. Climate Change is a sword poised to strike. A looming environmental disaster threatening the globe, from one end to the other end, except perhaps a few lucky spots.
But there are other, less publicized threats such as deforestation, soil erosion, water pollution which are even more damaging, though with less drama, than global warming. Already there are quite a number of places which have become zero grounds of environmental refugees.
Definitely in Ethiopia, time is of the essence in fighting the erosion of the top soil, the destruction of biodiversity across-the-board. Already, much too much, has been lost. Since there is no way of retrieving what had been lost, the next wise thing to do is take care of whatever is left. "The fierce urgency of now" is most applicable to the protection of our environment.
It has been said that most of the living systems thought the world have become unstable. As the Vanity Fair magazine described the phenomenon, "Living systems are coral reef, climate stability, forest cover, climate stability, forest cover, the oceans themselves, aquifers, water, the conditions of the soil, biodiversity. The list goes on, if you want to go down through the hierarchy. That shows our Planet is indeed wobbly.
Is there a dichotomy between economic growth and the workings of some of the systems mentioned? It seems unlimited and heedless economic expansion will sooner or later hit a brick wall. The world economy is geared for unremitting growth. The biosphere, which basically comprises all the living systems, never can grow or expand. What is going to happen is that, you give up what used to be there. In many instances at present, the indirect costs of the products, the goods, and the services we consume may be greater than the direct ones.
Conventional economics, and the way it calculates things, they say, is the culprit. Many of the free things in life don't make it into the calculus. Plant pollination of all the flowering plants (remember your high school botany?) is free and you don't have to put your request in advance.
How about the many precious things the world is losing quietly and unnoticed. Numerous places, Ethiopia among them, lose billions of tons of fertile soil each year due to wind and water erosion. Water pollution is rampant, so too are man-induced localized droughts.
Conventional economics hardly accounts for any of those loses. A few environmental researchers from time to time probably crunch numbers in an attempt to show us what we are losing in terms of the bottom line, but nobody that counts in the planning departments seems to be listening.
What the world has in place right now could be called a waste-making system. It has been calculated that for every truckload of product with lasting value, 32 truckloads of waste are produced. All this ends up in landfills or incinerators, which are creating problems in turn. Besides it has not become any easier to find new ones.
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The men and women in the documentary tell us also that human beings don't have to go back out in the woods to live sustainable lives, "Some people suggest that in order to live sustainably we have to go out in the woods and put on animal skins and live on roots and berries. The simple reality is that we do have the technology. The question is, how can we use our understanding of technology along with our understanding of culture, and how culture changes, to create a culture that will interact with science and with the world around us in a sustainable fashion" Lastly, what people have to embrace, we are told, is the "remaking". The definitive words in the new age will have to be: design, redesign remake and reimagine.
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