About 5% of Salt Spring Islands population came out to hear global hero @naomiaklein speak yesterday. She is such a heavyweight intellectual I could have listened for another two hours. It wasnt doom and gloom at all, though of course the science about the future and the result of our twenty years of climate procrastination all is. But 3 things I learned that are super helpful to all our work on climate change and climate justice: 1. The worst countries on dealing with climate change and the hardcore extreme extractivist states are settler countries (ie Australia, USA, Canada). This is because of our mindset of the endless frontier. Our current behaviour pattern goes back 500 years, its not new, and will not be easily changed because of our worldview and deeply held cultural mythology. This mindset btw is not just dooming part of the world to certain future chaos, but all of it. 2. Dealing with climate change for real is going to make a small group of very powerful people lose trillions of dollars, because the carbon they have in their reserves simply cant be burned. Thats why they are so passionate, creative, resourced, and extremely aggressive in their tactics to slow any kind of global response / evolution that we know needs to take place. Most well meaning liberals care about climate change but dont really do anything real about it. Working in this movement that one is really hard for me. They dont really engage because they dont live in the sacrifice zone, their comfortable lives arent being directly affected by the climate crisis. The only way were going to beat this global elite is through organizing the people who are in the sacrifice zones now, or will be imminently. When we have more people with something to GAIN from action we will be powerful, and we will topple the world destroyers. Not getting this, and not doing real cross movement organizing is the biggest weakness of our (my) work in climate change. That one stings but its also super exciting and empowering! 3. The key to solutions is Distributed Renewable Energy systems. DRE for short. Distributed means they are community owned and controlled. This gets us out of the top down corporate system whose mindset is the domination of nature, which is why were in this giant mess. Renewable energy then forces us to get in touch with nature: to know how the wind is blowing, to see and feel the sun. DRE incidentally is how Germany is now at 25% renewable, mist of that new capacity is via municipal and other co-ops. Gaining community control over our energy not only creates 8X more jobs than fossil fuels do but it divests more capital and power from global energy firms and their investors, again who are directly complicit in taking our whole planet and 8B people over the cliff. Ive said it before and believe even more so now that Naomis book is the most important book of the 21st century so far. Do yourself a favour and read it, and help us organizing a massive movement of movements that will be the great transition that life needs us humans to really get if were going to make it.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 02:57:20 +0000