Climate Change: What Then Must We Do?
Billy: And the people asked him, saying, “What shall we do then?”
Guy: What’s that?
Billy: It’s from Luke chapter three, verse ten. What then must we do? Tolstoy asked the same question. He wrote a book with that title. He was so upset about the poverty in Moscow that he went one night into the poorest section and just gave away all his money. You could do that now. Five American dollars would be a fortune to one of these people.
Guy: Wouldn’t do any good, just be a drop in the ocean.
Billy: Ahh, that’s the same conclusion Tolstoy came to, I disagree.
Guy: Oh, what’s your solution?
Billy: Well, I support the view that you just don’t think about the major issues. You do whatever you can about the misery that’s in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light. You think that’s naïve, don’t you?
Guy: Yep.
Billy: It’s alright, most journalists do.
Guy: We can’t afford to get involved.
Billy: Typical journo's answer.
From: The Year of Living Dangerously. A film by Peter Weir
I spoke to a friend over dinner one evening this week. She was interested in my new initiative My Carbon Zero, designed to inspire individual and collective action in the fight against climate change. Not from a personal point of view, and not overly from the perspective of her business either, just a bit. She recognises that she has to do something because her clients are asking her tricky questions. They're big companies and, for whatever reason - whether they believe it or just because their customers and investors are asking - they're pushing out along their supply chains to find out what their suppliers are doing on climate change. She's feeling a bit of heat.
"Don't get me wrong, I believe in climate change," she noted, bringing me at least some sense of relief. "It's just that I don't think it's my responsibility to do anything about it."
Hmmm...OK, I thought. A few days earlier, I'd sent her a BBC News article, just published, about the accelerating collapse of the Greenland ice-sheet. This bit had caught my eye.
“The result for 2019 confirms that the ice sheet has returned to a state of high loss, in line with the IPCCs worst-case climate warming scenario,” said Prof Andy Shepherd from Leeds University, who is the co-lead investigator for Imbie.
”This means we need to prepare for an extra 10cm or so of global sea level rise by 2100 from Greenland alone.”
”And at the same time we have to invent a new worst-case climate warming scenario, because Greenland is already tracking the current one.””
Already tracking the current worst-case scenario...
Not super great news. I've long stopped giving presentations about what a 6 oC warming will do to the planet. "No large mammals can live on the planet at that point," I'd share with the audience. "You've all got that large mammal look about you" I'd add, cuing nervous laughter but seemingly little action. Grim it is indeed and here we are tracking it already. But it's not my friend's responsibility, and by extension, it seems not anyone else's either, other than "the government's," whoever that is.
"What we need," she said, "Is a big, clear report that makes it totally undeniable that we're in deep trouble, and then governments might act, then companies like mine might be inspired to do something."
I almost cried. "Geez," I said, "How many big, clear reports do you need? The IPCC and so many climate scientists have been publishing reports for decades and yet here we are, in the deepest of poos."
I added that this report about the Greenland ice-shelf should alone be the equivalent of the falling sky, the turning point to finally stimulate action.
"Oh..." she said and we moved to dessert.
I've long learned not to get too despondent about such conversations. "Ke garne" was a saying I learned in 1984 when I first left Australia and spent three months working in the community forests of Nepal's Middle Hills. "Ke garne" or "What to do?" is a wonderful way of coping with things you can't change. It's karma, just soldier on.
One of the great tensions for change-makers is this question of what to do when you're confronted by an immovable object beyond your power to change. Despite everything you do, all the tricks you've learned from past experiences, your sheer will and determination, your oratory skills, nothing works, you just can't make a dent.
When then must we do? Ke garne.
And then yesterday morning I was uplifted on my daily walk with Finn when I saw the wee plant in the photo here. Standing tall, it had somehow survived the entire hay-making drama that had swirled around it. Tractors had run back and forth criss-crossing the field, first cutting everything, then whirling the grass to dry and finally, the bailing process. Everything was levelled, neat, tidy, very human and yet somehow…
A few steps further and then this! Another survivor! But this time with the utter audacity, the belligerent commitment to life to have burst into flower! Complete madness, disdainful disobedience! I looked for more but alas, the rest of the vast field was flattened.
Two small plants, two little symbols of precious life, of Nature unbowed by humanity's violence. Just two souls whispering, "Ke garne."
What hope!
I was reminded of Billy's words in The Year of Living Dangerously. Two years ago I bought Tolstoy's masterpiece but haven't been able to labour my way to the end.
Yet this sense of just doing what you can, adding your light to the sum of light came to me again yesterday when I saw these plants. It reminded me of Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen's words, "How would I live if I was exactly what’s needed to heal the world?" She'd been sharing her story of the light that's within all of us and its power to heal. Could we each add our light to the sum of light? Might that be the way?
"Keep going, that's how you get there" said Australian philosopher and cartoonist Michael Leunig. While I subscribe to the Deep Adaptation school of thought that has that what's coming our way is irreversible, I refuse to let go of hope. Smarter people than me, members of that school included, argue that this is a chimera, a foolishness and that the sooner I let it go, the sooner I'll be able to cope as that aforementioned poo hits the fan.
Well, I can't. I know that what's coming is going to be bad, but I refuse to act as though my actions don't count. "Be the Hummingbird" Wangari Maathai urged and so I must.
I look to my own inspiration, Richard St Barbe Baker, who spent his long life, probably the world's first global conservationist, urging us to protect forests and plant trees. Tireless work over generations and yet, nearly 40 years after his death, the carnage continues. "What did he achieve?" I often ask myself. I don't have an answer but I know it wasn't forest conservation. I know the trees he planted on the barren Judean Hills, delicately placing a few stones around each to inspire the life-giving work of earthworms, are no longer there.
What then of my work? When then must I do?
It is an eternal question for me, but I know I must do something. I must act and do what I can in the fight against climate change. I must reduce my own emissions, I must help to reduce emissions elsewhere and I must take all the carbon I've ever caused to be emitted into the atmosphere, out. I must try to inspire others to do the same.
“If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it may be an unjust fate”
Science tells us that the future isn't looking great and we'd be unwise to ignore that. But I hope that we can each do something and perhaps inspire others to act too. Should it fall that our collective boat does sail over the abyss, we might be able to cope somewhat better with the event if we at least know we gave it our best shot to turn it at some point. Waiting for someone else to wipe our bottom doesn't sound like a good way to live to me.
I hope my friend can find the inspiration she needs to take her first step, even if it's because someone else asked her too, just because it became a threat to her business she could no longer ignore. It feels good to act, and who knows, having taken one step, she might take ten. Fingers crossed.