The people have voted for change in the UK general elections, says Pat Thomas. Which political leader will be courageous enough to respond?

Stability. Ever since the votes were counted in the UK’s general election and the reality of a hung parliament was made clear, ’stability’ has been the message of our potential leaders.

The juxtaposition of concepts is pure PR gold. These are ‘changing times’, ‘challenging times’ and we need ‘stability’. The strongest leader will be the one that can supply that quality in the greatest measure. At the moment voters are assured that behind the scenes, and with no single party having an overall majority, Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and a handful of independents are bargaining for the benefit of the country, for the stability that we all want – and need.

But is stability really what we want – or need? And as goals go is it really the best thing for the country in the short-term? 

Certainly, in pursuit of a good story, in desperation to make the election sexy and dramatic, the media are guilty of devoting far too many column inches to the disaster scenarios of a possible hung parliament.  Encouragingly  voters didn’t buy into them. Some actively hankered after them.

Even before the polls opened, voters from across London gathered in Parliament Square to express their support for a hung parliament and displeasure with the scare tactics of the (largely) right-wing tabloid press. The organisers of the ‘flashmob’ protest called it the  “biggest rolled-up newspaper sword fight ever” – an off the cuff demonstration organised by word of mouth, through facebook, the email lists of online civil society groups Avaaz and 38 Degrees and on individual blogs and Twitter pages.

There was a petition calling for Rupert Murdoch and the British tabloid press to, “…stop spreading fear and trying to manipulate how people vote”. Over 30,000 people signed it.

In particular our newspapers and TV news programmes love to play follow the leader and the prospect of a hung parliament deeply challenges their political affiliations and indeed their corporate identities. What’s the point of being a Tory or a Labour rag if neither party has the leadership? In some ways a coalition government could be the remaking of the media since it hands back to journalists the opportunity to think their own independent thoughts again. If you don’t think that this is vital to democracy, think again.

In reality an outcome where no party has an overall majority is not unusual nor insurmountable, though it can be a nightmare for those whose sole aim is to put their personal stamp on a country or create a personal power base. So it is worthwhile speculating whom all this hand-wringing actually serves. And why in a time of tremendous change we keep grasping for ’stability’ when embracing the disruption and chaos might ultimately be more productive?

A different reading of events suggests that while our political leaders think they are facing-off some potential disaster, the public are actually relishing the prospect of this moment of change and negotiation.

We think of politics and the political process as a done deal – as systems of governance that were worked out a long time ago and which will always function in the same way. In fact politics is little more than an evolving experiment in collective living. Thinking of it as a fixed entity is what leads to bribery and corruption, expenses scandals, cuts in education and health, big subsidies for polluting industries and ever widening gaps between the haves and have-nots.

Because of this belief there is an overriding notion that this hung parliament is somehow dysfunctional and needs to be fixed as soon as possible. The other way of looking at it is that the way the British public has voted is a recognition, on a very deep level, that the political system in its current state is dysfunctional and needs to be re-envisaged.

On the Saturday after the election another flash protest broke out in central London The 1500 or so protesters – a coalition of democracy campaigners, political activists and ordinary voters – were calling for a fairer electoral system and for support for their Take Back Parliament petition. Within a few days over 35,000 people (out of a hoped for 50,000 or more) had signed the online petition calling for a Citizens Convention to decide on a new voting system to be put to the people in a referendum.

Unfairness has long been a flaw in our system of government. The voting public knows this, has experienced it in its daily life, and has expressed its anger with both politics and politicians. The pre-election surge in support for the Liberal Democrats, unmasked the unfairness of the electoral systemand the need to reconsider the long-standing first past the post system and adopt proportional representation instead. While all this is working itself out a hung (or maybe we should be thinking of it as ‘balanced’?) parliament could better represent what the voters want, give us some breathing space to work out a better system, and possibly encourage MPs to be more aware of and responsive to public opinion.

We can’t remove this election from its national or international context. Under pressure from a number of social and environmental challenges including climate change, peak oil/energy descent, economic instability, rising population and loss of biodiversity, the world is reinventing itself everyday. There are ‘hung parliament’ scenarios – that is to say shifting paradigms of power and priorities, changes in heart and mind – running through everything that we do now. 

