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As mentioned recently, I find it impossible to write a blog post every Sunday these days. Sorry about that. It's just too, well, negative. (I sometimes laugh that I once lost a friend because, as she put it, I was too positive!)
Today, I'll share with you (with his permission) the words of an activist friend who agreed with my take on the tagline ("subtitle") of a new climate change group's proposed banner. I was glad to discover that I'm not alone in thinking we have got to stop candy-coating what's happening to this precious planet and its 8 million species of inhabitants (not including viruses and bacteria).
Here's the original tagline: "Fighting for Our Children's Future"
Here are the complaints about it, paraphrased:
- a bit negative
- the word "fighting" has negative connotations
- it can conjure up battling, arguing, combating
- am similarly uncomfortable with "fighting"
- is not our strength that we were not fighting, but rather leading, standing up, organizing, etc.?
- what about "Standing up for our children's future"?
- how about a positive word with similar strength (working? acting? leading? organizing? marching?)
- if we see ourselves working with other stakeholders, saying "we are fighting" might not be helpful
- the language of “fighting” will alienate a lot of folks, especially if our intent is to reach out and engage, motivate and inspire others to participate and get active
- if you are fighting, it is a fight against someone
- many folks who work in the resource extraction business care about their kids; let's not fight against them, let's offer a vision of the future that they can get behind
- just drop the "fighting" and have "For Our Children’s Future" ... it's more inclusive
I was fascinated (if a little alarmed) and responded: "It's a fight. A fight not unlike a world war. A fight to safeguard the future for all living things, especially your children. It's a fight. Be proud warriors."
My friend privately said (paraphrasing), "Well put, Julie! I wish folks would stop soft-pedalling human and
species extinction. Perhaps to get Canadians on the same page, they need to see more graphically that children around the world
are suffering NOW."
But then proud papa and climate change activist extraordinaire, Howard Breen, chimed in (printed here with his permission):
Such truly good gentle beings we all are. We are loving parents who would do almost anything for our dearest. I am unequivocally convinced of that.
But things have seriously fundamentally changed. The science couldn't be clearer. There is nothing that is even remotely existentially the same in the history of humankind, except the prospect of nuclear winter or a bioterror pandemic. There are more 65 MILLION displaced in refugee camps around the world TODAY (and by 2030 my hunch is that this will at least triple), and North America and Europe are building walls.
President Bill Clinton once was asked how can the environmental movement win? He said that first and foremost, environmentalists are "far too polite," which is why we routinely get out-maneuvered by the corporate world.
Canada and the world are currently on a trajectory to exceed the non-binding Paris Climate Accord (meaning 3ºC or much much higher by 2050). To be honest (in adult company only), I think it's truly over for the next generation. Unless we fight. And with every ounce of courage we can muster.
Given the first responsibility of being a parent is to protect my children and grandchildren, I'm going to risk being arrested in an Extinction Rebellion NVDA [non-violent direct action].... I believe there's no longer any other choice — if I am to do everything moral and non-violently possible.
If anyone is not up for a fight against the worst corporate evil humanity has ever faced, fine, I understand (I may be the only one on this list that has been in a couple of different war zones or ever seen a lot of dead people close up).
But please, good folks, move aside, for those stepping up to fight the good fight for their kids — and feel we need to call it what it is. It is a climate necessity now to use the militaristic metaphors, as it was to go from "climate change" to "climate emergency" at the school district meeting.
That said, and I say this without reservation but with much heartache for everyone on the list that truly means well and feels nauseated by militarism and violence, when things get obviously desperate for everyone's children, those who are not actively "fighting for them" will increasingly be seen as enemy sympathizers.
In the meantime, my animal icon is a mother grizzly with threatened cubs.
T**** [and other leaders whose actions are increasingly planet-destroying and unprecedentedly evil], take note: The Extinction Rebellion "pitchforks" (as the right has taken to calling us of late) are amassing for the children.
With passionately fierce love,
Howard
"To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." — Sun Tzu
Howard, cher camarade, thank you for your fierce and passionate love for the children ... of all species!
Here's a guest post by Howard Breen, which was published June 30th, 2016 as an op ed in the Vancouver Observer. (If you've already read it, it's worth reading again!)
As a physician for nearly 40 years, Pender Islander Dr. Peter Carter [my beloved] did his best to save lives and help heal thousands of patients. But it wasn’t until he retired and became a full-time climate change research presenter that he made his most dire diagnosis.
