The New Generation Society

Sarah Foster

Sarah Foster is an English undergraduate and member of the student newspaper Nouse at the University of York. In her response to Sir Crispin’s lecture she diverts our attention from the current obsession with global warming, and cites our terminal materialism as the primary problem facing our generation.

I am related to a global warming denier. My own brother believes that there is no proof that global warming even exists, and will tell anyone who cares to listen why he thinks this. This is obviously a sign that my family are just a little too intellectually middle class. Any other teenage boy who rebelled against his parents would do so with hard drugs and promiscuous sex. My brother decides to rebel by claiming not to believe in global warming. For a while I was quite certain that he was merely playing devil’s advocate, because while many things are unknown, it is generally agreed by most that global warming both exists, and that it is a very bad thing indeed. The only people who disagree with this are evil capitalists, who love to pump toxic waste into the atmosphere and then roll around in their big pile of money. They are certainly not sixteen-year-old boys, who study both Geography and Chemistry.

Nevertheless, a little bit of research will show you that there is actually a legitimate group of scientists who believe that global warming is nothing more than a myth. The recent increase in temperature, they claim, is nothing more than a part of a natural cycle, which due to the fact that we have only been accurately recording temperatures for under fifty years, we could have no way of knowing about. It has also been claimed that even if the earth is warming up, this is due to completely natural causes, such as the inconstant sun, so whatever actions the human race takes in an attempt to halt this warming will be completely ineffective.

Whether these scientists are correct in their denial of climate change is somewhat beyond the point. Listening to Sir Crispin Tickell talk, it seemed to me that global warming is only one factor that needs to be taken into account when thinking about the effect that human beings are having on the world. Even if it was removed from the equation, it does seem to appear that the human race, while not doomed, is certainly in for rather a big shock within the next hundred years.

While Sir Crispin may be known for his environmental work – coining the term ‘climate change’ – it was obvious from his talk that he sees that the issues which will need to be addressed by our generation are not all based around what he calls “eccentric weather”, and I’d certainly be one to agree with him. Whichever way we look at it, we’ve really not been nice to our own planet. The assumption seems to be that as the most evolved race inhabiting the Earth, we somehow have the right to do to it whatever we feel like doing. We’ve claimed ownership of something that has no reason to be ours at all. Land doesn’t really belong to us, trees don’t really belong to us and water doesn’t really belong to us. But because we’ve become the most technologically advanced predator on earth, we’ve taken our predator instincts to parasitic extremes; we all seem to assume that the Earth is ours now. Cutting down those trees? That’s fine. Dumping waste into the ocean? A-okay by all of us. Hunting animals into extinction? Well, if we are clever enough to invent guns, it gives us a right to. Global warming probably isn’t the biggest threat facing us all in the future; I’d say it was the human race’s sense of self-entitlement that is the real threat. As a race we’re rather egotistical, and none more so than us Westerners, doing our very best to bring our values to the rest of the world from the comfort of our big houses. This is not to say that we ought to brush off all attempts to help improve living conditions in African countries as nothing more than a modern day form of Imperialism, but we do need to realise that Capitalism isn’t always the answer. In fact, most of time it’s quite a large part of the problem.

The rise of clichés like the ‘American dream’ has hardly done a great deal to help either. It’s no use telling people that if they work hard enough they’ll be able to achieve anything. Creating a heavily materialistic society cannot be helping at all when, already, there isn’t enough of the pie to go around. Sir Crispin was completely right, when listing his seven challenges facing our generation, to list climate change as fourth on his list, behind what I believe to be infinitely more important: the lack of resources available to the human race, the pollution of our water, population issues (including a decline in birth rate in Western countries, resulting in an aging population) and lack of space. The odds seem to be against humanity surviving as we know it into the next millennium, and it also seems to be our fault. All of the problems listed above are problems created by humans, and most of them are linked to our completely absurd assumption that that the world is ours for the shaping. Resources are running low because we seem incapable of understanding that the planet isn’t magically able to create new ones for us. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. And yet we still live in a highly disposable culture, in which change in fashions and tastes dictate an ever-increasing amount of ‘stuff’ finding its way into our lives, little of which is necessary in any way.

Yet what are we supposed to do about this? Sir Crispin spoke of people-power, though was quick to note that awareness of the problem does not necessarily always lead to action, a fact which is clear to anyone witnessing the general apathy that seems to have swept over the human race. In fact, I can’t help but take a rather pessimistic view of the future. We’ve created a generation that seems to be horrendously self-centred and terminally materialistic. People like Sir Crispin Tickell – hugely intelligent, articulate people – can tell us that we need to change our ways until they’re blue in the face, but, at the moment, we don’t seem to be doing a great deal to change things. Yes, governments might be taking steps towards attempting to reduce climate change, but as we’ve established, the problem is far bigger than that. As the world moves even closer to the Western world’s idea of ‘development’ the problem is only going to get worse and it’s going to take far more than talks to change that for the New Generation.