A stable atmosphere is a civil right

This blog is a long one, it is an experiment in turning people to the criticality of Climate Change using other people's words. Most importantly it uses and will paraphrase the speech of a man who achieved great things. That man is dead, cut down long ago in midlife by those who believed that the Person and the Idea were synonymous. Those people were wrong; people might not be bulletproof, but ideas are. When Martin Luther King was killed, his vision was revealed as a Hydra. He was but one head, and when he was removed, his words proved an able body from which a million more heads sprung up. And from them, a million more to each head.

With Climate Change we are in a similar position to that of the North American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Our family, our sisters and brothers, our friends across the world are increasingly segregated from the right to a safe and secure environment, from an environment which supports a healthy life, from an environment to which they can turn for sustenance and support.

The text below is drawn from a speech King gave about Vietnam; in large tracts the text is unchanged, and where it is changed it is only to alter the focus from Vietnam to Climate Change, or to bring in relevant examples for the new subject, where King had ones relevant to the original text.

Using a speech about a passed battle is highly relevant to Climate Change. This time the battle is not for a nation but for the world, though both battles were, in the final analysis, ones of ideology, borne out then by the force of guns and bombs, and now by the force of markets and technologies. It is a global battle, and it is against ourselves, against our way of life, against our choices. It is a personal civil war for every person on the planet, where we must fight each day with our conscience and habits, fully cognizant of the reality of climate change, fully aware of how our actions contribute to it.

And fully aware of the inevitable and urgent need for change.

“I started this blog because my conscience leaves me no other choice. You join with me here because we are in deepest agreement with the aims and work of a mission that rings true through the sentiments of our own hearts, and with which all people find full accord: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Climate Change.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, people do not easily assume the task of opposing society's comforts, especially in time of war, for let us not fool ourselves: we are at war with ourselves and with our planet. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict with our planet, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our planet's history that a significant number of its people and leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of doom and self-protection to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history and science. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past few years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of the planet which gives us life, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the environment, Graeme?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent, the voices of those who say we must lose the comforts we have fought so hard to gain?" "Progress and environmentalism don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your movement," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path my life has followed leads clearly to these words.

I write this to make a passionate plea to my beloved planet. This blog is not addressed to any of the mighty organizations that run our societies. It is not addressed to any nation, no matter how large or small, how meek or powerful. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy that befalls our atmosphere each day. Neither is it an attempt to make me or any environmental campaigner paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role we must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While we both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of certain organizations and powerful nations, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

No, I wish not to speak with those who make powerful decisions on a grand scale, but rather to my fellow people, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that is exacting a heavy price across all continents, across all peoples and across all walks of life.

I am not a preacher by trade, though with the urgency of the problem we are increasingly living with, it is not difficult for me to find major reasons for bringing Climate Change into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious connection between our atmosphere and the struggle I, and others, have every day to improve our quality of life. A few years ago there were shining moments in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for everyone - in all nations developed and developing - through the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the betrayal of the Kyoto Protocol and the oil wars in the Middle East, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. I knew then that North America and the United Kingdom and Australia and other involved nations would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of our environment so long as such misadventures like these continued to draw people and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. I am compelled to see these oil wars as an enemy of the environment and to attack them as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that these oil wars were doing far more than devastating the hopes of the people in those oppressed countries, who had looked to us for salvation, whilst we looked to them for oil and strategic securities of supply. We send our sons and our brothers and our husbands, and our daughters and our sisters and our wives to fight for a past that needs to die, a past that will continue to kill our atmosphere for centuries to come; and all around them die those who dared hope for freedom, and they die in extraordinarily high proportions. And our past, our society that grew up on oil, which hangs onto our leaders like an infection, an addiction the like of which is seen in ghettoes in all countries, amongst the poor who know their lives are miserable and know how to make them better, but keep to their dark worlds and creeping infections and crazed addictions because they are too scared to move on; our society is infested with these habits of the past.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience of world events over the last three years - especially the last three summers. I have watched the news, and seen the desperate, rejected, and angry people of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. And also in Darfur, where the peoples of the region are driven to desperate measures as Lake Chad withers to a ghost of a glory that once gave life to Sudan and the surrounding region. I have seen these early effects of Climate Change, like Molotov cocktails thrown at the start of a civil war. I have tried to spare for those peoples my deepest compassion while, in the case of Darfur, maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But in Darfur who ever asks - what about Climate Change? They ask if their nations shouldn’t use massive doses of violence to solve their problems, to bring about the changes they want, to keep access to the waters of the Lake that sustains them. In New Orleans, the questions of Climate Change have now hit home, and we saw those that can never again raise their voices against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos. We saw their voices clearly drowned by the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - their own government. For the sake of those peoples, for the sake of the environment without which we would all be silent, for the sake of the billions trembling under the violence spewed forth from our changing climate, I cannot be silent.

You may ask a question, "Is this now about the environment or a protest against governments and war?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for environmental justice, and if you do, I have this further answer.

