Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.
As an addendum to my post of the Bhopal disaster, I would like to bring into the discussion the Risk Society theory that is, in my view, fundamental to the understanding of contemporary society in the global context.
What do the Bhopal industrial disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the epidemics of mad cow disease, and the widespread use of genetically modified crops have in common? According to German sociologist Ulrich Beck, they all indicate the rise of a world risk society.
According to Beck (1992), the world risk society is a product of modernity. Since the industrial revolution, one of the major large-scale societal issues was the reduction of scarcity. The solution was to develop and use technology to produce enormous numbers of goods and increase the general level of wealth for the populations of industrial societies. This was successful: scarcity is hardly a problem in post-industrial societies (core areas). If anything, abundance is. Generally speaking, people no longer starve in developed countries, quite the contrary, obesity has become a problem.
However, this mass production of goods has been accompanied by the production of “bads” or, in other words, risks. Beck defines risk as “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself. Risks, as opposed to older dangers, are consequences which relate to the threatening force of modernization and to its globalization of doubt" (1992: 21). As such, risks have several characteristics that distinguish them from dangers in previous periods of human history.
Nearly one-third of the small animals that make up the most massive and elaborate structures in coral reefs face an elevated risk of extinction from global warming and various local problems, an international group of scientists reported Thursday.
The worldwide assessment of more than 700 species of corals showed that 32.8% were threatened with extinction, especially those that formed large mounds or intricate branches resembling antlers.
Coral reefs provide hiding places and a habitat for 25% of all marine life and are a major source of food for the poor and of tourist revenue in tropical countries.
Some of the threats are global, including elevated ocean temperatures that have stressed corals so much that they are “bleached” bone-white. A massive bleaching brought on by warmer waters in the 1998 El Niño resulted in a vast decline of the world’s reefs.
Corals also face excessive and destructive fishing and polluted runoff that buries them under sediment or bathes them in nutrients that fuel out-of-control growth of algae and bacteria.
Located in on the shores of Lago Argentino in Argentina’s Patagonia, the Perito Moreno Glacier is an amazing site, a huge expanse of ice visible from the placid forested shores of the lake. The pressure from the waters of the lake had carved out a tunnel through the glacier and today that tunnel collapsed in spectacular fashion. The report below is from Argentinian television.
This report also from Argentine television is narrated.
Here is the Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 edition of interesting reads from around the world.
Iraq Calls For US Pullout Timetable
Iraq’s prime minister has for the first time publicly called for a US troop withdrawal timetable. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday that a military agreement the two countries are negotiating should include provisions for the withdrawal of American troops. More from Al Jazeera. It should be interesting to see how this plays in the US Presidential election.
G-8 Agrees Climate Change Deal to Halve Emissions
Leaders of G-8 agree to adopt goal of at least halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. 2050? And they are calling this a breakthrough. I shudder to think what their definition of failure is. The UK Guardian has all the bloody details.
Meanwhile, African leaders have pressed the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised nations to control oil and food prices. This story from Al Jazeera. And a video report on the summit from the Associated Press:
India Won’t Accept Carbon Emissions Targets
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said emphatically that India would not accept any targets that may be set by international bodies reducing its carbon emissions. Full details in The Hindu. Prime Minister Singh is to meet with US President Bush and other G-8 leaders tomorrow. On the table for US-India talks is the US-India Nuclear Agreement. More this story also from The Hindu.
India Suspends Maize Exports Until October 15, 2008
The Indian Government has already banned exports of wheat, non-basmati rice, edible oil and pulses. This just further puts pressure on global food markets but India is thinking of its own food security. To me, this reads as a repeat of the 1930s when countries acted to protect their own interests and thereby exacerbated the Stock Market Crash of October 1929 and turned it into a world-wide depression that lasted over a decade. India is the sixth largest supplier of corn in the world so its retreat from the global markets is not insignificant. Couple this with the mess in Argentina and we have a real crisis on our hands. This follows a very worrisome report out of China earlier this week that China faces a grain shortage. All About Feed has the details on this story.
