Climate Crisis Forces Us to Ask: To What Do We Devote Ourselves?

Again and again, the courageous ones invite us to not turn away. They invite us to not stay in denial and ignorance, or apathy and despair, and to refuse to throw up our hands and say there is nothing we can do. NOW is the time for each of us to take responsibility for what WE WILL DO. We truly are all needed. Regardless of outcome or how bleak things are, we can rally around each other and our children and all of Earth's inhabitants and be inspired by those who are so brave that they have spent their lifetimes not turning away. These are the heroic human beings — the researchers and explorers, the truth-tellers and indigenous voices, the healers and spiritual leaders, the visionaries and wisdom keepers, the authors and activists, the artists and poets — who model and inspire us to be in this world as best as we possibly can with our eyes and minds and hearts open. This is not easy. AND it is possible. And all the children of all the species everywhere need for us to be as conscious as we possibly can. It is exactly our awareness of the climate and ecological crises which can propel us individually and collectively into the national and global movements that have the potential to transform our nation and the world into one which cares for life rather than destroys it. We are all needed in this effort. There is some role that each of us can play. — Molly

A video journalist is silhouetted by a smoke-obscured sun and sky as the Holy Fire approaches the McVicker Canyon neighborhood, which was under mandatory evacuation in Lake Elsinore, California, on August 8, 2018.

 Part of the Truthout Series:

How Then Shall We Live?

 "The Universe says loss demands birth and 

the two are lovers." — Deena Metzger

By Dahr Jamail 

During the times when I’m being as emotionally honest with myself as I’m capable — when I truly ponder the idea that this industrialized version of our species may well have already baked enough warming into Earth’s life-supporting biosphere that all of us may very well be on the way out — I feel at a total loss as to what to do.

From that point of numbness, my life force begins to ask, “What next, then?” Cycling through this process for years since I’ve been reporting on the climate crisis, and most intensely during the research and field trips for my book The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, circumstances (namely my own grief and despair) have inevitably forced me into contending with my emotions.

I’ve learned, through a lot of pain and struggling, that the only way forward is to allow myself to deeply feel and express the fear, rage, shock, panic, sadness, anxiety and despair. Only then can I move into a place of taking some of the deep breaths which accompany acceptance of the grave situation at hand.

You, dear reader, who are paying such close attention to the unraveling of all that we know, must share in many of these feelings. When you see another of these grotesque, pasty-white iterations of humanity stuffed into a glossy suit, acting as nothing more than a fossil-fueled ventriloquist’s puppet, do you, like me, burn inside with rage, a rage that threatens to incinerate you? Do you fantasize of their demise? Of somehow bringing them, at least, a taste of the pain their soulless and heartless actions are bringing to the fish searching for food atop the bleached-out coral reefs? To show them the starving polar bears swimming for hundreds of miles to find no ice to rest upon? At these times, I wonder if any of these so-called humans can feel a goddamn thing anymore.

Do you feel the emptiness inside when you become aware of emperor penguin chicks drowning from collapsing ice resulting from planetary warming? Or the fear that comes when we understand our ability to feed ourselves is now very much under threat?

First: Accepting Reality

When you read of how 1.5 acres of rainforest are vanishing every, single, second, does your heart clench in fear? Or when the last of another of the rare frogs existing within said rainforest is lost from this world forever, do you shed the tears that come from a seemingly impotent sadness?    

When you come to understand what co-founder of Extinction RebellionRoger Hallam, himself a former organic farmer, has previously told the public, all of these feelings set in even more deeply. In the aforementioned lecture, to paraphrase Hallam, he pointed out how we have already warmed the planet 1.2 degrees Celsius (1.2°C). Based on observational data, we are easily within a decade of losing the summer sea ice in the Arctic. Within another decade, Earth will warm another .5°C due to the melting ice alone. There is already another .5°C warming to come from CO2 that has already been emitted but we’ve yet to experience the warming. The water vapor effect from these events (and other processes already in motion) doubles the impact of warming from other sources, adding another 1°C warming. Hence, at 3°C warming, most of the Amazon rainforest is lost, which in itself adds another 1.5°C of warming. At this point, most likely, Earth is tipped into a hothouse state, possibly into conditions that render it uninhabitable by humans.

Perhaps you might think this sounds too extreme, the stuff of science fiction. If so, consider this: the level of CO2 in the atmosphere today hasn’t been seen in 12 million years, and this level of greenhouse gas is rapidly bringing Earth back into the state it was in during the Eocene Epoch, 33 million years ago, when there was no ice on either of the poles.

Please continue this article here: https://truthout.org/articles/climate-crisis-forces-us-to-ask-to-what-do-we-devote-ourselves/