
By Rena Priest
Storytellers are the makers of culture and the shapers of consciousness. The word "author" is from the Latin word auctus, which translates literally to "one who causes to grow." As storytellers, we plant beliefs that blossom into the structure of the world. In these times, we need a new structure — a narrative built on climate justice.
Think of all the books you've read, the movies you've seen, the male voices who've spoken to you from pages and screens. Think of times when athletes, celebrities, and fictional characters have been your heroes. Did they look like you?
Elvis Presley once said, "When I was a child … I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed has come true a hundred times." He identified with heroes who looked like him. He grew up to be the King.
For millennia, storytellers have written about the hero's journey to celebrate men (particularly men of means or athletic ability) and to uphold the status quo. They become heroes by vanquishing villains who are almost always Brown, foreign, or feminine. The fight for climate justice requires a shift away from stories that elevate the White, male warrior or protector. In these times, the war they are fighting is not against the forces of evil. These supposed heroes today are fighting against the forces of change — much-needed change. Though the faces they're fighting are the same.
What if none of the heroes in books or movies ever looked like you? What if you always resembled the villain? What if you and everyone else in the world believed in that vision, so when you placed your Brown body in front of a wall of armored police, by default you became the villain and the police became the heroes? And when you cried out from your Brown face, "Water is life!" your message was not heard as a profound truth, but as defiant madness to be put down. When they tear gas you, turn fire hoses on you, and beat you on live TV, then take you to jail, society looks on and believes justice is being done. This is the tragedy we are living.
Climate protesters are collectively identified as agitators. At the same time, cops are seen as heroes based solely on their chosen occupation. Changing the mythology requires changing how we identify a hero.
As Winona LaDuke said, "Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn't make a corporation a terrorist." You may have seen this quote before. It's made the rounds on the internet, but it bears repeating. Every advertiser knows the power of repetition. If you have the money or leverage, you can repeat your message a hundred times an hour. You can repeat it until everyone gets it and buys what you're selling.
As a culture, we need to learn to celebrate climate defenders as heroes. We need stories that reflect the Brown, foreign, and female among us in a positive light so that their strength is passed on to those who might be inspired to become real heroes. This is how climate defenders, as the heroes they are, will truly save the world.
The "Indian" Story
Fifty years ago, the taming of the Wild West was among the most widely told stories on the planet. On any given weekend, a boy could turn on the TV and see his blue-eyed hero gun down Indians in the street. Classic movie networks rerun these stories in movie marathons so you can watch White men protecting their townsfolk from "savages" all day long. Repetition is how the cowboy and Indian story was sold to the generation of baby boomers who now govern.
Yes, it's fiction, but it's also the only representation of Indigenous identity that some people have encountered. Duncan McCue, creator of the journalist's guide to "Reporting in Indigenous Communities," was once told by a tribal elder that the only way an Indian would make news "is if he or she were one of the 4Ds: drumming, dancing, drunk, or dead."
To correct this, and to better steward this planet on which we depend, we must tell stories that celebrate Indigenous world views and values. And then we must repeat them, not just during Indigenous history month, but all day, every day, all week, every week, all year round, every year for decades, until the oversold fallacy that nature must be subdued and "settled" is dispelled and replaced by the truth that nature must be restored and protected.
Elevating Indigenous voices addresses the climate crisis because Indigenous issues are environmental issues, which are human rights issues. When tribes win fights against pipelines and coal trains, your rights to a healthy sustainable world are protected too. When the rights of nature are restored, your rights are restored too.
Scientists usually categorize Indigenous cultures as "hunter-gatherer" societies, but the truth is that before ecological disruption wrought by newcomers, we were more like permaculturists. The Earth cultivates a beautiful variety of sustenance. Before nature was "conquered," it provided a prosperous way of being, which required a civilized amount of effort together with a deep understanding of the behaviors of native flora and fauna. To be reliant on delicately balanced ecosystems requires an understanding that the consequences of disrupting the balance are hunger, or struggle, or death.
Collective Heroes
We fight to protect our treaties and the environment because our traditional stories tell us that we are a part of the environment and that people exist within a finite set of circumstances. Part of maintaining those circumstances is celebrating the heroic sacrifices of the beautiful plants and animals that give themselves as food. Yes, salmon as a collective can be heroes, too. And why not? They embody all the characteristics that qualify a hero as worthy of celebration.
Adventurous and brave, they swim from the shallows of their natal rivers out into the perils of the open ocean where their bodies soak up the rich nutrients of the sea. Persistent, resilient, and strong, they swim upstream against swift currents for hundreds of miles to return home to spawn and complete the cycle of life. When they die, the marine-derived nutrients are transferred from their bodies to all the animals, insects, soil, and plants of their original forest home. In this way, their hero's journey powerfully transforms barren inland landscapes into lush ecosystems. They are a keystone species, meaning without them, the whole system could collapse.
How can storytellers shift global perspectives to make us love salmon and pollinators and clean water more than we love John Wayne or Tony Stark? Keystone species are the heroes we need and should turn to.
People say the youth will solve the climate problem. But if we let matters play out as we wait for our children to create a cultural shift, we are shirking our responsibility to their future. We are also ignoring the risk that climate disasters will become so normalized in their lives that they may not feel a need to take up the mantle of an unsung climate hero, especially when they have only upholders of the status quo as role models.
Renowned Nisqually hero Billy Frank Jr. said, "We have to work together, all of us. … In the status quo we don't have long. We have to somewhere make a transition."
Collectively, we can embody a new type of hero that challenges mainstream iconography. We can begin by embracing mythologies aimed at exalting environmental sustainability and social equality in order to have heroes who truly do save the planet.
Reposted with permission from YES! Magazine.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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