China faces serious challenges in ensuring it will have enough grain to feed its population in the decades to come, according to Premier Wen Jiabao.
Industrialisation, urbanisation and a growing population are boosting grain demand while “shrinking arable land, water shortage and climate change is an increasing constraint on output,” Wen told a cabinet meeting.
“The long-term demand and supply will be balanced but tight and ensuring grain security faces serious challenges,” he said.
The meeting approved a mid- and long-term grain security plan that aims to keep the nation’s annual grain output above 500 million tonnes by 2010 and increase production to more than 540 million tonnes a year by 2020.
Litvinenko Murder Intrigue Resurfaces
The murder of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko was carried out with the backing of the Russian state, Whitehall sources have told the BBC.
Sondhi Limthongkul’s Corporatist Vision for Thailand
With Thailand now of its second month of intense political protests, opposition leader Sondhi Limthongkul is proposing reforms that to me sound rather corporatist. Sondhi Limthongkul, the core leader of the People’s Alliance for Democracy, has called for a “New Politics.”
The New Politics turns out to be a startlingly reactionary proposal to move Thailand’s parliamentary system towards a form of appointed corporatism, or what might be called a selectoral democracy. Thirty percent of MPs would come from elections, perhaps one per province, and the rest of MPS would derive from various occupations and associations. Sondhi says the proportion is not fixed, it’s up for debate.
The rationale for wanting to dismantle Thailand’s electoral system is evident: pro-Thaksin forces keep winning elections. And as Thaksin is said to represent everything bad about Thai politics, he can not be allowed to wield power directly or indirectly. Thus, for Sondhi, and it would seem the PAD leadership as whole, there is now a need to bring about a revolution in political representation.
Taiwan Exports Rise to Record Levels
Taiwan’s exports in June rose 21.3% from a year earlier to a record high of US$24.35 billion on rising demand from parts of Asia and Europe, the government said July 7. The June figure compared with a 20.5% rise to $23.60 billion recorded in May. More from Industry Week.
11 Bodies Found in Tijuana Over 3 Days
As a Colombian, I have seen this all before and it is worrisome that it is happening now in Mexico. What we have endured in Colombia is not something that I would wish on anyone. It is thus that I say with alarm that Mexico’s drug wars require serious attention. We will see bombings. Drug mafias will stop at nothing and only a strong response from the state and civil society can stop them. They will infiltrate politics. They can buy anything and anyone. Act now.
Police discovered the tortured and burned bodies of six men in an empty lot Monday morning, ending a period of relative calm in this border city beset by drug war violence.
Eleven bodies have been discovered since Saturday in violence believed to be drug-related, including the corpse of a woman found in a barrel, state and federal authorities said.
The weekend tally pushed the city’s death toll this year to more than 260, compared with about 152 homicides at this time last year, and underscored authorities’ difficulties curbing organized crime.
The full story from the Los Angeles Times. A 71% rise in drug-related homocides in Tijuana is not something to be taken lightly.
Syria To Restore Diplomatic Ties with France
Syria’s top diplomat in London says Damascus will soon send a new ambassador to Paris and end a freeze on diplomatic ties. Sami Khiyami says a new representative will likely be sent to France in the very near future. Syria has not had an ambassador in Paris since 2006. The report is from Haaretz.
350 is the most important number on the planet because that’s the safe line of carbon dioxide in parts per million for life as we know it on this planet. We are currently at 387 PPM and climbing higher at a rate of 2 PPM per year.
Twenty years ago today, NASA scientist James Hansen sounded the alarm in testimony before Congress about a “greenhouse effect” and the build-up of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. Here’s his full testimony (pdf.) Here’s a few highlights of what he said then:
“The earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements”
“The global warming now is large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect … Our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.”
