On Time, Timing and Deadlines

Virtual sketch from Gulf to Gulf session with Dr. Jim White, 2007.

We are well into Glasgow’s COP26 and governmental officials are making promises about what measures will materialize by 2030. Neither Russia nor China deigned to attend. Deforestation, a major source of climate change was discussed. Previous commitments about deforestation were mouthed and ignored in previous COPs.

So how should the ordinary concerned citizen regard this disregard?

In the real world, when someone tells us we are facing a life-threatening situation, for example, like cancer, most sane people consult a doctor and then do something about it. In the case of climate change, our “doctors’ are thoughtful scientists and the wisdom of Indigenous peoples informed by thousands of years of experience in what is called the alternate science of Traditional Environmental Knowledge. In this case, scientists are basically being told, “later gator.” Indigenous peoples internationally, especially activists trying desperately to protect their own homelands, are being murdered. If climate change were cancer, we might go for chemo, surgery, heavy duty meds or all of the above. Sitting it out while continuing life as usual to support a status quo that will gallop towards doom is generally suicidal. We are being told we have stage four cancer of the ecosystem and galloping towards doom and our leaders are saying, “I will sort of get around to it in nine years.” Stage four cancer without treatment is usually considered a death sentence. Scientists from every corner of the Earth have warned we are at Stage four of climate change.

I find this incomprehensible. I am one of those whose hair has been on fire for decades now, to the point of changing my entire life in 1990 when I bought the Vinalhaven town dump for the Ghost Nets project. And yet, I understand it too. There’s denial. There’s also the pressure of poor populations who can’t think ahead of their next meal. But there are solutions for the brave and the willing. Those solutions have been cited at every single COP and have been ignored.

What then? We have a death sentence. Time is not on our side. We have a deadline. We had a deadline. The time is now. Towards the end of my book, Divining Chaos, I write, “… there will be another time.” But if we miss this deadline, that time will not be for us all and not for everything.

So how should the ordinary concerned citizen regard this disregard? The answer is, with profound alarm. So what is the sane response to that alarm? In my book, I argue that despite urgency, haste makes waste. In the midst of my naked terror, I remind myself of the physics of emergence. Enormous impacts emerge as tiny blips of change. For example, in the King James bible, the king and his noble clerical translators changed the Aramaic reference from “care” for all beings to “dominion” over all life. Just one word was what I call a trigger point, that set off and legitimized an avalanche of colonial genocide, ecocide, slavery, extractions and persecution that has lasted for centuries and into our own times. Yes, that impunity was the sentiment and assumption of the Christian church and European monarchs of those times but changing that one word was what granted spiritual entitlement to all subsequent English speakers of whatever class or nationality, what became known centuries later in the United States as manifest destiny, to behave with impunity as they ravaged the lands and beings of others.

In the illustration attached to this post, the text at the Chinese border is “Do Something.” The problem is the melting of the Himalayas from climate change. The melting is already causing massive water system troubles all the way south through India to Bangladesh, already drowning simultaneously from sea level rise even as fresh water is dwindling. Why then isn’t China at the COP? This is a complex situation for many reasons and doing any old thing isn’t going to help, in fact, could make things worse. The question I can’t answer is “do what?” I would say, show up for the trouble.

What I do know, is that the COP is where this convergence of trouble should be discussed. This following week is the deadline to show up and discuss. This is that time. The COP would be that place.

So how can the ordinary citizen intervene, to be the small point of emergence? I would say, insist on the discourse. Show up for the trouble and discuss. Now is that time.