Time to stop pissing on the Children’s Fire.
As children step forward to demand urgent climate action, do we have the courage to stand with them in the face of overwhelming evidence ?
Last Friday was the first school climate strike in the UK, my son decided to take part and protest with thousands of others across the country.
If you missed it, it’s a student led protest against the lack of meaningful climate action by the UK and international govts and what this continual inaction means for the future for young people.
A grassroots movement, activating monthly on a friday and spreading around the world, inspired by the courageous action of one teenage girl, Greta Thunberg. If you’ve not watched her TED talk , I recommend it highly, her clarity, logic and delivery is extraordinary.
My boy spent a couple of weeks chatting with us about the strike, figuring out how he felt about it, eventually he decided that he’s worried, frustrated and felt strongly enough about it to participate.
I wrote to his school but they didn’t grant him permission to be absent for the strike, not ‘exceptional circumstances’ apparently.
I did note in my letter to the school that planetary collapse in 12 years according to the best scientists in the world felt like exceptional circumstances , but there you go.
We backed him 100%. 200 leading UK academics also backed the student action.
I feel proud of him and scared for him and his generation.
The fear is hard to describe, it’s a living fear, an emotional pain, whole body and mind, when it started years back initially it could become unbearable at times, now — occasionally overwhelming but mostly these days a numbness.
I’ve been struggling with the enormity of climate change, the denial and lack of meaningful action for a long time, front of mind for the last decade, since my life started to follow a path of deeper questioning, unravelling, unlearning and re-connecting with life.
Over time and with much reflection and new perspectives I believe that the sense of unease I’ve been carrying is an embodied response to a destructive human industrial society, the quest for infinite growth and the dominant cultural view of nature as separate from humans, a resource for extraction and destruction. It’s taken me about 35 years to properly make sense of this anxiety.
I’ve spent much of my working life traversing the intersections of business, creativity, environmentalism, social change and activism and today I can only see the story of unfettered capitalism, free markets and infinite growth heading towards a global car crash, Umair Haque does a much better job than me in painting that scenario.
I find it useful to remember that no-one has ever globalised a planet before.
But over the years it’s become harder to speak about climate change, friends, colleagues and family often find the subject too depressing.
I guess the uncertainty makes people too uncomfortable, for those of us lucky to live in relative comfort it’s a hard idea to sit with, if you talk too much about the destruction, if you ask too many questions about it because we are so deeply implicated through our ways of living and so I’ve learned over time to quieten down, to keep it to myself or to just talk with others who have also accepted this reality and are open to exploring how we might adapt.
As a father I’ve found this particularly challenging , on one hand how to help my children connect with the wonder and awe of the non human world and being alive in this moment, to help them understand lifes’ principles, ecological impacts and the concepts of limits on a living planet, taking responsibility for your own actions…
While at the same time being open to their experiences of the world, their fresh and different ways of seeing, the culture they are born into and all that it offers, as well as helping them develop awareness of the persuasiveness and pitfalls of consumption led life and an industrialised society, because if you’ve never experienced anything else, how do you really know anything else exists? Shifting baseline syndrome I think it might be called.
And all the while, mindfully trying not to scare them about the destruction we humans are causing with our modern, ‘developed’ ways of living.
It’s a very strange one — how to warn of imminent danger, how to adapt and prepare for that, while living in a system seemingly determined to maintain an illusion of progress, control and certainty. And in order to survive you currently have to partake in a system that is destroying things.
We’re led to believe that the future will be a gradual improvement on the present, right now I think we need to rethink that.
So it brings me back to the school strikes and taking action. Because if you accept that continuing with a way of thinking and acting is going to end in trouble and you don’t like that outcome you stop doing it right?
I’m tired of playing along with ignorance and denial as being the unspoken rule, bored of wasting time with the dumbing down optimism about innovation and technology to fix everything, and climate breakdown as the elephant in the room — it feels psychotic, deluded, nonsense.
I used to think it was me, not anymore.
Just as a continually growing cancer eventually destroys its life support systems by destroying its host, a continuously expanding global economy is slowly destroying its host — the Earth’s ecosystem.”
Lester Brown. State of the World, 1998.
I’m not anti-optimism at all, but if you keep smoking or drinking when the doctor tells you you’re heading for serious illness and potential death, you don’t continue hoping that a future med fix will sort it out — you may for a while, but at some point if you want to raise the chances of continuing your life you decide to accept that knowledge, the scientific evidence and then you act accordingly.
And often you might begin the process of figuring out why you are addicted or resistant to change in the first place, what is really driving it ? Because then with that new knowledge you can truly evolve, move on and grow.
Reflection to understand, raise self, community and society awareness, create new subjective knowledge and then act and evolve, to co-create something better for all life, this is absolutely missing from our central narrative of industrialisation, consumerism, and getting ahead of everyone else. It’s like there is no alternative.
This is madness.
And as the children begin to rise up, this creates huge questions for me.
Are we able to openly admit and accept climate breakdown?
(According to latest thinking from IPPR — ‘Climate change’ is no longer an appropriate frame for what is happening)
Mainstream political and policy debates have failed to recognise that human impacts on the environment have reached a critical stage, potentially eroding the conditions upon which socioeconomic stability is possible. The term “climate change” no longer captures reality. The scale of environmental change that our earth is currently experiencing far exceeds it. This is happening at a pace that is unprecedented in human history and in some cases millions, or even billions, of years….We call this what it is: the age of environmental breakdown — a term that is a more proportionate description of the totality that the earth presently faces.
