From a whisper to a roar
In Technology’s disruption of the truth (22 July) Katherine Viner writes about social media, and Facebook in particular, from her journalistic point of view. That is worrying enough, but what I find far more disturbing in today’s political climate is its potential to unleash the mob.
We all cheered when protesters of the Arab spring rallied via social media networks and brought down tyrants. But there was a telling silence when President Erdoğan used the same process to bring out Turkish demonstrators on the streets to foil the military coup against him. It was a hand-over-the-mouth, OMG moment when we saw a glimpse of a possibly very scary future.
What if some unscrupulous political leader does the same to intimidate opponents? It could be Kristallnacht all over again, perpetrated, not by people in uniform, but just by people. In the hate-filled echo chamber of their filter bubble, a mere whisper can become a shattering roar, unmediated by any reasoned counterweight. And as Viner shows, there need be no truth in the whisper; it could be set off by maliciousness or by those who would profit from the consequent crackdown on such disturbances.
This places an enormous moral responsibility on those running the media platforms, which currently seems to be ducked.
David Trubridge
Havelock North, New Zealand
A leader and his party
John Harris (22 July) makes a key point: the leader of a political party can’t function without the support of the parliamentary party. The UK is a parliamentary democracy and we achieve things by electing a parliament that will support a government. Or is there now an alternative?
Is the world of western-style representative democracies now crying out for a more direct “people’s democracy”, empowered by social media? Donald Trump, France’s Front National, Ukip and Italy’s Five Star movement are examples of the tragicomic expression of this movement. Syriza and Jeremy Corbyn on the left appear to be more serious in their ideology. Syriza has been put to the test of government in a parliamentary democracy, and has become part of the establishment so scorned by the people.
So I don’t see a just alternative to representative democracy, and I will not vote for a leader who can’t command the confidence of his parliamentary colleagues, even though the party membership is a constituency of equal value. Why can’t Corbyn command that confidence even though his team are developing clear policies? His colleagues are rightly concerned because they believe him to be unelectable. But others believe he is the only leader who can make Labour electable. It is not just a “battle for Labour’s soul” – it stands at the heart of the crisis of western democracy.
Martin Jewitt
Folkestone, UK
Creative problem-solving
It is all too easy to create an artificial dichotomy between reducing human population on the one hand and dealing with green energy, climate change etc on the other (1 July). We need both. In a finite space, the increase in one species takes place at the expense of other species. Even if we ignore the wellbeing of other species, the impact on the environment of an increasing human population is bad for us.
Ethical living columnist Lucy Siegle says that we should worry about poverty and overconsumption rather than population growth. Again, they are not mutually exclusive. Overconsumption is a problem that needs to be tackled in a number of ways. The most efficient one is to reduce the number of consumers.
Poverty is a major problem that requires many kinds of interventions; one of them is to make it easier for those who are being helped out of poverty to have fewer children, as this helps them give better support to the children they do have.
Finally, an increasing population puts greater pressure on finite resources such as water. With global warming, there is less snow cover to provide water to major river systems; aquifers are being depleted. When the wells run dry, what are we going to do? With dwindling resources and an increasing population, more conflict is inevitable. It is already happening.
Jérôme Rousseau
Saint-Lazare, Quebec, Canada
• Pure electric and hybrid-electric vehicles (22 July) whose batteries are charged from the electricity grid are only green if the electricity is green. Yes, every electric vehicle means less petroleum consumption, but it also increases the demand for electricity. If the ultimate energy source is coal, and more than 40% of electricity is generated from coal globally, the effect may be to increase climate change, not lessen it. Our next car should only be an electric vehicle if we have first signed up for green electricity. Otherwise we delude ourselves that we do good when in fact we may do harm.
Evan Gray
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Survival of the otters
Robin McKie extracts more cheer than I could in the fact that other species don’t just give up in the face of the most abysmal anthropogenic marine environments (22 July). Saved from utter extinction largely by the changing economics of human fur hunting, sea otters now find themselves on the menu of killer whales, which are hungry due to the drastic human depletion of the larger whales.
The otters may survive in areas less accessible to killer whales, but only until acidification puts paid to the sea urchins they rely upon. Closer to humans, they need to contend with the effects of oestrogen from birth control pills.
In Australia, a new government claiming to be the avatar of scientific savvy has moved to slacken environmental regulations as its famed reefs turn white.
John Hayward
Weegena, Tasmania, Australia
What threatens butterflies
I read your piece on the project to count butterflies (22 July) and, yes, this is a most admirable assignment. But while changes in weather patterns do play a significant role, surely the spraying of pesticides is key to understanding the dramatic loss of insect life that we have experienced over recent decades.
Indeed, when I was a child in the 1960s, drinking lemonade outside would attract masses of flying insects. These days, in exactly the same garden, you can eat whatever you like without being pestered at all. Indeed, during my childhood, whenever my mother threw scraps on to the lawn, birds would swarm in colourful masses. These birds have now, along with the insects that they fed on, disappeared.
I recently read Rachel Carson’s masterpiece Silent Spring where she warns of the dangers of pesticides, and discovered that all you need to do is to replace references to DDT with some of the controversial pesticides of our day and the book becomes just as current as it ever was.
Out of the window of the train where I am writing, I can see countless fields with telltale tractor tracks indicating GPS-guided spraying. In Carson’s day we might have seen masses of dead birds but, unfortunately, the birds have disappeared, so we have been robbed of the canaries that would have warned us that we are being poisoned.
Alan Mitcham
Cologne, Germany
Briefly
• I was very moved by What I’m really thinking: The son of an alcoholic (22 July). The disease of alcoholism tears apart so many families and the enabling that is done out of love seldom does much to change the alcoholic. It has to be the decision of the person struggling with drinking to ask for help. In sobriety his or her mum can go to that cafe again for the carrot cake and plot the birthday party. As seemingly kind as one thinks it is to enable the alcoholic to escape the consequences of drinking, this merely prolongs the reaching of a necessary low point. It is a long and winding road, but the “old you mum” can come back. She first must ask for help.
Doreen Forney
Pownal, Vermont, US
• The fantasy life of supermarkets in the US (and I fear the UK) that demands blemish-free produce is a 21st-century phenomenon (15 July). In the 19th century, the watercolours of the vast array of apples almost all showed russeting or apple scab. Neither condition made any difference to the apples’ flavour.
Unfortunately our ignorant mass market is made up of urbanites who have never seen anything growing. This means that apples must begin waxy, perfect and, preferably, bright red. Perhaps we are a species doomed to extinction by unrealistic concepts of perfection.
TC Webb
Sechelt, British Columbia, Canada
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