First Steps: Acknowledging the Problems We Face
One of the tenets of personal development is that people can not change what they don’t acknowledge. On that basis we’ve seen heartening news in the last week that public attitudes to climate change may be growing more realistic.
15th December 2011 | Peter Rolton: Chairman, Rolton Group
First came the news that David Attenborough’s TV series Frozen Planet would be broadcast in full in the US. The seven part series took four years to make and has been sold to 30 countries. However the US Discovery Channel, joint producers of the series, initially declined to show the final episode, which looks at climate change caused by man. The fact that half of the US population does not accept the idea of climate change was all the more reason why the episode had to be aired, and it would have been outrageous if the self-censorship had gone ahead.
"More than half of the US population
don't accept the idea of climate change…"
Now the channel has changed its stance and the series, which will be screened next year in the States, will be shown in its entirety. Meanwhile in the UK most of the tabloid coverage of the series has centred on the fact that one sequence was shot in a Dutch zoo and not in the Arctic. Ridiculously, the climate change debate has been sidelined by a row over the authenticity of a short piece of film of a mother bear with two cubs. As a result the bigger picture – and the important message has been missed completely.
Slightly more cheering news come from China, where the official stance on the air pollution that has plagued Beijing for the past few weeks has softened. Despite reduced visibility, the cancellation of 200 flights and the closure of motorways, the official position had been that the city – population almost 20 million – was suffering from the effects of fog. Now in acceptance of the plight of the city where respirator masks are a common sight on the streets, the government has acknowledged that the third largest city in China has a smog problem.
This image shows four pictures of Beijing taken from the same spot on four consecutive days in early December. The first and last shots aren't camera failures. They show the air quality that the camera recorded.
It may be that the first step to change is an acknowledgement of the problem, in which case both of these stories may represent significant first steps on the road to tackling the issues we face. There is however a long way to go...
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