Over at The Interpreter, Sam Roggeveen objects to Jules’s call for national service to be used to toughen up the youth in the face of a changing climate.
This strikes me as completely contrary to the spirit of ‘resilience-ism’ (sorry; ugly, I know), which emphasises local knowledge rather than a top-down approach — giving communities the tools to help themselves rather than waiting for government to do it for them. It also raises my libertarian hackles (again): there are few better ways to empower the state at the expense of the individual than to have it conscript its youth.
Two points. First, why do we always want to conscript the young? To be sure, they make excellent cannon fodder, which is why national service was vital to the ‘total wars’ of the late 19th and early 20th century. But modern challenges are knowledge-intensive, needing people with much greater experience and skills.
So if we’re going to have compulsory service of any kind, let’s impose it on the post-war, baby boom generation – surely the most narcissistic generation of them all (in the spotlight as teenagers in the sixties, hippies in the seventies, yuppies in the eighties, middle aged and smug in the 90s, early-retired victims of age discrimination in the noughties)?
And second, I want to pick up on his Sam on his comfortable equation of resilience with bare-chested libertarianism. Alex and I began to delve into the politics of resilience in the most recent issue of Renewal. Our conclusion? Resilience is tough on all major strands of political thinking – libertarianism (or what Brits still think of as liberalism) included: (more…)
The climate clock is ticking, but civil society is still missing in action. With only nine months to go before the Copenhagen climate summit, the world’s NGOs are far from having a compelling set of demands to campaign on.
Perhaps it is already too late. Many governments are already ramping back their expectations of what can be delivered. The deal-makers among them now desperately need civil society to change the terms of debate and boost all countries’ level of ambition.
I’d give campaigners until April’s London Summit to get their act together. After that, they have zero chance of retaking the high ground and starting to shape the pre-Copenhagen agenda.
So what should their demands be? What makes a good headline ‘ask’?
First, it has to fit with the science – that means stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at 450ppm CO2e (nothing lower is now possible).
Then, it needs to make sense to insiders – people who are making the major policy or investment decisions a clear sense of what they need to do now.
Third, it must communicate to a wider public – which means a goal that the average 12 year-old (or journalist) can understand and remember.
And finally, it needs to build climate into a wider post-meltdown narrative, offering an integrated vision for global recovery.
I think one clear, crisp demand fulfils all these criteria, providing a starting point from which all key elements of a global deal logically flow. Global greenhouse gas emissions exploded during the boom years, pumped up by debt-fuelled overconsumption. Now oil demand is declining – and we can expect global emissions see a modest fall too.
This provides civil society with a real opportunity. They should declare 2009 the year of peak emissions and challenge the world’s governments to develop a concrete plan to ensure they are never allowed to rise again.(more…)
Just thinking through how our society copes with climate change. One way might be to bring back national service.
Why?
1) We need to train a generation of young people how to deal with crises, whether that’s food riots, race riots, or extreme weather. They will have to be physically and mentally tough, resilient and disciplined.
2) In general, we need to instill a war-time discipline into the country if it is going to cope with a drastic reduction in our quality of life.
3) We need a bigger domestic emergency force.
4) We may need a bigger external defence force as well.
What are the arguments against it?
1) It’s the first step to a fascist military state.
2) We need experts, not amateurs.
3) We need a bigger global peacecorps, not brownshirts at home.
4) We need de-centralised innovation and spontaneous systems evolution, not goose-stepping drones.
I think the arguments for are better than the arguments against. If you want the UK to be at a forefront of a global solution to food shortages, helping other states that are failing, then you will need an even bigger armed forces.
Our country will need to become much more disciplined very quickly, and I think national service is one step towards that.
I wonder if this could become part of the Resilience programme which Martin Seligman developed, and which the government is now piloting in some schools in the UK.
That programme is based on the assumption of an affluent society. But it could easily be adapted to a much more Stoical sense of resilience – how to survive and stay positive, engaged and ethical in a crisis-prone society.
While we’re on the subject of climate change misery (see the two posts below), an interesting finding in Raymond Fisman and Eduardo Miguel’s ‘Economic Gangsters‘ is that in Africa, the world’s most conflict-prone region, “the risk of armed civil conflict is much more likely the year after a large drop in rainfall than in normal years.”
In the Sahel region – the area between the Sahara and the equatorial zone which takes in such beacons of stability as Sudan, Chad, northern Nigeria and Niger – climate change is expected to reduce average rainfall by 24 per cent. Much of the rain that does fall will evaporate because of higher temperatures. Fisman and Miguel reckon all this will increase the risk of conflict in the region by 15 per cent by 2080, meaning some countries will face a 1 in 3 chance of civil war EACH YEAR!
