What's the Right Word for "Emergency"?

Holy flying freak out! The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide hit over 412 parts per million (ppm) this past week! We're still setting temperature records, especially in the Arctic. Despite fossil fuel CO2 emissions being flat over the last few years, CO2 concentration is still increasing — and at an accelerating rate. Sea level is rising at an accelerating rate. The oceans are heating at an accelerating rate. Unprecedented ocean acidification is increasing at an accelerating rate. And ocean de-oxygenation is on the increase, as well.

If you understand global warming and climate change, you'll understand how distressing all of this is. But if you don't understand it, what can I say to explain that this is an emergency — even though you're not bleeding or in pain? Yet.

Look at this. It's a fuzzy version of what my hubby just presented at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly. Just note how all the graphs are on the upswing.

All of these data trends point to a planetary emergency ... but still, amongst the public (and even amongst the vast majority of scientists, it seems), there's no sense of panic or urgency. No sense of impending calamity or danger. No sense of crisis or emergency.

What's a gal who cares about the biosphere — and all the children, of all species — to do? What WORD is going to help people grasp the plight we are in? What metaphor will help people get that we're in a doomsday scenario?

Please, I'm begging for help here. Can we put our heads (and hearts) together globally and come up with the right words to say? The right metaphors and analogies? The right graphs and graphics? Can the advertising agencies of the world do some pro bono work in order to help us safeguard the future? Can the artists and musicians come up with ways to wake up the public? 

We are so close to the point of no return (if not already past it) that my plea is a desperate one. 

Can you help solve this problem? Or do you know someone who might be able to?

Reform, Revolt, Transformation (and Vitamin B12)

A tweet wafted past me the other day (I don't go checkin' out Twitter ... no time) and it really stuck out as profound, and maybe important. Here's what I saw: 

AntiReform ProRevolt @Anti_Reform Reform is designed to create an illusion of progress.

That reminded me of a discussion my hubby and I had had recently in our kitchen. In a (possibly B12 deficiency-induced) moment of guilt (did you know that about vitamin B12?), I was talking about something I haven't successfully shifted in my life. "Well, at least I'm further along than most people." 

Now, in the interests of not misquoting my beloved, I can't tell you exactly how he responded because I can't remember exactly what he said (I've since upped my B12 intake!). But it wasn't a pretty observation about our culture and it led to the following realization for me. We've been posing the wrong question all these years. We've been asking

What can I do? 

instead of 

How must I change?

"How must I change?" shows an understanding that transformation is necessary. It shows a willingness to make necessary sacrifices. It shows an appreciation that we're all implicated (it's not someone or something else that must change). 

A couple of weeks ago, I told you that "What can I do?" usually means "I'm not really interested in doing anything (because if I was, I would have done it by now)." "How must I change?" sounds like a sincere quest ... a call for a personal revolution that will snowball (ahem, a lot of those melting these days, eh?) into societal transformation. 

Reform has taken us nowhere but backwards. Revolt? My gosh, that's a toughie. So many human beings are too comfortable. So many other human beings are struggling every day of their lives. Where are those who will risk revolt or who can afford revolt? 

I suppose that's why I talk of rapid transformation to a zero-carbon economy, one that will be safer, cleaner, healthier, more equitable and more peaceful. Because who, who, who would not want that?

Have you heard of the 12-second transition? A prof at university talked about it. I remember experiencing it myself one morning when I threw open my dorm room window after pulling an all-nighter to complete a paper. The beautiful spring air wafted in and the pheasants down in the ravine behind our college started squawking their morning greeting. Instantly, I transformed from an armchair-hugging bookworm to someone who delights in the natural world and outdoor pursuits. It was virtually instantaneous.

If we can fall in love at first sight, become parents overnight, have an accident that changes everything in an instant ... then we know that rapid transformation is possible. For the sake of the children and future generations of all species, how must we change?

We're Standing in the Intersection

That image of the huge juggernaut wending its way down the street in India, through throngs of people, some of whom, it is purported, are getting crushed beneath the chariot's giant wheels ... that image has stuck with me all week. 

And now I realize, we — humanity and all life on Earth — are trapped in an intersection with juggernauts rolling towards us from all four directions. There's (1) the Big Money profit-at-all-costs economy (and the governments riding along in their pockets); there are (2) the mammoth fossil fuel industries (who refuse to budge out of their number one money-making spot); there's (3) the colossus of EuroAmerican consumer culture turning every citizen of the world into a shopper; and then there's (4) the climate armageddon — increasingly catastrophic impacts of global climate disruption — bearing down on us. 

