All the World's Problems

This is an interesting interview with Russell Brand. The interviewer acts like a dick for some presumably British reason that I can't understand but Brand is a very intelligent man and a very fast talker. He ends the interview with a restatement of the classic principle "Liberties are always taken,  never given." No one has given Brand the right to try to solve the world's problems, he has taken it for himself. Which made me think if more people did that we might actually have a hope of solving them - an extremely slim hope but better than nothing, which is what we have now. So it seems to me worth making a list of those problems most likely to cause global catastrophe(s) even if I have no solutions to offer. I suspect the list will be pretty short and yet illuminating for those of us who live in democracies. Because in the approximately five minutes I have been thinking about this list, I have also been trying to think about how frequently they are major topics in elections and the answer is almost never. They almost never enter the political dialogue at all. So this list will be, if nothing else, useful to me in determining how much interest I should have in what any given politician is saying at any given time.

Each of these problems constitute a ongoing threat to ourselves, our children, and our ideas about what we can expect from this life. In Canada, at this moment, the biggest story in the media is about members of our Senate misusing their expense accounts. Is it a betrayal of public trust? Sure. Is it on par with any of the items that will make this list? Not even close. So long as shit like this dominates our politics, our politics remains trivial - it is the politics of the status quo, which, as this list (or the one you have already started to make in your head) makes abundantly clear is not something we can allow to continue. So...

First, the economy. I struggled with whether to put this before the environment or after it but since most people seem to believe the economy is a genuine political issue and the environment is a fringe issue, the economy comes first. And I should point out, I'm not talking about local economies but national and global ones. I'm not certain there are local economies in developed nations anymore.

As Brand points out in the interview, if nothing else the Occupy Movement served to place the issue of the 1% vs the 99% in the public mind. A recent study has shown you have to be in the top 10% of earners (per family) in Canada to afford a typical house in Toronto (where I live). Here is a video showing income disparity in the US perceived versus actual. It surprises most people. And anyone who has even a basic concept of human dignity has to be offended by the income disparity, the worst in the G8 nations. Still, even the poorest Americans, people with no options left but panhandling on the street, earn more on an average day than the majority of the population in the mega-cities of the Southern Hemisphere. Something like 1 billion people (that's a conservative number, it might be closer to 2 billion) survive on the equivalent of less than $2(US) per day. So if that infographic included the whole world, instead of just the United States, the results would be even more appalling. If you want a terrifying and immensely depressing overview I suggest Mike Davis's Planet of Slums.

Even people who might be comfortable with some kind of income redistribution in wealthier countries, for example the progressive taxation and socialized redistribution of the Scandinavian countries, don't often talk about the necessity to create a redistribution system on a global scale. There are limits based, if not on national borders, on some kind of psychological geography. There is no need to redistribute income from the US (still the richest nation in the world) to Sierra Leone (for example) because they are so far away (and, in the case of the US, race, nationalism, cultural attitudes and extremist politics/economics would also enter the picture).

Even if we leave all arguments about fairness and human dignity aside, which I think is a good idea, there are strong pragmatic arguments for income redistribution. Here is Richard Wilkinson presenting evidence, collected over many years and in many nations, demonstrating income disparity is inversely correlated to quality of life. Still, societies tend to see themselves as having fixed, rather than porous or permeable, boundaries. Canada is not the US, the US is not Mexico. North America is not South America. I think it is naive to think a solution that only works in one part of the world is a solution at all. It is a good start and nothing more. The Scandinavian nations I love to rave about are separated from the rest of Europe by geography and culture but the economies are all connected. I think 2007 showed us the extent to which the global economy is a single entity with little regard for national or cultural borders. And yet, the First World is not the Third World. So, other than sponsoring a child through some organization for "less than the cost of a cup of coffee" or giving micro-loans through Kiva, why should we be expected to care about the Third World? This is a hard argument to make with any immediacy without invoking notions of fairness and human dignity and to do it I'll have to move on to the second big problem.

The Environment. This one is a no-brainer. The fact NTE theory has been out there for a while but even someone like me, reasonably well informed and interested, only heard about it recently (and randomly) shows the extent to which concern for the environment has devolved into arguments about local problems. Again, at this moment the big environmental issue in Canada is the Keystone Pipeline. It's a monumentally terrible idea that makes perfect sense within the completely fucked up set of ideologies and economic realities that generated it. Essentially, a couple huge corporations want to build a pipeline that is guaranteed to leak through very sensitive (and at least legally, or nominally, protected) areas. In another world this would not even be an issue - no one could be persuaded to argue for it. Say the pipeline wasn't carrying oil, say it was carrying heavy water from nuclear reactors instead. No one would support it, it would be laughed out of everyone's lives and we could forget about it. But the world doesn't run on nuclear energy, it runs on oil so very heavy-hitters have convinced a whole lot of people the economies of both the US and Canada will collapse imminently if this thing doesn't happen.

This is a local issue that has been pumped up to national importance because it is easier to talk about than any environmental issue of real importance. Like the possibility the Earth's aggregate global average temperature might increase sufficiently to cause the extinction of homo sapiens. That's a big problem. And the first politician I hear mention it, I will devote my life to getting them elected to anything they run for. I can make that promise without fear of derailing my (currently non-existent) career because no one will ever say anything about it to the media - not even the Green Party wants to freak people out that badly.

But sometimes local issues become global. And environmental issues become economic ones often and quickly. Sometime during my lifetime and for the first time in human history, the majority of our species live in cities. And the majority of city-dwellers live in the mega-cities of the Southern Hemisphere. I saw a series of documentaries on the BBC about life in Nairobi, following the lives of some of its poorest residents. I'm not going to link it because it was, as impossible as it sounds, a feel-good human interest story. A "these people make the best of their situation and don't complain" complaint against anyone who has a problem in Britain. If we look at global slums, as Davis does, we see they are all scary - and not in the sense of not a place I'd like to live. I hesitate to include this link but I will. It's a list of the biggest slums in the world. When you read it, keep in mind they are referring to specific areas. Dharavi, for example, is not the only slum in Mumbai; it's just the most populous. And the blurb at the end about opportunities through transit and new forms of housing is hideous. Dharavi is going to get bull-dozed (it's right beside the most expensive private home in the world) it isn't going to get better transit lines and more advanced architecture. Aside from the daily human cost these slums have on their residents (which is enormous when looked at in terms of infant mortality, crime, and any other statistic that measures either indifference or degradation), they are likely to have a human cost that spreads beyond their borders. I'm not a scientist but I know those are the perfect environments for a new disease (or variation on an old one) to develop. Those people, living in some of the most contaminated places in the world, will have immune systems like junkyard dogs. If it takes them down, it will go through the rest of us like a scythe through long grass. So maybe it makes sense to try to prevent that from happening. It would have the side benefit of improving the lives of millions of people.

I only thought of two major areas that could throw large sections of the planet into chaos and possess the possibility of creating world wide catastrophes on a biblical scale. I'm going to stop anyway because I am depressed.