Keep Talking
It's difficult to keep talking about climate change because it seems like it's not really going anywhere. You hear about it at first and it sounds monumental and deadly. You troll through internet sites listing all kinds of disasters and you heart races because it's the end times and you think you'd better drink that bottle of wine you've been saving for years and go skydiving and kiss that man or woman you've been fantasizing about. You think you'd better straighten out your life, too. Better focus up and write that novel or run that marathon or quit smoking or reach out to your estranged family members because the end is near, because the apocalypse is right around the corner. And then, after a month or so you get used to it, to climate change, to your grief and elation, to the threat of death, to the numbing pace of it.
There are stories of refugees from Burma and Sudan and other places who watched their families tortured and killed, who had their limbs hacked off and escaped by the barest margins from certain death only to wake up in a new hell... the refugee camp. The refugee camp, where there is systematic rape from those who are supposed to be protecting the camp and those within it, where there is a constant flow of human waste, a constant shortage of food and fuel. Sometimes the camps are as bad as the places people have just left, and after weeks, months, years of it, this existence becomes reality.
It's not the same, but if people can get used to living a hell like that every day. If human beings can begin to accept that kind of suffering as mundane, as the everyday reality of their lives, what chance do we have of keeping climate change, a much less immediate disaster close to us. They are connected, these two very different kinds of disasters, connected by an act of forgetting. How many of us would stop a rape if we saw it happening right in front of us? How many of us did anything about a hundred thousand rapes on the other side of the world? I'm not talking about sending money. Money is almost meaningless in a situation like that. I'm talking about getting personally involved, having enough at stake to change your life. Who needs to get raped before you do something? How close do they need to be to you before you're unable to forget, unable to sleep soundly, unable to stand by and watch?
There is another connection between genocide and climate change. Both are happening because of the economic disparity between the first world and so called “developing nations.” Burma is a particularly good example of this. Despite the Burmese government's policy of destroying certain ethnic groups like the Karens through systematic rape, torture, imprisonment, and outright murder, the UN security council refuses to classify the situation there as genocide. Why? Because China and Russia are buying natural gas from Burma, which they burn for energy. When burned, natural gas releases CO2, a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gasses tend to raise the average mean temperature of the earth leading to severe weather events, the melting of polar ice caps, the migration of deadly tropical diseases to new geographic areas, and many other phenomena which threaten us all. We tend to think of global climate change as a disaster that will affect all human kind equally, but that's not true. Rich countries with better transportation infrastructures will fare much much better than poor ones. As food becomes scarce, poor countries will not have the resources to import enough for their citizens or the infrastructure to distribute it. People in “developing nations” will be the victims. Same thing for severe weather events with which rich countries are prepared financially to deal, while poor ones will struggle. Same for diseases. And First world nations are the ones burning oil, gas, and coal in the first place. The US, alone, puts out more CO2 than any other country in the world.
First world nations, while not entirely responsible for both kinds of disasters, certainly exacerbate them to say the least. We are not helping, at least not all the time, probably not most of the time. People point to Darfur and say we did something there, but it took us ten years to act. How many Darfurs are there in the world? How long will it take us to act on each?
In the case of climate change, ten years of inaction may be long enough to make damn sure that most of the human beings on the planet die rather than live.
There are a lot of factors contributing to climate change... diet, transportation, heat, technology. Each of us chooses how much is enough, whether it's worth it to eat meat at every meal or every day, whether we set the thermostat at 70 or 60 or turn off the heat altogether, which car we need to buy to make us happy and make sure we can get to work and soccer and dance and shopping safely, how often to upgrade our cell phones and computers, how often to go out to eat. These things make a difference.
You need a good reason to make the right decision. I get that. I couldn't make myself change. Think of how it might be 50 years from now when the food begins to get scarce, when the power blackouts are in full swing, when you can't fill up the tank of your car because there's no gas. We'll get through it, but the world that will be left behind for our children will be less of a world than we had, less than our parents had, less than I am comfortable imagining. My son made me change my actions, my thinking about climate change and genocide. Even the possibility of that future motivates me to make sure it will not happen... not to my son. I will not wait until it gets truly bad.
I must change my life.
There are stories of refugees from Burma and Sudan and other places who watched their families tortured and killed, who had their limbs hacked off and escaped by the barest margins from certain death only to wake up in a new hell... the refugee camp. The refugee camp, where there is systematic rape from those who are supposed to be protecting the camp and those within it, where there is a constant flow of human waste, a constant shortage of food and fuel. Sometimes the camps are as bad as the places people have just left, and after weeks, months, years of it, this existence becomes reality.
It's not the same, but if people can get used to living a hell like that every day. If human beings can begin to accept that kind of suffering as mundane, as the everyday reality of their lives, what chance do we have of keeping climate change, a much less immediate disaster close to us. They are connected, these two very different kinds of disasters, connected by an act of forgetting. How many of us would stop a rape if we saw it happening right in front of us? How many of us did anything about a hundred thousand rapes on the other side of the world? I'm not talking about sending money. Money is almost meaningless in a situation like that. I'm talking about getting personally involved, having enough at stake to change your life. Who needs to get raped before you do something? How close do they need to be to you before you're unable to forget, unable to sleep soundly, unable to stand by and watch?
There is another connection between genocide and climate change. Both are happening because of the economic disparity between the first world and so called “developing nations.” Burma is a particularly good example of this. Despite the Burmese government's policy of destroying certain ethnic groups like the Karens through systematic rape, torture, imprisonment, and outright murder, the UN security council refuses to classify the situation there as genocide. Why? Because China and Russia are buying natural gas from Burma, which they burn for energy. When burned, natural gas releases CO2, a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gasses tend to raise the average mean temperature of the earth leading to severe weather events, the melting of polar ice caps, the migration of deadly tropical diseases to new geographic areas, and many other phenomena which threaten us all. We tend to think of global climate change as a disaster that will affect all human kind equally, but that's not true. Rich countries with better transportation infrastructures will fare much much better than poor ones. As food becomes scarce, poor countries will not have the resources to import enough for their citizens or the infrastructure to distribute it. People in “developing nations” will be the victims. Same thing for severe weather events with which rich countries are prepared financially to deal, while poor ones will struggle. Same for diseases. And First world nations are the ones burning oil, gas, and coal in the first place. The US, alone, puts out more CO2 than any other country in the world.
First world nations, while not entirely responsible for both kinds of disasters, certainly exacerbate them to say the least. We are not helping, at least not all the time, probably not most of the time. People point to Darfur and say we did something there, but it took us ten years to act. How many Darfurs are there in the world? How long will it take us to act on each?
In the case of climate change, ten years of inaction may be long enough to make damn sure that most of the human beings on the planet die rather than live.
There are a lot of factors contributing to climate change... diet, transportation, heat, technology. Each of us chooses how much is enough, whether it's worth it to eat meat at every meal or every day, whether we set the thermostat at 70 or 60 or turn off the heat altogether, which car we need to buy to make us happy and make sure we can get to work and soccer and dance and shopping safely, how often to upgrade our cell phones and computers, how often to go out to eat. These things make a difference.
You need a good reason to make the right decision. I get that. I couldn't make myself change. Think of how it might be 50 years from now when the food begins to get scarce, when the power blackouts are in full swing, when you can't fill up the tank of your car because there's no gas. We'll get through it, but the world that will be left behind for our children will be less of a world than we had, less than our parents had, less than I am comfortable imagining. My son made me change my actions, my thinking about climate change and genocide. Even the possibility of that future motivates me to make sure it will not happen... not to my son. I will not wait until it gets truly bad.
I must change my life.
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