Tag: Extinction Rebellion

Humanity’s Endgame, or New Beginning?

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I was struck by the juxtaposition of two book reviews in the recent edition of Paradigm Explorer – magazine of the Scientific and Medical Network.

uninhabitable earthFirst, David Lorimer reviews The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells, a book that suggests that our institutions and leaders are simply not up to the task of addressing the challenges of climate breakdown. Humanity is basically not an intelligent species en masse and will go down the pan.

planet remadeThis is followed by Paul Kieniewicz’s review of The Planet Remade – How Geoengineering Could Change the World, by Oliver Morton. This sort of accepts the premise of the previous book, except suggests that humanity will increasingly resort to geoengineering to try to alleviate the resulting problems. Of course, geoengineering is a largely unknown, untested and inherently unpredictable.

At the end of the day, neither of these mindsets seems likely to do more than scare us, which is perhaps what is needed, in addition to the positive work being done by Extinction Rebellion and many others.

The problem is enormous, almost beyond comprehension, and involves every living person. The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. If the majority of people did their little bit every day, always making the carbon-reducing, climate stabilising, non-polluting choices – so that individuals, communities, businesses, corporations, towns and cities, regions, national governments, international institutions were all moving in the same direction, we would soon realise that we were solving the problem.

We just have to give up caring about money more than people and nature, and about power and fighting more than peace and cooperation. Nothing less than total transformation of our politics and economics!

When did this ever happen before? Well, after WW2 there was a recognition of the need for change and the establishment of institutions to improve cooperation (UN, EU) and reduce the chance of wars, and to establish improved living standards for peoples. The game of sovereignty and ‘interests’ of nation states and powerful individuals has since undermined all this. It has to stop, or the ‘interests’ of the big boys will destroy us all.

This Is Not A Drill

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this is not a drillThese days, daughter is much more clued up about the latest ‘must read’ books on green issues than I am. So this book, subtitled An Extinction Rebellion Handbook, was kindly left for me to read. And an incredible book it is, outlining the thinking and practicalities behind the recent phenomenon of Extinction Rebellion.

The premise is that we can no longer continue to ignore the issue of climate breakdown, as argued so many times in this blog. So we cannot continue with ‘business as usual’, which has been the response to pretty well all climate change protests and initiatives so far. The first part of the book presents evidence of climate breakdown and its consequences from all over the world – you can be in no doubt that change is needed after reading this. This leads to the conclusion that the needed system change will only come about though some sort of non-violent revolution/rebellion, whereby the status quo is disrupted sufficiently to evoke and force through the necessary changes. And non-violent it must be, enabling peaceful and democratic change; violence always begets more violence and leaves the wrong sort of people in control of societies.

It is a handbook, in that it outlines the approach that was taken recently in the London protests, and the experience of many of the protestors. It really was a quite incredible operation.

This is needed to evoke the necessary economic and political change needed for continuation of human societies on the planet in a form that is a recognisable continuation of today’s societies. Otherwise, the status quo is driving us towards increasing disasters, wars and breakdown of societies and ecosystems.

Yes, this book outlines a vital aspect of the needed New Renaissance of humanity. It is not the whole story, but a vital part of it, comparable to that played by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King in their struggles for justice.

Read This Is Not A Drill, and you might even be inspired to become an essential part of the necessary change that is ever more pressing.

 

 

The Wrong Road

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“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost‘s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring



We are still on the wrong road, as so beautifully expressed by Rachel Carson so many years ago. Did we really listen? No wonder people, in desperation, now take part in Extinction Rebellion.

Mainstream Environment?

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I’d guess it was the 1980s when I really became aware of environmental issues, including fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect, including pollution of the air in cities, including degrading of farmland by intensive farming, including the effects of pesticides on the natural world. For so long, those 40 years since, the mainstream media have largely ignored these issues, or reported them as the concern of ‘environmentalists’, neatly compartmentalized away from the mainstream.

So I’ve had a strange sense of cognitive dissonance this past week or so as these issues are being discussed on the mainstream bulletins of the BBC, that bastion of UK establishment thinking. Of course, this is a reaction to the success of Extinction Rebellion in highlighting just how urgent now is the situation on global warming/ climate change and species loss (as well as to the success of Netflix in pinching David Attenborough and allowing him his full environmental voice). It really is a planetary emergency with little time left to effectively act.

The worry is that this is just to fill in the air time left by a government and parliament doing nothing but obsess about Brexit. There is no other legislation, no ‘queen’s speech’. The broadcasters must be sick of reiterating the minutiae of customs union, the withdrawal agreement, the splits in the two main parties and on and on.

But we have to be optimistic and suppose that
(a) something will eventually be sorted on Brexit and then
(b) this time legislators are accepting of the urgency and will eventually set out a programme that will at least partially address the climate/fossil fuel issue, encouraging people and business in the right direction. That is their job.
Difficult for a Conservative government that has spent 4 years rolling back the little environmental progress they allowed the Liberal Democrats to make in the coalition government of 2010.

The big question at the moment: Is Environment Secretary Michael Gove up to the job? He appears to understand the issues, but can he persuade the government to act and explain to the public what they are doing and why, and anyway will he still be there when prime minister Theresa May goes (ie soon)?

My optimism is somewhat subdued!