“Earth has a dangerous fever it can’t shake,” Dr. Carter says. “The atmosphere and oceans are being poisoned by excess carbon dioxide, which reached a record 409 parts per million this spring. (It should be under 350 ppm.) CO2 is highly persistent and cumulative in both vital systems of the biosphere. The planet is in a rapidly deteriorating state of emergency for our future survival.”
As if to prove this diagnosis correct, the NASA team at Climate Science Awareness and Solutions has recently predicted that 2016 will be another record year for surface temperature increase, which is now above 1.0ºC (a record reached in 2015). “We are living on a planet substantially damaged and different from the one our species has developed on. Global temperature is now in the extremely dangerous zone for the world population and the rest of the “biosphere,” Dr. Carter explains.
According to Dr. Carter, founder of the Climate Emergency Institute, “The 2015 UN Paris Climate Agreement prescription only offers ‘intended’ targets that pretend to cure the afflicted Earth. The Paris prescription is to keep administering the poison under the guise of good intentions, which can only result in the death of the patient.” The 2 May 2016 UN Climate Secretariat update of nations’ non-binding targets reports that emissions will be higher in 2030 than they are today – making the Paris Agreement a death sentence.”
The essential – and totally reliable – test that Dr. Carter uses for this grim diagnosis is the level of greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere. “Record high, still accelerating levels of atmospheric GHG pollution have for years been on a consistent heading to end the human race and wipe out almost all life on Earth (both on land and in the oceans). Just in the last few years, the levels have jumped up even faster.”
“In a time of climate change deceit,” Dr. Carter confides, “telling the truth is a personal act for global survival.” So he doesn’t mince words when he shares the urgency of the climate and oceans emergency. “When I was a physician, it would have been the grossest negligence not to tell my patients of their diagnosis, no matter how bad it was.”
“The worst crime of all time, and now clearly the greatest evil ever, is the connivance of the big banking and fossil fuel corporations – with the compliant complicity of some big-economy governments – to deny the catastrophic dangers of continued emissions and to keep delaying decisive and rapid action to put global emissions into decline. This worst-ever negligence has come about because as a society we are in deep denial of the dire state of planetary emergency the entire world is in.”
The prognosis is grim. Dr. Carter believes that “only our profound care and compassion can save today's children and all future generations from inheriting a literal hell on Earth.”
The 2014 Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave us the bottom line for our future survival. “The IPCC said that limiting warming requires ‘near zero emissions of carbon dioxide and other long-lived greenhouse gases.’ Science rules this world, and rules out more carbon emissions.”
The “other long-lived greenhouse gases” are methane and nitrous oxide. Methane emissions from the livestock industry and artificial wetland rice production, as well as from the natural gas industry (fracking), can and must be eliminated. According to Dr. Carter, “The switch to a healthy vegan (lower GHG-emitting) diet is now vital for tomorrow’s children – and today’s – to have a life worth living.
Other “prescriptions” to get our greenhouse gas fever down include ending government subsidies to fossil fuel corporations and charging large corporate greenhouse gas polluters the full cost of their deadly pollution.
“Our only and best imaginable future is with safe, clean, everlasting 100% renewable energy,” Dr. Carter says. That’s why he is now urging an immediate planetary emergency Manhattan-style R&D Project along the lines of a worldwide Marshall Plan model – a global-scale venture to rescue our future. His emergency response plan depends on fast tracking the progress being made to develop safe, zero-carbon, and super-high energy-dense fusion power. Fusion will be able to power heavy industry and heavy transportation that clean renewable energy is not yet up to.
“The burning age is over,” insists Dr. Carter. “We literally have no future with fossil fuels. With carbon-free fusion power, we’ll be able to manufacture the enormous amount of renewable energy infrastructure we need without having to burn more fossil fuels to rebuild the entire world for the age of safe, clean, everlasting energy. To survive the climate and oceans emergency, and revert to a safe level below 350ppm CO2 and 1.5 degrees Celsius, we also have to mechanically remove vast amounts of carbon dioxide directly from the air for the next hundred years, chemically converting it to a solid carbonate, which can be safely achieved only with safe, zero-carbon, energy-dense fusion power.”
“Runaway climate change and ocean acidification are not future-tense events,” concludes Dr. Carter. “It is of the utmost urgency that we immediately act to abolish the burning of fossil fuels – or watch as fossil fuels abolish humanity.”
EARTHx event in Victoria, BC, Canada - July 4th, 6-10 p.m. at the Victoria Event Centre (1415 Broad Street). The planned program for EARTHx includes video screenings and presentations on the climate and oceans emergency. (The VEC refreshment bar will be open for the event.)
