“In the struggle for freedom of information, technology — not politics — will be the ultimate decider.”
These words, by Sir Arthur C Clarke, have been cited in recent days and weeks in many debates surrounding WikiLeaks, secrecy and the public’s right to know.
I invoke these words, and many related reflections by the late author and futurist, in a 2,250-word essay I have just written. Titled Living in the Global Glass House, it is presented in the form of an Open Letter to Sir Arthur C Clarke. It has just been published by Groundviews.org
This is my own attempt to make sense of the international controversy – and confusion – surrounding WikiLeaks. Taking off from the current concerns, I also look at what it means for individuals, corporations and governments to live in the Age of Transparency that has resulted from the Information Society we’ve been building for years.
Sir Arthur foresaw these developments year or decades ago, and wrote perceptively and sometimes in cautionary terms about how we can cope with these developments. As a research assistant and occasional co-author to Sir Arthur from 1987 to 2008, I had the rare privilege of sharing his views firsthand. In this essay, I distill some of the best and most timely for wider dissemination. The above Wordle graphic illustrates the keywords in my essay.
The essay was also prompted by recent experiences. Here’s that story behind the story:
By happy coincidence, I arrived in London on 28 November 2010, the very day the WikiLeaks Cablegate erupted all over the web, beginning to spill out what would eventually be over 250,000 secret international ‘cables’ within the US diplomatic corps.
The Guardian UK that day published an interactive map-based visualization of the leaks. By moving the mouse over the map, readers can find key stories and a selection of original documents by country, subject or people
During the week I spent in London, I experienced not only uncharacteristically early and intense snow storms, but a mounting international storm on the web over the leaked cables. WikiLeaks’ co-founder and chief editor Julian Assange was also somewhere in the UK, playing cat and mouse at the time with the Swedish police and Interpol. (He later turned himself in to the British authorities.)
Sir Arthur Clarke: The legacy continues...On December 1, the British Interplanetary Society invited me to join their annual Christmas get-together where they were remembering their founder member and past chairman Arthur C Clarke. They talked mostly about the man’s contribution to space exploration, but listening to those fond memories against the wider backdrop of WikiLeaks very likely inspired me to write this essay.
Soon after I returned to Colombo, Transparency International Sri Lanka asked me to speak at a workshop on the right to information they had organised for journalists. Given my reputation as a geek-watcher and commentator on the Information Society, they asked to talk about what WikiLeaks means for investigative journalism. Two days later, the Ravaya newspaper did a lengthy interview with me on the same topic which they have just published in their issue for 19 December 2010.
All these elements and experiences combined in writing this essay. Being confined to home by a nasty cold and cough also helped! In fact, on 16 December when Sir Arthur’s 93rd Birth Anniversary was marked, I was too weak to even step out of the house to visit his gravesite. In the end, I finished writing this Open Letter to him on the evening of that day.
My daughter Dhara and I would normally have taken flowers to Sir Arthur’s grave on his birth anniversary. This year, instead, I offer him 2,250 words in his memory. The fine writer would surely appreciate this tribute from a small-time wordsmith.
I’m delighted to highlight another commendable effort, this time on the web. It’s a website called The Juice Media, which presents news reports in, believe it or not, rap music! It has been online for a while, drawing rave reviews. One of them: “Like a mix of Eminem and Jon Stewart”.
TheJuiceMedia: Rap News is written and created by Hugo Farrant and Giordano Nanni in a home-studio/suburban backyard in Melbourne, Australia. In fact, Hugo appears as the amiable Rap News anchorman, Robert Foster.
Here are their latest three releases, which are hilariously serious.
Rap News 6 – Wikileaks’ Cablegate: the truth is out there
Rap News 5: Wikileaks & the war on journalism (ft. Julian Assange)
RAP NEWS 4: Wikileaks vs The Pentagon – the WWWAR on the Internet
Poddala Jayantha's mother and father receiving award from Kanak Mani dixit (extreme R)
Two persons stood out among the several hundred people gathered at Sri Lanka National Integrity Awards ceremony on December 9 evening in Colombo. Dressed in off-white, the elderly couple looked dignified yet slightly bewildered by the pace of events at Colombo’s top conventions venue.
But when their moment arrived, the parents of investigative journalist Poddala Jayantha rose to the occasion: they accepted the Global Integrity Award presented to him by the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI).
