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Rhetoric and what's right...
Posted by: Ed Gillespie
It's sobering to realise how feeble most of the orators of today are in comparison to the greats of yesteryear. I received an email today from Kate at ContaminantMedia which had the following Martin Luther King quote on the bottom:
"Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it politic? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular - but one must take it simply because it is right."
How often do we feel the arguments used to block progress in tackling climate change are guilty of the vices Luther King highlights? All the bloody time if you ask me! Especially the tyrannical 'populism' that seems to undermine any attempt at anything that might be seen as controversial even if it is ultimately in our best, collective interests (e.g. the congestion charge). Conversely I wouldn't want a pro-nuclear lobbyist to accuse me of cowardice for asking whether the technology is safe...which is why I'd always argue instead that actually it's uneconomic and unnecessary given the right support and investment for decentralised energy and an integrated mix of complementary renewables.
But the one that really gets me is 'expediency'. This is the bullshit, messy, ugly pragmatism of our age where a third runway at Heathrow is needed to serve the interests of BA and BAA, Kingsnorth power station is all about allowing EoN an unprecedented opportunity to go 'retro' in terms of dirty energy and Shell and BP pathetically try to argue that tar shales are somehow a 'sustainable' form of energy. In whose interests are these decisions vested? Not mine that's for sure!
In terms of climate change it's time to stretch the vision, take a few risks, ignore the lobbyists and defenders of the status 'business as usual' quo, implement some potentially unpopular decisions (Lord knows we might even have to use a little less energy and twang ourselves around in planes a bit more infrequently) and simply do what's right. Will 'Change we can believe in' or 'The straight talk express' deliver this? I'm not so sure, but I live in hope and still have a dream...
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That wasn't the only sensible thing Martin Luther King said that could bear relevance to this. Mike Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus wrote an essay called the Death of Environmentalism in October 2004 where they played on an MLK quote to level much of the blame at us environmentalists. The basic gist is that we've been guilty of a tactical rather than strategic response to the challenges at hand, and it's because we've failed to create an alternative, high-concept vision for how things could be (a dream, if you will), that we've left the door open for what is happening at the moment. You can read the whole speech at http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/01/13/doe-reprint/index.html, but this is the key quote:'Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream speech" is famous because it put forward an inspiring, positive vision that carried a critique of the current moment within it. Imagine how history would have turned out had King given an "I have a nightmare" speech instead. In the absence of a bold vision and a reconsideration of the problem, environmental leaders are effectively giving the "I have a nightmare" speech, not just in our press interviews but also in the way that we make our proposals. The world's most effective leaders are not issue-identified but rather vision and value-identified. These leaders distinguish themselves by inspiring hope against fear, love against injustice, and power against powerlessness. A positive, transformative vision doesn't just inspire, it also creates the cognitive space for assumptions to be challenged and new ideas to surface.'