I can’t wait anymore, for whatever we are waiting for (covid to be over, the government to lead on climate action, the magic pixies who will save the Antarctic and Arctic from heating at an ‘impossible’ rate). It’s time to act as if our lives depend on it, to make climate change and ecological systems the context of everything we do.
We are in the long emergency. If we look at the last five years, the pace of crises is increasing and we’re not getting much of a break (Trump, forest fires, floods, rising fascism, the burning of the Amazon, insurrection, the covid pandemic, Russia invading the Ukraine, the oil crisis).
There are going to be more and compounding crises as time goes on, there is no going back to normal. Even if all other crises abated, we would still face the mamoth task of transitioning to post-carbon societies.
We can however choose to act for life, the best chance of things working out, and humans finding a new stability and way of being that doesn’t involve killing the planet.
The good news is that resiliency can be taught and learned. We can adapt to unsettled times and precarity, and we can even create better lives than many are living now. We’ve learned a lot in the past two years. There are whole swathes of counter cultures dedicated to just this: transitioning away from our current life-destroying societies to life-affirming ones that are built to both mitigate and adapt to climate change and to restore the natural world.
To that end, I’m going to put up a post every Monday dedicated to taking action on climate and ecology. This isn’t a post to argue about the angels dancing on the head of the COP pin. It’s for discussing action, talking about how to manage, developing strategy, telling the stories of how things can be different and how we can make that happen right now. This is empowerment work, not handwringing or intellectualising while Rome burns.
I’m in solidarity with nature. I’m in favour of proactive pathways – if we are going to acknowledge the scary stuff we have to, at the same time, talk about what we can do, and then go do something.
If you want to argue about abstract ideas about climate, please do that somewhere else (try Open Mike).
If you want to do something about climate change and the ecological crises, please join the conversation below.
Needless to say, I don’t allow climate denialism of any kind under my posts. That includes arguing the Bart defense (‘humans didn’t do it’), or the Gosman defense (BAU capitalism must reign supreme/change is too hard) or the McPherson defense (‘it’s too late’).
I’m with her ^^^
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