Comment

Tony Hawkhead

That politician wasn't an avowed environmentalist - it was Margaret Thatcher. Depressingly, the speech could still be made today. Maybe this year, another conviction politician can turn words into action.

Nearly 40 years ago, man walked on the moon. Thankfully, we don't yet need to regenerate failing lunar colonies. The imminence of that anniversary reminds me that there are two other important anniversaries this year that continue to resonate, both globally and locally. Twenty years ago this year, a British man changed the world. Tim Berners-Lee developed the technology that would become the World Wide Web. Back in 1989, few could have imagined the impact of his work less than two decades later. Web space has turned out to be more important than the space race in defining how we live and work.

The internet may have begun as a plaything of hobbyists and geeks, but quickly it developed into a research tool, a magic money making machine in the short lived dot.com era and eventually into the everyday work, entertainment and shopping resource we all rely on today. How did we cope without it?

Unquestionably, the most interesting development in the last few years has been ‘web 2.0' - the growing focus on the creation of online communities, user-generated content, collaboration and participation.

It's not an area that our sector has yet grasped to its full potential. When it comes to the internet, the focus for good reasons has been on developing information technology skills and addressing the ‘digital divide'. A lack of basic skills in using PCs and the internet is now becoming as big a barrier to social mobility as literacy and numeracy. However, as research from Ofcom has demonstrated, the digital divide is narrowing. It's time for those of us who work in disadvantaged communities to use this technology as a key tool in regeneration initiatives.

Groundwork has had some great success using online surveying as part of community consultations for example. We're also experimenting with project blogs (see www.groundworkaction.org.uk) and aim to develop much further in this direction this year. Like many other organisations though, we need to make a big cultural shift. The potential of using the internet to harness the knowledge and activism of local communities in shaping their places is only just beginning.

It's been nothing short of an information revolution in an astonishingly short period of time. But now the impact of an older revolution - the industrial revolution - threatens our world. The year 1989 also saw the first warnings about the huge dangers of global warming by a leading politician. At the United Nations, her speech was apocalyptic in tone and demanded action from world leaders:

‘While the conventional, political dangers - the threat of global annihilation, the fact of regional war - appear to be receding, we have all recently become aware of another insidious danger. It is as menacing in its way as those more accustomed perils with which international diplomacy has concerned itself for centuries. It is the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to earth itself. The evidence is there. The damage is being done. What do we, the international community, do about it?'

That politician wasn't an avowed environmentalist - it was Margaret Thatcher. Depressingly, the speech could still be made today. Maybe this year, another conviction politician can turn words into action. The world is waiting for Barack Obama to put the United States at the front of global action on climate change.

The 20 years since 1989 have flown by. Regeneration initiatives and governments have come and gone. Now though, according to the new Committee on Climate Change we have just eleven years to make a massive 34% reduction in our carbon emissions.

The clock is ticking - a short time for another huge transformation in how we live and work and another giant leap for mankind. Lunar colonies are not an option and we can't retreat into cyberspace. In 2009 we must make decisive progress in rescuing our fragile worlds from the immense dangers it, and we, face. The alternative is simply beyond contemplation.