But, as author Thomas Homer-Dixon has said, there is an upside to all this down. From an environmental perspective (if I can bang a personal drum for a moment) there is already the recognition of the opportunity to reform governmental attitude and policy. The day after the election seven of the UK’s largest environmental organisations issued a joint statement to remind those politicians haggling for their share of the power base to put action on climate change back on the political agenda.

According to David Norman, head of Campaigns at WWF: “Whoever becomes Prime Minister, one of their most pressing tasks will be to take rapid action to deal with the threat of climate change. They must also take action to protect our under-pressure natural environment. 

“This is an historic opportunity. The next Government has the power to establish the UK as a climate leader and to reap the tremendous benefits to the UK’s economy, society and security of doing so.

“Scientists say global greenhouse gases must peak during this Parliament and then decline if we are to prevent serious, irreversible consequences. All parties say they are committed; now what we need is action.” 

The coalition’s top priorities for government are:

● A cut in greenhouse gas emissions of at least 42 per cent by 2020.

● Investment in green industries, infrastructure and skills to boost the economy and ensure the UK becomes a world leader in low carbon technology.

● A dramatic shift to renewable sources of energy generation – at least 15 per cent by 2020.

● No new coal-fired power stations unless they are able to fully capture and store their emissions.

● No third runway at Heathrow and a new aviation policy compatible with the Climate Change Act.

● Financial support to developing countries to help them develop cleanly, adapt to climate change and stop deforestation.

● Urgent action to protect and enhance the UK’s natural environment including a White Paper on nature.
 
Almost any industry, NGO or community group could – and should – come up with a similar wish list. Many are in the process of doing so. Three days after the election the real campaigning is, in many respects, just beginning. The hung parliament is a chance to build effective coalitions, to work together and find solutions rather than bargain for personal glory. Entered into willingly and with a positive attitude it could be a watershed for our politicians. It could signal an end to playground squabbling, a recognition of the need to grow up.

And the result of this recognition could me a more democratic process of governance. Or it could just turn into a political bun fight, egged on by the media. It’s hard to tell which way it will go.

Gordon Brown, who has more to lose than anyone – at least publicly – accepted that the process of negotiation will take time and cooperation. We can only speculate about the temper tantrums behind the scenes Nick Clegg is under intense pressure not to sell his party down the river, especially on the issue of electoral reform. David Cameron’s response has been bullish. Even before the election he indicated that if no party had an overall majority the Conservatives would consider challenging the convention that if Britain votes for a hung parliament, the existing Prime Minister gets the first chance to form a government.

If he doesn’t get what he wants out of the backroom horsetrading, will he drag the country into a messy constitutional wrangle that may ultimately show up the ugly side of his own will to power and damage people’s faith in politicians and politics even more?

Really, it’s time to end the politics of confrontation and bluster, of personal favours and  cooking the books, of privileges for the few and stuff the rest.

In a world of change people will want more say in the decisions that affect their daily lives; the personal becomes more and more political with every passing moment. It is perhaps a debate for another day whether centralised government, as opposed to more localised government, is flexible and responsive enough to meet this need.

What is clear is that voters are awakening to the need for an electoral system that better represents them and are continuing to voice their deep distrust of politicians both as keepers of the public trust and as people. Likewise there is growing mistrust of the process of politics, as something little more than a sleight of hand game in which the needs of the wealthiest individuals and the biggest global corporations are held to be more important than the needs of the majority of average individuals and their communities and environments.

Whether the voting public knew it intellectually or intuitively a hung parliament was the outcome everyone wanted because it would be a vote for change. As the world changes, politics must change too. And it is a truism of personal change, that is wholly applicable to social change, that when we fear it the most this can be an indication that change is not only inevitable but necessary. Our strongest leaders will not only acknowledge this but  be humbled enough by the election outcome to realise that political office is not something taken by force of personality, but is instead offered in service. To paraphrase Tao the Ching, the strongest leaders are those that follow the people.

Originally posted here.

Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.

© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without author’s permission.

Wildlife documentaries? Eco-tourism? Pat Thomas asks: Are we loving nature to death?

A new report puts forward the theory that wildlife film makers are invading the privacy of animals by going to ever greater extremes to film otherwise unseen moments of life in the animal kingdom.

According to Brett Mills, a lecturer in film studies at the University of East Anglia, the growing use of miniature cameras by wildlife photographers and film makers produces an invasive level of surveillance most humans would find objectionable if they were on the other end of the lens: “The key thing in most wildlife documentaries is filming those very private moments of mating or giving birth. Many of these activities, in the human realm, are considered deeply private, but with other species we don’t recognise that”.

He adds that while it might seem strange to claim that animals have a right to privacy, the idea should not be dismissed: “We can never really know if animals are giving consent, but they do often engage in forms of behaviour which suggest they’d rather not encounter humans”.

Debate on animals and privacy is largely philosophical. Allowing for the general validity of Mills’ argument, the very use of the term ‘privacy’, a mainly anthropocentric concern, may be obscuring the point of what is a potentially important discussion about the rest of the animal kingdom.

To require privacy requires a sense of oneself and as well as awareness of being observed by others. Some higher mammals appear to have one or both of these senses, but not all animals do. While they may not explicitly seek privacy, animals are exquisitely aware of their environments and will, when necessary, seek refuge or shelter or take other measures to ensure safety for themselves and their young and their group. 

Human sexual behaviour isn’t just for procreation and (usually) has a private element to it. But in the animal world mating rituals can be gloriously public, flashy, competitive, even violent. These open displays of sexuality have some practical purposes. They define territory and hierarchy assuring that the strongest males are given the chance to pass their genetic traits on; it also allows the most prolific breeding females to display their fecundity. All this happens to support the survival of the species; it’s only relatively recently that these activities have come to be regarded as entertainment for humans.

We all have to live on the same earth together and it would seem a given that all animals should have the right to exist in a way and in an environment that is natural to them without being deliberately interfered with, exploited or intruded upon. But most humans have such trouble with this simple notion that we have invented wildlife preserves and parks and zoos to keep the animals, that once had free roam of the wilderness, enclosed in legally defined territory (a few humans are now challenging this with the concept of rewilding, though to some extent both ideas assume the right of humans to dictate terms).

And, of course, we also have wildlife films that safely confine our experience of animals to screens big and small.

Wildlife film makers explain their craft in part by saying that they are providing a public service by helping more of us to know, love and maybe protect the natural world. Newer technologies, they argue, mean that the act of watching animals in their natural or near-natural habitat is less and less invasive. All of this is true – up to a point. And I admit to being one of those who first fell in love with the nature that extended well beyond my back garden through watching wildlife programmes. As a small child in the 60’s I was hooked on the corny wildlife films on The Wonderful World of Disney, the Wild Kingdom and the Undersea Adventures of Jacques Cousteau. Through most of my adult life David Attenborough’s obvious love for his subject has also been inspirational.

But nature films are also a big industry now. There are endless cable channels hungry for content and there is big money to be spent and made. March of the Penguins, for example, grossed £85 million [$130 million] at the global box office and the BBC notes that Planet Earth “has been sold to 95 countries and territories and the DVD was the highest ever TV DVD pre-order on Amazon. It has already generated over £22 million [$34 millon] of gross revenue”.

It is in this comodification of nature, the packaging of it for mass appeal and profit, where the issue of what has been termed ‘wildlife porn’ or ‘nature porn’ starts to make sense.

For some, the juxtaposition of the words ‘nature’ and ‘pornography’ may seem strange. The linking factor is the way pornography objectifies its subject by removing context, whether that context might be character, life story, environment or ecosystem. You know you are watching nature porn when nature becomes a commodity – and this, of course, is how the human body and sexual experience is presented in human pornography – something to be consumed and then discarded as we flick the channel over to X-factor or Lost or the night’s football or a re-run of Friends.

