Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change has to be Addressed NOW

As my readers know, I'm just back from Ethiopia. As much as I love Ethiopia, and for that matter, Ghana, China and India, I found the same pressing problem in each of these countries, and that is air pollution. These countries are often blanketed with a permanent haze, and being on the streets is dangerous to your health because of the diesel and other fumes that choke the roadways. People are of course dying, some slowly, some quickly as a result of this unchecked air pollution. However, we are also changing our planet, changing it in ways that will render it uninhabitable for humans.

Now it's not that I'm worried about Gaia, the name many call her when thinking of our planet as alive, as an organism, as goddess; Gaia has not always been habitable by us, and is not likely to always be habitable by us. No, the problem is what we're doing to our own environment and to that of our children and our grand-children.

We have to stop using petroleum for everything-- it is so dirty and it has been fouling up our planet and our bodies for a long time. We also have to stop consuming way more than we need. We have to stop designing campaigns to get people to buy things they don't need! Whoever dreamt up the expansion of the economy as some sort of inalienable good has left way too many things off the balance sheet. The cost of cleaning up our messes now has to added to this balance sheet in govenment and international policies, and, we need to aggressively invest in changing how we do things: the status quo of expanding consumption and our use of petroleum has to stop.

So I leave you with a citation from David Berman, who in is presentation "Weapon of Mass Deception" and his book "Do Good Design" (with Design Struck out) very effectively makes this point:
". . . global branding strategies are the most powerful tools used today to encourage over-consumption amongst growing Developing World populations, resulting in the largest long-term threat to global harmony and the environment. Communications professionals have more conspicuous power than they realize, and play a core role in helping some corporations mislead audiences in order to invent unfulfilled "needs" in larger and larger markets. In a World where design has become a recognized corporate asset, creative people have the opportunity to use their persuasive skills responsibly and to accelerate awareness of the messages the World really needs shared. Recent developments regarding professionalism and ethics offer hope. Designers and other professionals need to choose what their still-young professions will be about: creating visual lies to help sell stuff, or helping repair the World by bridging knowledge and understanding. http://davidberman.com/seminars/howlogo.php#description

grace and blessings

your brother Daniel