The Lessons Of Living Things: Contemplating Climate Change At The Ika Seafood Bar & Grill

By
Chris Trotter
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14
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THE WHOLE ISSUE of Climate Change is so overwhelming that most of us prefer not to think about it. Like death, it presages the ending of the world’s light in our eyes. We find it hard to accept that the knowledge we take for granted – like the shape of the world’s continents – can be changed. That the familiar transition of the seasons can be broken. That the planet our ancestors called “Mother Earth” is about to shuck off our species like a skin she has outgrown.

Auckland was doing its steamy best as I made my way to Ika Seafood Bar & Grill to take in the first of Laila Harré’s new mid-day lecture series: “Cooler Together: Topics of Climate Change and Climate Action.” (Wednesday, 11 May 2016.)

Not that I any longer believe that effective action to prevent runaway global warming is possible. The time left for capitalism to learn the error of its ways, and acknowledge, finally, the physical and moral limits to economic growth, is just too short.

No, it was the particular viewpoint of the advertised speakers that caught my eye. I was intrigued to learn how the ending of the industrial world, and the resulting mass die-off of billions of human-beings, was being processed by the world’s indigenous peoples.

Dr Kyle Powys Whyte is a son of the Native American Potawatomi nation, and his colleague, Elizabeth Hoover, hails from the Mohawk people of upstate New York. Visiting New Zealand at the invitation of the University of Auckland, these two distinguished scholars (from the University of Michigan and Brown University respectively) are attempting to measure the impact of climate change on the cultivation and consumption of indigenous people’s traditional foods.

For many Native Americans these issues are as much about the past as they are about the future. Kyle explained how, in 1838, the Potawatomi nation was forced to walk the infamous “Trail of Tears” by the US Government. From the lakes and birch forests of the Great Lakes region, the Potawatomi were forcibly resettled on the arid plains of what would later become Oklahoma.

This was climate change by dint of ruthless European colonisation. Back now in Michigan, his people’s original home, Kyle noted the irony of hearing climate change scientists warning him that by 2050 the state’s climate will resemble that of Oklahoma’s!

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“It seems the US Government will stop at nothing to eradicate my culture!”, he said – only half in jest.

Elizabeth’s half of the joint lecture dealt with the way the multitudinous indigenous communities of North America are struggling to hold onto and/or reclaim the agricultural and horticultural knowledge that sustained their people for thousands of years. Knowledge which the racist US Bureau of Indian Affairs did its best to destroy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She spoke movingly of her own Mohawk people’s cultivation of the “Three Sisters” – Corn, Squash and Beans – describing cultivation techniques that modern permaculturalists can only wonder at.

To add texture to his lecture, Kyle passed around plates of the Potawatomi staple manomim (wild rice). Running these long dry seeds through my fingers, I wondered if, somehow, indigenous peoples like the Potawatomi and the Mohawk might be spared the wrath of Gaia. After all, as Kyle told Ika’s lunchtime diners, his ancestors did not believe human-beings possessed any real knowledge of their own. Everything they knew, he said, they’d learned from animals and plants.

How unfair it would be if these peoples, who walked so lightly upon the earth, and who suffered so much at the hands of “Western Civilisation”, should be included among the uncountable future victims of its suicidal greed.

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14 COMMENTS

  1. The cognitive dissonance peolple have over this issue is incredible. Watching the talking heads present the record breaking temperatures on the nightly weather report with comments like “you can still head to the beach” and “great weather for drying the washing” is so grimly funny that that is all you can do – laugh.

    • Lke I said in your last article yesterday Chris,

      Watch the Bilderberg plan to rid the world of at least half of us by any means they can be it war/pestilence/famine or disease it seems climate change is the easiest way for them to achieve their end prophetic dream of ruling a smaller subservient community on this planet.

      http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/10/see-earths-temperature-spiral-toward-2c-rise-graphic

      You can bet they will have a planned an elaborate method of surviving in some hidden away bunker climate controlled area of habitation well after we have perished at their hands.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLlwpZQrQUU

      Goggle all the Bilderberg sites and learn.

      • I have thought about the lunatics living in a bunker while all life on Earth snuffs it.
        One thought that crossed my mind; has our FJK got a pad in this bunker? And thought two; it would be hilarious to be a fly on the wall of the bunker. They wouldn’t last long, the last man standing being the perfect example of this twisted culture.

    • Yes I know what you mean Steve, when are these people going to grow up. It is frightening to watch and listen to such stupid comments of something so terrible, serious and real. When the ice goes in the Arctic ‘bang’ goes our atmosphere. It’s terrifying, and made more so by seeing the clowns reading the news every night, like a creepy horror story!

  2. Good stuff, Chris.

    The looting-polluting-exploiting-and-lying-about-it-all culture of western-style industrial civilisation will not change. The political-economic-financial system is geared to making everything worse faster, so everything is made worse faster.

    Highest ever atmospheric CO2, rising at an an increasing rate:

    Daily CO2

    May 10, 2016: 408.08 ppm

    May 10, 2015: 403.50 ppm

    Up 4.58 ppm (more than twice the recent norm)

    Lowest ever Arctic ice cover, which is declining at a phenomenal rate:

    https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop/vishop-extent.html

    Cowardly and mendacious politicians in combination with inept and corrupt bureaucrats have sealed the next generation’s fate. Runaway Greenhouse, Abrupt Climate Change, Planetary Meltdown or whatever you want to call it, is underway.

    It’s going to be an ‘interesting’ northern summer

  3. Robert Scribbler still thinks humanity can save itself from catastrophe. Apart from that, he’s pretty much on the right track:

    ‘……the blame mostly rests within the policy-making apparatuses of dominance-based economic systems and in the very few individuals around the world who now hold the keys to that power.