(Read this Scientific American article if you want to feel chilled this morning. "Climate Armageddon: How the World's Weather Could Quickly Run Amok," by Fred Guterl, is an excerpt from his book The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It. In it, Guterl lists dynamical systems theorist Tim Lenton's nine tipping points that could lead to abrupt climate flips — and catastrophic effects. Ironically, Lenton doesn't even mention the scariest one: the methane time bomb in the Arctic. See the Arctic Methane Emergency Group website and this Homo Sapiens, Save Your Earth blog post for information on this potential cataclysm.)

Where do the global warming/climate change denialists, skeptics, ignorers and delayers fit into this metaphor? Ah, they're the ones pushing innocent people under the wheels. Their delay tactics are bringing on a holocaust of unimaginable proportions, and yet they still get their feelings hurt when you call them deniers. Grrrr.

So, here we are. Trapped. Cornered. (Ha! Figuratively literally!) Will some survive by slipping under the enormous chariots? Or by pressing themselves against the walls of the surrounding buildings? Perhaps, but we don't know how many juggernauts are waiting for us behind the four we can see. So, what do we do?

Quite often, the question is "But what can one person do?" I think it's time we stopped posing this question. We have to start seeing the power and strength in our numbers. The solution is simple: stop the juggernauts. How we stop the juggernauts is the complex part.

1. Pull the rug out from under Big Money. Invest only in renewable (perpetual, non-burning) energy technologies and other ethical funds. Stop buying frivolous things. Buy organic and locally grown foods (and less of it = lose weight = more energy to fight this good fight). Vote with your money! 

And wake up when it comes to election time — and in between. Was it Marx who called religion the opiate of the masses? Well, democracy has become our soother, our pacifier. It has dumbed us down and convinced us that we have nothing to worry about. With democracies everywhere becoming police states (to protect fossil fuel production and profits), it's time to be worried, very worried!

2. Fossil fuels. Can't live with 'em (they're killing us!). Can't live without 'em (we're hooked because of our lifestyles). Getting ourselves off this addiction means convincing our governments to invest public funds in the right things, rather than fighter jets and wars on other countries. Our children and grandchildren will be happy to repay debts incurred to ensure them a future. It's those other debts they will find abhorrent. Individuals will not be able to change en masse until governments use everything they've got to make the necessary changes for us: legislation, incentives, disincentives, fines and penalties, education and publicity, tax money, intergovernmental relationships ....

3. The globalized EuroAmerican culture? See through it, folks. Don't buy in, don't feed it. Go for walks instead of watching violent movies. Take a bike trip instead of planning a vacation in Hawaii (unless you live in Hawaii). Our consumer culture drives the fossil-fuelled economy, which necessitates the military-industrial complex. Why don't we all just step out of the rat race for a while till we get the climate mess fixed. Then we can figure out if we want to build a renewable energy-powered rat race — or maybe not go back there.

4. Climate catastrophe? Everyone's talking about adaptation (and hey, I'm guilty: I'm teaching my students to grow food, because you can't learn that sort of thing overnight), but without mitigation (from the Latin verb mitigare, to alleviate: the action of reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of something), we simply will not be able to adapt. Global warming, climate change, and ocean acidification will continue for a thousand years — and that's after we reach zero carbon emissions and stabilize carbon in the atmosphere. We must do something drastic NOW. I'm now a convert to the call for geoengineering in the north. If we don't cool and refreeze the Arctic, we are doomed. And for those who insist we shouldn't experiment with the climate system, I say Hellooooo! Wake up! We have been meddling with it (albeit unknowingly at first) since the start of the industrial revolution. There's no time left to be a purist. If we're going down already, why not try the one thing that could possibly stick a spoke in the wheels.

Which brings me back to what we should be doing as a threatened species facing our exterminators. We need to poke giant sticks in the wheels of the juggernauts. We need to place wheel chocks/wedges, giant bricks or blocks in front of the chariots' wheels. Together.

We have to stop these juggernauts at all costs — except our children's lives.

Responding to Scientists Who Don't Like "Alarmism"

Sometimes I find myself commenting on websites and blogs (or responding to other commenters) and thinking that what I've written is rather profound or potentially transformative. So today I'd like to share a couple of those comments with you.

Here's the first:
"But what if you're completely wrong? What if it is NOT 'true that climate impacts will be ... not as bad as some climate hawks say'? What if agriculture is going to fail everywhere? What if billions of people are going to die? What if the planet is going to become uninhabitable (to all but jellyfish and cockroaches, if they're lucky)?

