By Sinead Mercier - 2 December 2013
David Suzuki writes that before we can hope to adequately tackle climate change we must internalise the fact that “we are the earth, and whatever we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.
Yet ‘hope’, to my mind, is not enough of a driving force for the promotion of sustainable living. It is has an air of sacrifice and persists in the idea that the way we live in the Global North, with an overt reliance on dirty energy, daily power showers and avocados from Peru, is normal. In reality, living within your means, within your 1.8 hectares of a planet that you share in companion with 7 billion others, is simply what is right. This to me is the meaning of climate justice, that no other human being, present or future, should suffer due to the greedy consumption of resources that you neither need nor deserve.
Our grandparents did not live the way we do now, nor do the majority of the planet’s human inhabitants from whom we rob the resources for a gluttonous way of life. Hope can stunt action, leading us to believe that ‘doing what we can’ is enough to obstruct an uncertain future where growing inequalities and climate chaos are already at hand.
My first few days inside COP19 were disheartening. I came to the COP19 to find the source of our stalled progress to clean energy and sustainability was a minority of thumb-twiddling governments and corporations lacking in innovation and foresight. Seeing at first hand the painfully slow, if not stagnant, movement of the world’s government towards agreement in the face of great urgency was difficult and oftentimes surreal. At one point, I found myself in a room on Gender Day being encouraged to sing what I can only describe as a Disney song about ‘hopes and dreams’- as if it would be terribly rude to ask for more urgency at the UNFCCC.
What I do take away from this trip is the power of solidarity, as opposed to sympathy, that I witnessed as part of the 800 strong civil society and G77 walk out. Friends of the Earth International, their partner organisations and the truly incredible young people I met in Warsaw made me realise the strength of the collective. There is a ‘blessed unrest’ at work – millions of people across the globe bound together by respect for the planet and a shared belief that the way we live is neither just nor right.
We are living not only on a planet in flux but a societal shift in what we believe to be ‘the good life’. People are beginning to realise that our economy, based on ever-increasing growth, is unsustainable from a climate, social and global justice perspective. Like Graham Barnes said, ‘work and quality of life are two legs of the stool; the third is future’. We cannot allow a fiction of powerlessness to allow us abdicate responsibility for the imagining of what our future will look like. Each of us as individuals have a duty not only to reduce our carbon count but to engage with our governments, private enterprises and communities and make our voices heard.
This is not to say that we should revert back to the hardship and injustice of life before the carbon-heavy modern era, or condemn the Global South to slow development. Instead I believe with David Suzuki, that the chance is at hand for “opportunity, beauty, wonder and companionship with the rest of creation”, that the human capacity for intelligence and adaptability that has brought us to this dire future will see us out of it.
Yet, practical action and change will not be driven by ‘hope’ of avoiding catastrophe but the welcome of individual and collective responsibility to leave enough for lives after us and in the most vulnerable countries, to be lived in full and pleasant splendour.
By Sinead Mercier
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