As we absorb the news of Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, let's take a moment to recognize a simple fact. For years, Mr. Gore, his colleagues and predecessors have been battling powerful commercial interests and no small about of misinformation in the ongoing climate debate. Yet against those odds, the truth has prevailed. Global recognition is now beyond dispute. How we react to the inconvenient truth that Mr. Gore talks about may well determine our future on this planet.
The dynamics that drive the climate debate may also serve as an analogue in the ongoing debate over the preservation of cultural heritage. In both cases, the facts and the truths that can be derived from those facts will prevail. But have we achieved global recognition in the cultural heritage debate?
What struck me most while listening to Mr. Gore at yesterday's press conference was his razor-sharp focus and recognition that enormous difficulties lay ahead. Let's all take lessons from this.
How we react, as a civilization, to the facts that are now beyond dispute in the cultural heritage debate will determine whether our most precious non-renewable resource — the intact evidence of our undiscovered past — will be preserved. Or not.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Will we achieve global recognition in the cultural heritage debate?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
See also http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/2007/10/al-gore-and-finite-resource.html.
In “Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future” (Houghton Mifflin 2006) Jeff Goodell writes about “eco-extremism”--the energy lobby straw man, “…if you take the position that impinges in any way on the free and unfettered consumption of coal [also a non-renewable resource], you’re an extremist who elevates the birds and the bees above the success of the human race. This idea, or a variation of it, runs through the rhetoric of Big Coal like a thick seam of anthracite.”
http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/2007/08/coins-and-cyprus-listening-to-coin.html
Post a Comment