20:
Last night, a couple of us went to hear Ed Miliband’s lecture at the LSE – The Road to Copenhagen. You can see the podcast here. Given the recent pessimism from many political leaders and commentators, including Obama, it was refreshing to hear such optimism and commitment from someone who is clearly passionate about achieving a global deal on climate change. Although he did point out that it was probably only if and when the big guys showed up would any real progress be made…
Ed spoke about a prevailing sense of ‘distance’ in the politics of climate change, which has also been described by Anthony Giddens. This ‘distance’ exists on three levels:
Temporal distance: There’s a significant time lag between action and consequences. Changes 30 or 40 years from now are already inevitable because of our actions over the last few decades. That’s not to say it’s too late to do anything, but it certainly poses the question of how protect the rights of future generations.
Geographical distance: The people most affected by climate change are those least responsible for causing it to happen in the first place. Ed told a moving story about the Nomadic people in North Kenya, who have seen frequency of drought increase from every 12 years, to 8 then 6, then 4 and now every 2 years. The carbon footprint of an average Kenyan is 0.3 tonnes. Compare that with the 20 tonne footprint of the average American and you get the idea.
Causal distance: It’s hard to link individual actions with monumental impact. Small steps equals big change works both ways, but I guess there is a kind of cognitive dissonance at play when you’re making the decision about whether to take the car or walk. You convince yourself that something so small couldn’t actually make a difference. Especially when it’s raining.
So part of the challenge is closing the gap on climate change. And I think that in some small way, #thisplace09 achieves this through the messages we’ve captured on twitter. We’ve had tweets from every continent. Tweets about what’s already happening as well as what’s coming. Our hopes and fears for our children and our children’s children. Tweets from some of the poorest and richest parts of the world. From the North and South, East and West. And reading through them, I really get the feeling that we all recognise that it’s people power that will ultimately drive change. And it’s change for a better today and tomorrow that we want, one that could be achieved at Copenhagen.
I’ve already emailed Ed Miliband this morning to see if he’ll help us get the books into the hands of delegates at the conference. So come on Ed, help us out!
09:
This weekend was spent with family and friends in a home that still has a VHS cassette machine. In 1989 I was at primary school and a video camcorder was a pretty cutting edge piece of kit. It just so happened that my head teacher was an analogue early adopter and taught at least two years of my education from behind a camera. This was the time when behind the camera meant your entire head was hidden from view. When I left the virtual safety of a school with 60 children to the fear and excitement of one with 1600 we were presented with two VHS tapes of our recent past. Fair play to Mr Clements who clearly had to spend hours with two video recorders running off copies – to say nothing of how hard it much have been to use home editing equipment back then. The main purpose of viewing these this weekend was for everyone to laugh at how short and fat I was for my age. Though for everyone present this was a joke that never got old, I was able to notice a few things other than my tendency to be caught on camera with a giant bottle of orangeade or something equally sugary.
Firstly Puma must have been doing a roaring trade at that time. Full technicolour tracksuits were all the rage – a uniform of sorts.  Not the much famed shell suit but a nylon finish worn tight to the skin – or at least mine was.  But another thing I noticed which was more likely of making a positive contribution toward my future lives, was the amazing array of things we seemed to get up to. ‘201’ (loosely based on 2001 but with an 0 missing,) was a film, written, produced, and acted by myself and my slimmer peers. The robot was a sorry combination of cardboard and foil all fixed precariously to a radio controlled car. Sound effects were courtesy of an early printer which strangely enough did create a good range of unearthly sounds.
Looking back I remember that this project and others like it were discussed with, what I now know to be, notes of irony, if not ridicule at the school gates. But I am grateful for them and now believe  wholeheartedly, in the role of the imagination in understanding anything. In some ways the #thisplace project is meant to bring some little nuggets of imagination into a big global issue. Hopefully we will have an update soon about an injection of creativity that I think will help them come to life more.  However this journey back to the way I was in 1989, courtesy of the VHS Camcorder, made me think about the project for another reason.
Though the media is different, the output will still be a cultural artifact or document of a moment in time. Like the VHS tape, in some other time in the future people will be able to know what (at least some) people were thinking and hoping for in the days leading up to a big important opportunity for change.  Of course I am referring to the opportunity to do something about the pending threat of climate change in Copenhagen this December. Choosing a book format for the final output of the project gives it far more longevity than a project created as a purely digital object which will hopefully help it last (a good read here about digital and real world teamwork.)  If found I hope people will find something positive in what it seeks to achieve. I also wonder about the present day context that will surround it in all those years from now – what will that be like? Naturally I don’t have anything close to the answer but I do know that the range of possibilities is broader than perhaps we can even imagine.  It runs from the good, to the bad, through to the very very ugly. Some meaningful yet hasty steps to cut our CO2 emissions in line with the present science could narrow these possibilities to something more favourable.  In turn this may improve the view that’s taken by these people in the future when looking back at us and the way we were.
