These people are wackadoodle
Could we save Earth if we treated it like a child? We are in crisis and need to heal the planet.
As mothers, we have often felt engulfed by the gnawing worry of climate change, the jagged feeling akin to that moment when you, as a mother, drop off your child in the care of someone who hasn’t yet earned your trust. You see your child’s bright, observant gaze. Their nerves express concern to you with quiet messages designed to tug at your unique receptivity – a tight squeeze, a shifted foot, a tear in the corner of the eye. And you ask yourself: What if they are imperiled and unprotected when I am not present?
So, because a few of you are bat guano loopy, the rest of us must comply? Piss off.
The three of us (Kealoha Fox, Maya Soetoro-Ng and Zelda Keller, the screed writers) form the backbone of the Institute for Climate and Peace, a nonprofit organization based out of Hawaii focusing on the intersections between climate change and peace. We know how precarious the situation is. And we know that many of our leaders – well-intentioned as they may be – are ignoring the truest solutions to bring about peace and climate resilience. Central to our climate justice work is helping to frame the conversation about what peace is.
Would this be the same Hawaii that wouldn’t survive without fossil fuels, which bring in food, goods, and vacationers?
Historically, peace has been too often confused with the topic of security and defined simply as an absence of war and violent conflict, otherwise known as “negative peace.” However, there is another type of peace: “positive peace,” which means the presence of active systems and processes that allow human potential to flourish.
Many systems that led to positive peace were integral to ancestral communities but dissipated during the industrial revolution. Indeed, technology has provided many boons to civilization, but it has led directly to our climate crisis, and now technology alone cannot get us out of this emergency.
Positive peaceful climate solutions present the greatest opportunity to build social cohesion, create lasting commitments that survive beyond partisanship, and are sustained beyond each of us. Our work, which complements broad efforts to reduce emissions, focuses on locally rooted, more tailored measures. This includes things like the preservation or restoration of cultural assets on our coastlines, just and dignified migration, democracy building and gender inclusive leadership.
????? Does anyone understand this Climaspeak?
That is why our institute is dedicated to a new narrative: Climate science and social science are integrated, collaborative fields helping to advance community-based climate solutions for thriving, cohesive communities.
So, basically this is all politics.
Despite the demonstrated successes of locally based efforts like these, governments and philanthropies invest most climate finance in top-down and technology-centric approaches. An International Institute of Environment and Development assessment of climate finance between 2003 and 2016 estimated that less than 10% went to locally led climate change projects.
One of the biggest reasons that gatherings like the U.N. Climate Change Conference or publications like IPCC reports fail to achieve large goals, or inspire global change, is because too few of the solutions they promote invest robustly in communal infrastructure that fosters healthy communication, compromise and the realization of shared goals.
Give us money.
We must invest in positive peaceful climate solutions around the world. In essence, dividing the planet into smaller canoes where people come together to build stronger vessels that navigate even the most unknown reality beyond the horizon – beyond the doldrums.
Good grief. Here’s a question: why must we? What if the rest of us aren’t interested? Why do we have to comply? Why can’t you just leave the rest of us the hell alone?
Read: Hey, What If We Treated ‘Climate Change’ Like A Child Or Something »
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