Foxy Futurists and how to become one. Clem Sunter
around 1 000 new infections a day, so we are holding steady at about five and a half million people infected in South Africa. The average lifespan of a South African has fallen to 47 years.”
The last figure ties in with the registered death curve for each age group, which is produced annually. Since the late 1990s, the curve has featured a growing hump in the 26 to 30 and 31 to 35 age categories. These are people who have been infected in their teens and early 20s and died 10 to 12 years later. We hope the availability of antiretroviral drugs will diminish this premature hump in the death curve by allowing those infected to live longer. But the roll-out is taking time.
Meanwhile, what is really concerning is the way we have come to accept these statistics as the norm. Think about it. We don’t really talk about the causes of the epidemic because we don’t like talking in public about sex, which is the main cause of transmission. We throw insults, we make jokes, the media dutifully report progress in their middle pages, but the tragedy – and it is a real tragedy – passes most citizens by. I remember talking to one young man in an Aids hospice a few years ago. He said: “It feels like I’ve got a huge weight on my chest. It gets heavier every day, so one day I will no longer be able to breathe.” He died 24 hours later.
I’ve been to a children’s hospice in Pietermaritzburg. It is a kindergarten for children infected from birth. The lady in charge described how the kids blossomed until the age of four or five and then gradually faded away. I’ve watched a film about a young girl of 17, both of whose parents had died of Aids. When interviewed, she said that she had given up school to look after her younger siblings. She gave them breakfast in the morning, saw them off to school, spent the day cleaning the house, washing their clothes, buying food and household necessities with whatever grants she could obtain, and then gave them dinner in the evening and saw them to bed. Imagine that: giving up your education, your chance to make it in life in order to take on the full responsibility of being a parent. She accepted gracefully the cards that fate had cruelly dealt her, even though it wasn’t her fault.
We recently witnessed the huge coverage given to the Air France Airbus that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Two hundred and twenty-eight people perished in that disaster. Putting our Aids statistics into perspective, the equivalent is four airliners full of mostly young South Africans plunging into the sea every day of every month of every year. And yet silence accompanies their death, because they die individually and the majority are from deprived backgrounds.
We should be ashamed and we should do everything to break the sound of silence. We should talk openly about ways to change sexual behaviour to minimise transmission of the virus. We should get the advertising agencies involved, since it is their speciality to change behaviour. We should encourage people to get themselves tested and, if they test positive, to seek the appropriate medical treatment. We should focus on compliance with the pill regimen and the fact that even when you feel better you can’t stop taking the pills.
Finally we should openly praise all those heroes and heroines who have dedicated their lives to caring for the victims of the epidemic. They deserve national medals for their bravery and compassion.
All eyes on Copenhagen
| I hope this article convinces you that part of being a foxy futurist is to lay out the scenarios in a matrix that can be easily digested. I did not want to quote the probabilities given by the experts mentioned in the article, because I thought it would be too depressing. Now that Copenhagen is over and was a disaster, I can. They attached a 90% probability to Dances with Wolves and only a 10% chance to Strictly Ballroom. They were unconvinced that the world had enough political will and had attained the requisite level of international cooperation for a positive flag to pop up on global warming. They were right. |
‘Do you wanna dance?’ was the theme of a meeting of climate change experts that I facilitated in London not so long ago. The group included one of the chief policy advisers to the British government and two top advisers to the US Senate.
In terms of current policy options and those that might flow out of a new international agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2012, they came up with the gameboard below.
In the period leading up to 2012, they allocated various nations to the two lower quadrants. Dirty Dancers, which are basically nations that put economic development ahead of any goal to reduce carbon emissions, included most of the developing world. Poverty alleviation heads their agenda, and the last thing they want to do is to increase the cost of electricity with expensive ways of sequestrating the carbon dioxide that comes out of the smokestacks of their power stations.
Their main goal is to give as many citizens as possible access
to cheap electricity. Moreover coal-burning power stations trump nuclear on cost (particularly when you include the money needed to get rid of the radioactive waste). Meanwhile, wind, solar and geothermal are too unproven on a large scale. Hydro means displacement of communities.
Most European countries were placed into the Different Dances quadrant, on the grounds that Europe as a whole has made significant progress towards reducing emissions to 1990 levels – which was the central aim of the Kyoto Protocol. America has done the reverse because it never signed the accord. Its carbon emissions per citizen per annum have risen to 25 tons, the highest figure in the world. By comparison, Europe is at half that level. However, certain American states such as California qualify for Different Dances in light of the measures they are taking to reduce car emissions. California’s current governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has even been dubbed ‘The Greenerator’ for his personal stand on environmental issues!
The two quadrants above the line of the gameboard illustrate the possible outcomes to the negotiations that started in Bali and will end hopefully in Copenhagen at the end of this year. Dances with Wolves is an agreement reached with much fanfare but having little substance. Absent are carbon reduction targets to which individual nations are held accountable by an international body like the United Nations. Immediately after the agreement is signed, the dirty dancers (or wolves) begin to cheat on it with no apparent penalties.
The virtuous outcome is Strictly Ballroom, an agreement to which virtually all nations subscribe and which they honour in word and deed. Inevitably there will be rogue states, but the major emitters (America, Europe, Japan, China and India) sign on the dotted line, as do countries like Brazil, Russia and South Africa. Our per capita emissions, in fact, are nearly as high as Europe’s.
The experts at the meeting felt that Strictly Ballroom could only come about with genuine leadership on the issue from America. Barack Obama must be applauded for taking a totally different approach to George Bush’s. Moreover, the West, who caused the problem in the first place, would have to share technological breakthroughs in areas like energy savings, new energy sources and carbon sequestration – on a generous basis – with the developing world. There would also have to be a system of rewards and punishments for nations that did better or worse than the goals set in the agreement.
All in all, Strictly Ballroom is a tall order, requiring high levels of goodwill and cooperation in a world that is currently racked by a recession. Although the right noises came out of the recent meeting of leaders in Italy, including the proposed target of reducing developed countries’ emissions by 80% before 2050, the details have yet to be hammered out.
Let us not forget the downside of Dances with Wolves or, worse still, no agreement at all. It is that our little ball in space becomes a microwave oven and eventually uninhabitable. Only the astronauts survive, because they can blast off to another planet!
So get on the ballroom floor, put your best foot forward and let the waltz begin. All eyes are on you. That is my message to the international community when they meet in Copenhagen.
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