SEVENTEEN
ACULTURE OF CELEBRITY
IT IS ASTONISHING and frightening to see the extent to which the phenomenon of celebrity has come to dominate our consciousness. Not only tabloids and magazines like People and Us Weekly but also the mainstream media seem obsessed with celebrities — and not just for days or weeks but for months and years. When the media lavish as much attention (or even more) on celebrities as they do on weightier issues, how can people distinguish what is important from what is not? The result of our preoccupation with celebrity is that the opinion of someone who might be a lightweight or a fool carries as much heft as the words of a scientist, doctor, or other expert.
Consider how information is packaged in a newspaper: entire sections are devoted to celebrity (entertainment), sports, business, and politics, yet few newspapers assign reporters to write specifically about science or the environment. Our focus on economics often results in big headlines for a developer, promoter, or hustler, while the environmental or social implications of industry are ignored. But when more than half of all living Nobel Prize — winning scientists sign a document of warning — as they did in November 1992, when the Union of Concerned Scientists declared that human activities were on a collision course with the natural world and, unchecked, could result in catastrophe in as little as ten years — they are virtually ignored.
Their predictions have been corroborated by reports about threats to significant portions of mammalian and bird species, the melting ice sheets and permafrost of circumpolar nations, and coral bleaching due to warming oceans. In 2001, I accepted a position on the board of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a United Nations — appointed committee created to assess the state of global ecosystems and the services they perform (exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen in the air, pollinating flowering plants, fixing nitrogen in the soil, filtering water, and so on). The reports from this $24-million project, which involved some 1,300 scientists from more than seventy countries, painted a devastating picture of the natural world on which we are all ultimately dependent.
The final report was released in March 2005 and in Canada was covered in an article on page 3 of the Globe and Mail newspaper. The next day, Pope John Paul II was taken to hospital, and his illness, death, and succession pushed our report out of the news. So a major study warning that Earth's ecosystems are being degraded at an unsustainable rate was a one-day, inside-page wonder.
We live in a time when the military, industry, and medicine are all applying scientific insights, with profound social, economic, and political consequences. As a result, ignoring scientific matters is very dangerous. It's not that I believe science will ultimately provide solutions to major problems we face; I think solutions to environmental issues are much more likely to result from political, social, and economic decisions than from scientific ones. But scientists can deliver the best descriptions of the state of climate, species, pollution, deforestation, and so on, and these should inform our political and economic actions. If we don't base our long-term actions on the best scientific knowledge, then I believe we are in great danger of succumbing to the exigencies of politics and economics.
SOME “CELEBRITIES” DO DESERVE attention. Noam Chomsky is an academic I admire enormously. As a linguist, he is widely respected by academics for his idea that language and syntax are built into the human brain by heredity. His celebrity status, however, rests on his role as an outspoken critic of American foreign policy.
He has near cult status in Canada, where each of his books rockets to the top of best-seller lists, and he has gained a wide audience through the National Film Board documentary Manufacturing Consent. His forays into Canada are met with a rapturous response from his fans, a striking contrast to the reaction in his own country, where he is reviled as a traitor by large segments of American society. When Tara was teaching at Harvard, she saw an announcement that Chomsky was speaking on campus, so she went to the hall early to get a seat. To her surprise, there was no one else there, and by the time Chomsky spoke, there may have been thirty students in the room. He has a large following in Europe, Australia, and Latin America, where his left-leaning analyses strike a chord with activists.
I first met Noam Chomsky in the early '90s, when he was in Toronto to speak at Ryerson Institute of Technology. At that time, the CBC offices I worked in were at the corner of Bay and College, only a few blocks from Ryerson, so I dropped in to see whether I might meet him. It was a few hours before his talk, and he was in an auditorium checking the audiovisual system with a few students. To my delight, he greeted me warmly, informing me that Canadians regularly sent him my newspaper columns, and he complimented me on what I was writing. He is a superstar, and it was flattering to be acknowledged so generously.
For years after I began to speak out about environmental issues, as I said earlier, I felt as Chomsky does — that it was not up to me to tell people what to do or where the solutions were; I was simply a messenger trying to catalyze public concern. But I have read many books and articles, met many people, acquired information and knowledge, and reflected a lot about issues, all of which has shaped the way I see the problems. It has become clear to me over the years that it would be very difficult and time-consuming for people who are starting to get involved to wade through the same volume of material in a short period. And if the issues are urgent, then those of us who are pressing those issues have a responsibility at the very least to help people avoid unnecessary material or sources and get up to speed faster, still on their own but with some shortcuts to assist them. Chomsky refused to give any tips or recommendations when asked.
American consumer advocate and reformer Ralph Nader once spoke in Vancouver in the same week that Chomsky lectured at the city's Queen Elizabeth Theatre. It was almost too much to have two such prominent figures on hand at the same time. Nader's performance two nights later was a huge contrast to Chomsky's presentation. Nader had been invited by nurses who were involved in a dispute with the government. Instead of the grand surroundings of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, his event was in a movie house in a rougher part of downtown Vancouver. It too was packed, and Nader gave a stirring speech in which he praised Canadians for our leadership in social issues (with Duff Conacher he had written a best-selling book about Canadian firsts) and compared Canadian social values with those of the United States. He received a standing ovation. Unlike Chomsky, when he was asked what could be done, Nader immediately listed off people, organizations, and strategies that could be contacted and worked with.