LOOK YOUR KIDS IN THE EYE AND TELL THEM - OUT LOUD - WHAT ACTIONS YOU, PERSONALLY, ARE TAKING TO SAFEGUARD THEIR FUTURE.
Given the reality of the Climate/Ecology crisis, what is each of us — you, me, everyone — willing to do (or stop doing) to ensure that our kids have a chance at a decent future? And when I say ‘do’, I mean politically. Personal lifestyle choices certainly matter; but not as much as political action.
If you’ve read this far, I assume you do actually care. So you’ll vote with your kids’ future in mind, and you’ll cut your family GHG footprint. Good; but not enough. We need political action. But where, in the push for political change, do we focus our energy?
We need to go low-carbon. Actually, that’s not enough - we need to go low energy. Such a downshift is perfectly feasible PROVIDED THAT a majority of the population comes to accept the need for planned, cooperative downsizing. The barriers are not scientific or engineering ones; they are sociological and cultural. We have to face reality and ditch the childish endless-growth Ponzi scheme - the delusion we have been sold (and willingly bought into) for some generations now, which many politicians take as gospel, and which corporate interests work hard to maintain.
Polls show that a majority of citizens now clearly accept the science and the need for change…. In theory. But when it comes to accepting painful choices like no flying, or fewer cars, that’s different. It’s going to be a hard battle. Getting wide acceptance of the need to downsize will be a Herculean task. Our own selfishness and short-term thinking are our enemies; it’s vital to be realistic about what we are up against.
A parable: Chemists talk about the ‘rate determining step’ when describing a sequence of reactions, e.g. those that cause ozone depletion. The slowest step governs the rate of the whole process.
Ditto with a process like bottling beer. If filling the bottle is the slowest step, there’s little point in getting a faster labelling machine or stoppering machine. To get improvement, you have to identify the slowest step so you can deal with it.
It’s the same with the climate crisis. Those of us whose horizons extend beyond short-term self-interest need to decide where to put our energy to get some bang for our buck. Every activist I meet seems to have strong (and differing) opinions about the best ways.
Do we lobby politicians? Write letters to the mainstream media? Protest? Non-violent direct action, XR style? Focus on local resilience and adaptation? Plant trees? Challenge denialism? Push for investment funds to divest from fossil fuels? Support legal action against fossil fuel interests and do-nothing governments?
I argue that we should focus on the bulk of citizens that might swing our way if they start to understand that their kids’ future is at stake. There’s no point in talking to those who are already convinced of the need for change. Nor is it worth wasting energy on die-hard deniers and the utterly selfish — we won’t influence them. Not in the short-term.
So we need to help people to understand that we need their support, their willingness to accept painful policy action. Let’s not underestimate the difficulty - this is a herculean task. It requires aligning popular culture with the idea of degrowth and restraint. Until the average citizen is on board with that, nothing else we try to do will have any real effect. How then do we help the public to adopt a culture in which unnecessary consumption is seen as unacceptable and simple living is a virtue?
Failure would invite catastrophic climate disruption and a likely 6th mass extinction. In the lead-up to that, we could expect to see economic chaos and desperate inequality in many nations, along with mass migration and conflict. A desperate search for simplistic solutions would almost certainly increase the appeal of autocrats, a la Trump or Bolsonaro, offering their undemocratic, simplistic, xenophobic ‘solutions’. This trend, alas, has already gained some global momentum in the last few years, as challenges multiply and conventional solutions falter.
It’s no use asking what “they” should do; there is no ‘they”, there’s just us. Each of us.
As Marshall McLuhan said: There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
It’s up to us. That’s what it comes down to - nothing else really matters.
