Almost exactly a year ago somewhere up to 15,000 souls, including many of the world’s Great and the Good, were gathered here in Bali for the UNFCCC to save the world from the ravages of Global Warming, the effects of which had already begun to engulf the world. Forest fires raged over large swathes of Southeast Asia and Amazonia, the Arctic icecap was shrinking almost visibly, polar bears were drowning in the North West Passage, open at last to navigation, glaciers were melting away, country sized chunks of the Antarctic ice ledge were breaking off from the continent, giant tsunamis raced across oceans at incredible speed bringing death and destruction on a vast scale where they hit land, various island nations are set to vanish below the waves in the not-so-distant future and the snows finally disappeared from atop Mt Kilimanjaro. All we really needed at the time to complete the picture of gloom and doom was a financial meltdown in the world’s economic system. And now a year on, we’ve got that too!
With all this coming down, a chap could be forgiven for thinking that the end was truly nigh and it really was time to head for the hills and consider one’s navel, if not the error of one’s ways and the fate of one’s immortal soul.
And yet life goes on. And so does business. So is the answer just to keep one’s head down, swim with the tide, ride with the punches of fickle fate and wait for things to get back to normal? Alas, I think not. There is no normal, if indeed there ever was. The pace of human evolution is quickening in ways of which we are only beginning to get the faintest glimmerings. One thing is very clear and that is we are, all of us, collectively and individually being inexorably forced to change the psycho-cultural and economic underpinnings that have sustained us for generations, if not millennia. If you are finding what worked for you up till now doesn’t seem to do it any more, that you find yourself adrift, unsure what direction to take, relax. We’re all in the same boat. We are all in a process of re-inventing ourselves, only some of us don’t know it yet. Some violently resist it. Don’t. Change is a wonderful and exhilarating experience, particularly when it’s on an epic scale, but it’s scary. We feel we could actually sink beneath the waves without trace. And it’s true, we could…. but we don’t. The trick is to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the bigger context, the bigger the better. Fact is, on our own we are a very small vessel and easily swamped. The more self-involved we are, the less we see and the tougher the process is on us.
So what are we to make of the UNFCCC Bali of December 2007? What if anything did it achieve? Certainly a lot of hot air and the people involved very soon stopped talking about offsetting the carbon emissions emitted by this Mother of all Boondoggles. Judged against the pressing and commonly accepted need to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2050 if we are to avoid catastrophic global disasters, not much. In fact on this basis the meeting was a dismal failure. If, on the other hand, you accept the much more modest aims articulated by UNFCC Secretary General, Yvo de Boer, that the world must agree to this by 2009 and have decided the means to do it by 2012. In which case we can still live in hope we can yet turn things around, not only maintaining our own standard of living but continue economic growth in a sustainable way, while doing away with world hunger and poverty. But that’s a very big “if”.
The 2007 Bali UNFCCC meeting would have been an obscene waste of time and money were it not for one thing, and that was its salvation. It was a tipping point. The first of many that will be required of us in the years to come. It was here that the world finally came to accept that global warming was real and that its effects would sweep our world utterly away unless we really did address the problem and did so with an urgency never seen before.
A year later the focus has become even clearer. World public opinion has reached overwhelming consensus, businessmen and politicians, who for self-serving purposes of their own, seek to deny the need for action will be swept away on the tide of history. Thankfully that is already the case with George W. Bush and his pathetic minions, sent to argue his bankrupt ecological policies a year ago.
To this extent I am a mid term optimist. Now the majority of us believe the problem has to be addressed and solved, I believe it will be. Vested interests will not be able to stand in the way of the progress we need to make if we are to solve the problem AND still lead half decent lives. In the short term however, I believe it may well be a very disruptive and possibly uncomfy process for many of us, as our lives are upturned and redirected. And that is why I feel we need to keep our eyes and hearts on the bigger context here, and what we are about is huge. No less a vision than creating a sustainable world while eradicating want globally. If fifty years from now if some of us are still around and can look back and say, we were part of that, that’d really be something…..
The downside I’m afraid that we’ve all got to get involved. Greenwashing won’t wash no more, it fact those who engage in it will pay an increasingly high price for their hypocrisy. And a good thing too.
As individuals, more and more of us will want to know what our carbon footprint is and find ways to reduce it. We’ll tend to patronize businesses which are carbon neutral, or at least seeking ways to reduce and/or offset their carbon emissions. We will become increasingly savvy on the subject and anyone caught cheating us or seeking to con us as the eco fools we no longer are. Such people will be mercilessly chastised at the cash register, and rightly so. Sustainable business will become smart business.
We here in Bali, by which I mean all of us, Balinese, other Indonesians and foreigners living here, have witnessed and, to whatever extent, participated in the most appalling degradation of this beautiful and unique island over the past 40 years. It is an absolute tragedy and a scandal. There is simply no other way to describe what happened here in the central plains of South Bali. It is time to clean it up. It can be done and it is time to follow the rules. It is a time for a personal eco audit, and a time to do business with people who are trying to be part of the solution, avoiding those who continue to add to the problem. It comes as good news then, to learn that the Bali Hotels Association, comprising 20 of Bali’s starred hotels, has partnered with The Green Asia Group on a long term program of education, audits in order to develop their own voluntary officially recognized carbon reduction program. Historically, most of the damage done has been done in the name of tourism, so this is a good place to make a meaningful and quantifiable start. We should all take an interest in how this pans out.
The world seems headed into an era where the real and the authentic are becoming the only true luxury. The days when people can be conned into buying a Dolce Gabbana T-shirt or a Prada handbag (it’s just a question of degree) and actually think they’ve bought into the couture dream is being revealed for the pernicious and nonsense that it is and are numbered. Luxe en masse is a contradiction and the antithesis of style, which is based on creativity and originality.
In a curious way that means the world is going Indonesia’s way. Where else in the world are there so many people, with skills honed over a millennia, who want nothing better than to make beautiful things with their hands made from natural materials, and do so in their homes?
