Where we lived, the settlers build their houses. Where
we drew fresh water, the oil companies sucked oil.
Where deer ran in countless numbers, we have a new
mall. Where the healing plants thrived; the river is
burning. Now, a fence cuts the road home. Next the sky
will be tethered, and we will pay for air.
From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo
It is thus that the novel takes its modern form, through “the relocation of the unheard-of toward the background…while the everyday moves into the foreground.” There is, however, an important difference between the weather events that we are now experiencing and those that occur in surrealist and magical realist novels: improbable though they might be, these events are neither surreal nor magical. To the contrary, these highly improbable occurrences are overwhelmingly, urgently, astoundingly real.
Amitav Ghosh The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Last Friday September 18, 2019, young people on every continent took to the streets, a student global strike protesting climate change, marching with signs reading “Save Nature, Save Earth, Save Future” and “Plastic Waste is an Economic Flaw” and chanting “You had a future and so should we…[and] we vote next.”[1]
Only the day before Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the House of Representatives Joint Committee to submit the landmark IPCC report[2] (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). “I don’t want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to the scientists,” Thunberg told the US lawmakers. “I want you to unite behind the science and I want you to take real action.” [3]
Afterwards, Thunberg addressed supporters in the grand committee room stating
“the USA is the biggest carbon polluter in history,” she told the audience. “It is also the world’s number one producer of oil. It is also the only nation to signal its intention to leave the Paris climate agreement because it was ‘a bad deal’.”
Speaking softly, she modulated her voice slightly to make clear she was quoting, disapprovingly, [President]Trump with the words “a bad deal”.
Thunberg invoked Martin Luther King’s struggle for civil rights and John F Kennedy’s goals that included landing a man on the moon – “not because they are easy, but because they are hard”, – to plead with Washington to lead in the fight, even if it seems impossible. “Giving up can never be an option,” she said.
Talking about her new book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal [4] Naomi Klein quoted Greta Thunberg “We cannot solve an emergency without treating it like an emergency.” We have to “act as if the house is on fire, because it is.” “That does not mean we simply need a New Deal painted green, or a Marshall Plan with solar panels. We need changes of a different quality and character. A new vision of what humanity can be is emerging. It is coming from the streets, from the schools, from workplaces, and even from inside houses of government. When the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve.”[5]
If the sound of a Shofar can be heard during WWII at Auschwitz, then surely each of us can act to preserve our world and what we cherish, and become a mensch…worthy of the humanity in the phrase ‘human being”.[6]
Update: On Monday 9/23/19, Greta Thunberg addressed the delegates at the United Nations “you have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words…the eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line.”
Afterwards Greta Thunberg stared down President Trump as he entered the United Nations (UN) building to attend a meeting on religious freedom after he had boycotted the UN climate summit.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/climate/global-climate-strike.html
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/18/greta-thunberg-testimony-congress-climate-change-action
[4] https://www.thenation.com/article/naomi-klein-green-new-deal-book-interview/
[5] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/17/the-green-new-deal-a-fight-for-our-lives/
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/arts/auschwitz-shofar.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
alive in the sea of information 