I believe the media grossly distort our perceptions of world problems. Our sources of news and information do not accurately portray the world around us. Newspapers, magazines, and television news programs all focus on recent events-they look at dramatic but superficial changes to the state of the world, rather than at the state of the world itself. If you listen to the mass media you hear a lot about factory explosions and plane crashes, car-jackings and oil spills, whales trapped near the north pole and little girls trapped in wells. You don't hear much about business as usual-systemic problems that haven't changed much since last year, like soil erosion and dirty drinking water. Our serious problems do not make for fast-breaking news-they're problems that have been building steam for years. They're old and boring, but terribly important.
My recommendation: If you're serious about being well informed, get your news from low frequency sources, not high frequency ones. Read books and reports, not newspapers and periodicals. Watch documentaries, not CNN. Focus on the big picture -- the pattern, not the perturbations in the pattern.
"There are occasional tragedies, such as the accidental release of poisonous gas into the air above Bhopal, India, which capture the whole world's attention. But the constant deadly levels of air pollution in cities throughout the developing world do not, even though on a 'normal' day they are responsible for the deaths of more people than died at Bhopal."
-- Vice President Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
Back in college I studied electrical engineering. Electrical engineers like to think in terms of signal to noise ratios, and they try to design equipment that responds to signals while ignoring noise. In many electrical engineering problems the noise consists of high frequency perturbations while the signal is a lower frequency pattern. The noise is an artifact of how you transmit information, and it should be filtered out. The signal represents important real world information which must not be ignored.
In the world of human problems, the signal represents real world trends that have enormous inertia. Because of the chemistry of CFCs in the ozone layer, the chemicals already in the ozone layer will continue to eat away at our ozone for decades to come. That's inertia. CFCs that we released a decade ago have yet to reach the ozone layer and begin their decades long process of destruction. That's inertia. Your car and my refrigerator still contain CFCs that were produced a decade ago-these CFCs have yet even to be released into the atmosphere to begin their journey to the ozone layer, to begin eating away at the ozone. That's inertia. Our factories have yet to stop creating new CFCs to put in new cars and refrigerators which will last another decade before their CFCs are released. That's inertia. Like ozone layer depletion, many serious human problems exhibit inertia. Population growth has its own inertia, which I'll describe later in the Landmarks section.
"People can complain about these incinerators all they want. They can argue against them, they can write to editors, but in the end, the garbage is going to win."
-- Brendan Sexton, former New York State sanitation commissioner
The Bottom Line
Pay attention to the pattern, not the perturbations--the signal,
not the noise. It's easiest to find the signal by reading books,
not periodicals and newspapers.
