Generational issues

Are there some world issues that are right to be forgotten but others that need a cross-generational reminder?

Remember the campaign against the fur trade in the 1980s? It did its job: the number of Mink farms in the USA decreased from 1,221 in 1974 to 274 in 2008 and retail fur sales declined by nearly 50% between 1985 and 1990 . While numbers peaked again in the mid 2000s (then dipped), legislation had been introduced to ensure that the fur business was ethical. The double peak represents two things. The first is fashion. People like to wear animal fur. The second is public opinion. People like to wear animal fur when it’s socially acceptable. The important point is that activists in the 1980s made their statement, politicians responded and business adapted. So is the issue of animal cruelty in the fur trade still relevant?

Remember CND, founded in 1958 to ‘rid the world of nuclear weapons’? In the 1980s, at a time of public discontent and when tensions were high between West and East, CND organised major protests and was under the surveillance of British Intelligence. Now, following the fall of communism and a general increase in prosperity, CND only pops up in the public psyche at times of war. Is it still as relevant as is used to be? If it doesn’t carry the weight to organise protests of hundreds of thousands of people, then people are probably not that concerned. If people are not that concerned, the threat of nuclear weapons are probably not that important. The ‘War on Terror’ is real but, unlike during the Cold War, Nations do not have nuclear weapons permanently aimed at each other.

But what about water? HIV/AIDS? Starvation in the Developing World? Gender inequality? These issues are as pertinent as ever yet people born after 1990 will not have witnessed the severity and public unity behind the warnings during the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet these issues are still as relevant today, so too is an awareness for their impact on our future.

Today is World Water Day, an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. As the global population expands, more emphasis is needed to provide clean water for consumption and sanitation. As Peter Brabeck-Letmanthe, Chairman of Nestle comments, “Global water requirements ... will be 40% greater than what can currently be sustainably supplied”. Why are people not concerned? Have people forgotten the significance of water to our wellbeing, a clear priority in 1992?

HIV / AIDS currently affects about 33 million people. In 1990 the number was about 9 million. The global growth has reached a plateau since the mid 2000s but 67% of people with HIV are in Africa – does this make HIV irrelevant to the West? In the UK, 27% of people infected with HIV are unaware and, since 1999, the largest group of people transmitting the disease are heterosexual partners. Clearly the levels of awareness around the transmission and severity of the disease has declined since the UK Government’s ‘tombstone’ advert in 1987.

Without drawing on other examples, the cases above point quite clearly to the fact that some global issues are dealt with and naturally come to a conclusion. But another set of issues, that span generations, continue to exist but are passed to the side as new global issues become the vogue. It is critical that the protracted global issues are reinforced for every generation to ensure ignorance is averted and the knowledge of our actions can be understood. This is the role of activists, politicians, the media, schools and ourselves. Where the public are currently concerned with ‘green’ we must maintain a balanced view on the top issues we are facing as a planet. These Generational Issues should not be prioritised but discussed, prevented and remediated in equal measure.