I've recently become more publicly overt about my terror regarding five converging emergencies: climate chaos, species collapse, resource depletion, biology breach, and infectious diseases.
These emergencies form an ecosystem of collapse which may quickly replace the ecosystem of bounty we have had for thousands of years.
I recently took a big risk, giving a stemwinder of a plenary speech (diaried about here) that contextualized these themes for scholarly publishers, a speech hopefully heard by a broader academic public. Giving that speech has galvanized me -- as has a recent viewing of Food, Inc., as fine a bit of documentary polemic as you're likely to see.
Consequently, I was musing about the problem -- as I often do -- of how to galvanize more people. How to ramp up the public consciousness (not just the already-converted) regarding facts that nobody wants to learn about.
Of course we faced this sort of question as we tried to explain the horrors of the Bush administration over the last eight years. Tried to explain about how the Iraq war was a war of choice, and a Very Bad Idea. Tried to explain that they were packing the regulatory agencies with lobbyists and shills.
But that's nothing compared to the difficulty of getting people to listen to the horrors we're doing to ourselves, worldwide. Most people just don't want to hear about what's going on.
We have overfished our oceans while simultaneously acidifying those same oceans. We have been producing a floating-plastic "continent" in the Pacific twice the size of Texas. We have introduced invasive species willy-nilly, radically disrupting evolutionary balances. We've been laying down a sediment of heavy metals and other toxins worldwide as if they were sparkles, delighting the eye.
Nobody wants to hear about these things because it's just damned depressing. The more you learn, the more scared you become. Over the last two years, my friend and I have collected and be-quipped nearly 3,000 news stories documenting these converging emergencies, and we now live in a fairly constant state of horror. Only when my naturally sunny disposition breaks through the facts on the ground, can I find optimism.
That said, I was musing, and the phrase "the revolution may yet be twittified" came to mind (riffing off "the revolution will not be televised."
Twitter is a fairly recent experience to me, I'm ashamed to say -- I really came to grapple with it watching the brief Iranian outburst of revolution, and then later, following tweets linking to my speech.
And I thought to myself: these are all pings, from one consciousness to others.
And I thought: retweets are pings too.
And I thought: we need people pinging the realities of the world -- these stories that identify the converging emergencies, and illuminate them. These stories need to be run across, by all the Twitterers in the known universe. The proportion of reality-based tweets in the Twitterverse needs to be higher.
If we could get the scary stories ReTweeted with increasing frequency, by an increasing number of mildly scared people -- especially if there's some humor or wit involved -- then we might help raise awareness quite rapidly, even among those who are tweeting about Britney or their peanut butter sandwich.
On the one hand, duh, that's called viral transmission. But on the other hand, it's a strategy that could become an operational part of one's work in the world, trying to mitigate the horror by passing on the memes that we need to understand, on a day-to-day basis.
Of course, this also applies to political activism in general -- but my focus is on the "converging emergencies" in general.
So I'm encouraging anyone with an interest in mitigating what we're doing to the world, to start Twittering the stories that matter, with humor and snark. Feel free to follow "apocadocs" on Twitter, and retweet away... but more importantly, start tweeting stories that matter.
Let's get rolling. These emergencies are growing faster than expected. We need to use all the tools we have available to make that clear to everyone.