Climactic Change

I live voluntary simplicity. Grow my own veggies, recycle, plant trees on my neighbourhood verges, consume and produce carefully and thoughtfully, and align myself politically with not for profits and political movements that prioritise steady state economics, sanity, integration and sobriety, rather than the madness of spurious and disconnected consumption. I identify completely with those who want bio-diversity, unpolluted seas and skies, temperate weather, viable ecosystems and a habitable planet. (habital for whom? the dinasours... or for those of us here now?)

But, as someone very sensitised to language, and the thinking it expresses, it wearies me to see the hysteria, hyperbole, lack of self awareness and in group-out group dynamic that characterises those using climate change advocacy as the vehicle to drape their identity on. And Greta's fiery rhetoric, while enchanting, thrilling, and heart-warming, is also nonsense. The old do not have a monopoly on demagoguery and melodrama. ("You have stolen our childhood" etc. A starving Zimbabwean or Yemenite child has not had their childhood stolen by coal fired power stations...or at least no more so than by a hundred other factors. Causation is complex, and really everything causes everything. To selectively disentangle the complex web of causation is always to leave some of the story untold. Besides, I know lots of children whose childhood is intact, despite the terrible things that are always going on.)

"The end of the world as we know it." All statements about the future are "don't knows." The unexpected is bound to happen and always has. Who at Woodstock would have predicted Trumpfs America?

Death will come to our bodies and our children's bodies irrespective, as it always has, on time and in place. Who by fire and who by water. Managing climate change, which is just a subset of all change, which is relentless and ongoing, will not stop the creation and destruction of name and form. "Change is coming" said Greta. And of course it is - it never left.

Anything which facilitates the evasion of our own contradictions will not stand. When our deepest aspirations get muddled up with our shallowest judgements, they cancel each other out. The movement generated by the aspiration is blunted by the resistance generated by the blame and shame. Always it has been so: we have met the enemy and she is us.