Kristof blogs Darfur project
From New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof's blog . I must admit, I jumped for joy when I saw his blog - fyi, it is part of NYTimes Select, which requires subscription. [First week 40,000 unique visits & 60,000 plays!]
A VERY COOL new video game has just been launched, called "Darfur is Dying." It's available at www.darfurisdying.com, and I recommend it to all.
Granted, it's a bit morbid. You play a Darfur refugee in a camp or out gathering firewood or water, and you have to outmaneuver the Janjaweed. My first two times, I was grabbed by the Janjaweed and presumably butchered. But, hey, if it'll get Americans interested in Darfur, I think it's great.
I have to confess that when I first tried to go to the site on my computer, it told me that I didn't have the right flash player installed -- I assumed that the NY Times deliberately gave me an old version of flash player so that I wouldn't while away my time playing video games. But then my kids showed me how to install it, and we've been sitting around playing it.
Comments
This is what i sent the local student newspaper a while ago; it suggests that your (admirable!) game and your (admirable) colleagues who developed it need to "look more deeply" into what is responsible for the current calamity.
Take a look:
Dear Editor:
It would seem unlikely that the news item on p. 4 ("War in Sudan's Darfur region has now spread into Chad") and the Editorial on p. 6 ("Melting ice, rising seas send message") would be connected, but they are: we profligate 'developed world' users of CO2 generating energy sources have created not only the "melting ice and rising seas" but also the drought in the Sahel which is the real source of the troubles there. Consider the following excerpts from Chapter 13 of Tim Flannery's comprehensive new treatise, "The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth."
"The world's media periodically show images of...starving camels and desperate families struggling in a dust-filled wasteland. I remember as a child seeing these images on television, and hearing about how overgrazing and a burgeoning population had caused this human misery...It's an interpretation...[that] is wrong in almost every respect. The true origin of the Sahel disaster was revealed in November 2003, when climatologists...published a painstaking study that used computer models to simulate rainfall regimes in the region between 1930 and 2000...A single climatic variable was responsible for much of the rainfall decline: rising sea-surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, which resulted from an accumulaton of greenhouse gases...As a result, by the 1960's the Sahelian "drought" had begun...This bolsters the argument that the Sahelian catastrophe was not the result of ecological mismanagement by primitive and ignorant pastoralists...The Sahelian climate shift is emblematic of the situation faced by the world as a whole, for in it we see the west focussing on religion and politics as the problem, rather than the well-documented and evident environmental catastrophe that is its ultimate cause"
(cf., pp. 124-127, and footnotes 2-6 in Flannery's excellent new book).
The "aerial ocean" is no respecter of nation-state boundaries: what enters the atmosphere anywhere is distributed everywhere. More coal-fired power plants, more gas-guzzling SUVs, more particulate-spewing smokestacks: that is the anthropogenic source behind the genocide in Darfur and the disappearing ice and the melting glaciers and the rising seas: look in the mirror to see who is responsible.
Bill Perk
RAND Emeritus; SIU Emeritus; Advisory Board, Buckminster Fuller Institute (www.bfi.org); co-founder and Board Member, RBF Dome NFP (www.buckysdome.org); Member, CESJ (www.cesj.org); Member, EI, LLC (www.equitechllc.com); Member, Team Syntegrity International (TSI); Emergy Synthesis supporter (www.EmergySystems.org); World Citizen and Design Science Consultant
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Posted by: Bill Perk | May 5, 2006 3:45 PM