60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

24 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
coming more and more diffi cult to ignore reality. More and more
people understand that the solution cannot possibly be directly or indirectly
related to the thinking that brought humanity to the brink
of annihilation.
Inconvenient truth and half-truths 16
If the point of An Inconvenient Truth is to draw attention to a massive
fraud, committed by the managers of an economic system which
advertises itself as the best ever, then the telling of that story is very
close to a fraud itself. At the end of the movie, Al Gore points out
that it is possible to correct all of the errors and misconceptions that
led to the current global crisis. He argues that ‘we can do it, we have
the technology’. In other words, thinking diff erently is, in the end,
not necessary.
History is replete with inconvenient truths coming from those who
have been disregarded and/or trampled upon, because they were considered
dispensable. Many of them have faced extinction, either directly
or because their environment has been threatened. In Al Gore’s
movie, a great deal of time is spent demonstrating how, for example,
the environment of polar bears has been devastated, while very little,
or no time at all, is given to what has happened to the Native Americans
reduced to living in reservations. After all, weren’t the Natives
of all conquered/colonised/occupied lands accused of being too close
to Nature and therefore in need of civilisation?
It is diffi cult not to ask oneself why, and not, at the same time, think
that the selective use of evidence is a disservice to the otherwise excellent
scientifi c coverage. At the same time, it is not diffi cult to understand
why progressive organisations fi nd it easier to focus on Nature
because whatever happens, it cannot talk in the same way that
Native Americans can, and do. An equation dealing with Nature is
much easier to deal with than one which inserts other humans who
live under appalling conditions, and among whom some will actually
denounce those they consider responsible for their own fate. In the
process of healing Nature, the West fi nds itself in its usual dominant
position and also not running the risk of hearing insults, denunciations,
condemnations. What is at work once again is the other side of
the syndrome of discovery: the syndrome of abolition. As with the
16 This section was originally written in November 2006, months before the documentary
fi lm won an Oscar for best documentary.