Concerning privilege
Massaging the collective conscience of the developed world
How much do you care about the fate of the world? Your country? Your town? Your community? Your family? Yourself?
In a recent corporate global meeting, some of my peers from the US and Europe shared details of work they’d been involved with, developing ideas about how cities could be designed differently to make them better in the future. They spoke about the reintroduction of nature, the greening of buildings, the removal of traffic, even the sculpting of the soundscape to make them less stressful for inhabitants. It was fascinating stuff, often funded by large NGOs, think tanks or corporations in the West, but aimed at cities in emerging markets and the developing economies.
What I found particularly interesting was that although I’ve spent most of my career based on the ground in those developing nations, including some of the exact same cities that these studies mentioned, I see nothing like the same level of spending on these types of initiatives where I am.
Right now, I live in Hong Kong. Sure, listen to the government and you’ll hear much the same rhetoric around sustainability and combating climate change as anywhere else. Smart city ideas and advanced mobility concepts are tossed around on conference agenda all the time because they sound cool, and there’s much talk of innovation, but in reality the construction sector goes on doing much the same as always, with no more than a cursory nod in the direction of a few green washing certification schemes.
It suddenly occurred to me in the midst of the meeting that what I was witnessing was a form of privilege — an odd manifestation of an ivory tower mechanism — where the developed world busied itself with studies and reports focused on parts of the world that would only ever appear as distant lands, made tiny and obscure through the wrong end of the research telescope.
Is climate action in fact another form of privilege?
How strange. All of that money spent on developing nations but never to be spent in developing nations…
Merton Barracks lives in Hong Kong after a life literally and metaphorically on the road.
He is a security technology expert, an autonomous vehicle expert, a counter-terrorism expert, a writer of fiction, a father, a ranter and an exposer of bullshit.
I am also increasingly drawn into the fakery and fraudery of climate action conversation.
https://medium.com/illumination/faking-our-way-to-net-zero-d6cdb2c320f
He is also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, who took half a century to face up to what that did to him and also what it made him. You don’t recover. You don’t repair.
Take a look at some of his fiction
Or read about the process of coping