"When my first teaching job took me to a logging town, I quickly learned to say, 'Sure, not every tree is for saving, but nor is every tree for chopping down.' Loggers and kids of loggers could handle that 'moderate' stance. But we weren't talking about a (literally) potential end-of-the-world scenario, we were talking about local forests.

"Does it really make sense to continue sitting around, talking about our fire safety rules and discussing the wisdom of pulling the alarm while the blinkin' house is on fire? If you're going to do that, at least lead the children to safety first, damn it! Indeed, take all the time you want to figure out how best to communicate the emergency, just ensure the children — of all species — a viable future first."

That was my response to the blogger. Then I read some of the comments and bumped up against a scientist who seems to be placing "the scientific method" ahead of life. Guys, guys, when are you going to get it through your heads? If you're fighting for anything other than life, what you're fighting for is moot! It (money, profit, power, fame, the scientific method) will not even exist if we don't safeguard the future of life on this planet.

So here's my response to that scientist, in the form of five questions: 
"1. Given that the Global Humanitarian Forum "conceded" a significant margin of error and was reviewed by Hans Schellnhuber, Jeffrey Sachs and other experts, what is the real complaint about their Human Impact Report? (It strikes me that any human loss due to the climate change emergency should invoke a humanitarian response, but I guess if those who've died aren't our loved ones, well ....)

"2. Scientists think that the best way to think about the impacts of global heating and climate disruption is scientifically. But how have scientists proved this? What if the best way is to think with our hearts and our guts, with our compassion, spiritually, or with our parents' and grandparents' love and concern for the children we love? I'm just sayin'. That we should stay calm and think scientifically is still just a hypothesis, is it not?

"3. Isn't considering the worst case scenario an important aspect of risk management?

"4. Is it true that many (most? all?) computer climate models don't include the scariest, er, biggest Arctic carbon feedbacks (peatlands, permafrost, methane hydrates)?

"5. If that's true, then shouldn't we be far more concerned than we are now?"

Give me James Hansen any day. He's a scientist through and through (listen to him give any presentation other than his TED Talk), but he loves his grandchildren and he's willing to fight for their right to a viable and climate-safe future.

Communicating Climate Change - Where's the (Com)Passion?

I have a folder in my email program called Communicating CC. I have this fantasy that one day I'll do my PhD on the best way to communicate the science and impacts of climate change to the public, and my research will save the world! (I thought my master's research on sustainable development learning was going to save the world, too, but alas, no one was interested in that topic either.)
Anyway, I save any message that is even remotely related to how to get people to understand climate change. And between one of those items and a conversation I had this week with someone who works in the fossil fuel industry, I think I've figured something out.
Greenpeace recently asked me (and a million others) to ask Shell not to drill for oil in the Arctic. It struck me that their rationale was orders of magnitude less urgent than the actual situation:

"Today, a Finnish icebreaker is heading to Alaska to help Shell drill for oil. Everyone has a limit - for me it's the Arctic. That's why I'm here in Helsinki to stop it before it gets there. And that's why I need your help. Take action now and stop Shell with me. The Arctic is one of the last untouched natural areas on the planet, home of polar bears, narwhals, and other unique wildlife. Due to climate change, the Arctic sea ice is melting at an accelerating rate, opening up the Arctic to companies in search of more oil. It is wrong in so many ways. What would happen when an oil spill happens, I’m afraid to even think of it."

