My life, and your life, and all the life around us are worth fighting for.
This week’s post comes from http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-06-02/fighting-for-our-lives/ . If you don’t subscribe to www.resilience.org , you ought to do so today.
The author, Emily Johnston, was, and is, an ordinary citizen whose eyes and mind were opened by the climate crisis currently diminishing life, both ours and wild, on Earth. Ordinary people can, and must, unite and make a difference. No one else can.
It’s obvious to me that there’s a crisis in Climate, and so much else. At The Canadian Association for the Club of Rome we all know this, yet as far as I can see, most of us, myself included, do very little active to change things. Even simple, little things, such as turning up at a well announced and publicized peaceful gathering on Parliament Hill fail for lack of attendance. CACOR is at least 100 strong, but only about 5 of us turned up for a recent 2 hour event. And only 250 to 300 turned up at all, out of the ~1,000,000 person local population. No wonder our ‘leaders’ ignore climate concerns!
Here are a few quotes from the article which we should all go to and read, more, we ought to incorporate its ideas and philosophy into our lives. Doing nothing is less and less and ethical alternative. It’s my opinion that, when one’s informed and yet does nothing, one becomes complicit with what’s happening. This is a very small step from guilty.
“First, let’s dispel the “it’s too late” idea. Too late for what? Too late for whom? The difference between some regions becoming unlivable for people (with the remaining regions welcoming those people) and all regions becoming unlivable for people is a difference very much worth fighting for. The difference between ten percent biodiversity loss and 95% is also a difference very much worth fighting for.
So we’ll fight.
But the biggest impact, if we do things right, is that we begin to understand our power. Because it’s not actually climate change we’re fighting—climate change is a natural response, like a person running a fever. What we’re fighting is the agent of that fever—and that’s fossil fuel use. Which is widespread, for sure, but it’s a human artifact subject to social and political forces—by which I mean you and me.
Before, I had been acting from a sense of responsibility; I could no longer look myself in the mirror if I wasn’t doing all I could to change things. After, I was acting from a sense of agency. And I began to understand viscerally that to not act to whatever degree one is capable, is to give consent to what is happening now, which within decades—scientists have made clear—will amount to the end of the world humans have known since the dawn of civilization. The fossil fuel companies need our consent; they run millions of miles of pipeline through our farmland, thousands of tankers in our waters, and hundreds of oil trains through our towns. If we don’t let them, they can’t destroy our world.”
There’s more, which anyone who cares for the Earth ought to go and read:
Leave a Reply