Climate Change
– a Convenient Opportunity
Although climate change presents a complex challenge, we already have the tools – both conceptual and physical - and the technologies to deal with it.
By Roger Creagh-Osborne
At the end of February I was
privileged to spend an incredibly stimulating week at
Schumacher College near Totnes in Devon on a course on
Climate Change Responses.The tutors included Aubrey Meyer
(Contraction & Convergence), Catherine Cameron
(co-author of Stern Report), Ed Gillespie, and Tony
Juniper (Director FoE UK).
We spent a brief time reviewing the science and understanding that climate change is real, happening and serious, and that large-scale responses are needed in a very short time scale . This is now an accepted truth - as Tony observed, the game is moving incredibly fast and climate change deniers are increasingly being ridiculed by public and media alike. We then moved on to spend the bulk of the week looking at the range of possible and required responses, lessons from previous comparable historic challenges, blockages to action and how to circumvent them, priorities and tactics to achieve effective results.
Society has overcome similar challenges before – from recreating London after the Great Fire to adapting to an oil-free lifestyle in Cuba. It is a complex problem, but nothing that we can’t deal with. An interesting feature of most successful responses to previous situations is that clear leadership is available, or emerges, to pull people together.
Climate change presents additional psychological difficulties owing to the distance (in time and space) of the consequences, and the scale of the problem. We have naturally evolved to deal with close-up threats and human scale challenges. The key is to find ways of bringing the distant effects close up, and of breaking the problem down into manageable chunks that individuals feel some control over.
Thus the best starting point for action is to get people making small (and beneficial) changes in their individual lives – this builds momentum for lasting change, rather than relying on top-down political initiatives which then get rejected by the naturally short-sighted electorate.
Someone who has visualised their own house with the roof destroyed by a storm, and who has already made a personal investment in tacking climate change by going vegetarian or fitting energy saving measures, becomes a very powerful advocate for the higher level political changes that are also needed.
Schumacher provides a very focused and well grounded learning environment that is quite unlike any other course I have been on. The teaching fitted naturally into a cycle from (optional) early morning meditation through cooking and cleaning to informal evening ‘fireside chats’ with Satish Kumar the resident guru (and of course the bar afterwards). The context is a Gaian worldview, and the perspective is always one of wholeness and connectedness which provided a really valuable backdrop for our debates.
We spent a brief time reviewing the science and understanding that climate change is real, happening and serious, and that large-scale responses are needed in a very short time scale . This is now an accepted truth - as Tony observed, the game is moving incredibly fast and climate change deniers are increasingly being ridiculed by public and media alike. We then moved on to spend the bulk of the week looking at the range of possible and required responses, lessons from previous comparable historic challenges, blockages to action and how to circumvent them, priorities and tactics to achieve effective results.
Society has overcome similar challenges before – from recreating London after the Great Fire to adapting to an oil-free lifestyle in Cuba. It is a complex problem, but nothing that we can’t deal with. An interesting feature of most successful responses to previous situations is that clear leadership is available, or emerges, to pull people together.
Climate change presents additional psychological difficulties owing to the distance (in time and space) of the consequences, and the scale of the problem. We have naturally evolved to deal with close-up threats and human scale challenges. The key is to find ways of bringing the distant effects close up, and of breaking the problem down into manageable chunks that individuals feel some control over.
Thus the best starting point for action is to get people making small (and beneficial) changes in their individual lives – this builds momentum for lasting change, rather than relying on top-down political initiatives which then get rejected by the naturally short-sighted electorate.
Someone who has visualised their own house with the roof destroyed by a storm, and who has already made a personal investment in tacking climate change by going vegetarian or fitting energy saving measures, becomes a very powerful advocate for the higher level political changes that are also needed.
Schumacher provides a very focused and well grounded learning environment that is quite unlike any other course I have been on. The teaching fitted naturally into a cycle from (optional) early morning meditation through cooking and cleaning to informal evening ‘fireside chats’ with Satish Kumar the resident guru (and of course the bar afterwards). The context is a Gaian worldview, and the perspective is always one of wholeness and connectedness which provided a really valuable backdrop for our debates.
I
would summarise the key things I came away with as
follows:
1. Climate change is certainly both the most important and the most urgent problem that we have to solve today.
2. The time scale to make corrections in the way we live is short, but there are ways of achieving the required changes without diminishing our real quality of life.
3. Although climate change presents a complex challenge, we already have the tools (conceptual and physical) and technologies to deal with it. Any new technology that does not already exist today simply cannot be developed and deployed in any useful time-scale.
4. We may be on a knife edge between disaster and a better future, but humanity is awakening very rapidly and once people become aware, governments and organisational structures that stand in the way of necessary change will be swept away - this is already beginning to happen.