Jayantha could not turn up in person because his is under threat and fled Sri Lanka for safety. In June 2009, he was abducted by unidentified persons and assaulted. The attack, one among many on journalists in Sri Lanka, left him permanently disabled in his legs. That’s the high price he had to pay for systematically exposing corruption and irregularities in government and corporate sector in Sri Lanka.
TI, which created this award to recognise the courage and determination of individuals and organisations fighting corruption around the world, commended Jayantha for his “dedication to exposing injustice in Sri Lanka”.
Poddala Jayantha“I am happy that I could fight against corruption and campaign for press freedom while working for the state media,” he told BBC Sinhala after the awards announcement. “But yes I had to leave the country as a result.”
I’ve long admired Poddala’s courage and meticulous research, and have been amazed that he managed to do so much while working in a state-owned media establishment like Lake House, where he was employed after leaving the independent Ravaya newspaper. Of course he was the exception to the rule, but what a refreshing exception that was — reminding us that even amidst all those sacred cows that state media journalists must tiptoe around, they can still serve the public interest if they want to…
Of course, there were also stories that he never got to write. In November 2008, I wrote about one such example in an essay commenting on the Lankan media’s shameful conduct in relation to our own Ponzi scheme and local Madoff called Sakvithi.
L to R - Gerd Shonwalder (IDRC Canada), Faye Reagon (HSRC South Africa), Nalaka Gunawardene, Ann Waters-Bayer (ETC Netherlands) & Eliya Zulu (AIDP, Kenya)
What needs to be done to improve connections between researchers and the media?
The workshop, organised by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the Australian Government Aid Programme (AusAid), brought together close to 100 research managers, science communicators and development donors from all regions of the world.
As always, I spoke from a practitioner’s perspective. Our panel was asked to discuss ‘different ways of making the links between research, policy and practice’. Each panel member was allowed 5 – 6 minutes of speaking time, with no PowerPoint or other visual aids.
I started off by flagging two fairly self-evident yet important points:
• Media is a PLURAL – there is no single recipe that works for all media because it is such a diverse sector!
• Media is only a SUB-SET of a wider process of communicating for social change.
Within this, there is always room for improvement! As a science journalist, I am a ‘critical cheerleader’ of researchers and their institutes. From that point of view, there are 3 elements that we need more of.
I call them A, B and C.
• A is for Access: Today, 24/7 news cycles dominate the media landscape. That means, more often than not, journalists need quick and easy access to researchers, and rapid (or ‘live’) responses to breaking stories. Ideally, journalists want to talk to the researchers themselves, and not PR people or administrators within research institutes or universities.
• B is for Bridges: To enable good access, we need strong and reliable links between researchers and the media. That can take many forms. They may be physical or virtual – including events, online platforms, and other activities. I see them as ‘Intersections’ where research, media and policy communities come together. These help share information, but also nurture trust –- that precious and rare virtue!
• C is for Credibility: We’ve already heard how critical this element is to all our work as researchers and journalists. Credibility is something hard to earn, easy to lose. We can’t buy it – but good, long-term investments in people can help consolidate it.
I argued that these A, B and C can certainly help improve connections between researchers and the media, and ultimately, with the wider public.
Paper paper shining bright...but for how long? Cartoon by Mike Luckovich
My regular readers know my deep interest in political satire, and fascination with cartoons of all kinds including those political. On this blog, we’ve also discussed the worldwide decline in mainstream journalism.
“Political satire is nothing new: it has been around for as long as organised government, trying to keep the wielders of power in check. Over the centuries, it has manifested in many oral, literary or theatrical traditions, some of it more enduring — such as Gulliver’s Travels and Animal Farm. And for over a century, political cartoonists have also been doing it with such brilliant economy of words. Together, these two groups probably inspire more nightmares in tyrants than anyone or anything else.
“Today, political satire has also emerged as a genre on the airwaves and in cyberspace, and partly compensates for the worldwide decline in serious and investigative journalism. Many mainstream media outlets have become too submissive and subservient to political and corporate powers. Those who still have the guts often lack the resources and staff to pursue good journalism.
