When in Britain last week at the
Skoll World Forum, I was referred to
a recent article in The Observer written by
Joss Garman, the 24-year-old co-founder of the British environmental group,
Plane Stupid. In the excerpt below, read to Skoll Forum delegates by
Lord David Puttnam,
Garman says many people [chiefly Baby Boomers] tend to write off as
"fad" the deeply held climate-change worries shared by many in Garman's
Millennial generation. Garman writes:
"This
isn't the next fad. The naive popular narrative that "every generation
has its thing" and that climate is ours—that we're the "Facebook
generation"—simply does not hold. This isn't about being disaffected
and rebellious without a cause. This isn't about dropping out,
rejecting the norm, culture-jamming and hacking the system. This isn't
even about altruism. It's not just about defending the rights and lives
of those who are less fortunate than us and it certainly isn't about
polar bears. This is about us. For the Millennial generation, the
patronising cliches fall apart, because this isn't about ideals so much
as hard science and the terrifying reality that what the scientists
have been warning us all about for years—sea-level rises, catastrophic
droughts, and melting ice caps—will now happen in our lifetimes.
So we become angry when we witness the same generation which let the
economic system collapse—and that is leaving my generation with an
unfathomable burden of debt—now knowingly setting us on another
disastrous course.
We know how this story ends, but not because we've read obscure
economic treatises or dense theories. We know because scientists are
providing measurable, objective evidence that the high-carbon economic
model has an in-built, self-destruct mechanism."
What do you think?
