EXCHANGE GIFTS

(From "A Weekend Note," the editor's letter in Style Weekend, a weekend special every Friday in Manila Bulletin, 16 November 2007)

What globalization really means is a constant exchange of gifts among nations. Finland, along with Korea, presents the world with a great way to stay in touch through mobile technology. Paris, Milan, New York, and London keep the rest of the world in step with the latest in fashion. Seattle’s gift is coffee, hot or cold, and a new hangout for the young. Brazil’s timber is building homes elsewhere on the planet.

BLURB
We predict a scenario in which people and nations are threatened by massive food and water shortages, devastating natural disasters, and deadly disease outbreaks. —John Podesta, former US President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff

Unfortunately, most of these gifts that we so proudly share with each other, whether from the Pantanal or from Guimaras, come from one and the same source: nature, whose miraculous ability to heal and replenish itself cannot quite keep up with the demands of a global community, if only because we give back too little as we take too much.

At a forum held early this month in Washington D.C., national security experts predicted the end of globalization by 2040 on account of climate change. In their report, dubbed “Age of Consequences,” published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, scarcity of resources could disrupt international relations. Rising waters and drought could make refugees out of whole towns or cities, causing conflict, and nations or units smaller than nations would hold on to what little they could during such a crisis of global proportions.

“Some of the consequences could essentially involve the end of globalization as we have known it,” said George Washington University’s Leon Fuerth, national security adviser to former US Vice President Al Gore and one of the principal authors of the report. “Different parts of the world [would] contract upon themselves in order to conserve what they need to survive.”

It’s not at all difficult to imagine this dire scenario. To call it a prediction is like sweeping the issue under the rug. After all, it has long been happening. Just over the past week or two, world weather has been worse than unpredictable. It has been apocalyptic, with the Santa Ana winds keeping much of Southern California ablaze for almost a week, with Bogota drowning in ice weather, with Haiti swimming in mud, with the Arctic ice melting…

And climate change has barely begun. In fact, it has yet to be wholly accepted as a fact. In the Washington D.C. report, the forecast for global warming by 2040 is a difference of 2.3 degrees F or 1.3 degrees C, “with a sea level rise of about nine inches.”

The good news, however, is that we are all burdened by this problem, which could end life as we know it now, and therefore we have no other choice but to share in its resolution. That is if we all first agree to recognize the problem, no matter what the consequences or inconveniences.

Nature is wise and even in its rage it hopes to impart a lesson, so that weird weather is affecting not only the poorest of nations but the superpowers as well, the United States and China, particularly.

Our forefathers used to sniff the air to detect the pouring of rain. They would look up in the sky to tell the time. They would count on certain sounds from frogs or lizards or birds or insects to tell the changing of the seasons.
Maybe the best gift we can give each other as well as ourselves in this season that celebrates the birth of hope and salvation is to learn to heed the signs of nature again. After all, 2040 is half a lifetime away, but, thanks to global TV, we can all see it happening now all over the planet.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com