“If Nature abhors a vacuum, so does human society — and both conjure ways of quickly filling it up. Into this ‘journalism void’ have stepped two very different groups of people: citizen journalists, who take advantage of the new information and communications technologies (ICTs), and political satirists who revive the ancient arts of caricaturisation and ego-blasting…”
Ray Wijewardene on the set of 'Sri Lanka 2048' TV show, June 2008: Cautiously optimistic about the future...The small farmers, buffaloes and earthworms all over the world lost a true friend and spokesman this week when Lankan scientist Ray Wijewardene passed away.
Ray packed multiple interests and pursuits into his 86 years of life – including engineering, building and flying light aircraft, and Olympic-level competitive sailing. But he was happiest being a farmer and mechanic, and had strong opinions on the subject. He was vocal about misguided priorities in tropical farming his native Sri Lanka – and across the developing world.
He was especially passionate when speaking about small farmers in the developing world, with whom he worked many years of his international career as an expert on tropical farming systems.
Educated at Cambridge and Harvard universities, and with impeccable technical credentials, he was no stranger to the ways of academia. But he remained a sceptic about the efficacy and benefits of agricultural research — on which hundreds of millions of development funding is invested every year.
The main problem with agricultural research, he used to say, is that those who engaged in such studies and experimentation didn’t have to rely on farming for their sustenance. There was not enough self interest. In contrast, the small farmer had to eke out a meagre existence from whatever land, water and seeds or livestock she had. In her case — and a majority of small farmers around the world today are indeed women — it’s a stark choice of innovate or perish.
Thai researchers and farmers looking for field solutions (from Living Labs TV series)The heroic efforts of small farmers were rarely recognised by the rest of humanity who consume their produce — and the farmers themselves are too busy planting crops or raising animals to speak on their own behalf. This is where Ray Wijewardene came in: with his education, exposure and talent, he made an outstanding spokesman for small farmers all over the tropics.
In the 1960s, as the inventor and promoter of the world’s first two-wheeled (Land Master) tractor, Ray travelled all over Asia, Africa and Latin America working with tropical farmers.
For half a century, Ray has championed the lot of the small farmer at national, regional and global levels with UN agencies, academic and research groups, corporate sector and governments. But in later years, he questioned the wisdom of trying to mechanise tropical farming, and considered that phase of his career a ‘big mistake’. He dedicated the rest of his life to researching and promoting ecologically sustainable agriculture, on which he co-wrote an authoritative book in 1984.
Ray had the rare ability to ask piercing questions without antagonizing his audiences. He was an activist in the true sense of the word, but one whose opinions were well informed and grounded in reality, not rhetoric.
This comes through very powerfully in an extensive media interview I did with Ray in 1995, which I released online this week as a tribute to Ray — who has been my mentor and friend for almost 25 years.
At the outset, Ray points out where the Green Revolutionists went astray: “All along in the Green Revolution, its promoters focused on maximizing yields through massive inputs. But they forgot that what the farmer wants is to maximize profits, not necessarily yields!”
We then talked about the particular challenges faced in tropical farming, and the mismatch of temperate farming systems promoted widely in the tropics where climatic and soil conditions are different. One of Ray’s main concerns was agriculture’s profligate use of water – more for weed control than to meet the strict biological needs of crop plants themselves!
Ray, a grandmaster in summing up complex technical issues in colourful terms, said at the time: “Water is rapidly becoming the most expensive herbicide in the world — and freshwater is increasingly scarce!” [A decade later, I would go on to script and executive produce a global TV series called Living Labs on just this issue: how to grow more food with less water, or get more crop per drop.]
Ray wasn’t fundamentally opposed to external, chemical inputs to boost soil fertility but he advocated a mix of natural and synthetic options. In our interview, he asked: “We have multinational companies supporting — directly or indirectly — the extensive use of chemical fertilizers. But who supports cow-dung? Who extols the virtues of the humble earthworm?”
He then added: “For us in Asia, these elements are far more important. Indians have recognized this, but we still haven’t. As long as our agricultural scientists are trained in the western mould of high external input agriculture, this (mindset) won’t change. Cow-dung and earthworms won’t stand a chance – until some western academic suddenly ‘re-discovers’ them…“
It was Indian science writer and environmentalist Anil Agarwal who asked me, sometime in mid 1995, to interview Ray for Down to Earth, the science and environmental fortnightly magazine published by his Centre for Science and Environment. As Anil told me, “In Ray, you have not only one of the topmost agricultural experts in the developing world but one of its most original thinkers.”
