An Old Man and a Young Girl
It’s Davos 2020. A posh ski resort where the politicians and
CEOs show up and try to pretend they’re concerned about the planet. But the
carbon footprint they’ve made just getting there tells a different story. This year they’ve been given free snowshoes
in the hope that they’ll walk between the venues. Perhaps Trump will give it a
go? After all he’s just said that “I’m a big
believer in the environment. The environment to me is very important.” But he followed
it up with a disclaimer. Don’t pay any attention to the doom-and-gloom sayers,
he added. It’s all fake news. Apparently, everything is just fine.
In spite of the hopeless task of
convincing neo-liberal capitalists they have to give it all up, some important
speeches are being made. Already the
major figures in the climate change debate are making their voices heard –
particularly David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg. “The moment of crisis has come,” Attenborough said, unambiguously, a
few days ago. Thunberg reminded the politicians and bankers that they have
failed lamentably since the first climate change conference more than 30 years
ago. Since then, “No
political ideology or economic structure has managed to tackle the climate and
environmental emergency and create a cohesive and sustainable world. Because
that world, in case you hadn’t noticed, is currently on fire.”
It takes an old man and a young girl to tell us the
unpalatable facts about the state of the world we live on. The former can tell
the truth because he no longer has anything to lose – his career is behind him,
his standing in environmental science is unassailable. The second because she has all her life in
front of her and everything to lose by not speaking out. She is risking
everything for the future that older generations have compromised – perhaps
irrevocably.
The beautiful, natural world that existed when I was born no
longer exists. For me that is shocking, because I’m not that old. The
environment around the small farm I grew up on was teeming with wildlife – more
than 50% of which is now extinct or seriously endangered by human activity.
Moths, butterflies, bees, doves, sparrows, nightingales, corn-crakes, snow
hares, otters – I grew up taking their presence for granted. Further afield there
were wildernesses where you could wander and imagine that there was no other
human on the planet. Now even these are shrunk to a fraction of their size and
altered beyond recognition by human activity. This is not just me being nostalgic or a bit alarmist. In a new programme on the BBC Attenborough warns of "
The satellites circling the globe tell us the truth. Forests
are vanishing at the rate of thousands of acres every day. Vanishing ice is
raising ocean levels across the planet, currently at increments of a couple of
centimetres, but the rate is increasing. In Louisiana land is being lost to the
sea at the rate of a football field every 45 minutes. In New Zealand a legal
case has just admitted that some Pacific islands will not exist in as little as
a decade. You can’t turn on the TV
without a ‘natural’ disaster caused by fire, rain or wind – sometimes all
three. And each disaster comes at a humanitarian as well as an economic cost.
But we carry on our unsustainable lives as usual. Sadly, a
keep-cup and a reusable shopping bag won’t keep catastrophe at bay. We have to look at a fundamental
restructuring of the way we live. It’s a
matter of time – optimists say we have a decade, other scientists say a few
years – before we will be forced to abandon our wasteful, destructive
lifestyles and relive the privations of a third world economic crisis, as governments
become less able to fund reconstruction or relocation.
If we want to live like the inhabitants of Winter Fell in a
21st century version of Game of Thrones, we are heading in the right
direction.
The stark message that Davos should be addressing is that
most of the planet is on track to become an arid, storm-ravaged waste land. The
survivors will be fighting over whatever is left habitable. And how are we going to breathe an atmosphere
saturated by carbon dioxide, methane and the smoke of burning forests?
No one is coming to save us.
We have to do it ourselves. And we can start by listening to the voices
crying truth in the wilderness of fake news – David Attenborough and Greta
Thunberg. We don’t all have to be activists, but we do have to take action and
make our governments aware that the natural world matters, because it’s the
only one we have.
#BrexitClimateEmergencyExtinctionCrisis
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