If you are appalled that school children
are missing school to attend the climate strike today, you are not alone. I am
appalled. But I am appalled because those who birthed those children, who are
raising them, who collectively share reponsibility for keeping them safe - are
so blind to the most significant issue of our time – likely of all time – that
they they didn’t strike first, and indeed for the most part are not striking at
all. Instead, they are leaving leadership on this issue to their children, who
take action so they do not have to fear for their future.
So that they don’t have to fear for a future in which which water
shortages become more frequent and severe. In which refugees become greater in
number. In which mental health deteriorates. In which refugees grow in number
as they flee areas where water has become so scarce that they are no longer
able to inhabit them. In which conflict increases, as habitable land diminishes
and displaced people struggle to find somewhere to call home. In which huge
swathes of the weird and wonderful creatures we share this bit of space rock
with have gone extinct, never to be seen again – and in some cases, never to be
seen at all.[i]
If you think this sounds dramatic, it is
already happening. The US Department of Defence is already planning for a
future in which conflict as a result of climate change increases significantly.[ii]
The President of Kiribati, after years of
advocating for change to protect his small island nation, has bought 100 acres
of land in Fiji, so that when the now apparently inevitable time comes that his
people have to abandon their home as a result of the sea level rise which is
already impacting them, they have somewhere to go. He worries about the impact
this will have on his people, whose identity is intertwined with their land –
and how they will negotiate a Kiribati identity in a foreign land.[iii]
Traditional owners of lands in Samoa and
Tonga, whose cultures, stories, traditions have grown up around the patterns of
the world around them – are finding that these stories, rooted deep in time,
are out of kilter with changing weather patterns, and the resulting changes to
behaviour of plants and animals. Doesn’t sound like much, until you learn that
these changing patterns of behaviour are already impacting production of fruits
and other plants which we all eat – including the creatures we eat – rely on
pollination by insects, birds and seasonal winds.
For the most part, in urban Australia, we
are fairly well insulated from impacts such as these, so they, and the climate
changes which are producing them, are easy to dismiss. But the lived experience
of those in rural areas shows that our wide brown land is already being hit hard.
Many parts of NSW are experiencing the most severe drought on record. The
results of this have already been catastrophic for many. Mass fish deaths, the
shooting of thousands of head of sheep by landowners with no other choice,
people leaving farms which have been in their families for generations, loss of
precious topsoil no longer held in place by grass lond dead due to the drought
is swept away by windstorms, suicide by those who cannot bear these changes and
their impacts any more.
While for those of us in urban Australia
the greatest impact most of us have personally experienced is a slight increase
to our milk prices, beyond the urban fringe the impacts are such that within 50
years Dubbo will be a town set in the midst of desert.
To those who say that the response we should be making to
this situation is to recycle, catch public transport, and so on - I, and many, many others like me, have been doing this for years. I
recycle - but Australia's recycling crisis makes it doubtful that
thoserecycalabes will in fact be recycled. I try to take public transport -but
Sydney's woeful public tranport system makes this often impractical and
sometimes unsafe. I water my garden with grey water from my kitchen and shower.
I buy the ethical choices when I’m shopping. I, and the many, many others like
me, have done these things, and all the other things one is
"supposed" to do - the little things which collectively are supposed
to produce the necessary change. They are not enough.
Unlike many, I have had the privilege of
leading an environmental education organisation; I now work with another in
which care for our common home is integral to its work; I am fortunate to be
able to work with like-minded others in similar organisations in this space.
It is not enough.
We need urgent society-scale change.
The efforts of individuals, NGOs, and even
many business enterprises,[iv] are not enough to get the
job done. The change we need now needs to happen in, and come from, the top. It
needs to come from our government. And this change can only be accomplished
with votes and/or the weight of public opinion.
Our last federal election showed how little
confidence we should have in the electoral process to produce the necessary
change. We have a Prime Minister who, before assuming his current role, attracted
global notoriety for bringing a lump of coal into parliament and joking about
how there was no need to be scared of it. It came as no surprise that his
government continued to support the advancement of the Adani mine, with its
promise of being one of the biggest fossil fuel extractors in the world when up
and running. With some time until the next election, votes, for the purposes of
now, are out.
This leaves the weight of public opinion.
Well-planned civil disobedience typically follows a hierarchy, in which each
new level of disobedience is embarked upon when action at the previous level
has failed to achieve the sought-for result.
People who have been alert to the situation
we are in have been signing petitions and lobbying politicians and educating
children for years – decades now. All these years of lobbying have made no
difference, except that the situation has continued to worsen. And so today we
step up a level on the hierarchy of civil disobedience. To one which speaks of
disruption – to one which speaks to those who talk only money in economic cost,
the only language they seem to understand. Those in power should be paying
attention. The people they govern are becoming increasingly desperate in the
face of their governments’ failure to act.
If you're saying that the children who are
skipping school today would better serve this crisis by finishing their
educations and growing up to make a difference – we don’t have time. Without
dramatic society-wide change, in 12 years the climate will have changed, and
with that all the consequences we know about, and likely others we haven’t
thought of, will come to pass. The lives millions of fellow creatures whose lives
are being, and will be lost, through these changes at increasing rates, taking
with them their unique genetic codes, the results of millons of years of
evolution, as a result of our action and inaction. No matter how sophistcated
our cloning etc gets, the damage will already have been done. We will not be
able to recreate the Eden into which we and our children were born.
The only answer is action. And the time for
that action is now. The people who should be taking it are the adults – the
mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, the teachers of today. But in
the face of their inaction, the children are stepping in. And in my first act
of civil disobedience, so am I.