Get your ire on!

This week was a pretty good reminder that there is no shortage of injustice and short-sited thinking and greed in the world.

On Tuesday, I squeezed in a lecture by controversial academic Lawrence Lessig on the subject of institutional corruption. Using a variety of examples from US politics, he proposed the very simple yet profound idea of institutional trust as a cyclical problem. If there is a perception, regardless of its validity, that politicians or institutions are biased, or outright corrupt, democratic participation in that institution will drastically drop off because its assumed that nothing can be done to fix the problem, which only makes it easier to get away with questionable behaviors.

So then, the day after, I went to see Gaslands, a documentary about the relatively new process of natural gas extraction through hydralic fracturing or "fracking," that has gotten a ton of press lately with its Oscar nod and backlash from gas companies who challenge its message. With dark humor and a homemade aesthetic, filmmaker Josh Fox tells personal and institutional histories of what appears to be yet another faustian bargain for "cheap" energy. Harking back to Lessig's message: even if he had fabricated the entire thing, as many gas companies have the audacity to claim, the fact that we live in a world where it's completely plausible for serious exceptions to the Clean Water Act to have been made for special interests, where water could be polluted with impunity and where budget cuts could have obliterated environmental accountability says more than whatever did actually transpire behind the closed doors.
Plug: Watch the movie.


Finally, this weekend, was the annual EPIIC conference, a big conference bringing in speakers and students from all over the world to address one theme. This year's was "Our Nuclear Age," pretty much the biggest example of humans being short sited that I can think of.
I made it to 2 panels:
-The first was on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty System, addressing whether or not the system was actually functioning and addressing areas of contention that have been exploited by states with intentions to nuclearize.
-One really interesting statistic I happened to remember from the panel: every year, the US makes about as many nuclear weapons as Pakistan and India have made in the last 20. Funding $$$ for NPR and education anyone? (Naively oversimplified, I know.) But, as is quite evident, how can we expect other states and actors to not want weapons when we continue to send a signal that they are desirable?

-The second, "Re-Thinking Iran" provided fewer truly innovative solutions than might have been expected given the pre-fix, but still had some really interesting perspectives on what Iran's capabilities truly are and will be, the role that a divided political elite within the country has on nuclear policy, the effectiveness (or not) of sanctions, regional power politics and the role of the 6/12 elections and spreading protest in the middle east. What I had really wanted to hear was someone say, ok, well since it seems pretty obvious that they are going to get weapons eventually, what do we do when they do?

So, as usual, lots of things to think about. And fight for/against.