Fri 12 Oct 2007
It seems like the other day when our very own Mohammed Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to become the first Bangladeshi to reach that stature. In reality, a year has gone by and we witnessed a situation escalating almost to a civil war, a state of emergency which is still in effect, an army backed caretaker government taking over the control of the government with a promise to bring mass reforms to the nation, a terrible flood, rise and fall of many powerful men and women and many other myriad events in Bangladesh.
During my morning commute today, I got to know from radio news that Al Gore (former vice-president and presidential candidate) was nominated as the 2007 Nobel Peace Price winner for his climate change campaign. First thing that came to my mind was “global warming” and then “Bangladesh”. It is without a doubt that Bangladesh is one of the top countries to suffer the consequences of climate change or global warming if we are not seeing some of the affects already. Inadvertently but undoubtedly, the Noble Peace Prize touched Bangladesh profoundly two years in a row.
Al Gore is a man with probably equal share of critics and exponents from the left to the right. Leaving aside you political view on Gore, he deserves accolades for bringing global awareness to this very serious global issue. We have not seen much needed broadened and elevated conversation on global warning until recently and if you recall it was at the top of recently concluded UN general assembly meeting. It is hard to believe the number of people still denying global warming as a scientific fact – it is like believing the Earth is flat simply because we can’t see the arch. Congratulations to Al Gore for his campaign that directly affects millions of lives in Bangladesh.
October 13th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Al Gore deserves the prize for his commendable contribution in sensitizing mankind to the delicate balance between human greed and ecology.
I think Al Gore as a presidential candidate and Senator Hillary Clinton as his VP nominee would have been the perfect winning combination for the democratic ticket in 2008!
October 13th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Bangladesh as the poster girl for Climate Change is problematic.
Congratulations to Dr Rajendra Pachauri and gazillion scientists who have contributed to the IPCC compendiums over the years and good luck to the scientists still at the forefront of trying to figure out what on earth is going on without being swayed by the fickle globalised fashions.
October 14th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
He definately deserves it more than Yunus.
October 16th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
#2 fugstar, If Bangladesh is a “poster girl” –then so would be Manhattan, NY and many more cities/areas that are most endangered by Global Warming according to the movie..(see the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”).
The issue was not to exploit images of a places to send the message across. The issue was to show the facts. And Bangladesh is geographically in a vulnerable situation.
Saying the truth about any thing , should not be held as a “crisis to its image” problem.
October 17th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
But not in the same way as Manhattan in recent films and not with the same baggage of pity exploitation. For about good decade now, desh has been the poster girl, im not focussing on recent media items.
The pattern is wha’ts problematic.
It has distorting effects on the planners, the science community, the internationally dependant part of the development industry and not to forget the jonogon who are subjected to ‘Climate Change Awareness’ programmes by folks who dont get it themselves yet.
I know of one INGO in desh that i respected in theory, that was promoting fuel efficient and low CO stoves to the poorest of poor people by virtue of their lower green house gas emmissions (in bangla on the back of a rickshaw). Thats a perversion that needs avoiding.
Bangladesh has always been in a vulnerable position due to our own lack of respect for learning institutions, ineptitude as well as the huge forces that we struggle to control but can if we will it.
CC is like another peculiar layer of troubles to this dynamic land where people discern the value of notes by their colour.
I worry that unlike India and china who have stable and high level scientific ordanance with which to figure this one out and deal with it, we will just end up extending our developmentgiri and stamp collecting sciences, it will become another rental income.
Depending on international justice, pity and erm… ‘post industrial guilt’ yet again abdicates responsibility and proves that we will swallow any any so long as we can benefit, jonogon wont really. Nobody but ourselves can build that ordanance, or those ordanace factories.
I feel that the ‘truth’ behind our vulnerability is the lack of a strong, trusted and endowed research and engineering establishment. This then brings us to political disunity and 3rd sector opportunism.
When i hear our people talk about CC like its the end of us in a defeatist way its really sad, not least because its partially informed by interesting people wearing snazzy vests.
How many thousands of hectares are growing each year around noakhali? how long are we going to pussyfoot around taking reclamation and a just CHT resettlement seriously?
When i see certain bd institutions not really attacking the beast with primary disciplines, but cataloguing the projected pain and playing with buzzwords to write some proposal I worry about who is taking responsibility.
Often my worst prejudices about NGOgiri in desh are confirmed. I hope what i witness is just an early part of the learning process.
Some people are attributing and tieing historical and present environmental hazards which have NOTHING TO DO with CC, to CC and it takes so so so much effort to change their minds because they are set and they think instrumentally about it.
Once you put some self perpetuating commonsense with sciencey bells and whistles into the society, just watch it proliferate, get noisier and confused. Its the same in the UK.
And at the end of the day our people get taken less seriously with their claims.
Poster girls we are and will remain, then well send them to the factories to earn us money and call it empowerment…