12 October 2007
What to think of the Goreacle and His Prize
Posted by Andrew under: Amigos; Environmentalism; Exhortation .
So, I woke up this morning to find a pleasant surprise amongst all my news sources and even in my e-mail– Al Gore had won the Nobel Peace Prize!
Here’s what Al personally wrote to me (on mass e-mail):
Dear Andrew,
I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change–the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis–a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.
My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.
The response has been mixed. Many jubilant, while others skeptical over whether Al Gore really deserved the award (they must have not received the personal e-mail). I responded (like someone who watches Academy Award winning movies) by saying that global warming will cause resource wars, and a friend’s dinner response was “resource wars are going on right now” (meaning there must be someon who deserved this prize more) which made me write this e-mail to a fellow Truman Scholar…
After a long hard day doing the entrepreneur thing (playing Wii, finding out the former CEO of CNET has entered the political arena [kind of], impressed that his site was made by ninja programmers who like comic books, and then trying to read in a crystal ball the future of Web 3.0**), I had to respond because I haven’t given a response with a surreptitious update.
So I’m mixed, but I think the award brings up some interesting issues for Sunday brunch, Saturday happy hour (or housewarmings), or good old-fashioned pillow talk. The gist is that Gore won because global warming will lead to future resource wars and worse living conditions for many parts of the third world (see exact wording). ++
The three issues seem to be:
- How close (both causally and locally) to the conflict does one need to be to promote peace? Do we only promote peace when we are most near to the conflict (when in some cases all that can be done is trying to save those who have fled)? How do we compare standing in front of a tank, stopping weapons manufacturing, negotiating a peace deal, guaranteeing free and fair elections, promoting women’s rights and education, or a bank that gives micro-loans to the third world?
- A deeper issue we all must wrestle with is how serious we think global warming is? Sure, the Nobel prize has been awarded to people who stop current human rights abuses and for those who campaign for peace. Those threats seemed imminent, but there seems to be the lingering American skepticism (which is always healthy to have). Is her serious about increased hurricanes, desertification, mass migrations, starvation, resource wars, and Europe freezing over? Really, what’s the R^2 on that prediction?
- Ultimately, it’s a political prize aimed to promote a universal moral standard. The Nobel Peace Prize is a political prize that tries to capture the focus of our world to show distinction for deeds in the past in hopes even greater ones will be done in the future. I don’t know if the Nobel Peace Prize really thought that just giving out one award would stop conflict the Middle East, but they haven’t stopped giving. I don’t think they hope that a single award (come on it’s not even an Oscar) will stop global warming, but it’s all about the message and the attempt to get people to think and do something.
See more from the Nobel foundation on the Nobel Prize’s evolution.
Personally, I think it’s the same song. Just this time instead of a pacifist protesting a current war, it’s the Goreacle trying to prevent conflict. This Tennessee Christian boy also wrote that we should look beyond our own lives because ” . . . much of our success in rescuing the global ecological system will depend upon whether we can find a new reverence for the environment as a whole — not just its parts.”
So, that was the response on behalf of the environmentalists in the Truman group…
P.S. I’ll be in Seattle 10-21 to 10-27 and San Jose 10-27 to 11-3. Let’s meet up!
**Probably going to be the semantic web (don’t know if it will be RDF, it will probably come from geoweb and homegrown structures) combined with OpenID and a mobile geoweb. Practical example: I’m walking around town and my digital identity knows what my preferences are. My cell phone pings me and says that I might like to go eat at the place around the corner because it has “fast beer and women on tap” (I only saw the Microsoft version in the crystal ball).
++For example, did you know the .tv domain and 900 numbers bring a lot of income for the island of Tuvalu (smaller than Rhode Island), but this island nation of less than $1100 per capita will be underwater in a couple of years? What will become of Justin.tv? (See NPR’s story)
