informage

Simon's response to my post on Tuvalu is a well researched and argued piece (I'd expect nothing less from a blog entitled Rational Liberal, and by the way Psi: I like - it suits you). The quality of referencing puts me to shame. I actually agree with almost everything he says, and all three of his recommended steps of increased neutrality of scientific research funding, improved empiricism and teaching people to be better at evaluating competing sources of information certainly get my solid support.

Contemporary human epistemology is limited, and we rely on "best estimates". As far as I can tell - and Simon's piece actually reinforces this - the current scientific consensus is that human actions *are* causing climate change, and that climate change will cause changes in sea levels. Any debate appears to be around how much change will occur and over what time period. Considering that all predictions are based on metereological models, and that the best of those models can still have difficulty predicting events more than a few days away, I feel personally open to the possibility that any research findings contain errors. It seems that the eventual test will inevitably be the one we'll live through.

Tuvalu and the recent tsunami are important, not because they provide evidence of anything, but because they act as a kind of harbinger; a means of contacting the possible reality we may have to live into. No one seriously suggests any link between climate change and the tsunami, and perhaps Simon is also right to argue that there is not much of a link with Tuvalu either. When a Tuvuluan says "Doubters should visit Tuvalu", perhaps he offers an opportunity to see what the future might look like rather than an experience of any real emperical value.

My own private Tuvalu was J.G. Ballard's first, and - of those I've read - best, novel The Drowned World. The novel is set some two hundred years in the future after the sea levels have risen, most of the world is underwater, and humanity has retreated to the arctic circle. The focus of Ballard's narrative is the pyschological unravelling of each of the members of a rescue mission that, it transpires, is boating around the remaining visible peaks of London. One by one the characters sail off towards the south and the sun as they get "the dreams" - dark vivid pre-racial memories of a time when humanity was dominated by lizards. Giant iguanas and geckos line the flooded avenues of the city and the baking heat saps the will.

The twist is that Ballard wrote this novel in 1962 before notions of human-induced climate change or global warming had entered the scientific vocabulary. He actually attributes the change in the weather to unusually high levels of solar flare activity, drawing no connection to human activity. It doesn't matter. Ballard wrote an extraordinarily evocative account of what it might be like to be alive as we become aliens on our own planet, as our environment shifts out from under us and ceases to support us. If it happens it'll be damn scary, and if there's anything we can do now to prevent it, then for pete's sake let's do it!

Thick grey clouds fill the upper stratosphere and wispy strands of vapour like rolling smoke lie strewn across Harare as we descend. It seems appropriate that a week after the US has branded Zimbabwe one of the last remaining "outposts of tyranny" it resembles nothing more than Tolkien's Mordor. The smell of kerosene from a fuel leak before takeoff - prompting the pilot, unusually, to instruct us "please keep your seatbelts unfastened" - heightens my anxiety at entering Mugabe's nation for the first time in ten years.

Despite having had several conversations with Zimbabweans last year that suggested there is more to Zim than we hear in SA's media - let alone the media of the west - I can't help worrying about trivialities like my English accent and khaki jacket. Fortunately I have a South African passport to enter with, and I'm much reassured when the immigration guy - a mellow looking white-haired African - turns out to be the friendliest I've encountered. "Oh, you forgot to fill in your passport expiry date - don't worry, I'll do it for you".

The drive from the airport announces in no uncertain terms Zimbabwe's fall from wealth: badly maintained tar roads, a rusting faded gate of a once glorious game park - the irony of "Scenic Entrance" almost too much to bear - veering off-road to pass a decrepid truck carrying farmworkers, encountering exhaust pipe of same half a kilometre further on, jumping out to move it before we can continue. We pass wild unkempt fields. "These are farms occupied by 'war vets'" my companions tell me, "of course the land had to be redistributed, but these people don't know the first thing about farming".

I'm here to visit Kufunda, a learning village founded by Pioneers of Change colleague Marianne, a remarkable and inspiring woman of Danish and Zimbabwean descent. The village is on the grounds of her mother's farm, and its mission is to develop sustainable communities in rural Zimbabwe. Kufunda itself means 'learning', and whilst there is much practical work - permaculture, composting toilets, cheap and sustainable building methods - the emphasis is on hosting deep learning sessions using many of the same group processes we use in Pioneers of Change.