David Attenborough’s Planet Earth was, at the time of its release, considered by some to be a good example of ‘wildlife porn’ – a near constant flow of epic imagery, of vast desert vistas and brooding forests, of skies brim full of migratory flocks birds, of flowing rivers and raging oceans, all filmed and edited to provoke arousal and to incite powerful feelings in the viewer. Beautiful, yes, but also in some ways numbing and ultimately a false reassurance that, when it comes to the natural world, voyeurism is our only role. And of course, it also ignored the many genuine environmental perils going on behind the scenes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the rise of the nature documentary/series/film doesn’t seem to have inspired many of us to take better care of the world, but it has helped give rise to the idea of eco-tourism. Essentially, you’ve bought the album, now see the live show.

This leads to another issue; namely that we change what we observe. This isn’t just the experience of quantum physics. Any observed ‘object’, if it is alive and aware or can sense that it is being observed, will react to the observation, even if the reactions are unconscious or unintentional.

The intrusion of wildlife photographers and, perhaps worse, eco-tourists into the natural world to watch, to feel a part of nature while still being apart from it, is having a profound effect on wildlife. It doesn’t just put habitats under pressure; it also impacts the reproductive behaviour of the animals within those systems.

Eco-tourism may superficially seem to be an antidote to couch-potato consumption of nature documentaries, but the fact is that at a very basic level, taking busloads of people into the wild crowds the natural environment of the animals and alters their biology and behaviour in significant ways.

In 2004 New Scientist reported on studies showing that polar bears, penguins, dolphins, dingoes, even birds in the rainforest were becoming stressed as a result the invasion from eco-tourism. The physiological effects noted were sometimes subtle: changes to an animal’s heart rate, metabolism, stress hormone levels and social behaviour. But the wider impacts on the animals were worryingly high and included fewer hours of sleep each day, weight loss, lower resistance to disease, lower reproductive rates and premature death.

Two years ago the Wall Street Journal reported that the boom in eco-tourism to the Galápagos Islands was having a devastating effect on wildlife there. Unsustainable development, an influx of workers from the mainland and introduced species were, the article noted, putting endemic biodiversity and habitats at risk.

In the forests of California, scientists have found that hiking, bird watching and other similar ‘low-impact’ non-consumptive activities can interfere with the mating habits of bobcats and coyotes. Where the eco-tourists went, there was a fivefold reduction in numbers of these animals. After banning the tourists, their numbers began to rise again.

We understood how animals respond to crowding even before eco-tourism came into being. Over the years studies have shown that animal populations living in crowded conditions display a number of behaviours that tend to limit the size of the population, including aberrant forms of sexual behaviour, small litter sizes, a higher incidence of spontaneous abortion, ineffectual maternal care and even cannibalism of their young.

In this respect ‘privacy’, or whatever we choose to call it, may be important to the normal physiology of many species, even when particular individuals or groups don’t appear to live, or in the case of zoo animals, may never have lived, in a very ‘private’ environment.

For me the unasked questions are: Why do we watch nature films? What is it about the drama of birth, sex, survival and death of other species that draws us in? What do we – that is we who are not scientists – get out of the experience? Nature has long been our blank canvas and it’s tempting to consider whether our interest in animal lifestyles is really just a projection of our desire to be more free in our own mating choices and habits, to be more in tune with our natural environment, instincts and biology. What a strange world we live in where we can effectively watch a parade of elephants, tigers, chimps and whales humping all day long, but where a man, a human animal, can be prosected for indecent exposure (though finally, sensibly acquitted) after a neighbour, out walking with her child, inadvertently spied him making coffee in the nude in the privacy his own home.

As humans we believe that awareness of ourselves is our greatest gift. Maybe it’s time to apply some of this sentience in a less inwardly-focused way. It’s reassuring that so many of us love nature. But as with all forms of consumption we should at least question our ongoing, really voracious, desire for nature porn, and ask where it gets us, what it is displacing, what is lost through it, what might serve us better and what the potential damage is, to us and to the rest of the animal kingdom, if we don’t direct our interest in a more positive, practical way. These questions are more than a philosophical game, they are the obligations of a conscious, enlightened society.

Originally posted here.

Pat’s pevious AlterNet post can be found here.

© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without author’s permission.