Framing Science is using comparison between two years ago‘s Time Magazine special issue on global warming, and this year‘s special issue on same topic, to make a point on shift that is taking place in the media and the collective consciousness:
From fear of global threat and helplessness, to hope and interest in personal solutions. As I look inside, I certainly have made that travel as well. This is also confirmed by latest Nielsen research.
I am curious to know. Does this match your personal experience as well?
I think the shift is best represented by the overall look of the cover. The use of colors and the overall brightness.
I would still associate the words “war” and “global warming”, and the soldiers in the composition with the color red.
But combined with the actual green color it could mean that we know we have to fight, but are confident of a bright future.
I’d rather see a Time’s cover like “How to be warm and cozy without buying what Big Industry would like you to buy.”
I really don’t think we’ll need to fight anything. There is no enemy. All it’s gonna take is stopping with the madness.
But I’m probably a little ahead of the curve.
I’ve made the travel from ambivalence to fierce skepticism.
As a Marine (1965 – 1968) I beleive the use of the image of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima is one step over the line. Rather than rant on I’ll just repeat what I said in my letter to Editors of Time:
Your usage and despoiling of Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the five Marines and one Navy Corpsman raising our flag on Iwo Jima is disgraceful. To use this image to promote a blatant political agenda dishonors all of those who have served in the Armed Forces. That is if you had the courage to show up. I was going to ask, sir, if you had no shame, no decency, but then it’s obvious you don’t. Were this the age of Jackson, tomorrow at dawn it would pistols, knives, or claymores at 20 paces. No quarter!
I’ve made a lot of posts recently about the hope inherent in this situation, and specifically the opportunities that there are for people to make the best of the situation – this isn’t all sacrifice!
http://www.getsolar.com/blog/going-green-and-earning-green/
Please keep visiting and join the conversation. I’m loving your posts about this, keep it up!
“To use this image to promote a blatant political agenda dishonors all of those who have served in the Armed Forces. “
“War is the continuation of politics by other means.” – Clausewitz.
That said, I think it’s a bit lame. War on drugs, war on pollution, blahblahblah, stupid. War is about destruction. This is about construction, about building a new way of life. The old way, clearfelling forests, levelling mountains to get coal, that was about destruction, that was a war of conquest against the Earth.
A better image would have been the signing of the Japanese surrender. We could subtitle it, “Humanity admits it cannot conquer nature, signs treaty to work with it instead.”
Hmmmm.
Total nonsense.
A. Polar bears can swim and are omnivorous. They literally can eat anything.
B. Polar bears have been around since before the Holocene.
C. The Holocene saw global temperatures that were as much as 10+ degrees higher than anything we’ve seen.
D. Polar bears are going to die out? Yeah right.
E. Frankly Time magazine has turned into a shitpile not worth perusing.
What does amuse me greatly though is a *paper* magazine culled from standing trees, manufactured using highly destructive processes and distributed by trucks, screaming endlessly about carbon, wasted resources and GW.
The enemy is really us, and if any war, it is a war against ourselves. On the outside, as Kyle and Meryn pointed, more accurate would be images of peace treaty with nature, and of reconstruction.
I suppose the latest cover is a true Pogoism: we’ve met the enemy at it is us! Part of that is our stupid habit of knocking big old trees down. But we cannot just stand them up again, can we? The tree on the Time cover is an ancient Redwood that took 1200 years to grow. That’s about 50 human generations’ worth of Time. Do we have that much Time left? There’s a genuine scientific debate whether humans will even be around in that many years from now, since we are burning the harvest of 50 million years worth of ancient sunlight every single year now, and the US military is hell-bent on raising the US flag over every oil field on the planet.
True, if we put as much energy and resources into fighting climate change as we did into fighting fascism and communism, we may have a slim chance of avoiding unimaginable planetary misery, but the Time left for such heroic measures is only a few years, and the current leading candidates for US Captain of this runaway train are not even talking about the cliff we are going over!
THE ‘FRAMING’ OF SCIENCE AND THE REFUSAL TO EXAMINE UNWELCOME EVIDENCE OF THE HUMAN OVERPOPULATION OF EARTH
A particularly pernicious disturbance exists in the human community. ELECTIVE MUTISM is one of the great, clear and present dangers to human and environmental health. It is a worldwide “plague” in our time from which many too many in the vast community of science suffer egregiously. That elective mutism has afflicted so many in the social sciences is one thing. The family of humanity can understand, I suppose, how social scientists do not possess the most adequate expertise to speak out loudly and clearly regarding the emerging and converging global challenges derived from the human overpopulation of Earth.
