This commentary is by Tim Stevenson of Athens, Vt., founding director of Post Oil Solutions.
We have reached the point in the climate crisis when we can no longer postpone a transformation of everyday life to sometime other than now.
This is the only life-affirmative choice we have. We either embrace and take responsibility for ourselves, for life, and for our fellow beings with our inherent heart values. Or we submit to the catastrophe that is increasingly and rapidly unfolding all around us, with its threat of near-term collapse.
WHEREAS:
“Anything above 1.5˚C will see the advent of a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. A rise of 2˚C and above will seriously threaten the stability of global society.
“As of April 2022, none of the world’s biggest economies — which together generate 80 percent of carbon emissions — are on target to keep the promises they made in Paris (in 2015) to stop the global average temperature rise topping 1.5˚C.
“The global average temperature rise is slated to exceed 1.5˚C within a decade.
“A rise of more than 2˚C (3.6˚F) is already “baked-in” or, in plain language, certain.
“Our climate is changing for the worse far quicker than predicted.
“The most worrying thing about the frequency and intensity of unprecedented weather events (this past summer from hell, for example, included extreme heat and wildfires, flooding and drought, famine and storms in places from Pakistan to southern Florida, France to East Africa, the Pacific Northwest to Central America) is that this is being driven by a relatively small temperature rise.
“There is now no chance of dodging a grim future of perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown.”
(Gratitude to Bill McGuire, professor of geophysical and climate hazards, for his book, “Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide” whose conclusions are quoted above, and are totally consistent with those of the world’s recognized authority on climate science, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.)
As if the preceding required exclamatory punctuation, a slew of recent major reports have laid bare how, as one scientist put our situation, “we are very, very close to irreversible changes.” For this reason, the U.N.’s climate agency concluded that only a “rapid transformation of societies will limit the worst impact of the climate crisis.”
Bill McKibben has written, “It’s too late to stop global warming; that’s no longer on the menu. … Even if we do everything right at this point, the temperature will go up. The main question is whether we’ll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization. The latter is a distinct possibility.”
THEREFORE:
I am a longtime climate activist. While I support the continuing efforts of those working to bring about the change necessary to avoid the worst calamities, I no longer see the value of concentrating my efforts on trying to convince the petroleum industry and its political allies to do the right thing when the evidence repeatedly has demonstrated that this is not in their pecuniary interests.
Anything short of transformative change will only result in a green variation of the power relationships that are at the heart of our present dilemma.
In the interests of being relevant, therefore, I choose to act upon the unmistakable reality that we live in a rapidly collapsing world, where nothing less than a practice of service will suffice, one that is both part of and helps to organize caring, compassionate communities that respond to the unavoidable pain and suffering people will increasingly experience as the collapse intensifies, and whose everyday example of righteous behavior could serve to prefigure in the present moment the world we seek.
Rather than trying to change people to politically correct behaviors, activism would render nonjudgmental service to all in need, instead, helping to mitigate some of their hardship and adversity as best we can. And because the crisis is spiritual in nature, a commensurate values-based practice also has the potential to bring about the metamorphic change required.
The beauty of such a practice is that, to be effective, it must be delivered not only in what we do, but equally on how we perform what we do.
Heart-inspired, life-sustaining values are at the basis of this practice, where our acts of love are done for their own sake, and because they are the right thing to do, without expectation about future outcomes. In short, a practice of our inherent goodness is an end in itself.
There is no guarantee, of course, that this will translate into a transformation of our collapsing society. This is not to suggest, however, that an act of heart is inconsequential to a transformed society. Quite the contrary; consistent acts of kindness, compassion and generosity are what a transformed society is all about.
This is the best we can do anyway, but in the living moment, a values practice is good enough.