What if this committed activist had said, "The Arctic is sitting on massive amounts of frozen methane, a greenhouse gas that is 100 times more potent that carbon dioxide. If we allow more drilling and burning of fossil fuels, the Arctic will warm even more, releasing the methane and causing catastrophic climate chaos — including agricultural disasters and loss of food security around the world — and we'll all be guilty of the worst crime ever against humanity and the rest of Nature for having allowed it to happen."
I don't know. Doesn't that come closer to telling the terrifying truth? And even if some people read that and throw the covers over their heads, many more will wake up and demand action ... "You mean it's not just about polar bears and a few little oil spills affecting narwhals up north?" At least, that's what I believe.
(By the way, the automated response I got from Greenpeace actually made me laugh: "You’re amazing. As Shell is trying to expand into the Arctic, you’ve let them know that’s unacceptable. It will make a difference for the polar bears, Arctic terns and other amazing animals that depend on the Arctic." Hey, Greenpeace! I'm doing this to save my own ass, okay? And my niece's and stepsons' asses, okay? If I save them, the Arctic terns will be saved too. Okay? Bless 'em, they're lovely birds. And it's really cool that theirs is the longest regular migration by any known animal. But I don't think that's why people are going to go up against Shell to fight Arctic drilling and global warming.)
Then I found myself talking with someone who works in Calgary, Canada's seat of the fossil fuel industry. He was all excited about efficiency standards in American cars, and how "Saudi America" will soon be energy independent because there's so much fuel here (in North America) that we haven't tapped yet. He was standing there with his wife and young daughter. How could I inform him (as if he doesn't know) that American fossil fuels are just as destructive to the climate system as those from the Middle East? How could I tell him that automotive fuel standards are too little, too late? How could I explain that fracking for "all sorts of natural gas" is going to be disastrous?
I came away both relieved that I hadn't started a fight, especially with his daughter standing there, and ashamed that I didn't have the guts to speak up.
It seems that the world will not be saved because too many of us (Greenpeace and I included) are too nice (aka, too wussie) to speak up and tell the truth in public to defend the children and their future from those who knowingly or unwittingly are putting profit before life.
Grandfather of biodiversity, Edward O. Wilson, recently told an interviewer:

"We have to do everything we possibly can. I like to tell this the way a former Southern Baptist would tell it, in the original accent. Then you’ll see what I’m trying to say when I say we have to use every weapon at our disposal, all the time, everything from science to activism to political influence, etc. So this is Billy Sunday, a pioneer in Southern evangelicalism and fundamentalism in the ’20s: 'I hate sin. I hate sin so much I’m going to fight it till my arms won’t move no more. When my arms don’t move no more, I’m gonna bite it. And when all my teeth are gone, I’m gonna gum it.' Now you get the picture. We all have to do that. When there’s nothing else at hand, gum it."

So let's not be afraid to wear down our climate activist teeth, my friends!!! If need be, we'll just gum the problem till we solve it! In the meantime, let's communicate the potential (and probable, if we don't change our track) impacts of the climate change emergency in ways that people will actually hear and take seriously. With all honour to the remarkable Arctic tern.

Geoengineering, Our Metaphorical Tracheotomy

December 4, 2011

If your child is deathly allergic to insect stings, what do you do? You buy an EpiPen® (or two or three) and keep it near your child at all times. An epinephrine auto-injector could save your child's life one day if a bee sting or wasp sting leads to anaphylactic shock.

Now, let's apply this as a metaphor. Your child (or your wife, in the case I witnessed) is stung on the neck by a wasp. You always carry an EpiPen, just in case. Well, this is the "case" you've been waiting for, but instead you decide to wait and see. Why use an EpiPen if you don't have to, right? I mean, heck, nobody wants to be given a medication they don't need. Right? And why waste the money?

Fast forward about 30 minutes. You carry your child (or your wife, in the case I witnessed) into the emergency ward. They're almost dead, but the doctor works feverishly, injecting this and that, setting up a drip, calling the helicopter ambulance, staying with your child (or wife) to monitor their condition until the moment the helicopter ambulance closes its door. Just before that door closes, eyelids flutter and open slightly, and a very weak voice says, "I was almost gone there, wasn't I?" Your child (or your wife, in this case) lives. 

The doctor is shaken for weeks. He knows how close he came to losing your child (or your spouse). He's just happy he didn't have to perform a tracheotomy but keeps asking the same question, over and over. Why, if they had an EpiPen, did they not use it? (My husband was the doctor, I was his assistant. This incident took place many years ago. As you can tell, I am still shaken by this memory.)

WE ARE ALL ALLERGIC TO METHANE. The Arctic is warming and spewing methane. This is creating a huge allergic reaction (or positive feedback loop). The methane, a potent greenhouse gas, creates more warming. According to the latest satellite data, the Arctic is now warming four times faster than the rest of the world. This extra warming is leading to more melting permafrost and more destabilized (thawed) methane hydrates along the continental shelf, releasing more methane, leading to more warming. It is a viciously vicious cycle, and we are dangerously close to letting it kill us.

(You think I'm being overly dramatic, perhaps for effect? No. Once we allow the summer Arctic sea ice to disappear, the northern hemisphere will lose the cooling "air conditioner" effect during our growing season. Remember Russia, 2010? It won't take too many widespread crop failures before we descend into global chaos.)

How many people deal with their bee sting allergy by just living life indoors all the time? Not many. Most choose to go outdoors — and carry an EpiPen. We've been carrying a metaphorical EpiPen around since at least 1988: the concept of living the same lifestyle but lowering our global greenhouse gas emissions, moving to renewable energy, being greener.

