The inconvenience & the habit...(7/12)

As planned, I went to see the film tonight. Featuring Al Gore is one of the reasons I went for it, and it was also interesting to view a documentary about the greenhouse effect...in Paris, I found that the film was still screening at l'Entrepot (a cinema which I have not gone for more than one year), and so everything appeared to be perfectly for a Thurs evening. On the same day, I talked to my colleagues about skiing. It is a good proposal for a family to spend an enjoyable Christmas. The situation for 2006 is that the weather is quite warm in France, and there is not yet any snowfall up till this second week of December. The skiing operators are facing a headache at those 'uncapped' skiing sites on the slope. I understood that the weather was getting warm globally, and that it was something 'reasonable' to me (or to others too perhaps). This is global warming that exists, ok...what I thought was that within a week or two, there should be some snow so that people can still go for their sporty vacation as scheduled at year end. But who guarantees actually?
I went to see the film in the evening. It was like a lecture rather than a film. Quite intensive and precise, the documentary pinpointed the situation in our world. True, we know a general concept about the issue and the possible impact, but a more scientific approach with data support would be a good approach to such a documentation, and there we got. I admire Al Gore's passion and will to work on the issue, disregarding any interpretation of his political and commercial intention. He may be right to do a film rather than preaching thousands times around the world. The approach applies to Hawkings too as he is doing his time theory on screen now. The film was a bit heavy but it was smoothly edited and presented. There are three things I got from watching the film: an update and recognition of the greenhouse effect issue, a good memory of the geography lessons I had in secondary school and a move by the charismatic presentation of Al Gore. Some remarks about the current capacity of Al Gore...he is actually one of the board directors of Apple and an advisor of Google. You will therefore understand more about the filming touch of Davis Guggenheim on the ibook etc. The atmosphere and comfort of l'Entrepot is always a stroke of film fans. There is a website of the documentary at climatecrisis.net but disappointedly there is not much additional information about the issue. The trailer of the documentary was a failure to me, as it projects exaggerated images of the disastrous moments that is simply like a copycat of one for the day after tomorrow. This is one of the few trailers that I have seen worse than the film itself.
At this same day, a tornado hit London...true or not the observation as per Al Gore?
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I still recall the first exhibition I visited in Paris last year at Villettes, and it was one on global warming. How ironic that I conclude my stay here with the same issue. Old problems always exist.

Laddering smoke...(26/9)

Energy is a form of invisible power exists in the world. Energy is generated by various means around us and in different civilisations and religious beliefs, it has its divine status and projected imagination...our life simply co-habits with the human-intercepted forms of energy and motion pictures...we are reliant on all these invisible sensation of passion and power.
France is an advanced country to me in terms of energy generation and technology transfer. Since the second half of 20th century, nuclear energy has been contributing a large proportion of its power supply to its economic activities. While the major power generators in the world get more aware of environmental conservation & investment diversification nowadays (in monetary & political terms), and the European Union talks about energy in its regular weekly agenda, the G8 develops strategically their own energy plan to get prepared for any uncertain future development. A remarkable move of the French government is to progressively reduce the proportion of its electricity generated using nuclear power to 73% in 10-year's time, whilst it empowers new development of renewable energy sources to diversify its operation. In 2005, nuclear power generated 78% of electricity in France. The 10-year energy investment plan looks for sustainable contributions from natural resources including wind and biomass like animal and organic waste. This is not anything new, but if the French were to get hold of its development verve, such intensive implementation & alteration would need certain patience and devotion.

The visual of uprising vents is the symbolised lightness of dynamism, and the power plants along highways or at the far end of the city peripherals are always the pick of my random vision and sight. They are phantoms of reminding signs, and they are the generator of dreamy smoke. Since long time ago, I am fascinated by the upright metallic power towers which resemble climbing ladders of human intervention to the unreachable sky. These towers break the space. It is an artificial art of geometry. I like these flying tracks across the dream of humankind. It creates a hybrid habitat for the flying objects in nature from the bird eyes' view probably. To me, it just landmarks the distinction between our urban territory and the owl's night somewhere else.

Happy Planet...(12/7)

At the same time when the bomb attack took place in Bombay, New Economics Foundation (NEF) released its Happy Planet Index. Based on a formula of life expectancy multiplies life satisfactory and divided by ecological footprint, the index depicts according to NEF a measure of how happy people are in different nations... It measures the ecological efficiency to deliver human well-being in different parts of the world. Assuming this is a sensible and fair perspective to look at our life, the research appears to conclude that wealth is not necessarily correlated to happiness and satisfaction.
Interestingly, the tendency of the capitalistic economy approach at this stage of human history has formulated a "world order" based on the nations' economic development and wealth. The index calls for a totally different order system. As quoted, "high levels of resource consumption do not reliably produce high levels of well-being". Perhaps it is true, though not many people would agree. Apparently happiness is relativity, and it is rated according to expectation and experience. I have no idea how we can compare our degree of happiness with our ancestors. One century ago, people might be very happy to get on a plane to travel, and now this needs not be true. Fifty years ago, people were extremely happy owning a TV at home, and the fantasy of media spectrum was the flying colours. It is a different story now. When I was in Kenya, I saw their children smiling wholeheartedly when they received souvenirs of pencils and sweets from the tourists. This is happiness to them, and this is a matter of expectation and experience. Those tourists might be happy too, as the donation fulfilled their willingness to give and offer. Based on our scope of knowledge and sense of value, we define what we named to ourselves satisfaction, disappointment, happiness and fulfillment. This may be a meaning of life. When the French team lost the World Cup, French people were sad because they had expected victory to be brought back to Champs-Elysees. The disappointment would be forgotten, though some may not go away. Simply, definition becomes a norm to an individual, a community and a nation on how each of them values themselves and weights their meaning of life. Perhaps this limitation should sometimes be taken away, and by all means, satisfaction is always a very personal treasure.
As happiness is relativity, all elements of trend and development, expectation and anticipation, experience and knowledge build up a curve of ups and downs. Human becomes emotional.
The Happy Planet Index takes into account the environmental factor. Me too. Environment shapes a mind, and changes a mindset. This is a topic of psychology perhaps. Drugs are another extension to stimulating our extent of imagination and feeling. People work on psychopharmacology, and this may be a further research to the coefficient between satisfaction and ecological footprint named by NEF.
Having my time in Europe, the people I met demonstrate to me the variance of happiness definition, and this is inspiring. Travelling to different nations with varying definition of satisfaction and experience enable me to taste the different form of happiness and unhappiness. In the actual world, globalisation is like a go-or-not-go paradox and it is far more complex than we are thinking of about the pros and cons of the unification. The Global Manifesto of NEF remains as always a utopian statement...wealth distribution, recognition of social classes, environmental concern and balance...these are still the terminology we can find in books of economics, geography or sociology.
We still have the smiling faces in chatrooms and email boxes though.
Check out the HPI report at http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/dl44k145g5scuy453044gqbu11072006194758.pdf