What is a climate action?
Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions.
Jonathan Franzen https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending
For years all environmental international development cooperation projects have been labelled as “climate change projects”. Land use planning, biodiversity conservation, sustainable rural livelihoods, you name it, all these have pretended to be “climate change” projects. Of course, the underlying reason for this has been the money and how to access it to continue to do to the same things we have always done.
What has been very problematic with that approach is that the problems of today, the actual problems people feel in the everyday life, have been hidden in the face of trying to mitigate or adapt to the problems of the future.
What I most like in this article is that it is not about the future, it is what is good now. I guess it is indeed a time to stop pretending. Not to pretend that all projects are climate change projects, but to stop pretending that climate action is about us trying to solve the climate problem.
Instead, it is about trying to listen to what is good for us now, what is missing from our lives now, and what it means to be alive.
It is time to realise that in the end, it is listening to what mother earth is trying to tell us. Yes, the planet is heating, yes sea level is rising, yes hurricanes and typhoons keep on knocking at our front door. We are facing mass extinction and climate refugees are flooding into our living rooms. This bedtime story is not a pretty lullaby but full of despair, and it is our time to listen to the story and not to speak for once, with open hearts and holding hands. Because it is a story for the whole of humanity.
How about if time is not linear and the future is now and now is past. Is it a time to participate in the story as something that is in the past and lives in the future. Let us label all our actions climate actions. Without an intention to solve the problems of the future, but turning our attention to problems of today.
Photo by Charlein Gracia on Unsplash