Climate Frog
Last summer Jon Lebkowsky interviewed Cliff Figallo, author of Climate Frog, at WorldChanging. It was a two part interview. Part one is here. It brings focus to Cliff’s lengthy experience in intentional communities, from The Farm to The WELL.
Part two is here. It focuses on “…climate change, denial, and the possibility of mitigation and adaptation.” Regarding denial, Figallo refers to a letter in Newsweek which I had a hard enough time finding that I reproduce it here in its entirety:
Kaneohe, Hawaii
Sharon Begley’s article about “The Denial Machine,” as frightening as it was, misses a crucial aspect of the problem. It is not just that well-heeled corporations are buying up politicians or promoting science-as-they-want-it-to-be. It is that our society is more than happy to accept spin and cant because we have come to believe that all expertise is bias, that all knowledge is opinion, that every judgment is relative. I see this daily in my university classroom. Many of even my best students seem to have lost the ability to think critically about the world. They do not believe in the transformative power of knowledge because they do not believe in knowledge itself. Begley decries the tactic of making the scientists appear divided, but the corporations didn’t have to invent this tactic. It is built into our carefully balanced political “debates,” into our news shows with equal time given to pundits from each side and into the “fairness” we try to teach in our schools. We need not be surprised that people have become consumers who demand the right to choose as they wish between the two equally questionable sides of every story. Neither global warming nor any other serious problem can be addressed by a society that equates willful ignorance with freedom of thought.
Bernard Dov Cooperman
Dept. of History, University of Maryland
Cliff Figallo believes in the power of networked communications and particularly blogging to help get the word out on this most crucial problem that faces us all. His blog, Climate Frog, collects reports of local climate change impacts and responses from around the world. What have you done to reduce your carbon emissions today?
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