7 Days to Copenhagen - Compassion for the Environmental Refugees

Beautiful photo by Nattu

You know how our hearts have been going out to the people who have to evacuate their homes because of wildfires or floods? We feel particularly anguished for those who lose their houses in these blazes or inundations, which don't respect the human territory staked out in their path.

Could we perhaps reach out our compassion a bit further, to those living in the Carteret Islands, for example, a coral atoll off the coast of Papua New Guinea? These islanders are literally losing their homeland, taken by the sea — first through salination and tidal destruction of their gardens, and now through submersion of their islands.

Though some commentators are calling this the first evacuation of an entire people because of climate change, the deniers and skeptics are out in full force, saying the islands are disappearing because of tectonic movement or isostatic adjustments of the seafloor. But the cause doesn't matter; their evacuation remains an environmental tragedy for these islanders, and they deserve our compassion.

I hope it's not just because I'm an islander myself, living off the west coast of Canada, that I can relate to what these people are experiencing. It is said that they have lived on their atoll for over 1000 years — long enough to feel rather attached to it, I would think. (I've been here 11 years, and I'm feeling rather attached.) Imagine having to pick up a whole people and resettle them in a new place. I don't think we'd be too happy about it. There but for the grace of the Universe....

I think we'd better start asking our governments what their environmental refugee policies are going to be. Evacuations, migrations, shifts, conflicts are starting to happen in Pacific Islands and African nations and low-lying countries like Bangladesh. Are we going to start accepting climate refugees in our nice comfy countries? (With our current winters, I'm not sure they'd want to come!) Are we going to help out financially, as we promised to do when we signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992? We have to pose these questions in order to get our policy makers thinking about them.

Meantime, my heart goes out to the Tuluun people of the Carteret Islands.

8 Days to Copenhagen - This is Starting to Sound Like a Christmas Song

Come on, sing along!

With only 8 days til Copenhagen, my true love said to me ...

... Obama said he's going

... what's up with our prime minister?

... Al Gore has a new book out

... the Carteret Islands are sinking

... coral reefs are doomed

... oceans are acidifying

... deniers and skeptics are still bellowing

... we're still pumping out greenhouse gases

... and the temperature continues to rise at the North Pole!

9 Days to Copenhagen - Are We Ready to Make Sacrifices for the Sake of Our Children?

Quite invisibly to the public eye, psychologists from around the world — especially those who specialize in conservation psychology and/or ecopsychology — are wrestling with the question of how to help people move towards behaviours and lifestyles that will lead to sustainability.

As an educator, I get to sit on the sidelines of these listserves and listen in. Sometimes I contribute a thought or two. Recently, some of the discussion focused on "framing" our messages so that people will listen and take them to heart.

In this discussion, a dichotomy seemed to be set up between what's called "motivational framing" (which, according to some research, increased "perceived competence") and "sacrificial framing" (which apparently decreased perceived competence to take action and make changes) (Louise Comeau, Royal Roads University). Put another way, "encouraging competence is more effective than emphasizing sacrifice" (Robert Gifford, University of Victoria).

While not wanting to argue with anyone about their research findings (I figure "competence" will be moot if the governments don't get off their butts and legislate the necessary changes — but who is going to ask their governments to do this?), my heart was telling me something else, so I chimed in:

Have we (as a society) actually done much asking of people to sacrifice? Sacrifice as in "the act of giving up something valued for the sake of something regarded as more important or worthy"? Or, in our research, are we just asking people how they would feel if we asked them to give something up?

The word "sacrifice" comes from the Latin sacer, meaning "holy," which reminds me of a point my husband and I have been discussing recently. Does behaviour change come more easily to people who hold the Earth and life as sacred? And are those people more willing to make sacrifices for the sake of the greater good?

I ask because I have a hunch that asking people to make sacrifices for the sake of their children's future well-being in a carbon-constrained and climate-wracked world might actually work. If we appealed to their sense of love and compassion and "ancestorhood" (I suppose as a way to "frame" what we're asking for), we might be surprised (in either direction) by the reaction and results.