By this time, I’d known Ray for almost a decade, and been exposed to several of his multiple facets. But each encounter with Ray was enriching for me, so I immediately seized the opportunity. The usually media-shy Ray already knew of and respected Anil, which helped.
Down to Earth is part of Anil Agarwal's legacyThe interview was audio taped over two long sessions, and I remember spending many hours transcribing it. I had to check some references with Ray, who cooperated wonderfully. I’ve been trained to observe the word limit set by editors, but in this instance, I sent in the full length Q&A, for it was so interesting. Down to Earth issue for 31 October 1995 carried a compact version, skillfully distilling the essence of that long exchange between Ray and myself — one of the most memorable interviews among hundreds I’ve done during 25 years of work in print and broadcast media.
How I wish the exchange was also preserved on audio tape! Indeed, it’s a small miracle that the original transcript survived for 15 years. The soft copy was lost in a hard drive crash of 1998, but fortunately I’d taken a full print-out. I’m grateful to a former colleague, Buddhini Ekanayake, for retyping the entire interview in mid 2008 when I considered releasing it in the wake of the global food crisis. That somehow didn’t work out, but the soft copy was ready at hand for me to rush to the editor of Groundviews on the day of Ray’s funeral. All I added was a new, 500-word introduction which tried to sum up the Ray Wijewardene phenomenon.
Ray Wijewardene: Freed from gravity, at last!I went straight from a paddy field, where I was filming much of the morning, to the funeral of my mentor and friend Ray Wijewardene early afternoon at the General Cemetery Colombo.
Ray would have approved: despite being a high flyer in every sense of that phrase, he had his feet firmly on the ground — and sometimes in the mud. He was fond of saying, “Agriculture is my bread and butter, while aviation is the jam on top of it”.
Dr Philip Revatha (Ray) Wijewardene, who passed away on August 18 aged 86, was an accomplished engineer, aviator, inventor, Olympian and a public intellectual of the highest calibre. He was also one of the most practical and down to earth people I’ve known.
He preferred to introduce himself as a farmer and mechanic ‘who still got his hands dirty’. Perhaps that’s how he wanted to be remembered — but each one of us will carry our own vivid memories of this colourful, jovial and altogether remarkable human being.
I’ve already written a quick introduction about Ray for Groundviews.org, which has published a long interview I did with Ray 15 years ago, originally for an Indian science magazine. That exchange is a reminder of the imaginative thinker, life-long experimenter and outspoken scientist that Ray always was.
I’ll be writing more about Ray Wijewardene in the coming weeks, exploring his many different facets. I’ve known and walked alongside him for almost a quarter century. For now, I’ll remember him for one facet that I didn’t share despite many offers and invitations: flying.
per ardua ad astra...Ray just loved to fly. Most humans share this age old dream, but Ray wasn’t contented just being flown around on commercial jets — which to him were merely large, sealed up cylinders. He far preferred the small, propeller-driven aircraft – single or twin seaters that gave their passengers a true sense flying and a real taste of the sky.
Looking back, it was quite apt that I first met Ray at the Ratmalana Airport, just south of Colombo, from where he took off and landed hundreds of times over the decades. One sunny morning in mid 1986, he took time off from his flying to talk to a group of high school leavers who were participating in the first Science for Youth programme. It exposed us to various (then) modern technologies over six consecutive weekends. Much of the knowledge we gained has long been obsolete, but its inspirational value was timeless….and continues to propel me forward.
Much of that inspiration came from Ray Wijewardene, who talked to us – with lots of practical demonstrations – about problem solving and innovations in three areas close to his heart: energy, agriculture and transport. I remember how he was experimenting with improvements to the humble bicycle at the time, so that riders could optimise performance with modest efforts.
He also talked about growing our food and energy. But it was his flying experience that most fascinated us starry-eyed youngsters. As a pilot, Ray was licensed to fly three kinds of flying machines: fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters and autogyros. But this pilot was flying not only factory-fitted, mass-manufactured units. He also experimented with building and flying his own ultra-light aircraft and helicopters – he was particularly interested in building amphibious small planes that could land on, and take off from, Sri Lanka’s numerous inland lakes and reservoirs.
