I have never seen climate carnage on the scale of the floods here in Pakistan.
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) September 10, 2022
As our planet continues to warm, all countries will increasingly suffer losses and damage from climate beyond their capacity to adapt.
This is a global crisis. It demands a global response. pic.twitter.com/5nqcJIMoIA
I know this is a hell of a message to send on the 21st anniversary of 9/11, but I can't hear the skirling bagpipes deliver "Amazing Grace" one more time without thinking about the future pressures of what colonialism and global commodification of the planet will mean for future generations. We've been looking at the war on terror as about a lot of things, but about oil and water, not so much--maybe we should. About self-determination, and the world corporations would leave us to--not so much. Maybe we should. We were lost, but will we be found? We were blind, but will we see?
We tend to want to put a face on our terrors and consider the villain as "the other". Nature, in its raw power and inexorableness, seems to us to act in ways so removed from our capability to harness it--but we harnessed the atom. We can make use of the energies of water and wind and even capture lightning in a bottle and the sun in a mirror. I think we should be able to understand that over 30 million people are displaced and maybe thousands have died or will, and a third of a large country is under water, destroying crops and homes and livelihoods, because for over a hundred years, we, humanity, did something to the atmosphere that made storms more potent and the future more uncertain.
More specifically, western white humanity. I understand why Fox News calls climate change a hoax--it's to absolve the West from what we did when we decided a smokestack was our pillar of cloud by day and our pillar of fire by night that would lead us to a better tomorrow. We (not me, but like, folks who looked a lot like me) also decided to subject various dominions to the lash and unfair laws. Those people didn't raise smokestacks, they raised rice, cotton, sugarcane and tea. But because geography and life isn't fair, they are also getting screwed on the backside of colonialism.
The former subjects of colonialism will come to our pleasant and green lands because theirs have been made a nightmare. And they are our brothers and sisters. And we are only waiting for our turn in the climate barrel. Some of us have seen our cars float down the road, or seen the wind flex an invisible muscle to decimate some part of a town we know quite well. This will be a regular part of our future. We aren't exempt from the terror to come.
I want us to systemize relief for the climate-challenged places where people are harried and disrupted by natural causes with unnatural force. I also want us to, for the sake of our future, realize terror can also be unintentional, and we can stop climate terror in our time, by not feeding burnt carbon into the system, by letting the earth grow new forest, by letting fish and birds and bees come back.
They will. Earth is resilient. But we must be intelligent. The terror these people of Pakistan face is from a kind of accidental terrorism of commerce. There has to be a reckoning. We need to purposefully see to this planet and its resources. We need to protect one another.
2 comments:
And the reaction in the US to events in Pakistan . . . (crickets). . . Oh, we'll send humanitarian aid, this time. At this point it seems unlikely that the US (at least) will do anything substantive to diminish our carbon footprint until it's WAY, WAY too late. Catastrophic flooding in far off places filled by brown people clearly doesn't sound any alarm bells so I'm not sure what it would take to get the public behind the sort of changes that are necessary.
The problem with wondering what it would take is the concrete reality that if direct proof in the form of climate disaster delivered to one's door should be proof enough, I give you the folks who live in tornado alley and on the southern coast of the US--they have seen it. And a lot of them still don't believe something has gotten worse. I think the problem with humanity is that the very basic idea of a round world, where the disaster occurring on the other side of it is also our problem, doesn't compute. We (to generalize) think about things very locally, even tribally. The idea that sacrificing fossil fuels will affect the storm gods one way or the other isn't a recognized part of the culture. The idea that we are connected to drowning brown folks seems maybe even less so.
It takes a cultural shift, and I think we need to put a face on anthropogenic climate change. It's like Covid-19--some people started to fuss about masks and other trappings and hated lock-downs and got assholish and protest hospitals and school board meetings because people have faces to get into and the virus didn't. Climate change doesn't have a face to punch or a soul to damn--but the people in the denial industry, backed by fossil fuel money do.
Climate terror is impersonal. We can say "act of God" or "Mother Nature is angry"--but that isn't an actual face. The effects actual humans have are tangible. So the actual humans who hold us back, who lie about the science, they are the ones to confront.
(Of course, rhetorically, she added as a belated disclaimer. Of course.)
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