In typical climate activism, I often hear about solar power and how we just need X solar panels installations to offset Y gallons of fossil fuels. Or we have proposals to geoengineer the climate to compensate for the vast increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Yes, technology will save us!
It is no wonder that today, we believe technological solutions will be our saviour. Already almost forty years ago, eco-philosopher Henryk Skolimowski wrote in his book Eco-theology,
Traditional religion may have waned; the idea of the Messiah has not.
Here, Skolimowski was writing about how we have replaced the idea of a saviour with technology, and this belief is unquestionably ingrained in our collective psyche.
This applies to the problem of climate change. Indeed, the problem of the climate and ecosystem destruction is not an engineering problem, even though we may need to use engineering here and there to fix it. The true problem is our disrespectful attitude towards nature.
We have an attitude that we should have anything we want at any time. Look at any grocery store: we can get almost any fruit, any vegetable, any type of food year-round. We force the earth to produce and we want it available, always. It’s an attitude that nature is our slave. Instead, we should be happy to have different foods at different times as nature allows.
We have an attitude that we should be able to do anything at any time. Look at the lights outside, always on, whenever we want. Who cares if it causes the death of millions of insects, or the inability for most human beings to see the stars. It’s an attitude that we come first. We should turn off our lights at night, to show respect for the night.
We have an attitude that animals don’t matter. Millions of Gray bats were burned alive by the millions, dying painfully, on unsubstantiated hints that it could be carry rabies, and thousands more were killed for entertainment.
We put animals in zoos, we clear millions of hectares of forests, we kill, kill, kill. All of us are participants in a genocidal culture with no regard for life. We should care for nonhuman beings but instead we kill them. Of the nearly eleven thousand birds, more than one thousand of them are threatened with extinction, because of us. Many have already gone extinct, because of us. Beautiful creatures that have had their potential for life stolen, because of us. Our culture is no better than the one that burned women alive on the suspicion of being witches.
The economy is our religion. The dollar is what we worship. We glorify our intelligence but have no wisdom to use it. We are not ethical. We have selective ethics only so far as it is required for societal cohesion. And still, mainstream environmentalists insist on working within this broken system, perhaps because they are themselves hostages of the immense potential of violence required to keep our destructive society functioning. We are not fundamentally evil, but we have build a society in which the only way to function is to be evil.
In short, modern mainstream human society has no respect for life, and thus we cannot live. We see the problem and we do almost nothing. CO2 is still rising, plastic production is still rising, forests and dying, and our efforts are only a tiny fraction of what is needed. We cannot do what we need to do because the fundamental structures of our society exist only for destruction. So the only thing left to do is dismantle these structures. We need a revolution.
Yes, we know what to do, but we do not do it. Scientists know what to do, and yet they still participate in the system that grooms the young to become cogs in the very machine that promotes destructive consumerism. That system is called ‘higher education’.
In order to actually do something, we need a new attitude of respect for all life, and a new attitude that the natural world is more important than the technological. We need to regain relationships with animals and plants and give them space to come back by rewilding as much as we can. We need to tear down buildings and resorts and the headquarters of big tech and huge corporations and let forests come back. We need to prioritize access to beautiful forests in everyone’s backyard, instead of phone in every hand.
But because we do not respect life, we are dead, and technology will not be our saviour. Science will not help us. The only thing that will bring us back to life is ourselves, using the immense power of our connection with natural systems to learn how to be more harmonious with the living planet.
So how can we start to really heal the destruction we have brought down upon life? How can we really help the climate? We have to start with a respectful attitude towards it. We have to use less energy, develop less technology, cut less grass, build smaller homes, spend more time in nature, spend more time watching birds, spend more time with animals, and above all, stop the killing.