I wanted to talk today about how do we move from fear about the climate emergency to action. After all I have known about climate change for most of my life and while I had done some individual action to lower my carbon footprint I hadn’t moved to collective action. It takes strong emotions to make us act, otherwise it is just an intellectual thing in the back of our mind. We need strong emotions like fear, anger and love in order to act.
When the IPCC report came out in October last year I realised just how little time we had and just how bad it was going to get. The IPCC report only looks at the differences between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming but we are currently on track for 3-4 degrees of warming.
It was fear that made me act first. Fear for my five children and my 6 year old granddaughter who will be 87 years old in 2100. But fear of being socially different is also strong so it took three months before I decided that my fear of looking foolish was less than my fear for Niamh’s future. So taking my inspiration from Greta Thunberg I started sitting outside my elected representative office all day every Friday. After all if a fifteen year old could be that brave surely I a 52 year old could do the same. Today is my fifteenth week of doing a climate strike on Fridays.
The next emotion that made me act was anger. Anger that Michael Keenan a Liberal minister could say that the Greens were more dangerous to Australia than One Nation (and this was just after Christchurch). So I joined the Greens because I wanted to be dangerous.
But I want to suggest a better emotion for action- Love or Hope. Climate change is a logical outcome of our high carbon capitalist society that values continuous growth on a limited planet regardless of the people or environment that gets damaged or destroyed in the process. We have grown up in this society but it is not working for anyone except the 1%. Look at the symptoms: indigenous suicide rates, the Sixth Extinction, a welfare system that is broken, a democracy that is broken, drug addictions, people continually buying stuff hoping it will make them happy and working long hours, people being exploited to make this stuff, and the climate emergency threatens our very existence……...and it’s not making us happy.
So I want to challenge each of you to sit down tonight and write an imaginative piece from the future, from 2040. Write it in a future where we made the change and transformed our society into a fairer, healthier, happier, more sustainable world. Write about your town , what does it look like?, where do you live?, what do you eat?, how do you travel? What do you do for work and what do you do for entertainment?
Because it is really hard to walk each day towards disaster but it is not hard to walk towards a better future.
I wrote mine describing my life as a 73 years old surrounded by friends and family, eating a plant based diet that I had grown, foraged or bought from local farmers, living in my low carbon house and walking and biking everywhere I needed to go. I mentioned the losses but that there were definitely gains because instead of things we had community.
And then I could see where I needed to act if I want this future. I can see what individual actions I need to take to gain the skills I need. I can see the collective actions I can start to take to develop the community I want to live in. I can see where we need local government to step up, and state government and national government. And what’s more I started to do them. I started a neighbourhood morning tea, a Twitter workshop, a Foraging Walk, submitted an EOI for the Council Climate Change Resilience Panel, went to the Climate Emergency Mobilisation meeting, ……. stood up here to do this speech.
Your vision of the future may be different from mine (I admit I copied a lot of the ideas of Retrosuburbia by David Holmgren) but I’m sure that there will be plenty that is the same that we can work on together.
So that‘s my challenge to you tonight. Write that future. Because whether we take action or not the world and Australia is going to change. But we can take it as an opportunity to build a fairer, healthier, happier, low carbon future.
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