“We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world.”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer
Confession: I’ve always had a huge problem with the word “sustainability.” Last week I attended the inspirational Resurgence online Festival of Wellbeing, featuring, among other fine speakers, Robin Wall Kimmerer, scientist, professor, founder of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment and author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Robin spoke about that problematic word, and she quoted what an Indigenous elder had to say about it: “That sounds to me like they’re trying to find a way to just keep on taking. It’s not our right to keep taking. When your feet hit the ground in the morning, we should be thinking, what can we give?” https://www.resurgence.org/
The 27 September climate protest march starting from the Université de Sherbrooke (see photo) was supported by barely 200 people, with a smattering of elders and primary school students. The Université de Sherbrooke has a student population of tens of thousands, but where were they? Bishop’s University students were in short supply too. Despite the daily alarms sounded by climate scientists, who declare that with the ever-increasing rise in carbon emissions will come more and more catastrophes, what is going on with such a disengaged group?
Why won’t Canadian students do anything to help their own future?
Well, of course some students are rising up to challenge and change the narrative away from submission to a broken political agenda that only cares about more accumulation as opposed to one of inclusivity with Nature. All young adults need to embrace a new economic model and have a policy centred on degrowth. Survival depends on it.
If you are still not convinced, this talk is of critical importance for you: https://tinyurl.com/Earth-health-summary
In an article titled “La marche pour le climat a-t-elle encore un sens?” (“Does marching for the climate still make sense?”, Le Devoir, 1 October 2024) Juliette Husson confirms what so many of us feel: that in the midst of unprecedented Earth disasters, ecological matters are no longer being taken seriously by the governments, corporations or citizens of the global north. Husson concludes that it is vital to continue to protest, even though many people do not believe that protest is relevant or the priority while they are concerned about solving their perceived economic woes. Climate protests renew our commitment to Nature, Husson asserts. https://tinyurl.com/march-for-climate
Even the success of the Canadian carbon tax, which has helped reduce Canada’s carbon emissions and has put more money back in the pockets of lower-income families, is now being threatened by both the Conservatives and, bizarrely, the New Democratic Party. https://tinyurl.com/carbon-tax-faces-axe
Misinformation has contributed to a dangerous retreat from confronting climate risks, even though most people have seen how climate breakdown is showing up in their own vicinity; take last year’s Québec wildfires as our local example.
Truly wanting less, and even ultimately knowing that we have enough, is not an easy task to internalize if so many in our western society want more. (By the way, this conversation is not motivated by some plot to get the poor to accept a more debilitating poverty. A policy of austerity has already accelerated poverty. No: it is the top 10% of households that are ransacking the planet.)
There are so many questions as to why, how and when to create a rejuvenated society, but working against this realization is today’s corporate fetish-technology fundamentalism, which declares that all our ills will be solved by the future magic of technological innovation. In his article “Ironic and Tragic: Technological Fundamentalism and Our Fear of Limits,”Robert Jensen writes: “We lack strategies that we can implement tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t wrestle with the challenge today. It is ironic that technological fundamentalists believe we can do anything we set our minds to, except limit the voraciousness of the human enterprise.” https://tinyurl.com/jensen-ironic-tragic
Working contrary to the anti-Nature pie-in-the-sky techno-fix delirium are many great thinkers, including Indigenous people and artists. On a global trajectory to realize a humane response, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is in effect till 2030, alongside the Sustainable Development Goals. These endeavours cannot succeed too soon. Many people think this decade is humanity’s last chance to halt the climate and biodiversity crises.
Sometimes it feels that it is impossible to keep up with all the latest scientific and cultural news, which is intensifying. My file named “Biodiversity” has so many subjects of interest that I am adding a new file about the upcoming UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16) taking place in Colombia from October 21, 2024, because news reports and media announcements are soaring. The UN Climate Change Conference in Azerbaijan (COP29) beginning on 11 November this year is a separate file. The information I have accumulated on subjects from conservation, activism and ecocide to a plastics treaty is enormous. The abundance of information coming to us daily and the red flags that are increasingly attached must make us not only stop and consider where we went wrong but also reflect urgently on a system of knowledge and education that left out what is most important: our place in Nature—not beside Nature or playing the puppeteer for our distant cousin Nature.
The safe carbon level of 350 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere 35 years ago has now reached 421.9 ppm, never before realized since the dawn of humanity. We’d better re-evaluate what is important to us, because we have arrived at a rapidly shrinking window of opportunity to turn towards a clear and safe planetary response and act decisively for our long-term survival. The victims of Hurricane Helene know viscerally what survival means, as do many others in the seemingly endless cycles of catastrophic paths of ruined lives around the world because the global north can’t get its act together.
Could it be that the usual extreme-right demagogues’ mantra that sings about how down and out the economy is, or adding on to that, how immigrants are to blame for a undefined national malaise, has successfully permeated so deeply the public consciousness and is now a key reason that people refuse to pay attention to climate science? They feel perhaps that acting on climate/biodiversity issues should no longer be on the agenda, even though ecological health is the foundation for all economic wellbeing.
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” doesn’t include cleaning up air pollution or resolving how to reduce atmospheric carbon levels. Has all of his poisonous bluster finally infected the body politic to such a degree that most people really believe that the USA, or for that matter, Canada, is a failed nation because our pay cheques are not large enough to consume even more? Again, the notion of wanting less, for mainstream economists and not only would-be dictators, is a profoundly anti-capitalist concept and according to these people must be blotted out from any discussion that looks at our perceived ills.
In 1972 the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth. This seminal book is even more relevant now. Each of us needs to reflect on our own propensity to demand more from a finite planet.
