Live Earth, a Convenient Truth

I’m sitting on what, potentially, could be the worst flight in Mango’s short history. My travelling partner and I arrived at Jozi airport in the knick of time only to discover that we’re not on the same flight back home to Cape Town. We say our farewells and I head off to find a Kauai smoothie to drink and a Sunday Independent to bury my head into for the next hour and a half or so. At the boarding gate, a fellow passenger tells me that the plane has been delayed by an hour. He is furious – apparently this is the third time he has been delayed by the previously mentioned airline. Now I’m stuck in the purgatory they call the departure lounge. Faced with the ethical dilemma of having to choose between Wimpy and Nescafe’s coffee I choose Wimpy because I just can’t bring myself to support Nestle whose tactics to get mothers in the “Third World” to feed their babies powder instead of breast milk rivals that of the cocaine industry. I’m now finally on the plane, and still there is no God.

I’m sandwiched between two screaming kids. Two! What are the chances? I am really regretting my decision not to order a whiskey when the refreshment brigade came around. What makes matters worse is that the co-pilot hasn’t instilled much confidence in me. She first announced that we would be landing in Joburg and then corrected herself (with a giggle, nogal) and confessed that she was a bit “confused”. Geez Louise sister, you can’t joke about shit like that in a post 9/11 world. Anyway, I’m starting to get the feeling that this is definitely a case of instant karma kicking in. I cast my mind back to a few weeks ago, when a free ticket to Egoli together with a comp for the Live Earth concert landed in my lap. Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t all plain sailing. I first had to endure a mental wrestling match between the activist and the self-serving writer that reside in my head. The activist pinned the writer down with the carbon footprint issue and the incongruity of flying to a huge music concert to raise awareness about global warming. The self-serving writer had no choice but to resort to some pretty dirty tactics which I can’t, in the interest of maintaining some degree of privacy when it comes to the workings of my innermost psyche, go into. Three minutes and 40 seconds into the wrestling match, the writer was declared the winner. Needless to say, that it’s the activist who is now getting the last laugh and while I sit typing on my laptop, is smugly telling off the writer that this rotten Mango is payback for having supported the biggest corporate greenwash event of the millennium.

At the concert, watching all the punters devouring their hot dogs and slurping their Cokes I wondered how many of them could define ‘carbon footprint’ let alone are aware of the fact that the meat industry generates about 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – that’s more than the transportation industry. I mean, does Al Gore really think that a heavily branded concert filled with musicians telling people to only boil the exact amount of water they need for their cup of afternoon tea is really going to make a difference when what we need is a radical shift from the business as usual mindset? If change, real change is going to happen people need to be challenged and they need to feel part of a global movement as activists rather than consumers. Also, is the Live Earth concert symptomatic of yet another way in which local responses and solutions to Africa’s problems are being hijacked by the West? Given the problems that Africa is grappling with, do we really need the rich and famous to put on yet another “Live 8” type concert which incidentally, did little in the way of providing debt relief? It’s hard to escape the irony of Al Gore, representative of a country which refuses to sign the Kyoto agreement and is the biggest contributor to carbon emissions, spending millions on an expensive, environmentally damaging event to raise awareness about global warming here in the “developing world” where Africa’s carbon footprint ranks amongst the lowest in the world. Speaking of climate change, we’ve just hit some serious turbulence. It looks like the Live Earth concert came at a price after all.