Waatea News Column: Meanwhile, the planet is melting
The latest state of the climate report by the World Meteorological Organisation out this month makes for some grim reading.
It states that warming has reached dangerous levels and that the Pacific is facing the realities of that change now.
So how do we culturally respond to a political system that won’t adapt and an economy that can’t adapt?
I think the friction of climate change will start to explode in other areas. Children are rising up with climate strikes, activists are organising direct action movements and self reliance cultures and in the worst mutation, even the terrorist who committed the atrocity in Christchurch claimed to be committing his murder for the environment as much as a racial murder.
Eco fascism is not something we would normally link to climate change, but if we are still in denial at the enormous adaptations global warming will require, it’s a radicalised link that will only multiply.
Taking on different cultural values towards the land is the only step forward if we are to begin that adaptation.
The problem is not the climate. The problem is the system. If you go right back to the founding of the system in Aotearoa-New Zealand when the Treaty was first singed, they weren’t thinking about the woman’s pay gap, or pricing pollution correctly. None of that.
Just looking at the ideal population number for the functioning of the system. Basically the idea is that sooner or latter 20%-80% of the people are surplus to requirements so disposable basically. That could just be a euphemism for war.
The problem now is there is an entire generation of students that are being sacrificed. They are studying at the university and they are aware in advance that they are disposable and are of no use and that there will be no jobs for them and all that.
So you, we, we all are already fucked in advance. And then even more tragic is we have Britain trying to outdo the failed state syndrome brought on by climate change by screwing themselves earlier. Just tragic.
This is where we are living in dangerous times when the old is dying and they’re trying to hang on and the contours of the new are not yet defined and this is where monsters are born. So I’m pessimistic. Our only hope is that enough people become pessimistic so that some one may emerge out of despair and does something.
We had the TPPA protest, the Arab Spring, 15/3. Maybe out of this mess we will get an explosion, and out of a crises we will fix something that was broke and get something wonderful.