Tuesday, June 20, 2006

From: melcher@nets.com Subject: The Player Date: June 20, 2006 9:13:42 PM MDT The Player An Inconvenient Truth is the most important movie of the year. There is not much that is new here for those who've been paying close attention to environmental issues over the years, but it's presentation is both comprehensive and visually stunning. Many will see it as a sort of covert campaign advertisement for an impending Al Gore run for the presidency. Perhaps this is so, or perhaps it's wishful thinking. Whether or no, the movie manages to document, in a carefully prepared scenario built out of a lifetime of observation, reflection and presentation, a crises of such immense proportion that only the most inspired and dedicated leadership, both moral and intellectual, can get us through it with our civilization more or less intact. The film also offers a biographical view that offers a model for true leadership in a century that promises changes beyond anything we have known. The most poignant moment for me in An Inconvenient Truth occurs when we follow Al Gore moving through an airport security checkpoint on his way to a slide show presentation somewhere in the world. We follow him through the airport concourse, a lonely figure with laptop in hand as his voice-over recounts his constant search for signs that people are ready to listen or to change, and his frustration that, as yet, he sees little indication of it. Still, he continues, calmly and purposefully, overcoming both rage and despair, accepting the role of message bearer for a society so caught up in its own self-image that it refuses to see the precipice toward which, with increasing speed, we are heading. What occurred to me as I watched the man's dignified and determined progress was that, no matter how dark the age becomes it appears that the possibility of good leadership has not left us. Although my generation appears to have, by and large chosen to forsake itself and everyone's future in order to build a nest egg of false security, and so many of our leaders have perished, either naturally or by assassination, there are still players in the game who are capable of taking the long view and leading those who are awake and willing toward a more promising future. Some are gifted, or cursed, either by intuitive leap or sheer circumstance, with an ability to see perhaps too far forward for their own good. This can lead to depression or madness or serious maladjustment, and I've known quite a few over the years who've been driven over the edge into various forms of self-destruction. It occurs to me that a society willing to sacrifice the sanity of its most far seeing members, either out of fear or an over-riding need for immediate gratification, is a society that probably deserves the worst that comes to it. Of course this is the dark voice that speaks to me out of my own sense of futility, and I struggle with it daily. When I was about twelve years old I started work on my first unpublished and unfinished novel, which I called Day of Epoch. It was about the struggle of human society to survive in the shadow of a newly descended ice age. I don't remember what gave me the idea. It may have been a combination of reading Andre Norton's science fiction novel about a post nuclear future, Starman's Son, combined with my school lessons about the cyclical repetition of environmental cycles. A large contributor was the constant fear of nuclear extinction held over the heads of my whole generation throughout the ebbs and calms of a long running Cold War. Perhaps something in me had caught a whiff of the future. Along with spinning tales in my imagination I sketched diagrams of futuristic self-contained underground cities in my grade school steno-pad. I designed them to keep the inhabitants safe against all external deprivations. In all of the years that have passed since those fantasy visions I've found myself returning to similar themes, as if a vision were stuck in my head, of a world that is cold and desolate with people hanging on the very edge of survival. Over the years the vision has been sometimes clearer, sometimes not, while something similar has actually begun to emerge in alarming projections made by scientists as they review environmental data. In 1985, almost twenty years after my vision in the form of fiction, I attended a conference in Boulder, Colorado, named Gaia Synthesis, after a theory then proposed by James Lovelock, who observed that the earth when viewed from space appears and acts exactly like a living organism. The conference explored implications and influences of this idea, one not new in the context of human thinking, but apparently so to a scientific establishment long mired in a swamp of logical positivist thinking. That gathering of scientists, teachers, students and spiritual leaders was privileged to be shown slides of hundreds of then unpublished photographs taken by orbiting NASA satellites showing the rapidly accelerating changes taking place across the planet, due apparently in some part to the actions of human societies. Lakes and seas were drying up, vast forests were on fire, glaciers were receding and deserts were spreading. We were also shown emerging data from the National Atmospheric Research Center that indicated average wind speed all over the world was every year increasing, and had been doing so steadily worldwide since global measurements had been taken. Evidence was accumulating that human civilization, with it's unrestrained growth of population and industry, had for centuries contributed to trends appearing to climax in this century due to the consequent elevation of carbon dioxide collecting in the atmosphere. Whatever the source of these accelerations in climactic processes, the enormity of what we could see with our own eyes was daunting. Along with the alarm dawning on a then small but growing segment of the scientific community there was a crescendo of voices arising from indigenous communities and spiritual visionaries standing at the edges of the mainstream, warning us that we were dangerously out of balance and nearing some kind of threshold for decision that would