There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.
Maya Angelou
I spent a couple of days last week immersed in the end of the world!
On Tuesday I spoke at the Chipping Norton Theatre with filmmaker Wayne Brittenden about the short film “Anthropology 101”. Wayne made the film in collaboration with the WMD Awareness Programme to raise awareness of the nuclear issue for a young audience that is not as aware as it should be of the threats we face from nuclear weapons today. It is a powerful and imaginative film featuring the voice of Mark Rylance and the music of Brian Eno. “Anthropology 101” is available in DVD format for £5.00 from carol@comeclean.org. After a question and answer session about this film the 250 strong audience saw “An Inconvenient Truth”, the film based on Al Gore’s lecture on global warming that has become a phenomenal success.
It was a very sobering evening but I was struck the fact that over 200 people came to see these films and engage in a conversation about what to do on a Tuesday night in January in small country town. I wonder if that many people would have come to a traditional public meeting about nuclear weapons and climate change?
The next day I went to the Royal Society in London to hear Professor Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, talk about the moving of the time on the Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to Doomsday to five minutes to midnight. The Doomsday Clock was created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to demonstrate how close we are to the end of civilisation because of nuclear war. Over the past 60 years - since it was instituted in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the clock has been changed 18 times in response to the nuclear threat (it was closest to midnight, two minutes, in 1953 after Russia and the US tested weapons; furthest, at 17 minutes, after the signing of the 1991 nuclear arms treaty). But this movement, closer to the hour of doom by two minutes, takes into account climate change, for the first time.
Professor Hawking starkly spelt out the twin threats.
"As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth," he said. "As citizens of the world, we have a duty to share that knowledge, and to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day. We foresee great peril if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change."
After these two days of different wake up calls of the need to take urgent action I feel more determined than ever to work for a world without nuclear weapons and nuclear power. A world where we strive together to live lightly on the earth so that future generations can thrive and not curse us for our inaction.
Janet Bloomfield.
Janet Bloomfield is the British Co-ordinator of the Atomic Mirror (http://www.atomicmirror.org). She was Chair of CND from 1993 to 1996 and now serves as a Vice-President.
* thanks to REM for the title!
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