All this and more made Ray a journalist’s dream, but as I soon found out, he wasn’t an easy subject to cover! In 1988, The Island newspaper asked me to interview Ray and write an article about the dream and reality of flying. He happily talked with me for two hours — yet, in the end, didn’t want his name mentioned in print. For all his accomplishments and outspoken views, Ray was completely publicity shy. He didn’t mind his views being reported, but with little or no mention of the source.
It’s the song that matters, not the singer, he said — and I heartily disagreed. I pointed out that we journalists needed to attribute wherever possible for greater credibility of what we write (I didn’t tell him that we also love good news-makers: the more informed and opinionated they are, the better!). This became a running argument that Ray and I had for two decades. Within a few years, he trusted me enough to talk to me on the record. But what he said off the record was always more interesting…
When he was approaching 75, Ray told me how nervous he was when he had to go for renewals of his pilot’s license. In the end, it wasn’t age that ended his flying career: along with everyone else, he was ‘grounded’ when private flying was first restricted and then banned during the latter years of Sri Lanka’s long-drawn war.
During the 1990s, Ray had repeatedly invited me to share a flight on one of his home-built light planes. He assured me they were perfectly safe — among satisfied customers was Prof Cyril Ponnamperuma, one time science advisor to the President of Sri Lanka and an internationally renowned biochemist. (Ray did acknowledge that he’d crash landed his various planes thrice — and each time, he lived to tell the tale. He believed that test flying one’s own aircraft designs quickly eliminated bad designers!)
I kept deferring my own tryst with the open skies and was too preoccupied with earthly matters — and suddenly, it was too late. By the time Sri Lanka’s war ended in May 2009, Ray’s flying days were over (and our skies are not yet fully free for private domestic aviation).
Gravity, bureaucracy and age may have conspired to keep Ray confined to the ground in the last few years of his life — but only just. His spirit soared even when the body wasn’t allowed to: in all my years and encounters with him, I’ve never seen him ‘down’ (concerned and reflective, yes; depressed, no).
A lone spirit, on a long journey....That passion, enthusiasm and spirit of adventure characterised Ray and influenced everything he did, on the ground and in the air. Born in the 1920s and raised as part of the first generation of humans for whom private flying was available, he was infected with the ‘flying bug’ in the same way that American author and aviator Richard Bach was. In fact, Ray knew Bach and was a devoted fan of the latter’s books, especially Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Perhaps Ray saw himself in Jonathan: a seagull tired of the monotonous life in his clan. He rather experiments with new – always more daring – flying techniques…which means he must fly solo most of the time, and confront the travails of life on his own.
Ray wasn’t a loner (to the contrary, he was very much a team player in everything he did). But sometimes he was racing ahead of us – or just flying at a higher altitude. Although I’ve never heard him say it, perhaps this unattributed quote partly explains the phenomenon: “When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
What Ray did quote, frequently, were these words of Robert Browning: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”
It was entirely fitting that a grand daughter would recite the poem ‘High Flight’ by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a favourite verse among aviators and, more recently, astronauts.
High Flight
by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
On returning from the simple yet moving funeral, I tweeted: No longer a prisoner of gravity: sky-lover, pilot & light aircraft builder Ray Wijewardene blasted off heavenwards. Farewell, high flyer!
I’m once again taking refuge in the make-believe world of cartoons. Dominating (and illuminating) my cartoon universe is Calvin and Hobbes, that inimitable character created by American cartoonist Bill Watterson.
Why do Calvin’s words remind me of some artistes, intellectuals even a few journalists?
My friend Kalpana Sharma just stepped down after serving on the Panos South Asia board for over a decade. The Executive Director A S Panneerselvan asked me to write a personalised piece felicitating her. Part of this was read at the annual meeting of the Board held in Dhaka last weekend. Here’s the full essay — a couple of mutual friends who read it say it isn’t too eulogistic! Now you can decide for yourself…
* * * * *
The Curious Ms Sharma of Mumbai
I knew Kalpana Sharma from her by-line long before I met her in person. Now, more than a dozen years after we became friends, she remains an inspiration and a role model.
Kalpana SharmaKalpana has been a path-finder and trail-blazer in journalism that cares. She has set the gold standard in investigating and critiquing development in the Indian media. Today, she continues her nearly four decades of association with the Indian media as a respected columnist, journalist and writer. Her stock in trade is a mix of curiosity, sense of social justice, wanderlust and a deep passion for people and issues. She is living proof that quality journalism can be pursued even in these turbulent and uncertain times for the mainstream, corporatised media.
