Democracy in distress

One of the victims of the climate changes that threaten the Earth would be the ethos of democracy, said William Ruckelhaus, formerly with the Environmental Protection Agency, to the Pulitzer prize winning journalist Ross Gelspan.

Henry Kendall of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and the recipient of the 1990 Nobel prize for physics, has expressed similar apprehensions. The two men point out that before the ecological systems of the planet are affected by global warming, the stress of ecological disasters would cause the disintegration of democracy.

Debates on climate change have mostly focused on the ecological impacts; the cultural consequences have been conspicuous by their absence. The stress caused by climate change would prove lethal to individual freedom, says Kendall. Ecological states of emergency would promote totalitarianism, especially in the poorer countries where democratic traditions are as fragile as the ecosystems, Kendall points. Governments in these countries would find democratic processes too unmanageable to deal with disruptions in food and water supplies and the growth in the numbers of refugees due to environmental degradation.

Moreover, the experts point out that dictatorship would not be restricted to governments; transnational corporations, especially oil and coal companies, hold a lot of power and operate through the media to influence -- and determine -- public opinion. They strive to control information and present the truth in a light that is beneficial to their interests. This would be another brand of totalitarianism that would be a threat in developing countries in particular, they add.

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