Another problem, perhaps, is that we've done an extremely poor job of educating the public about the impending impacts on their children's future lives — not making the impacts visual/graphic enough for people, for example, or not personalizing/localizing them. Since North Americans and Europeans are, generally, living in the most comfortable age and circumstances ever for human beings, it's hard to get them to see what climate chaos will do to their children's chances for similar comforts, or even survival. (And this is before we throw in the all the misinformation of deniers / skeptics / ignorers / delayers.)

This last idea came to me accidentally, several years ago, when I showed An Inconvenient Truth to three social studies classes in a secondary school and asked the students to write down the one thing that struck them most from the movie. The vast majority of these bright kids said it was the visualization of sea level rises.

That's when I realized that people have to be able to "see," in their mind's eye, what's going to happen to their children if we don't halt the carbon emissions. But when you do that, you are accused of presenting doom and gloom, of being a doom monger or an alarmist. Man, are our kids ever going to be pissed off with us when they realize what we didn't do because we were oh so afraid of being labelled "alarmist."

So, my question stands. Are we actually asking people to sacrifice today for the sake of their children's tomorrow? Sacrifice as in "the act of giving up something valued for the sake of something regarded as more important or worthy"?

If EuroAmericans truly love their meat and their cars and their money more than their kids, let's find that out now.

10 Days to Copenhagen - Hackers and Deniers/Skeptics, Beware!

We've blown your cover.

All this talk of hacked emails had me daydreaming today about what hackers would find if they hacked into my emails ... snore. They sure wouldn't find much to amuse them.

Instead, I got into the fray a couple of days ago at Grist, when someone named Phil asked, "For God's sake, why don't you folks discuss the content of these emails?"

He was, of course, talking about the hacked emails that skeptics and deniers somewhere will have paid good money for — and in which they are now revelling. I asked Phil to consider (a) that scientists are human beings with human frailties, and (b) that there are far more important things to be discussing. (Like carbon feedbacks, or getting to the Age of Renewable Energy, or going veg to reduce methane emissions and buy us some time in the Arctic.)

However, my husband spent a large part of yesterday going through all the hacked emails (not just the juicy, cherry-picked ones) and he discovered something that no one else is talking about.

Here's what Dr. Peter Carter has to say about the hacked emails:

Of course, the emails are very different in their full context and for sure there are a few (very few) containing emotional content that has no place in professional correspondence. We all know, however, that the email story coming just before the UN Copenhagen Climate Conference is part of an orchestrated campaign to deny the scientific reality of catastrophic global climate change.

The amazing thing that comes out of reading these emails is the steady stream of harassment that our top climate change scientists are subjected to by the aggressive campaign of the skeptics/deniers.

The scientists at Hadley are being continually forced to spend an inordinate amount of their time in defending their science from totally unfounded claims that appear on climate change blogs and get reported in the media. As this is a battle over complex computer models based on masses of scientific research, the climate scientists are at a huge disadvantage to prove that the statements of the deniers on the models are wrong.

The scientists spend a great deal of their out of work time educating public audiences on the climate change facts to counter the denial disinformation campaign. The scientists, as a result of all this, operate under a high degree of personal stress. The harassment includes threats of civil litigation and they are also subjected to personally insulting emails on their work. In other words, there is an aggressive campaign that has been constantly waged for years, against the scientists and the science. I would not be surprised if some of the scientists have been at nervous breaking point at times.

Reading the emails, it comes across so clearly that these scientists are trying hard to protect the future of humanity from global climate catastrophe (inevitable if greenhouse gas emissions don't fall) and the deniers don't care one bit that their campaign has already condemned to death and suffering countless millions of the most climate change vulnerable and innocent. In my mind, the deniers are a bunch of .... Oops.

I have been critical of the reluctance of the IPCC scientists to tell the full extent of the terrible risks that the world is facing. Now I know the reason for their reluctance.

So, take that, you accursed hackers and deniers! We're really starting to find out what a rotten bunch of bastards you are (I'm no longer afraid to say it). How about you having a little compassion for the scientists who are doing their best to help us all understand the grave situation we're in? How about you holding in your hearts some compassion for all the children, of all species, and all future generations? Oh, sorry, I forgot. You don't have hearts.