    An enforced global injustice set in place by wealthy individuals like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffet — who through a corrupt monetary influence regularly hijack the political process to protect legacy fossil fuel assets and to assault renewable energy industries. Those like the members of the governing board of Exxon Mobile — who have waged a decades-long campaign to misinform the public on the dangers of human-caused climate change. These so-called global elites are the authors of the climate change denial that has now crippled and deeply divided most legislative bodies around the world. The same fossil fuel drug pushers who’ve worked so hard to keep the global economic system addicted to the most damaging and corrupting of energy sources — oil, gas and coal.

    These people are the real monsters of the climate crisis. The ones who, often without any kind of visibility or accountability, have done everything they can to ensure that we, the people of an ailing Earth, have less and less power to make the right decisions and to form the kind of political consensus that would actually provide a pathway to leading us out of this worsening global nightmare. And so, whether we individually realize it now or not, we are in the fight of our lives — what is likely to be the most important struggle for justice that the human race has ever undertaken. For as difficult as such a fight will ultimately be — we must fight the fossil fuel interests and win if human civilization and much of life on Earth is to survive…..

    http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2016/05/red-tides-mass-de-offs-and.html

  5. “Not that I any longer believe that effective action to prevent runaway global warming is possible”

    Mr Trotter, you have been in the privileged position of having a weekly newspaper column for years. Years in which, one presumes, you have known about the need to take action on climate change. Metres of newspaper columns and sod all mention of this approaching catastrophe.

    Yeah, its incredibly unfair that many billions of people will be seriously harmed or killed by the consequences of the greed of western civilisation.Have you really only just thought of that?

    I am shocked and disappointed that you appear to have joined the ranks of those who have given up on taking action on climate change before you even got started!

    • I try to support belated attention to the most critical issue of all time, but you are right; for over 15 years when something useful could have been done, for over 15 years when I and others were ‘shouting at the tops of our voices’, we were largely ignored, vilified and lampooned.

      Now, 15 years later, the culture of ignorance, apathy, denial and complacency remains largely intact.

      We could stop making the predicament we are in worse. But ‘nobody’ is interested in doing that in the corrupt, consumeristic money-lender society we live in.

      Pity the next generation, who will have to endure the dire consequences of decades of stupidity and greed that have brought us to this point.

      https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_two_years.png

  6. Industrial civilization is killing the planet it must be stopped!
    If not stopped deliberately it will destroy itself. It is a mass murder suicide cult.
    Also the white man hierarchy has everyone and nature ranked and the violence runs down hill, animals, trees, soil, ocean and air are at the bottom and are being demolished. For fuck sakes the tar sands area fire that burnt Fort Mac should be a huge warning they have fucked up. I am sure the white people in charge will get production going again, ripping up more forest and polluting more rivers and land until nothing is left but a slag heap of life turned into death for money. We are tied to this sick trap, we all have to use a car, we all use sweat shop slave labour phones and clothes. We are tied to this ship of fools, the Titanic comes to mind. This culture has never changed and never will until it is stopped dead, and the sooner the better for the trees, animals, oceans and air. The Earth is now sold as a playground for the rich white money hungry maggots to fly around and around and around for fun all at the expense of the real world the living planet.
    Have a nice day, these days could be our last ones the methane isn’t far away. ANTHROPOCENTRIC mass extinction, happy days.

    • Yes, Kate, industrial civilisation, especially the corrupt money-lender-corporate-militarised-police-state version now established across the western world, is in the process of destroying the habitability of the Earth at an ever faster rate.

      However, although it needs to be stopped, it cannot be stopped because any individual or small group that seriously challenges looting and polluting agenda is immediately attacked by the system -so-called security forces- and incarcerated or murdered. The so-called justice system is nothing more than a sick joke, geared to protecting the real criminals in this tragedy. And the dumbed-down masses are not going to do anything other than participate in the rapid destruction of their own futures; indeed, most will defend the corrupt system that is constantly lying to them, just as they have been carefully trained to do.

      Rapid Planetary Meltdown just keeps accelerating (as it must):

      Arctic ice cover is the lowest ever, 11,488,450 km2（May 12, 2016), and declining at a phenomenal rate.

      https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop/vishop-extent.html

      Ice-free this September?

      Meanwhile, the main driver of Planetary Meltdown, atmospheric CO2 is ‘going through the roof’.

      April CO2

      April 2016: 407.57 ppm

      April 2015: 403.45 ppm

      Up 4.12 ppm

      (versus 2005 – 2014 average of 2.11 ppm per annum)

      Daily CO2

      May 12, 2016: 408.34 ppm

      May 12, 2015: 403.52 ppm

      Up 4.82 ppm

      Atmospheric CO2 is currently increasing at almost 7 TIMES THE ANNUAL RATE of the late 1950s to early 1960s, when Keeling first identified it as major issue of the times.

      So much for ‘carbon trading’ and ’emissions reduction’ scams.

  7. It is not just the fossil fuel interests, it is the industrial meat complex and the allied animal abuse industries such as dairy that are responsible for more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels – about 52% worldwide is nitrous oxide and methane from land animals. While we have destroyed over half of the wildlife on this planet in the last 40 years of neoliberal globalisation, we have increased the biomass of land animals being exploited by humans exponentially, so that 90% of all land animals are enslaved for us. There are also around three times as many of these such animals – cattle, sheep, pigs etc – as there are humans on this planet. Try telling your average person they have to give up eating their steaks or lamb chops and see how that goes. Holding your climate change discussions in a seafood restaurant is ironic to say the least, given that the oceans are being fished to their limits and ocean
    acidification, a direct result of greenhouse gases, is driving sea life to extinction

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