Solidarity on Climate Change
by Robert F. W. Whitlock
The Editor of Pacific Call contacted me a few days ago to ask if I would write an article on the topic of Climate Change. I told him I could probably have something within a week. I wanted time to think about how to approach the topic, in hopes of writing a meaningful and high-impact article. I was also looking forward to attending an Environmental Summit in Portland, hosted by Maitripa College, where the Dalai Lama was scheduled to speak.
After a week, I wrote him still struggling with the approach. The topic of climate change is huge, it’s implications and ramifications far and wide ranging, indeed, perhaps no aspect of life on Earth has been or will be left untouched by this awesome force of “anthropogenic forcing.” I want to introduce the topic this way, because my guess is that I am not alone having an experience of distress and shock at the monumental prospect of climate change. I want to focus on the psychological impacts on people like me, and surely many others. Fossil fuels, greenhouse gasses, and climate change. Changing the Earth’s atmosphere; destabilizing the living systems of the Earth; destabilizing lives, economies – indeed the situation is a crisis.
As I type these words news articles abound of wild weather events. The sky is different. I have seen it change, in my short life-time. The amount of carbon in the sky has increased in 35 years, from about 335 parts per million in 1978, to over 400 ppm today. Prior to industrialization the level of carbon was about 275 ppm. Today there is more haze in the sky. There is more moisture, and the frequency of intensely powerful and destructive storms has increased.
What are the psychological implications of seeing the world change? Personally, it has been a feeling of having been mind-boggled, how can leaders in politics and industry be so callous, as to endanger the well-being of life on planet Earth?
Edward Abbey wrote that “The Earth, like the air, like the water, belongs to everyone, … and to no one at all.” How do the fossil fuel industries justify extracting these precious fossil fuel resources? When extractions and consumptions endanger life: how do they justify profiting from these activities?
Why do we not yet have leaders who can step up with courage in opposition to this reckless force of industrial growth? The statistics support the necessity of urgent re-direction: already, human societies are living above the plateau of sustainability
I am sitting next to a poster of the Olympia Occupy Wall Street encampment, with the big top of Capitol Campus Legislative Building Dome in the background, with a large banner hung in the foreground reading “Solidarity Worldwide.”
The Dalai Lama and the rest of the panel on stage (including Andrea Durbin, David Suzuki, and Oregon Governor Kitzhaber) all agreed that a new path must be forged, away from materialism and consumerism, and toward a redefined story of success, based on friendliness, compassion, community and cooperation. Mutual prosperity must be the goal rather than competition to and domination. What is the path out of anxiety and stress and malaise brought on by fear over climate change? In part, it can be in taking action for change.
In Olympia, activists with the Olympia FOR’s “Confronting the Climate Crisis” project have been mounting a vigorous campaign to oppose the Port of Olympia’s complicity in the hydro-fracking industry of Western North Dakota Bakken Oil Shale formation.
Maybe our best bet to see positive, rational, common sense, meaningful change happen in our lifetimes, for the mutual benefit of all beings, will be through actions taken at the local level, where the changes can rebound and redouble up the political and economic chains of power. I hope so.