Thursday, February 13, 2020

Climate justice - Oh my God, what have we done and what are we doing!?


Global warming has improbably compressed into two generations the entire story of human civilization. First, the project of remaking the planet so that it is undeniably ours, a project whose exhaust, the poison of emissions, now casually works its way through millennia of ice so quickly you can see the melt with a naked eye, destroying the environmental conditions that have held stable and steadily governed for literally all of human history. That has been the work of a single generation. The second generation faces a very different task: the project of preserving our collective future, forestalling that devastation and engineering an alternate path. There is simply no analogy to draw on, outside of mythology and theology—and perhaps the Cold War prospect of mutually assured destruction.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 29). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

What, brothers and sisters, have we done? We boomers and our predecessors during the industrial age have polluted our earth to the point of destroying its life sustaining eco-systems.

We can say that we didn't know. Up until the mid 80s that excuse for our eggregious behaviors is legitimate, but now we know.

A conscientious person is aghast. And what is to be done so that our successors can survive and so that we have taken our legitimate responsibility for what our social systems have done to our eco-systems?

There are some clear actions we are called to:

  1. Educate ourselves and others about how our social systems are impacting the earth's eco-systems.
  2. Organize a response to the destruction to mitigate its consequences.
  3. Vote and impact systems of destruction as well as amelioration.
  4. Strike, boycott, and nonviolently protest the destructive practices of our social systems.
  5. Covenant with others in support and faith to care for each other and the eco-systems of which we are an integral and influential part.
  6. Support and participate in organizations and institutions working to ameliorate the relationships between our social systems and eco-systems.

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