by Yotam Marom
This article originally appeared on WagingNonviolence.org.
Mural by the artist Bansky along Regent’s Canal in London. (Flickr/Matt Brown)
I
suppose it wasn’t really until I was standing on the west side of
Hoboken, N.J., in water and oil up to my thigh, that climate change
really made sense. And it wasn’t until I was out organizing on New York
City’s outer beaches after Hurricane Sandy that I understood my
sluggishness on climate justice was nothing short of climate change
denial.
This article appears through a collaboration with Transformation, a feature of openDemocracy.net.
It
seems like everywhere we turn, we’re being fed the same old climate
Armageddon story. You’ve heard it, I’m sure: If we continue to be
dependent on fossil fuels, hundreds of gigatons of CO2 will continue to
pour into the atmosphere, the temperature will rise above 2 degrees
Celsius, and we’re done. There will be a biblical cocktail of
hurricanes, floods, famines, wars. It will be terrifying, awful, epic
and, yes, as far as any reputable scientist is concerned, those projections are for real.
I
call this narrative the Armageddon Complex, and my own denial was a
product of it. I spun all sorts of stories to keep the climate crisis
out of my life, ranging anywhere from “it can’t be that bad” to “if it
is that bad, there’s nothing I can do about it,” and “it’s notmy role. That’s for climate activists; I’m a different kind of activist.”
I
did not act alone, but rather as part of a culture of climate denial
among activists, who are already plagued by a tendency to see our work
as separate issues vying for attention. The Armageddon Complex tells us
that climate activism is about some far-off date, not about the pressing
and time-sensitive needs that people around us experience in their
day-to-day struggles. It pounds into us the idea that the crisis is more
titanic than any other, so if we’re going to do anything about it, we
have to do everything.
Most of us won’t put off the pressing needs of our families and
communities for something we abstractly understand is going to happen
later, and most of us aren’t willing to drop the other pieces of our
lives and our movement to do everything, because we already feel like
we’re doing everything and barely scraping by as it is. So we deny.
Unfortunately,
there is a lot of truth to this story: The crisis is gargantuan, and
it’s getting worse. Ultimately only a fundamental social, political,
economic and personal transformation is going to get us out of this
mess.
But
that’s not the whole story. Climate Armageddon isn’t a Will Smith movie
about what happens in 10 years when all hell breaks loose. Climate
change is already here: Hurricanes that land on families, rising tides
that flood homes, oil spills that drown communities and countless other
disasters. These are caused by the same economic and political systems
responsible for all the other crises we face — crises in which people
are displaced from land, families are ripped out of homes, people lose
their jobs, students sink into debt, and on and on.
Defeating
climate change doesn’t have to mean dropping everything to become
climate activists or ignoring the whole thing altogether. The truth is
exactly the opposite: We have to re-learn the climate crisis as one that
ties our struggles together and opens up potential for the world we’re
already busy fighting for.
To continue this article, please go here: http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/confessions-of-a-climate-change-denier/
***********
“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.” ― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.” ― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World
No comments:
Post a Comment