determine the success or failure of whole civilizations. Profoundly moved by all that I'd been shown I started cornering friends and acquaintances and anyone I came in contact with in order to weave a narrative of the future, not only out of my own visions but supported by facts, educated speculation and scientific theory, that I began to carry around with me in charts and graphs and maps and sketches. It appears that many people were also sensing a change in the weather, and pretty soon I was invited to give presentations at organized gatherings. This was during the Reagan years, when much of the population was reeling from the after effects of the 'inconvenient truths' revealed by a war in Vietnam and the fall of two presidents. Americans had seen the dark face of evil in its' own mirror, and many reacted by refusing to look. Reagan fed that denial with a thin veneer of false optimism based on the shallow urge to return to a time of unrestrained social and technological changes that followed one after another in a rush after the great war. As we watched the collapse of our long running enemies at the end of the Cold War, we hoped to dream again of our endless progress in a world where we solved all of our problems by building solutions with our wealth. It would be like wishing them away. For those who saw beyond the political games and marketing hype of the era, all of this was an ominous herald of the descent of a long dark age. In the 20 years since that time of turning, a thick curtain has descended, deliberately drawn by people whose power and wealth grow out of the very circumstances which lead us toward danger. Our economic model appears to be based on scarcity rather than plenty, and when an essential commodity becomes scarce it rises in value. By cornering and controlling this market of essentials our power is made secure. Unfortunately when the world inevitably resists our arrogant assumptions of righteousness and power we are all forced into thralldom by the most profitable industry of all, which grows out of the pursuit of endless wars. in the invention of our war on terrorism the leaders have declared the state of war to be virtually eternal. It will last as long as anyone resists our self-righteous priorities, and it will insure an ongoing flow of profits by providing an unending supply of enemies in those who lash out at those who presume to be their masters. 30 years after the facts began to emerge we are still, as a society debating the reality of things that have been known for years. Even as evidence accumulates, even when we can see year by year the accelerating consequences of our actions, we allow ourselves to be convinced that what we are seeing is untrue. I recently visited the junkscience dot com site with its lengthy pieces debunking everything from global warming theories to the 'claims' that DDT is dangerous (I'm not kidding. You can even buy a t-shirt and mug that reads: "DDT: A Weapon of Mass Survival" and watch a clock counting the ongoing cost to the American economy of the Kyoto Protocols). This site is bought and paid for by the Free Enterprise Action Fund which is a subsidiary of the oil and chemical industries who have paid billions of dollars over the past two decades to instill doubt and promote ignorance. The whole purpose of their impressive looking array of confusing charts and graphs and numbers is to convince us that what we can observe with our senses isn't really going on. There is no increase in wind and hurricane activity or melting of glaciers or breaking of the polar ice caps or changing of the ocean currents because, look, these statistics say it couldn't be so! As a result of these relentless efforts to obscure our vision many if not most Americans choose to believe the 'evidence' of numbers that they don't really understand, because it's easier to do so than to admit we are living and promoting a toxic culture. We've sacrificed as a result many years of creativity to these obscene manipulations of the public will. If American corporate power gets its way we will loose many more years, until it becomes too late to slow down the logarithmic acceleration of what, as every year shows us, is happening all around us. The epiphany I received at that conference 20 years ago was that the earth, as a living organism is much larger and older than any human society, and like any organism it has internal processes that can bring it back toward balance despite the temporary disturbances we cause, exactly as a living body throws off a rash or a sickness by reestablishing its relationship to health and balance. It may be that the winds will grow stronger, the heat will rise, the ice caps will melt, the ocean currents will be altered and disease will conquer an out of control population, or perhaps a more radical rebalancing will occur in the form of another ice age. Perhaps the fanciful story I told myself as a twelve year old will come true. Whatever it takes, I believe that the earth itself will endure and a new balance will be achieved, even at the expense of humanity's fragile social constructs. The outcome for us at this time remains a matter of our own reckoning. I figure the role of prophets, poets, artists, visionaries and all the mad dreamers who have seen this coming for so long grows from practice. With An Inconvenient Truth we are given the updated picture of an event that has been the conscious backdrop of many lives like Al Gore's. Whatever has taken place, whatever roles we play or power we wield, in the back of our minds is always the image of that train, that wall, that broken bridge...It may be that Al Gore's movie will only be seen by those who already know or suspect the oncoming troubles, while the majority continue to play increasingly irrelevant games of war and bigotry and religious fundamentalism and the like. Perhaps for now we can only sit by, telling our tales and knowing that one day the world will catch up to itself. We, who have been out here on the edges for so long, will be waiting. # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # You can't stop the signal. http://internet.cybermesa.com/~melcher/ 9:46:40 PM    comment []