Climate march: yes, we should save the world. But not only 'for the children'

Climate march: yes, we should save the world. But not only 'for the children'
We don’t need to have children to feel morally obligated to act – our focus on future generations allows for political inaction, and communicates a philosophy of despair

Climate march: yes, we should save the world. But not only 'for the children'

On Sunday, climate groups around the world rallied attendees for a People’s Climate March. The event was the largest environmental protest event in history, with participants in 150 countries. The march I attended was as multigenerational as the marches social media allowed me to observe elsewhere. A common theme to many placards, pledges and speeches heard around the world was a plea to take climate action as a duty to “our children”. The Huffington Post published commentary which cited actual “motherlove” as a reason for participants to attend. But is it the best way to wrap our heads around such a complex ethical issue? This trope of parental responsibility permeates much of the political discourse of climate action – last week, UK Labour’s Ed Miliband spoke about “safeguarding the future for our children” in response to a climate report. His lesser opposite, Nick Clegg, has said that “we cannot mortgage our children’s future to climate change” . “As father, and as an American, I’m here to say we need to act,” said Obama. Even the Climate inactive Australian government has admitted that “managing the risks” of climate change “will have lasting consequences for our children”. I am a childless woman in her 30s, but I was marching. Childlessness does not abrogate one from political responsibility to the planet. In the era of climate change, consistent scientific data advises that facing impending environmental transformation is a collective responsibility because it will be a collective experience. Yet, as a childless adult, the messaging around the science of climate change suggests my exclusion from the political and activist task at hand. It is not the camp of professional fact-evading science-deniers doing this, for their opinions are impotent for lack of hard data. It’s actually many and diverse communicators across the campaigns for climate action whose vocabulary of moral argument eschews me.

I’m not the only person to have picked up on the use of this language. Public intellectual and activist Naomi Klein, whose book This Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate was released this month responded to an interviewer from Canadian publication Macleans with similar observations: Q: You actually felt isolated from the environmental movement when you were struggling to get pregnant. A: It drove me crazy – hanging around with environmentalists who were constantly talking about how we were doing this for our kids, and our grandchildren. I found it exclusionary … And really strange messaging too, as if we only care about the future for our kids! Obviously, decisions made to address climate change today will impact future generations – maybe even doom them. The issue here is not actually exclusionary language applied to the childless, but how that language intellectually facilitates climate inaction; Klein’s last statement is the crucial one. Campaigners have long targeted parental anxieties to mobilise political or consumer behaviour – but when it comes to direct action on climate change, appealing to the parental theme has failed.

Demonstrators gather for the People’s Climate March in New York City. Photograph: Brian Cahn/Zuma/Corbis

Consider: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed by the UN in 1988. The children born the year of its convocation are now 26 years old – and while the climate-campaign discourse continues about “the future for our children”, in the elapsed quarter-century world carbon emissions have actually increased by 61%. This is why language of climate action strategy from scientists has had to shift from “preventing” threat to “adapting” to a now inevitable change. Talking about climate change as a futuristic scenario “for our children” suits the present western political leadership because it implies individual responsibility for a collective problem and suggests that an impact can be deferred. The climate campaigners Klein mentioned are failing their project by reinforcing this discursive frame. Social policy discussion around climate change is but a can the political class has kicked down the road for at least 26 years. All that time, the road beneath everyone’s feet has been crumbling. Language, of course, is polyphonic. While the use of “our children” in climate change discourse euphemises a political inaction, it simultaneously communicates a philosophy of despair. Communicating threats to the existence of those who’ll inherit our cultural achievements removes from humanity its solitary guarantee of immortality. Author PD James’s novel Children of Men got to the heart of this, depicting a dystopia where the decline of humanity as a biological entity entailed its intellectual and spiritual withering, too; a sense of meaning in our lives is to a large degree contingent on the assumption that our works and deeds will continue. The result of climate inaction threatening our sense of meaning has provoked what Klein’s book bluntly names an “existential crisis for the human species”.

Activists lead with a float while taking part in the People’s Climate March through Midtown, New York. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters

The evidence here is not merely scientific, but social. Philosophers such as Eugene Thacker have identified the cultural return of nihilism – Jay-Z was seen flaunting a jacket referencing his book, In the Dust of this Planet. True Detective’s main protagonist, a fatalist cop with Thackeresque ideas, has a cult popularity. The enormously popular Game of Thrones has thrived on a thematic maxim that “no one is safe”, and that its audience continues to grow may indicate that rippling beneath political inaction on climate change is a growing social realisation that neither are we. Pop culture is once again attuning to anxieties about climate catastrophe, and channelling a weltgeist of powerlessness and despair. These cultural phenomenon accord to Klein’s observation: “Even when people say they don’t care, you scratch the surface, and there is terror.” Klein’s book is an immediate action plan. “One of the ways in which we are screwed is that a lot of people have come to the conclusion that we are, and therefore it’s not even worth trying,” she told Macleans, but she maintains that action can yet “grab the wheel and swerve” from catastrophe.

The climate march in Paris. Photograph: Tom Craig/Demotix/Corbis

This “swerve” requires the political class accede to immediate strategies for climate mitigation and survival. This is only going to occur if the climate campaigns can inspire a moral imperative for radical, immediate engagement in the policy process, expounding the value that it’s not for the good of our children’s future that we should take action, but because immediate action of itself is good. The nihilistic terror presenting with cultural symptoms has a cure, and it’s some old-school ethics with the question of duty “to whom?” clearly resolved. Duty here is not to kings, gods, “our children”, or the inherited social structures that have led us to environmental crisis. It’s to the threatened reality faced by human life on earth.

Source : www.theguardian.com