Kalpana has been covering the ‘other India’ that is largely ignored by the Indian media. Its denizens are some 456 million people living under the global poverty line of $1.25 per day — a third of the world’s poor. (If they declared independence, they would immediately become the world’s third most populous nation.) Kalpana’s reporting from the ‘Ground Zero’ of many disasters and conflict zones has highlighted the multiple deprivations of these people living on the margins of survival.
For many such communities, a headline-creating event is just the latest episode in their prolonged and silent suffering. The media pack that descends on them after a sudden development can’t seem very different from the assorted politicians who turn up periodically during election campaigns. For too long, the grassroots have been treated merely as a grazing ground for stories or votes.
Kalpana doesn’t hesitate to be part of the media pack when duty calls, but once in the field, she sees connections often missed by other journalists looking for a quick sound byte or dramatic image. Unlike some news hounds, she doesn’t exploit the misery of affected people (“Hands up who’s poor, speaks English – and looks good on TV!”). And she returns to the same locations months or years later to follow up.
For all these reasons, Kalpana was our first choice to write the last chapter in a regional book on disasters and media that I co-edited with Indian journalist Frederick Noronha in 2007. Her 2,000-word reflective essay should be required reading for any journalist covering disasters and social disparity in South Asia.
Here is a passage that sums up her views on the subject: “Much of disaster reporting sounds and reads the same because the reporters only see what is in front of them, not what lies behind the mounds of rubble, figuratively speaking. What was this region before it became this disaster area? How were social relations between different groups? What was its history? What were its relations with the state government? Was it neglected or was it favoured? How important was it to the politics of the state?”
Kalpana has been asking such probing questions all her professional life. And it’s not just in the rural hinterland of India that Kalpana has travelled extensively listening and talking to people from all walks of life. Living in the world’s second most populous city Mumbai, she has been equally concerned with its burning issues of urban poverty, gender disparity, environmental mismanagement and governance.
In her quest for untold human stories, Kalpana has taken a particular interest in the plight of poor women. She has written many authentic and moving stories about women who struggle on the margins of the margin. A recurrent theme in her writing is how invisible ‘superwomen’ hold the social fabric together in much of India. Many communities and production systems –ranging from domestic work and child care to waste disposal and farming – would simply grind to a halt if these unseen and unsung women took even a single day off. In reality, of course, they just can’t afford such luxuries.
Kalpana’s column The Other Half, which started in The Indian Express and now appears in The Hindu, is a regular eye-opener. She takes a current topic – from politics, culture, sport or environment — and explores its gender dimensions. She does so by carefully blending facts, personal insights and opinion that makes her writing very different to the rhetorical shrill of gender activists.
Make no mistake: Kalpana is an activist in her own right, and one of the finest in modern India. It’s just that her approach is more subtle, rational and measured – and in the long run, wholly more effective. Long ago, she found how to balance public interest journalism with social activism. This is one more reason why I look up to her.
Partners in crime: Nalaka and Kalpana speaking at the Education for Sustainable Future conference in Ahmedabad, India, January 2005.
In her writing, television appearances and public speaking, Kalpana stays well within the boundaries of good, old-fashioned journalism based on its A, B and C: accuracy, balance and credibility. In my view, she enriches the mix by adding a ‘D’ and ‘E’: depth and empathy. Without these qualities, mere reporting is sterile and dispassionate.
And once we get to know her, we also discover the ‘F’ in Kalpana Sharma: she is a fun-loving, cheerful woman who doesn’t take herself too seriously. We can count on her to be adventurous, enthusiastic and endlessly curious.
Cultivating these attributes would certainly enrich any journalist. I can’t agree more when Kalpana says (in her chapter to a recent book on environmental journalism in South Asia): “Journalists are good or bad, professional or unprofessional. I am not sure if other labels, such as ‘environmental’ or ‘developmental’, ought to be tagged on to journalists.”
I hope Kalpana has no retirement plans. She has earned a break after a dozen years on the Board of Panos South Asia. But we want her to remain a guiding star – a bundle of energy that shines a light into the Darkness, and helps make sense of the tumult and frenzy that surrounds us.