On the other hand, what I find reprehensible and unbelievable is the way scientists with appropriate expertise in the physical and biological sciences, whatever their excuses, are choosing not to fullfil their professional responsibilities and not to discharge duties only they can perform. Their willful refusal to comment on good scientific evidence of the human species’ overpopulation of the planetary home God blesses us to inhabit is as unacceptable as it is perverse.
See the following link for a presentation of the apparently unforeseen evidence,
http://www.panearth.org
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Hmmmmm.
“On the other hand, what I find reprehensible and unbelievable is the way scientists with appropriate expertise in the physical and biological sciences, whatever their excuses, are choosing not to fullfil their professional responsibilities and not to discharge duties only they can perform. Their willful refusal to comment on good scientific evidence of the human species’ overpopulation of the planetary home God blesses us to inhabit is as unacceptable as it is perverse.”
On the other hand several “scientists” have expounded on the principle that there is massive overpopulation of the planet.
They then concluded that what was needed was bio-war or plague that would kill off 6+ billion people all in one go.
Excepting them of course. Because when progressives talk about “overpopulation” they never actually included themselves in that “excess” group. Oh no. They’re always so very necessary.
‘Cause they’re Progressive’s don’t cha know.
Thanks Steven for speaking up against mutism. I do see some changes though in the media. And that is encouraging.
Thanks Lamarguerite for your comments above and for all you are doing.
Unexpectedly, I have received a question to my comments on ELECTIVE MUTISM. If you, our colleagues and friends will please bear with me, I would like to share the question and my response to it, with the hope of encouraging more discussion.
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Thanks so much for responding to my post.
Absolute global human population numbers are not coming down nearly fast enough. Even with a substantial decrease of the population growth rate in some countries, the total population of the human species has been skyrocketing and is continuing to increase much too rapidly.
Perhaps the widely shared and consensually-validated “demographic transition” that is anticipated in the middle of Century XXI is an example of specious preternatural thinking and theorizing, borne of political convenience and economic expediency.
You have asked a wonderful question,
“Assuming you are right for the moment, do you have any concrete policy proposals which we might consider to enable us to think about what we might do?”
Perhaps we could follow what we already know from good science, reasoning and common sense. We can choose to respond ably and much differently, in a more reality-oriented way, to the global challenges before humanity, challenges we can certainly manage because we have induced them by our spectacular unrestrained overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, the ones now threatening to engulf the surface of Earth.
Of course, it is fair to ask what the family of humanity could choose to do “ably and differently.” Several ideas come to mind.
1) Implement universal, voluntary and humane programs that encourage people to limit the number of offspring to one child per family.
2) Establish an upper limit on the growth of the individual human footprint.
3) Restrict immediately the reckless dissipation of limited natural resources so that the Earth is given time to replenish them for human benefit.
4) Substitute clean, renewable sources of energy, through the use of substantial economic incentives, for the fossil fuels we rely upon now.
5) Recognize that everything human beings do on the surface of our tiny planet utterly depend on the finite resources of Earth. One consequence of this realization is understanding that there can be no such thing as an endlessly expanding global economy, given its current leviathan-like scale and anticipated growth rate, on a relatively small and noticeably frangible planet with the size and make-up of Earth.
The family of humanity has huge global challenges to address and overcome. Our leaders appear much too contented with arguing about which country will take the first step forward. Meanwhile, as reasonable and sensible actions are not taken, the threats to human and environmental health grow more daunting day by day.
As I see it, many leaders understand quite well the precarious status of the natural world we inhabit; nonetheless, they adamantly refuse to acknowledge or speak openly about the distinctly human-induced predicament that looms ominously before the family of humanity in our time.
Billions of human beings–- some overconsuming, others overproducing and still others overpopulating the Earth –-are ruining our planetary home as a fit place for human habitation and life as we know it. At least to me, what is incomprehensible and tragic is this: our leaders know what all of us are doing that is destructive of human and environmental health and still they remain resolute in their reckless pursuit of a “primrose path” to the future.
Tory, for a moment please consider that our top rank scientists have not found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the unregulated increase of human population numbers, the unbridled growth of per-capita consumption, the reckless dissipation of Earth’s limited resources and the relentless degradation of the planet’s frangible environment could result in the destruction of our celestial orb as a fit place for habitation by humankind and life as we know it. When taken together, these distinctly human activities appear to be growing at a breakneck pace toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
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Always, with thanks,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
Thanks Steven. Great summary!