“There is only a 1% chance of an accidental warming of this magnitude. … The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
The next day, the headline in New York Times read “Global warming has begun.” Twenty years, any real action has failed to take place. Why? In a few words, the oil and natural gas lobby that puts profits before people and their own welfare, short-sighted as that is, before the common good of life on this planet. They are condemning us to a hell on Earth.
Here’s the Monday, June 23rd, 2008 edition of interesting reads and news from around the world.
Tarija Votes for Autonomy
Tarija was the fourth of Bolivia’s nine provinces to approve such a statute in referendums that Bolivian President Evo Morales has called illegal because they were not called by the country’s Congress. The full story in the Miami Herald.
Put Oil & Gas CEOs on Trial for Crimes Against Humanity
James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer. The story from UK Guardian.
Lufthansa To Focus on India & China Markets With a Twist
Eyeing the India, China markets for its future growth, the German air carrier Lufthansa was also planning to enter the market of providing private jets to industrialists, private companies and top CEOs in both countries. Lufthansa is also adding an all business class flight between Frankfurt and Pune. More from The Hindu.
Women in the Japanese Workplace
Canada’s Global and Mail looks at the role of women in the Japanese economy, the second largest in the world.
Japanese women remain second-class citizens in the workplace, underrepresented, under-used and undervalued. Just 0.8 per cent of Japanese chief executive officers are women, compared with 10 per cent in Britain. Less than 10 per cent of managers are women, compared with 43 per cent in the United States. Japan’s female employment rate is 25 percentage points below the male rate, the highest gap for any major industrialized country except for Spain and Italy.
Thai PM Sundaravej Ever More Embattled The Wall Street Journal reports that Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej, already under pressure from street protests and a looming no-confidence vote, was grilled Monday by the Thai Senate over his management of the economy.
Here is the Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 edition of interesting reads and news from around the world.
Australia Most Obese
Australia has overtaken the US as the world’s most obese nation, according to a study published in Melbourne yesterday. The Baker Heart Institute’s study, entitled Australia’s Future Fat Bomb, found that 26% of adult Australians, or close to 4m people, were obese. Twenty-five percent of Americans are obese. More from the Financial Times.
Most Britons Doubt Humans Cause Climate Change
The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.
Tehran Backing Taliban
The UK Guardian reports that British special forces operating on the border between Afghanistan and Iran have uncovered fresh evidence that Tehran is actively backing insurgents fighting UK troops. The likelihood of an attack on Iran is growing.
Protests in Turkey Ahead of Court Decision on Islamic Party
On Saturday evening, a diverse crowd of several thousand people marched in central Istanbul, blowing whistles, banging drums and carrying round, pink signs that read, “Make Noise Against Coups.” More from the New York Times.
Timor-Leste’s Police Not Ready Asia Sentinel reports that the United Nations, called in two years ago in the wake of a breakdown of East Timor’s security forces that led to dozens of deaths, appears set to end its training of local police, many of whom are still unfit to be in uniform, leading to fears that carnage will begin again in a country ill-prepared for it.
Flooding in India
Major flooding is devastating large areas of Orissa, Assam and West Bengal in eastern India. More from The Hindu.
It’s called global climatic change. The model calls for more severe weather more frequently so that a “flood of the century” now happens every fifteen years. My condolences to the Wisconsin family that saw their home, not just flooded, but washed away. Not something you are bound to forget.
I witnessed one flood as a boy in my native Colombia and it was impactful. We lived a block from the Rio Cali in Cali, Colombia. Normally, one could skip across the rocks to cross it and not even get your feet wet. That one day, I saw jeeps tossed like bananas, boulders being swept downriver, trees lifted and placed wherever the water wanted to take them. I have never forgotten the spectacle. Perhaps worse were the after-effects, at least for me as a boy of 8, rats and snakes invaded our home which only saw our garage flooded. I’ll never forget my grandmother’s screams when she found a boa constrictor wrapped around the Sacred Heart of Jesus in our family chapel. The frogs, however, were beyond cool. The snakes not so much.
