Thursday, May 15, 2008

Food for Thought...

Time Lord and Scenarios

One of the BBC’s best loved programmes now and in the past has been Dr Who. It was first broadcast in 1963 and has had ten actors playing Dr Who, who by the way, did I mention, is a timelord. As a timelord he is over 900 years old and when he is killed can regenerate. One of the wonderful aspects of the programme was how, due to low budget, the aliens were made up of whatever was lying around. Perhaps the most memorable are the Daleks, with one of their arms made of a toilet plunger.

As a timelord, the Dr can travel in time and space and also between different parallel universes. That brings me to UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook 4. Last years Report, in addition to looking back twenty years to what has been achieved since the Brundtland Report, also looked forward under a set of four scenarios; ‘Markets First’, ‘Policy First’, ‘Security First’ and ‘Sustainability First’. They all gave us an idea of what parallel universes might be possible.

At the Stakeholder Forum launch event for GEO4, John Sauven, Director of Greenpeace UK, suggested that ‘Sustainability First’ is not only appealing because it tackles issues such as natural resources and biodiversity but because it is the only scenario to reduce inequality levels significantly.

‘Security First’ maintains high levels of inequality and David Nussbaum, Chief Executive of WWF-UK, pointed out that “If everyone consumed resources in the way that we do in UK or Europe, we will need three planets to support us by 2050”.

The ‘Markets First’ scenario only slightly reduces inequality. Tomorrow’s Company’s Tony Manwaring suggested that the majority of business leaders agree that ‘there is little point in having a vested interest in a global system that cannot endure’.

Malini Mehra (Centre for Social Markets and an old hand at the CSD in the 1990’s) stressed that we need to change the political culture and attitudinal context in which these issues can be raised. Only then is there a chance that they will be resolved. Too much emphasis has been placed on politicising our differences through terms such as ‘north and south’ or ‘developed and developing’; instead we should be focusing on our commonalities.

Being a time lord would be great as you could see which path humanity took, however, as a time lord you aren’t allowed to interfere as any changes will have repercussions in the future that you can’t predict. One small change now could impact on the survival of the planet. It reminds me of a more positive view of this by Robert Kennedy who said:

“Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ... Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”