"It is in the Hearts & Minds of Human Beings that the causes and cures of the Ecotastrophe are to be found." ~ Ralph Metzner
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
President Obama's Lethal Climate Legacy
As the IEA warned in 2008, we are now seeing giant waves of migration, with approximately 65 million refugees worldwide. Many are fleeing conflicts largely sparked by abrupt climate change, such as the unprecedented drought that fueled the Syrian civil war. According to the British Defense Ministry, by 2020, another 60 million people could be displaced from desertified areas of sub-Saharan Africa, and by 2050, about 200 million people may be permanently displaced.
THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE’VE KNOWN IT ~ AND I’M NOT FEELING SO GOOD
Why are people everywhere acting as if the world is falling apart at the seams? Because it is. And because, in the end, we are not Americans, or Muslims, or Democrats, or Republicans. We are earthlings. And as the whole ball of wax continues to melt, as temperatures continue to rise, as tidal forces continue to erode coastlands, swallow islands, and as wildlife, birds, and insects continue to disappear from poisoned lands, and as nobody in a position of authority responds rationally to the horrified scientists who really can look into the future (because climate chaos unfolds with a 40 year time lag), HOW WOULD WE EXPECT PEOPLE TO ACT?
Given the shape of these challenges, a new approach is necessary. The United States, its allies, and the global community must de-emphasize traditional notions of hard security more suited to the Cold War, and should focus on more appropriate concepts such as human security, livelihood protection, and sustainable development.
20% of all reptile species, 48% of all the world’s primates, 50% of all freshwater turtles, and68% of plant species are currently threatened with extinction. There’s also talk about the Cavendish banana going extinct as a result of a fungus, and research has confirmed that honey bees, which remain “the most important insect that transfers pollen between flowers and between plants,” are dying out around the world at an alarming rate due to what’s called “colony collapse disorder” — perhaps a good metaphor for our technologically advanced civilization and its self-destructive tendencies.
The question that confronts us is how do we allow this kind of wonky science filter down from our head to our heart. And how is it that this kind of critical information never makes it into a political debate?
We the people already have all the tools and know-how we need to solve the climate crisis among ourselves, working in community on health-based initiatives, without any need for treaties, laws, regulations or corporate altruism. And if everyone who has been working so hard to instill a conscience in global politicians would simply choose to devote the same amount of time and energy to acting on their own conscience in ways devoted to bringing about healthy changes in their own communities, we could probably achieve this transition to a “climate culture” in less time than governments and corporations have been “talking” about the need to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
In 1972, Harold Searles, a specialist in schizophrenia, wrote, “[We are] hampered in [our] meeting of the environmental crisis by a severe and pervasive apathy, largely of which [we are] unconscious” (Searles, 1972, 361). While Renee Lertzman (2008) has spoken of the “myth of apathy,” defining it as a “lack of feeling,” I prefer to focus on the alternative etymology, also from ancient Greek: A-pathos, against suffering. It is the act of orienting ourselves against suffering—the ways in which we attempt to counteract the painful effects of traumatic experiences and emotions—which needs our attention as we move through this long emergency. The ways we orient ourselves against suffering—dissociation, vigilance, and aggression—are the roots of our environmental ills. Stemming from a natural response to trauma, these orientations to the world demand to be treated in particular ways, and understanding how trauma works is the first step toward adequately treating this pervasive trauma and emerging from this long emergency.
Something grievous was lost when we split the atom. In taking final dominion over nature, actualizing our so-called “manifest destiny,” we not only fractured our bond to the natural world and the very soul of that world but arguably we opened a deep fissure in our own human nature as well. And as we are only now just realizing, in the climactic moment that the Anthropocene began, something else necessarily ended—the Holocene, an entire age marked by the ascent of human civilization and all we aspired to. Perhaps the significance of this abrupt transition was best captured by American philosopher and, at the time, University of Chicago Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins in the title of his 1945 Human Events pamphlet: Atomic Bomb Versus Civilization.
Americans have never grieved these momentous losses. Distancing the public from the reality behind a story, such as focusing on the (unfulfilled) promise of nuclear technology rather than the terrible human toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,7 blocks it from mourning loss (Jabarouti, 2014, p. 161). But how could we lose something so fundamental to human nature as our connection to the natural world itself, or the age which defined our very civilization, without grieving our loss? And how can we now expect Americans to make rational choices in relation to climate change if we are still actively suppressing this immense, unresolved grief? As Randall (2009) notes in her discussion of parallel narratives, “when loss remains unspoken, neither grieved nor worked through, then change and adjustment cannot follow” (p. 119). Until we have acknowledged and grieved our lost connection with the natural world, the Mother Earth archetype—recovering our own true nature—we may never be able to respond appropriately to the ongoing catastrophic losses attributable to climate change, such as the tragic losses of megafauna, rain forests, and biodiversity.
From Seabirds to Starfish: Climate Change Driving Unprecedented Die-Offs
“Incidents like these are often mysteries to be unraveled, with scientists sorting through various explanations—hunger, habitat loss, disease, disorientation—for the mass deaths,” Sarah Kaplan wrote at the Washington Post on Wednesday. “But in a swath of recent cases, many of the die-offs boil down to a common problem: the animals’ environments are changing, and they’re struggling to keep up.”
If emissions aren’t cut, “We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.
The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here | Rolling Stone (quoting Hansen et al., 2015)