'Do Not Incinerate Africa'

We take risks, others pay the price

Naomi Klein
CNN.com

(CNN) -- When I met George Awudi, a leader of Friends of the Earth Ghana, he was wearing a bright red T-shirt that said "Do Not Incinerate Africa." We were both attending the World Social Forum, a sprawling gathering of tens of thousands of activists held earlier this month in Dakar, Senegal.

Amid that political free-for-all -- with mini-protests breaking out against everything from Arab despots to education cuts -- I assumed that Awudi's T-shirt referred to some local environmental struggle I hadn't heard of, perhaps a dirty incinerator in Ghana.

He set me straight: "No, it's about climate change." Specifically, the combative slogan refers to the refusal of industrialized nations to commit to deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Since the hottest and poorest countries on the planet are being hit first and hardest by rising temperatures, that refusal will mean, according to Awudi, that large parts of Africa "will be incinerated."

He was quick to clarify that he did not think that people from wealthy countries actively want Africa to "burn" -- it's just that they want "to hold on to their interests," including "interests of profit-making."

But there is something deeper at play too, Awudi said. "It's a mentality that they have imported from the colonial days. A mentality of looking down upon people" from Africa. It is that mentality, he argued, that makes it possible to barrel ahead with economic policies that carry growing and glaring risks.

I decided to focus my TED talk on the psychology of reckless risk-taking, because I see that impulse at work behind so many of the catastrophes of recent years: the BP disaster, the invasion of Iraq, the financial sector collapse, and the ongoing refusal to take meaningful action in the face of climate change.

Again and again, policymakers ignore mountains of evidence warning of catastrophe, opting instead to roll the dice and hope for the best.

There are all kinds of explanations for what drives this sort of short-term decision-making, with greed and hubris cited most frequently. Less discussed, but possibly more important, is the phenomenon that Awudi referenced: that the people taking the risks often feel distinctly distant from, if not outright superior to, the people most endangered by their decisions.

(More here. CNN editor's note: Naomi Klein is the author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" (2007) and "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies" (2001, 2010). She is currently at work on a new book and film on how the climate crisis can spur economic and political transformation. Follow her on http://twitter.com/NaomiAKlein/.)

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