May 21, 2019
The May 6 headline said it all: Human Society Under Urgent Threat from Loss of Earth’s Natural Lifehttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/06/human-society-under-urgent-threat-loss-earth-natural-life-un-report Our Earthly inhabitants are at a dangerous crossroads. In 2002, the biologist E.O. Wilson said that humans and the other species on Earth are caught in the bottleneck of an accelerating ecological crisis. Industrial countries have lost their way, without the certain knowledge that we are capable of extracting ourselves or indeed willing to exit this relentless multi-faceted extinction squeeze on species ranging from insects to primates. Within just 150 years they have succeeded in threatening our planet’s viability. If humans won’t acknowledge and actively respond to the dangerous situation we have drifted into, we will sink with the remaining creatures into the quagmire of our making, for without pollinators, soil and seas we are doomed. The daily scientific news is relentless: unless we change our ways, and soon, climate change will cast an unchangeable veil of greyness across the planet. The U.N. Climate Report last November warned that we have 12 years to drastically reduce our fossil fuel emissions so that global temperatures don’t exceed 1.5 °C. As the respected environmental activist Bill McKibben has stated through his many books, starting with his 1989 treatise The End of Nature, the world is rapidly moving towards “climate chaos”. On May 6 this year The U.N. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services published its critically important 1,800-page Global Assessment Report. The outlook for us and our fellow Earthlings is becoming progressively bleaker. This fact is well established, but North Americans, and their politicians in particular, behave as if there were no planetary bio-climatic crisis. Québec’s Biodiversity Atlas demonstrates how serious the situation is in southern Québec, but few people know of this document. Yet one single person can inspire the rest of us to rise to the enormous challenge, “where the voice that is in us makes a true response, where the voice that is great within us rises up”. Last year a schoolgirl named Greta Thunberg did just that, galvanizing her fellow teenagers to find their voices and demand that adults protect them from the ravages of climate change. After centuries of feeling alienated from Nature, can we find our way back home – our only home? The path is tortuous, but we can focus on a vision that will allow us to succeed. Earthly community is the way forward. The 17th-century English poet John Donne wrote: “No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…” Now we know that our involvement must move to embrace all creatures. People are finally reacting strongly to government indifference, and speak of the climate and biodiversity crisis as a deeper symptom of our general malaise: increasing social injustice, over-population and capitalism’s mantra for unlimited growth on a finite planet are among the grave concerns that are being voiced. A multitude
Jul 13, 2015
Pope Francis’ long-awaited encyclical Laudato Si’, subtitled On care for our common home, has been praised by groups as diverse as scientists, anti-poverty and climate justice organizations and governments, as well as by the Dalai Lama and other religious leaders. The encyclical was released to all Catholic bishops in May 2015 and can be read in full at w2.vatican.va It is an astonishing document. As we might expect, it puts forward a strong moral defence for saving Creation. Climate-change mitigation has become a mainstream ethical response to the myriad assaults on life on Earth. The Pope speaks passionately about the climate as “a common good, belonging to all and meant for all”. As our oceans, forests and rivers are under siege, so too is our very climate, which allows all life to flourish. Justice for all encompasses the right to have an Earth, our home, that does not look “more and more like an immense pile of filth”. Furthermore, he admonishes us not to be caught up in a one-dimensional understanding of technological progress: “This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.” The encyclical points to the growing inequality of wealth and wellbeing as a major contributor to poverty and an increasing source of concern in the fight for justice and care for our only home. “The earth”, the Pope reminds us, “is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone.” As billions of people are excluded from any kind of food security or housing, so too are they the ones who face migration in the face of severe climate events, he points out. Although the Pope does not comment on the planet’s burgeoning human population as a major cause of increasing climate instability, his critical remarks regarding hyper-consumption, greed, and water and food insecurity, as well as unfettered growth, point to over-population as a key component entrenched in our global problems. He bids us protect “our common home”, which means making changes in how we understand the roots of poverty and the huge biodiversity/climate crisis now upon us. “We have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” The Pope tells us that “the ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion.” Our home is in jeopardy of being destroyed. We need to have an integral approach or ecology that embraces our common lands, our cultures, and people living in poverty. “I am interested in how such a spirituality can motivate us to a more passionate concern for the protection of our world,” the Pope explains. He asks us to educate
Jan 28, 2015