5. Political change almost always lags behind individual awareness. Governments are ultimately driven by their electorates (in most democracies). Changes in our individual way of life can be made relatively fast - changes in collective space (new laws, treaties) take time. Once people start to change, then leaders will emerge and governments will follow.
6. There are deep contradictions and disconnections in existing Government policy (e.g. cut emissions and build more runways) and these tensions are easy targets to exploit to leverage change.
7. In tackling climate change we will roll up a lot of other changes in the way society and the human world is organised that will be very positive in terms of rebalancing society and reconnecting us with the living planet.
8. There is no one solution or ‘magic bullet’. Everything is needed from global action at the WTO, UN, and G8 level down to individuals.
9. We need to prioritise the ‘quick-wins’ or ‘low-hanging fruit’ (a lot of which are the simpler personal changes) whilst simultaneously working on the more complex seemingly intractable problems (son of Kyoto, China, US)
10. You have a real voice in this - both by your individual actions and also by expressing your political voice. We get the politicians and governments that reflect our concerns, and if we need them do to something different (e.g. show leadership in tackling climate change) then we have to change them.
11. All ‘environmental’ organisations must make (and are making) climate change their number one priority. For the NGOs as an issue it encompasses and trumps all of their detailed concerns - almost every campaign has a climate change dimension. For the Green Parties we have an absolutely vital role as the political wing of the environmental movement in encouraging and enabling people to express their beliefs at the ballot box. We should be aiming to achieve at least 6 million votes nationwide at the next general election by targeting every member of RSPB, WWF, FoE, Greenpeace, CoE and the hundreds of other ‘apolitical’ groups. We are the only political voice they can have at the moment.
12. In overcoming the problems that climate change is already throwing at us I now believe that we will build a real new world order. The Green Party Manifesto for a Sustainable Society and the core principles that underpin it will become the world of the future.
The most effective thing we can all do once we have started to change our individual ways, is to talk to our family, friends and neighbours and start them changing their lives as well.
A Convenient Opportunity indeed!
1. Climate change is certainly both the most important and the most urgent problem that we have to solve today.
2. The time scale to make corrections in the way we live is short, but there are ways of achieving the required changes without diminishing our real quality of life.
3. Although climate change presents a complex challenge, we already have the tools (conceptual and physical) and technologies to deal with it. Any new technology that does not already exist today simply cannot be developed and deployed in any useful time-scale.
4. We may be on a knife edge between disaster and a better future, but humanity is awakening very rapidly and once people become aware, governments and organisational structures that stand in the way of necessary change will be swept away - this is already beginning to happen.
5. Political change almost always lags behind individual awareness. Governments are ultimately driven by their electorates (in most democracies). Changes in our individual way of life can be made relatively fast - changes in collective space (new laws, treaties) take time. Once people start to change, then leaders will emerge and governments will follow.
6. There are deep contradictions and disconnections in existing Government policy (e.g. cut emissions and build more runways) and these tensions are easy targets to exploit to leverage change.
7. In tackling climate change we will roll up a lot of other changes in the way society and the human world is organised that will be very positive in terms of rebalancing society and reconnecting us with the living planet.
8. There is no one solution or ‘magic bullet’. Everything is needed from global action at the WTO, UN, and G8 level down to individuals.
9. We need to prioritise the ‘quick-wins’ or ‘low-hanging fruit’ (a lot of which are the simpler personal changes) whilst simultaneously working on the more complex seemingly intractable problems (son of Kyoto, China, US)
10. You have a real voice in this - both by your individual actions and also by expressing your political voice. We get the politicians and governments that reflect our concerns, and if we need them do to something different (e.g. show leadership in tackling climate change) then we have to change them.
11. All ‘environmental’ organisations must make (and are making) climate change their number one priority. For the NGOs as an issue it encompasses and trumps all of their detailed concerns - almost every campaign has a climate change dimension. For the Green Parties we have an absolutely vital role as the political wing of the environmental movement in encouraging and enabling people to express their beliefs at the ballot box. We should be aiming to achieve at least 6 million votes nationwide at the next general election by targeting every member of RSPB, WWF, FoE, Greenpeace, CoE and the hundreds of other ‘apolitical’ groups. We are the only political voice they can have at the moment.
12. In overcoming the problems that climate change is already throwing at us I now believe that we will build a real new world order. The Green Party Manifesto for a Sustainable Society and the core principles that underpin it will become the world of the future.
The most effective thing we can all do once we have started to change our individual ways, is to talk to our family, friends and neighbours and start them changing their lives as well.
A Convenient Opportunity indeed!