The flood I witnessed in 1969 was a natural event. The floods in the mid-west are not. They are caused by our lifestyle. It’s time to take serious measures on climate change and that means getting Americans out of their cars, five days a week. We need massive transportation infrastructure so that most Americans can commute to work by light rail. The time for this was twenty years ago. When will Congress act?
To this we have come. It is another sad notch on our poor custodianship of this planet and our callous indifference to the plight of wildlife with whom we share this planet. A polar bear that had swam at least two hundred miles reached the northern shore of Iceland, just south of the Artic Circle. It was shot for its efforts. The story in the UK Guardian.
A polar bear that swam more than 200 miles in near-freezing waters to reach Iceland was shot on arrival in case it posed a threat to humans.
The bear, thought to be the first to reach the country in at least 15 years, was killed after local police claimed it was a danger to humans, triggering an outcry from animal lovers. Police claimed it was not possible to sedate the bear. The operation to kill the animal was captured on film.
The adult male, weighing 250kg, was presumed to have swum some 200 miles from Greenland, or from a distant chunk of Arctic ice, to Skagafjordur in northern Iceland.
A spokesman for PolarWorld, a German group dedicated to the preservation of the polar regions and the creatures which inhabit it, called the bear’s death “an avoidable tragedy … another great day for mankind”.
Here is the Monday, May 26th, 2008 edition of interesting reads from around the world.
Billions Wasted on UN Climate Programme
The UK Guardian reports on findings that billions of dollars are being wasted in paying industries in developing countries to reduce climate change emissions, according to two analyses of the UN’s carbon offsetting programme.
Hunger in Myanmar
Weeks after Cyclone Nargis ravaged Myanmar, the government of Myanmar has sought to suggest the country has enough rice, but people lining the roads of the ravaged Irrawaddy Delta waiting to be fed tell a different story. More on this story from the New York Times and The Times of London.
As Colombia Winds Down Its War, Mexico Is Just Getting Started
In Colombia we have lived through a nightmare with guerrillas and drug trafficking and its lessons should be obvious to others– a firm and untractable hand is required. Now Mexico, our neighbor to the south, is on the verge of a full scale drug war that has deep and widening implications for the United States and the world. Colombia is a nation of 44 million people. Mexico is two and half times that size. The New York Times reports on Mexico’s very worrisome drug war.
The Lebanese Parliament Elects a New President
Lebanon’s parliament elected the army commander, Gen. Michel Suleiman, as President of Lebanon Sunday, filling a post vacant for six months and bringing a symbolic if tenuous end to the country’s worst crisis since the 15-year civil war ended in 1990. The stories from the Washington Post and the UK Guardian plus some analysis from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Anti-Immigrant Riots in Italy The Times covers the latest craze around the world, bashing immigrants. Balaclava-clad gangs, some wearing bandanas emblazoned with swastikas, smashed shop windows with iron bars and baseball bats and beat up shopkeepers in a hitherto bohemian neighbourhood of Rome. Members of the gangs shouted “Get out, bastard foreigners” as they attacked Bengali shopkeepers in the explosion of xenophobic violence. This is only going to get worse and Silvio Berlusconi bears full responsibility with his xenophobic rhetoric.
Korean Politics, The Roughest of Them All?
Presidents of South Korea enjoy very short honeymoons. President Lee Myung-bak’s honeymoon is over as this article from the Asia Times reports.
Singapore Manufacturing Sector Declines in April
In a sign that the slowdown in the American economy is beginning to severely effect the export-oriented economies of Asia, the Asia Times reports that Singapore’s manufacturing output declined 5.7 percent in April, worse than analysts’ expectations, due to a contraction in electronics and pharmaceuticals production, the government said Monday.
Canadian Abortion Rates Continue To Drop
In Canada between 2004 and 2005, the most recent data available, the number of induced abortions dropped 3.2 per cent to 96,815, continuing a five-year downward trend. The rates fell in every age group except for women aged 35 to 39, which remained the same. More from Toronto’s Globe & Mail.
