Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Arena Magazine

After progress? the four questions of global politics.

Article Excerpt
First Act

Midway through one of Barry Cohen's earlier, funnier books he reminisces on a bizarre, fruitless issue that consumed the Whitlam Government at one time: whether or not to put some money into a failing historical theme park known as Old Sydney Town. Cohen says the debate over the tiny, otherworldly village consumed much of a Cabinet meeting on one particular morning--and that morning was, of course, 11 November 1975.

One is tempted to feel that a similar misperception of scale is now widespread across the anglophone western world, although it seems at its worst in Australia. Theme park inhabitants, lilliputians, sleepwalkers: the metaphors for a comprehensive failure to appreciate the dimensions of a series of global predicaments fly thick and fast.

Four clear problems are not being grasped at the level at which they exist: as universal human problems that take us beyond the existing frameworks that we have used to hitherto interpret politics. The first and by definition most encompassing is the threat of global warming, the single greatest act--albeit unintended--by humanity upon nature. The evidence for this now appears to be overwhelming. James Lovelock, the author of the Gaia hypothesis, has modelled scenarios which suggest that global warming, if not rapidly curbed, could be an irreversible trajectory, in which the warming of the atmosphere may go beyond the feasible capacity of human technology to reverse it. This threshold -after which Gaia/Earth would break free of stabilising tendencies and heat indefinitely to a point where human life becomes unsustainable--could be reached within thirty years.

The second and related problem is that levels of consumption and wealth between North and South are widening at the same time as a new global media makes over the values and aspirations of the latter in terms of the former. Those areas--chiefly Africa--immiserated by global debt...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!