Are we able to now see that our dominant ways of being on this planet are so clearly destructive and now threatening the future of human civilisation? That means > life threatening and therefore no longer appropriate.
(I suggest reading Jem Bendell’s challenging and influential paper — Deep Adaptation — if you want to go much deeper and know more. Or if audio is more your thing I would recommend this podcast conversation with Jem and the amazing human Amisha Ghadiali. )
Warning: This can be difficult content to process and accept but I’d argue essential to explore if we want to move beyond today to a regenerative, resilient, kinder and fairer way of being on this planet.Are we able to see a different and alternative human project across our systems and institutions and work with the wealth of brilliant ideas, innovations, technologies and knowledge that areall out there, proven, ready to scale up?
Are we able to join the dots between planetary health and human health, to see that rampant consumerism, personal debt, massive inequality, rising anxiety and mental health issues, chemical laden food, the dominion of animals, chronic stress related disorders, are all interconnected with the plastic choking oceans, toxic polluted air in our cities, collapse of other species and ecosystems, depleting soils, rising temperatures and sea levels?
We’re in the midst of the Earth’s 6th Mass extinction ffs — species disappearing somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 times faster than normal — you barely hear this mentioned. Is that not very strange?
I have been wondering what would happen if we opened up spaces for people to come and talk about all this, planetary grieving and unlearning spaces, where you can listen and be listened to, where we could be vulnerable together, not know together, learn together and explore new ways to respond, to develop new relationships with the world around us and each other.
High street retail is collapsing , maybe now there’s an opportunity for a new kind of experience beyond just shopping, — places for connecting with each other, listening to our collective struggles, learning about new life giving approaches, catalysing community projects and regenerative infrastructure development around food production, health, energy, education, care, self-learning, arts and culture which every community will absolutely need to thrive and survive and is so far off the radar of our local and national governments.
5 years ago, we hatched a learning experiment within the creative communications industry — ‘Break the Silence’ — to see if we might encourage a community with great influence to speak up on climate change, to open up deeper conversations. Many people seemed to appreciate the opportunity to open up, to share their fears and their not knowing. We hoped it might kickstart more action. It didn’t. But maybe now this type of approach would be more effective, popping up across industries, institutions, communities and culture.
Awareness and acceptance is key, and starting meaningful and open conversations, with authentic diversity of voices, where there is depth of enquiry is critical but then the real work must start and that requires radical and accelerated collaboration bottom up and top down. To regenerate, re-imagine and grow in new ways, it’s about doing the work. It could be beautiful work, tough, challenging, difficult work no doubt, but an enormous unlearning and re-learning journey where we could co-create the future, a more beautiful world.
Only a demanding common task builds community
George MacLeod
With climate breakdown it’s like you can see and feel what’s coming, we’ve got the smartest scientists on the planet telling us what is coming, we are overwhelmed with more and more data and evidence, you can feel it and see it, but its like collectively and publicly we don’t want to accept it, you can’t talk about it for very long before we turn off.
I believe fear is a big part of that, which stems from a lack of knowledge in our society about what is happening and why, and of limited understanding that there are many different ways to evolve with real potential to be better for everyone as well as in tune with life and the wider non human world.
With climate change, at least at a political and economic level, we cannot seem to accept that the planet supports all life and that human life is part of that, not separate. That the planet has limits, an operating system with principles and rules that if you don’t stick too, eventually the thing stops working with negative feedback accelerating that breakdown. It’s not that difficult an idea to understand. It’s like we’ve become more clever but less intelligent.
Could it be that the integrity, stability and beauty of nature is the wellspring of human intelligence? Could it be that the conquest of nature, however clever, is in fact a war against the source of mind?”
David Orr
I don’t want to whisper about this stuff around my children anymore, telling them everything is fine, do your homework and don’t ask questions. I want to help them develop and learn their way into an ecologically literate civilisation, a fairer one, a more connected and creative one, kinder, healthier, more diverse and life giving.
If we don’t talk about how to prepare for breakdown, if we don’t start to accept and explore it, regardless if it feels scary, it will be a truckload scarier if we’re not prepared. Not preparing is totally irresponsible and failing our children for sure in my opinion.
The thing is, the demands of the young people striking are very clear, actionable and meaningful. (When did you last get that from politicians ?)
1. That govt declares a climate emergency and focuses on mass awareness and public understanding — yes for sure — first step when you are heading for a breakdown — admit there is a problem, understand it deeply, build awareness and action.
2. Develop an eco/climate literate curriculum — no brainer — we’ve created the mess, at least allow children to learn their way out of it while they are in school — otherwise what? More of the same shit impacts and worse still children come out of school woefully unprepared and unskilled to deal with the complexity of the context they find themselves in.
3. Lower the voting age to 16 yrs — yes — why wouldn’t we want young ppl engaged in the world now, co-creating, taking responsibility, and having a say in decision making that will effect them way more than any other part of the population.
If you struggle with this, watch Mac Macartney talk from 9 years ago, about the ‘Children’s Fire’, an ancient, simple and beautiful human practice for those governing in Native America which ensured the young of all life are represented in any decision making. This really is worth 10 minutes of your time.
Imagine the ‘Children’s Fire’ approach adopted in political and economical decision making today, imagine the potential in just that one simple idea.
No new technology breakthroughs needed, just a breakthrough in what it means to be human.
In Macs words — “it’s a call for the brave to step forward”.
The children are beginning to step forward, the real question seems to be — do we have the courage to step forward and stand alongside them, and stop pissing on the children’s fire ?
Dan