L to R: Sam Labudde (EIA); Eric Soulier (Canal France International); Nalaka Gunawardene (speaking); and Durwood Zaelke (IGSD)
Every year, a couple of weeks before Christmas, a big Climate Circus takes place. The venue city keeps changing, but the process is always the same: it attracts thousands of people – from government officials and scientists to activists and journalists – who huddle in various corners, chat endlessly and gripe often during two chaotic weeks. Then they disperse, rather unhappy with the process…only to return to more of the same a year later.
This is how I see the annual Conference of Parties (COP) of the UN Climate Convention, or UNFCCC. Their last big ‘circus’ was in Copenhagen, Denmark — when the world held its breath for a breakthrough in measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that warm up the planet. But, as with many previous conferences, Copenhagen over-promised and under-delivered.
The next COP is to take place in Cancún, Mexico, in December 2010. We can expect more of the same.
I’m not always this cynical. I’m certainly not a climate skeptic or climate change denialist. But I came to this conclusion after covering climate change stories for over 20 years, and having seen the kind of distraction the annual Climate Circus can produce on the media coverage and fellow journalists.
My contention: COPs were intended for treaty-signing governments to come together, bicker among themselves and make slow, painful and incremental progress on what needs to be done to address the massive problems of global climate change. While the core of these conferences remains just that, over the years they have gathered so much else — side events that now completely outweigh the political conference, and often overshadow it. I’m not convinced that this is where the real climate stories are, for discerning journalists.
I was on the last panel for the day, which looked at the next “hot” ozone and climate related stories. We were asked to give our views on: what are the great stories on the road to COP16 in Mexico at the end of the year?
Forget Cancun, I said. We already know how little it’s going to change the status quo. Why bother with that promises to be a non-event? Must we be this concerned with non-stories in our media coverage? In fact, I suggested: we should give the entire UNFCCC processes a couple of years of benign neglect. The real climate stories are not in the unmanageable chaos that the annual Climate Circuses have become. They are out there in the real world.
In the real world where frontline states and communities are already bearing the brunt of extreme weather…where green energy is making rapid advances…where communities and economies are trying to figure out how to live with climate change impacts even as they reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
There are plenty of climate stories out there, covering the full range of journalistic interests: human interest, human enterprise, innovation, scientific research, community resilience and others. The challenge to journalists and other climate communicators is to go out there, unearth the untold stories, and bring them out in whatever media, forum or other platform.
I have nothing against climate COPs per se, and hope they can be restored to their original purpose of climate negotiations and working out acceptable, practical ways forward. (And this is certainly not a case of sour grapes: I’ve turned down all-expenses-paid invitations to COPs more than once.)
But we need to be concerned about the Climate Circus Effect on media, activist and educator groups, who seem to dissipate a good deal of their limited energies and resources in turning up at these mega-events. Copenhagen is said to have attracted over 17,000 persons (over 3,000 among them accredited journalists). How much of fruitful interaction and sharing can happen in such a setting? And when all the major news networks and wire services are covering the key negotiations and activities in considerable detail, what more can individual journalists capture and report to their home audiences?
Living as we do on a warming planet, we are challenged on many fronts to question old habits, and change our business-as-usual. The media pack has been running after the Climate Circus for over a dozen years. We need to pause, take stock and ask ourselves: is this the best way to cover the climate story?
And while at it, here’s something else for the UN, conveners of the annual Climate Circus. On World Environment Day 2008, whose theme was ‘CO2: Kick the Habit’, I asked the UN to kick its own CO2 habit. I suggested: “Adopt and strictly observe for a year or two a moratorium on all large UN gatherings (no matter what they are called – Summits, conferences, symposia, meetings, etc.) that involve more than 500 persons. In this day and age of advanced telecommunications, it is possible to consult widely without always bringing people physically together….Practising what you preach has a strong moral persuasive power — even if it goes against addictive habits formed for over 60 years of the UN’s history.”
PS: A global, comprehensive and legally-binding agreement on climate change is unlikely to be delivered at this year’s (Cancun) conference as well, the outgoing head of the UNFCCC, Yvo de Boer, was reported as saying on 27 May, just a few days after our Beijing seminar. See what I mean?
This is my own attempt to make sense of the international controversy – and confusion – surrounding WikiLeaks. Taking off from the current concerns, I also look at what it means for individuals, corporations and governments to live in the Age of Transparency that has resulted from the Information Society we’ve been building for years.
Open Minds! 