We're not at the stage yet where we feel climate change as a stomach-churning, sickening, suffocating imperative, the way a farmer whose crops fail because of drought will. We're still comfortably ensconced in our centrally heated homes with TVs and laptops and journeys to work in still mostly normal weather. Climate change activists are laughed at as "tree-huggers". (this is from the perspective of my workplace in a recruitment company, so a pretty conservative place but probably representative of a large swathe of opinion, tho more people are "getting it" all the time).
I just had an inchoate thought that a powerful lever to create the empathy (among northern consumers) for those who will be materially victims of climate change before us (i.e. people in the developing world), in ways which will affect their shelter, their food and water production and procurement - a lever which could help us be motivated to become activists for policy change on climate change - is going to be for people to get a sense of that kind of desiccating suffocation that will be experienced by normal, innocent people en masse. Partly because even if we can't relate to those peoples' situation (tho many can), we have a similar experience which can help us do so - the felt prospect of not being able to protect our future fulfilment of our desires for entertainment, for titillation, etc. That's the barely intimated feeling of impending existential suffocation we experience, here - which gives us an empathy which could be the basis of solidarity for those whose ability to live will similarly be suffocated, and precisely for those contingent desires we feel and express (i.e. climate change is created in large part by consumerism). In the face of this prospect of loss of livelihood, shelter, security, comfort, entertainment, we can be moved to reach out to each other, amongst each other for other forms, of society and politics, grounded in a different type of relating to the world than passive consumption, which are less prone to wreak these ill effects on all of us.
So those kinds of narratives, all of which are in prospect if not underway already - of farmers' crops failing, of forced migrations, of drying of lakes and forests, of flooding then droughts - of catastrophe attending already difficult existences in many cases because of the legacy of colonialism and current economic imperialism - those human narratives are the ones we need to put front and centre rather than the SF type ones or polar bears etc.
On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 3:06 AM, Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at aapt.net.au>wrote:
> At 9:21 PM -0400 11/3/09, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>
> But is this talk about drowned cities, burning forests, increased disease
>> virulence, an even greater insect population (of all the nastiest sorts)
>> and
>> the rest of it helpful?
>>
>
> You look up at the sky and it's blue on clear days and grey on rainy days.
>>
>
> People are dopey, but not that dopey, surely?
>
> Sure, "talk about drowned cities, burning forests, increased disease
> virulence, an even greater (nasty) insect population" isn't helpful. Hardly
> anyone listens, people doubt.
>
> But actually existing "drowned cities, burning forests, increased disease
> virulence, an even greater (nasty) insect population" are likely to have a
> different effect. Surely?
>
> It will be too late then of course. (Wait a minute! We already have
> "drowned cities, burning forests, increased disease virulence, an even
> greater (nasty) insect population". So make that: it *is* too late already.
> We're fucked.)
>
> But the point is, surely at this stage people aren't still looking up at a
> clear blue sky and saying "looks fine to me." Not in my neck of the woods
> they aren't. They are looking up at a clear blue sky and noting that we seem
> to be getting a lot less rainfall lately. And saying, "climate change."
>
> Too fucking late to stop it now of course. Have to move those cities inland
> a few miles instead. And build domes over them. Though people haven't woken
> up to that yet.
>
> But only the really dim-witted are still thinking, oh its a nice day today,
> so all's well with the world. I don't know anyone that stupid. Do you?
> Surely even Americans aren't that thick?
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas
>
>
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