Comments on: Donkeys, Ice Cream and Climate Change

By: Ian Rowberry

Ian Rowberry — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:26:55 +0000

Huh? The hasty comment never appeared – I assumed it was being moderated. Oh well. I just wanted to back up Matthew’s point that there are actually documents dating to 2002 on the Amnesty website that mention climate change. Still late to the party.

FYI, if you google “honesty” with your website, for example, you get zero hits. Your search method could bite you back…

[George says: hang on a minute- it's a cute point, but my website is very small and there are lots of words that don't appear on it. The vast international organisations I mention have huge websites and despite this "Honesty" only gets 47 mentions on the Amnesty site. It's hardly a key term. Anyway, thanks for mentioning it: now I have three mentions on mine!]

By: Ian Rowberry

Ian Rowberry — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:24:43 +0000

My apologies – I may have been a bit hasty here, George. My point still holds true re. the search method, but I may have been getting you confused with the George C. Marshall Institute… (Is that your intention?!)
Ian.

By: John K

John K — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 06:39:27 +0000

George Orwell wrote that “To see what is under your nose requires an intense struggle.” Amidst our confusion, or often willfully, we will miss the most simple and obvious things. This divorce from reality aids us in the pecking order, and can be observed in donkeys, also. Our powers of inattention are really exercised when it comes to the growth imperative. All around us are the innumerous signs of the destructive changes we have wrought and still we soldier on, bound to “economic growth.” Without trouncing the illogic of this evil, and banishing it from our “norms of attention,” how can any meaningful progress be made?

By: Ellie

Ellie — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:43:25 +0000

It would also be hard for Amnesty / HRW (and even Oxfam etc) to take climate change seriously because they LOVE their aeroplane flights. Those well-paid London / New York-based consultants would get far less job satisfaction if they could not whizz off to exotic points around the globe to tell the locals what to do. Taking climate change seriously might even mean taking devolved power seriously; it might mean starting to promote genuinely sustainable NGOs in the countries they are supposed to be helping.

Sorry if this sounds super-cynical but I have seen it from the inside, and it stinks.

By: Red

Red — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:04:51 +0000

You ask: Why do the websites of progressive civil society organisations pay virtually no attention to climate change?

The answer is very simple. Environmentalism is a deeply conservative ideology. It has for a while been synonymous with ‘progressive’ and ‘left’ movements for a variety of reasons. But this relationship is becoming increasingly tenuous, as people begin to recognise the entirely retrogressive nature of the anti-industrial, anti-progress, and misantrhopic character of the green movement.

The shrill hectoring of anyone who fails to make sufficient green noises by C-C activists doesn’t help your cause.

Please, keep it up.

By: George Darroch

George Darroch — Sat, 31 May 2008 08:00:23 +0000

Rather than asking the human rights organisations to treat climate change as an issue within their mandate (which I agree they should be doing), perhaps we should be asking Greenpeace etc. to underline climate change as a human rights issue. When I explain why I’m concerned about climate change, I talk about desertification in Africa, flooding of Bangladesh, etc. It is a very strong argument, because it concretises the impact of these changes on real people’s lives. Human rights and climate change are inextricably linked, but it isn’t only the human rights organisations who have neglected to emphasise this.

By: peter

peter — Tue, 27 May 2008 10:34:43 +0000

With the rising awareness of climate change and the effect that we are all having on the environment comes the parellel awareness that whatever we do will have very little effect on the final outcome.

By: Claire Poyner

Claire Poyner — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:21:37 +0000

Getting the peace & disarmament movement involved in other issues such as the environment is an uphill struggles as well. At least we have the excuse of being poorly funded (compared with Amnesty, Greenpeace, FOE, etc etc). But we do try to make the links with climate change, human rights etc. Sometimes it’s difficult to extend the remit of the organisation; the best some can do is offer links on the website and where funds permit, collaborate at meetings/conferences.

I attended a conference in Oxford in March which did attempt to make the links between war, peace and climate change, from a religious perspective. Collaborations between the likes of Pax Christi, Christian CND, Operation Noah and Christian Ecology Link were encouraged. Next step the secular groups working in these areas …

By: Toban Black

Toban Black — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:36:27 +0000

I’ll bet that other related environmental problems (e.g. fresh water depletion, e.g. species extinctions) receive even less attention from those NGOs.

Global warming receives more faux-green rhetoric than the other eco. problems — though there has been some more drastic measures taken on other forms of environmental degradation. (The anti-CFC Montreal Protocol is one such effort that I have in mind.)

By: Merrick

Merrick — Sat, 03 May 2008 02:06:20 +0000

George, don’t be too harsh on the donkeys; it’s not their fault that everyone loves them.

In the same way that humans are responsible for so much environmental catastrophe yet we shouldn’t hate everything pertaining to them, so we can love our donkeys whilst agreeing that they are overfunded.

Anyone who tells me that they don’t get soppy over a good donkey is either weirdly phobic or lying.

Regarding the NGOs, I think John McCormick’s right; they have to follow the funders to stay alive.

For example, it’s plain that whales get people to open their wallets to Greenpeace more than anything else. So when – as happened – the Icelandic government decided to obliterate the largest pristine wilderness in Europe in order to build a climate-assaulting dam to power a climate-assaulting aluminium smelter, Greenpeace stayed schtum. It would’ve clashed with their efforts to tempt Iceland into stopping whaling.

To them the whales are a sort of uber-donkey. No whale campaign, no money for whales or anything else.

I suspect they underestimate the ability of funders to grasp new relevant issues, especially if explained from the trusted voice of the NGO itself. But I’m making that up, maybe I just hope people of conscience are more open and less sentimental than they really are.

The bit that saddens me most is the factionalising among those who *are* campaigning on climate. They too play that NGO game; my biofuel issue is more important than your coal issue.

I suspect that there may be some truth in your idea that it’s to do with the political mindset of that generation of activists and their formative issues, but seeing climate activists treat sub-issues so gladiatorially I also believe there’s a big part of it that’s due to the narrow and inflexible structuring of NGOs.