Now we've been stung, and we refuse to use our EpiPen. It's too expensive, we say. We can't afford it. It's too inconvenient. "I'd rather die comfortable than live uncomfortable." (Real quote, that one.) I'm not going to use my EpiPen unless China uses its Epipen! Blah blah blah.

So what are we going to do? It's an emergency situation! What are we going to do? We're actually facing down the prospect of extinction of our species! What are we going to do?

Folks, the tracheotomy is an emergency procedure for emergency situations. Our collective tracheotomy is geoengineering: "deliberate large-scale engineering and manipulation of the planetary environment to combat or counteract anthropogenic changes in atmospheric chemistry" (Wikipedia).

If we're already saying no to the possibility of geoengineering, then we either don't realize the emergency we're in, or we're choosing a future with no future for our children. The Canadian Youth Climate Coalition naively, in my view, calls geoengineering "a false solution."

Friends, geoengineering is not a false solution, it is our last resort — and soon to be our only solution. We have been stung. We are ignoring the allergic reaction. We are refusing to use our EpiPen. If we don't get some adrenalin into our system soon, we'd better be open to a tracheotomy (pardon the pun). Because otherwise, we are opting for death.

 

 

 

April 7, 2024

It's a dozen years since I wrote the post above. Everything is — still — getting worse, faster. The deniers (and yes, kowtowing politicians and non-brave climate scientists) have caused so much delay that we're on catastrophe's doorstep. (Anyone remember the summer of 2023? Yowza.)

While the deniers have been denying that digging up and burning carbon that was safely stored away via the long-term carbon cycle 250 million years ago — and spewing an extra ±50 billion tonnes of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year — would affect the climate system or overwhelm the short-term carbon cycle, conspiracy theorists have been insisting that some secret cabal has been geoengineering the climate. (To be fair, the geoengineering began at the start of the Industrial Revolution back around 1750 when we industrialized our fossil fuel burning. (And our impacts began 11,000 years ago as we started developing agriculture.) But Dane, seriously dude, learn the science of condensation of contrails at different altitudes and humidities.) 

Anyway, as I exhorted above, if we'd used our metaphorical EpiPen by lowering our carbon and other GHG emissions in every way we could, we wouldn't now be needing a tracheotomy / geoengineering. And so the geoengineering experiments have begun. (BEGUN, Dane, got that?)

Here's the scary part for me. With all extreme weather events now increasing in intensity, frequency and/or duration — and many now starting to compound (pile on top of each other) — and with taxpayers still subsidizing fossil fuel corporations (who are making windfall profits, BTW) to the tune of $7 trillion around the world every year (IMF, 2023), and with practically every government still "moving ahead" with business as usual (AKA full-steam ahead to extinction), it seems like a "mere" tracheotomy (geoengineering) isn't going to cut it anymore (sorry for the pun).

 

But nothing, not even geoengineering, is going to save us without an immediate and rapid decline in global GHG emissions.

It's as though the world has decided to wait until the too-late very last minute and then opt for ... decapitation. That's a sure-fire way to open up our constricted airway and get some air into our lungs. It'll kill us, sure, but we kept the economy pumping away, didn't we? Yeah, that's what our chosen trajectory seems to be. Sure will make us wonder why we didn't use our collective EpiPen when we still had the chance.

THE GLOVES ARE OFF — NO MORE MS. NICE GUY!

It has been harder than usual for me to feel festive this Christmas season.

First, I heard recently that a large group representing business, industry and commerce in the United States (I will not dignify them by giving them free publicity here) is suing some youth who staged a phoney press conference. Ya know, when the old farts who care only for money start attacking the young people who are desperately trying to safeguard their own future — that's when my gloves come off. My generation has no right whatsoever — NONE — to give the younger generations a hard time when we are 100% responsible for the mess their future (heck, our future!) is in.

Second, a local newspaper defamed my husband — by name — and then gave him only one sentence in which to show the weight of evidence that we are in a global climate change emergency. Peter spends 8 to 18 hours of every day reading and synthesizing the global warming / climate change research, so to be insulted for caring about future generations (heck, today's generations!) was hard to bear. Not to mention it was also a sign that our small community isn't the entirely intelligent, supportive and caring place we thought it was.