Over the years many people have joined organizations such as Friends of the Earth to bring about a real change in the way we work with our planet. And now after all these years we find that whilst we gave our souls and our attention and our creativity to worthy issues that could be tackled quickly – chemical pollution of waters, processing of our wastes, protection on an individual scale of our habitats, after all this work, we find that the one thing that protects and nurtures all life on this planet, that keeps us safe from harm, could within decades bring about a rein of chaos and destruction on all ecological systems, on all financial systems and farming systems, on all habitation and transport systems. And we find in the face of this adversity only one motto that can sum up the urgency of action needed to rally us to this most unique and righteous of causes. We choose as our motto:

"No Planet B."

We are convinced now that we cannot limit our vision to certain rights for certain people, but instead affirm the conviction that we all, of every nation and creed and religion, will never be free or saved from ourselves until our descendants are loosed completely from the shackles that combating and adapting to Climate Change put on us. The great quote of the Native American peoples is pertinent here:

”We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children”

What sort of a people tie their lender’s wrists together and refuse to give back their property? This is not called borrowing, it is called theft. And when we are identified as thieves, will our children not have the right to seek justice against us?

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of any person today can ignore the present civil war in our hearts and in our minds. If our soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Oil. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of people the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that the atmosphere will be returned to those who have lent it to us are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our environment, of our communities and families, of our unborn children.

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all peoples the calling to be a child of all Gods; for all Gods are God; and God is the mystery of life and creation and love.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers or sisters.

And as I ponder the madness of denying Climate Change and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people now dead and dying, dispossessed or homeless because of it. I speak now not of oil wars, not of the ideologies of different governments, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of Climate Change in silence for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

Coral reefs the world over are dying. The habitats they provide for fish and other marine life help feed us all. Globally, the resources and jobs we can link to them contribute some US $30 billion to the global economy. They have no voice but ours.

Shismaref, a small Inuit village in Alaska, has been moved, after three of its seven houses fell into the sea. A small number of voices, and yet if we choose to turn our ears, we will hear the tiny roar of an approaching storm amongst them.

The people of Tegua, a small island of Vanuatu, a small republic in the South Pacific are among the victims of Climate Change. They have been relocated from their traditional home by the United Nations, a scheme launched at a meeting called Many Small Voices, as average sea levels rose, swamping their island in storm surges.

In the European heatwave of 2003 an estimated 35000 people died. Their voices are lost.

Lima and Cuzco in Peru are facing fresh water shortages as glaciers – their principal source of fresh water – shrink. Over 8 million people are affected, and they are starting to make their voices heard.

17 million people will be affected as sea levels rise over the Bangladesh coastal area. Many of these will have relatives in countries across the world, and in time their voices will be disparate, but they will all have a common tale to tell.

So these people go from their homes and from our lives, women and men and children and the aged. And they watch as we continue to poison their atmosphere. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees that are the lungs of our planet. They wander into the hospitals with illnesses caused by their own energy use. Who knows how many have died in processes we do not yet understand to be connected to a changing climate. In heatwaves it is thousands, in wars it is hundreds of thousands, in droughts it is millions.

What must people think as they strive to achieve our level of comfort and prosperity, only to hear us with our louder voices saying – No, this life is contributing to your misery.

We have destroyed our understanding of our place in the world. We are destroying our land and our crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of our souls, burdened and dragged down by the stone of guilt and greed, and our fear of admitting we are wrong.

And soon there will be little left to build on, save bitterness. The dispossessed and the dead, the waterless and the homeless may well wonder if we plan to carry on our passive killing, our accidental genocide. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers and our sisters.

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the point of view of those who have most reason to hate us and to seek justice against our nations. To hear their questions, to know their assessment of ourselves. For from their view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of the world who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves life, to the leaders of all nations: The great initiative in this war for our planet is ours; the initiative to stop it.

If we continue to avoid making the brave decisions, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that our leaders have no honourable intentions. If we do not stop our war against the planet immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of developed nations that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning, that we have been detrimental to the life of all people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our governments should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: To agree a cap for global carbon dioxide and methane emissions, and global contraction and convergence strategies for achieving year on year reductions in those emissions.

Number two: Declare a unilateral approach to combating climate change.

Number Three: Give to the United Nations the power to regulate nations’ carbon emissions.

Number Four: Realistically accept the fact that there will be environmental refugees as a result of Climate Change, and that provision must now be made for them.

Number Five: Set a date by which we will see fossil fuels substantially phased out use.

At this moment in history the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. He said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. In the context of securing energy supplies, using energy and dealing with environmental refugees, this triplet is of extreme importance. We must bring into our world view, as environmentalists, the interconnectedness of equalities and diversity, with the needs of the environment.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values is already looking uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it looks across the seas and sees individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay a hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning cities with drought, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous substances into our air, water and land, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military offense than on programs of environmental betterment and social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

The richest and most powerful nations in the world, must lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war, whether that war be on a traditional battlefield or within our conscience. There is nothing to keep us from moulding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into an inspiration and a life worth living.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against ourselves. War is not the answer. Environmental catastrophe will never be defeated by the use of nuclear energy. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negativity, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are a fertile soil for reaping more of the mistakes of the past.

These are revolutionary times.

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become humanist. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to humanity as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all of humanity. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word".

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The rising tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent, environmentally sensitive coexistence or violent, environmentally destructive coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world, where our climate is calmed and stable. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of modern life militate against a realization of full and happy lives, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong

Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.

If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of life.

If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”