“The greatness of humanity is not in being human, but in being humane.” – Mahatma Gandhi The Walk for Climate is a pilgrimage to the centre of Britain. It seeks to find a way back to the strongest values we all share. In order to do this we must include all people, not just those who already share our views. The Walk for Climate is a walk for solidarity with all of Nature. It embraces the deepest and most empathic values the British people hold dear. A day’s walk with people from your community that not only includes the usual ‘greens’ but encompasses people from all walks of life can bring forth the creativity that is vitally needed if the 21st century is not to be one of the last for humanity and many other species. The reverse can be true: a flourishing of Nature and the interconnectedness of us all. Join us. A precept for Buddhists says, “Do not waste, but conserve energy and natural resources.” It is now clear beyond question that Western industrialised countries have caused climate destabilisation, which in turn has brought many species to the brink of extinction. Over the last 250 years the British landscape has been devastated by the mining and use of coal and the development of industries that depended on it. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels has exacerbated climate change, leading to an increase in rainfall and in turn to the flooding that so many communities have experienced in the last few years. The effects of the greenhouse gas emissions already present will be part of the legacy of ‘civilised’ countries for a thousand years. However, a reduction and stabilisation in greenhouse gases in the 21st century can be achieved by a rapid increase in the use of renewable energy in the form of wind, solar, tidal and geothermal as well as other strategies, and thus mitigate a further deterioration in our climate. The precept “Do not harbour enmity against the wrongs of others, but promote peace and justice through nonviolent means” is very important. The climate dialogue has so often been an argument between ‘them’ and ‘us’. We will make greater progress to prevent climate chaos when we connect with those we perceive to be different from ourselves, whether in political affiliation or otherwise. Fortunately, the debate about whether human activity since the 1750s has contributed to changes in the Earth’s climate is over. We must now get on with finding the solutions that will protect our climate, and include everyone in finding those solutions. The ‘wrongs of others’ can easily be found in those who profit from the destructive legacy of fossil-fuel production and use, but those people too need to be part of the discussion. A shift from blame to collaboration and communication has the potential to solve many ecological concerns. Another precept “Do not lie, but speak the truth” leads Buddhists to actively pursue the truth when we ask ourselves how climate-change mitigation can take place.
Jan 19, 2015
“Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.” – attributed to the Sufi poet Hafiz The biologist Edward O. Wilson coined the word ‘biophilia’ as meaning ‘love of living things’ or ‘the urge to affiliate with other forms of life’. British people love Nature. Britain is one of the few places on the planet that allow people the right to roam, and its public paths are unrivalled: they enable its people to connect to and celebrate Nature. But Nature as we know it is in jeopardy. 2014 was the warmest year on record in Britain, and the winter floods and summer drought caused havoc for humans and other species. The Walk for Climate is a walk for solidarity with all of Nature. It embraces the deepest and most empathic values the British people hold dear. Biophilia is not one more fancy word. It embodies the pathway towards loving, collaborative solutions in our communities to stop climate destruction and prevent ecocide. Walk for Climate continues to create the organisational teamwork necessary to bring the Walk closer to helping communities realise a zero-carbon future. Will you join us? The journal Nature published in January 2015 the most detailed explanation yet of why we must not continue to extract all our fossil fuels; in fact, we are told, over 80% of coal, 50% of natural gas and 30% of oil deposits needs to stay in the ground and is never to be burnt if we are to remain below the 2 °C global temperature rise that the world’s governments pledged to honour under the 2010 Cancún Agreements. A precautionary and ecologically prudent ‘carbon budget’ puts into place limits for global extraction of coal, gas and oil. Lord Stern has written the foreword to a very important report by Carbon Tracker that explains why we must keep a large percentage of fossil fuels in the ground. This report can be found at http://carbontracker.live.kiln.it/Unburnable-Carbon-2-Web-Version.pdf The dangers the world faces if we continue to exploit fossil fuels are graphically illustrated here: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/07/much-worlds-fossil-fuel-reserve-must-stay-buried-prevent-climate-change-study-says The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015 (COP 21) will aim for a treaty that establishes the means to safeguard the Earth’s climate stability and not exceed the 2 °C limit on global temperature rise. Yet James Hansen, an American climate scientist, said recently: “The widely accepted view that ‘science’ established 2 °C above preindustrial temperature as a safe upper limit for global warming … is unadulterated hogwash.” We need to stay far below a 2 °C+ future. Walk for Climate wishes to connect with all communities in the UK to collaborate on the necessary pathway to do so. We have moved from the use of steam and coal, with the mechanisation of the textile industry in the First Industrial Revolution, to the introduction of steam-powered ships, railways, the internal combustion engine, steel production and electrical power generation, which we call the Second Industrial Revolution,