(Those in Canada will appreciate this farce: CBC's crank commentator Rex Murphy was one of the "experts" quoted to "prove" that my husband's stance is "extremist." I did not know that Murphy is a climatologist when he's not on radio and television. These climate change deniers are very busy people — busy memorizing all the latest denialist drivel it seems they have been asked to spout and spread at every opportunity. And the world continues to heat up. Don't believe it? Let's compare your so-called "facts" to what is actually happening in the Arctic.)

And third, the sense of failure and progenycidal disaster coming out of the Copenhagen climate talks hangs over me like a black cloud of betrayal. It seems that our human world is so entrenched in borders and boundaries and sovereignty that the negotiators and leaders just could not view the Earth as one planet, its atmosphere as the same atmosphere for all nations. The only thing that has been nearly globalized is our addiction to economic growth through fossil fuel use.

Reading this view of China's role in the final hours of the talks sealed that realization for me — and gave me a shudder. The government of China wants to develop — at all costs. Given what I've seen recently of the devastation in that once beautiful country, I'm not sure the Chinese people impacted by this not-sustainable development would choose it over living off the land, given the choice. (Photos by the very courageous photographer, Lu Guang.) Remember "economic globalization"? It seems we've created a monster that's come back to bite us in the butt.

87 Days - The Cognitive Dissonance that Leads to Confusion and Inaction

World Wildlife Fund put out a report this week (Arctic Climate Feedbacks: Global Implications), warning that the global impacts of warming in the Arctic will "outstrip predictions." That's a bit of an understatement if (a) you noticed that the 2007 IPCC report didn't include Arctic carbon feedbacks (nor any carbon feedbacks at all), and (b) you've got your eyes open.
But as is happening a lot these days, the seriousness of the report is not met with a serious enough response. That's when people get confused. "Hmmm," says the member of the public who doesn't have (or take) the time to find out what's really going on with global climate change, "I keep hearing that it's serious and urgent, but I don't see my government leaders and others who I respect addressing it seriously or urgently. All they do is talk and negotiate."
In this case, WWF has partnered with other concerned nongovernmental organizations to come up with A Copenhagen Climate Treaty [pdf], A Proposal for a Copenhagen Agreement by Members of the NGO Community.
In it, the NGO community sets out to "transform the world to a zero-carbon economy [hurray!] over the coming decades, including global emissions cuts of at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050." [Oh darn, hurrayed too soon.]
Now, I'm no mathematical genius, but I know that we can't get to a zero-carbon economy by reducing our emissions by only 80%, even if it's 80% below 1990 levels. We have to cut our emissions by 100%. And by far sooner than 2050.
My discomfort is that these well-meaning NGOs will probably defend this position by saying it's what they "realistically" think they can get. But killing the future more slowly than "business as usual" will kill it is still killing the future. And if we know we have to get to zero carbon emissions, why ask for 80% cuts? It's slow suicide.
Let's be bold and audacious — and courageous — on behalf of all future generations and ask for what we need to ensure their future: cuts of 100%, and a rapid transition to a renewable energy based, zero carbon economy that will be safer, cleaner, healthier, more equitable and more peaceful than what we've got right now!

89 Days - "Climate Change Now Has a Name and a Face"

As summer is now unofficially over here (most Canadian children head back to school today), it's a great pleasure to share this education-related compassionate climate action with teachers and non-teachers alike.

Lauren McClanahan is a professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, USA — quite close to where I live. In her quest to help her student teachers understand the climate change emergency, she called on the voices of students in a small village in Alaska. In Educating Heather, McClanahan explains how she found a way to connect the hearts of her students to the climate change crisis:

No doubt my preservice secondary education student, Heather, is familiar with the topic of climate change. Everywhere we look, we see media coverage. But there still seems to be something missing. There still appears to be a disconnect, for my preservice teachers, anyway, between what they read about online and what they see in their day-to-day lives. And this has huge implications for their futures as public school teachers. One way to address this disconnect has been to put a face to the topic of climate change. By connecting all of my "Heathers" to students who live in places where climate change is having actual, observable effects, a topic that was once only theoretical to many of my students becomes real.

She explains that her students probably believe themselves to be "green," but when it comes to the catastrophic changes happening in the Arctic, for example, her students just don't see them. The "First Person Singular" project she undertook gave voice to thawing permafrost, disappearing fish stocks, changing migratory routes, and an unravelling subsistence culture that has lasted for thousands of years.

I won't say too much more. The article is beautifully written and evocative. Please read it!

And let's start looking for ways to help people really see and hear what's happening to those already impacted by climate chaos in the most climate-change-vulnerable regions of the world.