Post
Justice, please!
How lovely and comfortable we all are here! How fantastic to be able to sleep easy, to drink water straight from the tap, to take hot showers every day, to have (too much) food whenever we want, to have heating when it's cold and air conditioning when it's hot. How easy it is for us to forget the survival struggles of most of the rest of the world.
I've had enough. It's about time that the developing world gets a break.
It is the developed countries that have benefited from polluting industrialisation processes and booming economies; and it is the developing countries that are already suffering most from the impacts of climate change. Please read this story on what is happening in East Africa - drought, crop failure, dying farm animals in an area of the world so precariously dependent on balance in nature.
I spent one amazing and eye-opening year living and working in Tanzania: a beautiful country touching the Indian Ocean, with incredibly generous, warm, welcoming and good-humored people. When I returned to Europe, I experienced the greatest culture-shock walking into a supermarket: why on earth do we need fifty different types of toothpaste? Why are all our vegetables vacuum-packed? Why do we need to eat pineapples 365 days a year? Our society here seemed suddenly so alien, so irresponsible, so wasteful.
Discussions are now going on in Bangkok on issues preparing for the Copenhagen COP15 climate summit in December. Among the main contentious issues is that of finance: who is going to pay for what? How much is needed?
Yet the logic of fairness and justice seems to clearly outline precisely who should pay...
Who has benefited from the economic development that has led to the climate change challenge? That would be us. Who is already suffering from the impacts of climate change, further hampering their development and chances for a better livelihood? That would be them.
Author's photo


Comments
I haven’t been to Tanzania, but some villages in my own country are barely living from one day to another.
At least up to a point, your frustration is also my frustration. On the other hand, I also question myself - what would happen with this planet if there would be no problems anywhere?
Overpopulation is just one answer. And overpopulation would also screw the apparent balance.
Yes, justice is needed, but let’s not forget justice is blind. The balance is always kept and everything comes with its goods & evils. While people in Tanzania have to live with a precarious dependency on the nature, you have to live with the 50 vacuum packed vegs in the supermarket.
Among the main contentious issues is that of finance: who is going to pay for what? How much is needed?
That is, unfortunately, the question on everyone’s mind. How much is it going to cost? Who’s going to pay?
While it may seem the most logical, it is also the most irrelevant. The only sensible question is: do we have the resources?, everything else comes after.
Once we can establish that, through a survey of the planet’s resources and distribution, than we can start to act accordingly, considering all the resources as common heritage.
Unfortunately this approach seems to be somewhat utopian, as the only focus we have is money, costs, profit. Maybe we should change that.
You forget two things:
1 the Berlin Wall falls in 1989!
Before we lived two Great Wars world and right after the terror of the nuclear bombs.
2 We succeeded too well and there are too many people on the earth and far too many rich person.
Recall that the Indians were badly nourished with 400 million people and today they are 1 billion or more.
The success is bright!
In the next years oil will be decreasing with a biggest crisis! and perhaps a lot of wars!
We must develop new energies for peace!
Can you forget CO²!