I Don't Like Trees

My friend, Lindsay, wrote this article about climate change:

I don‘t like trees. Simple. I don‘t hug them, I don‘t particularly think they‘re beautiful and more to the point I don‘t really care about them. I don‘t have an issue with them, or the rest of the natural world for that matter, but I certainly would not give up my time to save them.

Yet, I have a reputation for all of the above. I get questioned when I say that I don‘t appreciate the beauty of the natural world. People don‘t understand why I don‘t like being called an environmentalist. I‘m asked why I want to save the trees when I don‘t care about them. The answer is simple; because my passion is people.

When I was growing up I wanted to eradicate poverty; I read Marx and believed that it was the Gospel. I was convinced that my aim in life was to achieve global equality. Yet because of the people I was surrounded by I got drawn into climate change campaigning. I was forced to learn about it and it didn‘t take long until I realised that it was not worth caring about anything else; because what was the point in creating equality if it got destroyed by the climate. Why campaign on the rights of a certain peoples if those peoples are simply going to be wiped out in a century?

And the more I learn the more convinced I am of this. Every African leader who I saw speak in Cancun said the same thing; they‘re number one priority was poverty eradication, but to achieve that they needed to fight climate change; therefore their number one priority was climate change. Climate change currently looks to only exacerbate the gap between rich and poor, to lessen the rights of underrepresented peoples, and to further the tensions in the war hotspots of the world.

Yet at the same time my revolutionary ideas were squashed. I felt we simply did not have the time to have a revolution to deal with climate change; we had to use the channels already open. Yet the more I think about it the more I feel that this isn‘t quite true. Yes; we need to use the channels open to us. But no, we cannot continue with capitalism as we know it. To this end climate change and its impacts present a unique opportunity to reform our economic system to a more equal one. It demonstrates clearly that we cannot work on a system of exponential growth when we are living on a finite planet; finally our leaders know that something needs to change.

The more meetings I sit in on, the more faith I lose that we are going to curb the affects of climate change. To me it is unlikely that we shall ever avoid at least a 2 degree rise in our global temperatures. But nonetheless we must strive for 'climate justice‘. We must use this as an opportunity to re-invent our economic model to fit our finite resources, and our depleting oil. We must adapt the world we live in; not because of the trees but in order to sustain the human race. If we continue to live the way we are living as climate change gets worse we will self-destruct. Everyone in the world who believes in economic development must realise the necessity to adapt to changing circumstances.

I appreciate that some of this may be controversial; and I do not belittle those who still work towards mitigation. But I strongly believe that this fight is no longer about switching of lights or recycling. It is about the necessity to completely change the way we think in order to sustain the human race in a global situation totally different to the one we see today. If you like polar bears and trees, and trying to save them will motivate you; then that‘s fine. But if you‘re passion is development, or equality, or poverty eradication; then we need you in this fight. For it is, at the end of the day, new economic and political thinkers who will enable the survival of the human race in the 'post-apocalyptic‘ world