Consultant Dan
03 October 2010
A global renewable energy event, then diving in the Maldives
I am packed and waiting for the taxi to take me to the airport for a work trip to the beautiful Maldives. This is a wonderful opportunity for me personally and good for the business.
The event is the installation of PV solar panels on the Presidential residence in Male. President Nasheed of the Maldives is a champion of climate action (and indeed, democracy) and at this event he is supported by companies – who are donating and installing the equipment – and activists who are driving a global awareness campaign called 10/10/10.
You can read a bit more about the event here.
After the week’s work I will stay on in the Maldives for 3 days of diving. Online reviews tell me that the reef dives in the atolls near where I am staying are the best in the world.
I have always had a deep love of undersea life, from when I was a boy and snorkled around the rock pools of Shoreham Beach, on Western Port Bay over the summer holidays.
My optimism comes with some trepidation for I know that the Maldives are almost certainly doomed. The islands are low enough to be vulnerable to a modest rise in the sea level and all coral reefs are suffering from the multiple ecological consequences of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.
I will try to lap up the beauty and be in the moment. However, I know that when the time comes for me to farewell the fish, corals, plants and Cetaceans of the Maldives, it will also be a goodbye on behalf of those future generations who will inherit a diminished earth.
Even as we mobilise a new political economy to prevent catastrophic climate change, we know that some degree of change is already locked in to the system.
I think back to a passage from Henry David Thoreau which I first read in 1990, while living and working at the snow line, in the back-country of America’s stunning Yosemite National Park.
When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here – the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc., – I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.
…I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places.
I should not like to think that some demigod has come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.*
The sense of loss begat by climate change is not something to be conveyed in a blog post. That is why I have been saying for several years that we need the arts to step up and represent the meaning of this moment.
I implore artists, from computer gamers and painters to poets and novelists, to make images, stories and ideas about climate change; we need these in order to fully experience the moment and discover who we need to be, in our struggle to turn back the tide of rising emissions. We need Cultural campaigning.
As I embark on this little adventure, I am excited to be working for the solar energy revolution. I am not confident, for we are not Thoreau’s demigods, but I am always optimistic.
The event with the President of the Maldives will give me some hope. Swimming through nature’s undersea poem will give me something that is harder to explain.
*Bradford Torrey and Francis H Allen, eds., The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, (Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1905, 8 : pp220-21 quoted in Douglas H. Strong, Dreamers and Defenders : American conservationists, (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 1989), p.12
Thank you Linnet, for taking the time to leave a comment. It helps to know what readers think.
I’m enouraged that you appreciate the need for some philosophy as well as directness.
Dan, Completely agree with your focus on cultural campaigning and bringing “creativity and the heart” to the issue. That is the reason why I have become involved in the arts (www.lamirada.org.au – aiming to create the most regenerative film festival in the world) and building relationships with the arts industry leaders to inspire them to lead through innovation. Melbourne Fringe have some great ambitions for next year as do some other arts organisations. I really enjoy reading your blogs, so please keep them coming…
Thanks Dean!
We are thrilled in the Maldives to hear just now that Obama is putting solar on the White House. Maybe its because Rahm Emanuel has left the Obama administration….he was no fan of renewable energy apparently.
Its great what you are doing with the film festival.
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Go Dan!
I love how encompassing your approach is. I think such a wide-thinking approach is essential to us getting through the mess we’ve made as a species.