Living on Unstable Ground

Went through Google, Google News & the NY Times website looking for coverage and discussion of the climate conference recently hosted by Bolivia, the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.
See the  summary & comment by Naomi Klein in The Nation.

News of the conference  is essentially isolated to within progressive/left publications and blogs. No NY Times coverage. Didn’t find any discussion & debate about conference findings in sources with a point of view different from Morales and conference participants. The one mainline US media story I came across was in Time magazine, entitled “Bolivia’s Morales: Eating Chicken Makes You Gay?” with a link to “world’s worst-dressed leaders” ahead of any mention of climate issues.

I found out about the conference only because I read The Nation. Thank you Naomi Klein.

Note the combination of mainstream media control over information + interest groups talking only to themselves within publications and blogs that circulate among like-minded people, making engagement with the complexity of issues e.g. those raised at the conference almost impossible. There is no conversation.

Any genuine framework for effective action has to take into account the limits of rationality and go beyond them. How? Frank Rich’s column today points to the problem, but doesn’t provide answers:

[The White House party gate-crashing] was a symbolic indication (and, luckily, only symbolic) of how unbridled irrationality harnessed to sheer will, whether ludicrous in the crashers’ case or homicidal in the instance of the Fort Hood gunman, can penetrate even our most secure fortifications. Both incidents stand as a haunting reproach to the elegant powers of logic with which Obama tried to sell his exquisitely calibrated plan to vanquish Al Qaeda and its mad brethren.

Juxtapose this insight with the instability Tony Judt describes in his current NY Review of Books essay:

…Before 1914, it was widely asserted that the logic of peaceful economic exchange would triumph over national self-interest. No one expected all this to come to an abrupt end. But it did.

We too have lived through an era of stability, certainty, and the illusion of indefinite economic improvement. But all that is now behind us. For the foreseeable future we shall be as economically insecure as we are culturally uncertain. We are assuredly less confident of our collective purposes, our environmental well-being, or our personal safety than at any time since World War II. We have no idea what sort of world our children will inherit, but we can no longer delude ourselves into supposing that it must resemble our own in reassuring ways.

These indicate starting points for strategic thinking and effective action, and for personal decisions about how and when to engage with issues and events.