"We are everywhere, from us here in little Launceston (Tasmania) all the way to Greta Thunberg in Sweden."
"It's important that we can be sustainable across Australia, that we lower our own carbon emission and that we can move forward - youth and adults alike."
"Let's have some action."
Launceston was one of 50 cities and regional centers school-striking in Australia, one of 90 countries of the world where students quit school to call attention to climate change, held adults responsible, and proclaimed loudly:
"You are stealing our future."
To face a new future that some are calling apocalyptic, Jem Bendell is articulating a new ethic and approach, a deep adaptation agenda that explores how to reduce harm and not make matters worse.
We have until Wednesday evening to raise funds for the making of Jem Bendell's film Oskar's Quest (we're 79% to goal), what to tell a thirteen-year-old boy about his future as climate change wreaks havoc.
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School Strike for Climate Change in Nuuk, Greenland, Friday March 15, 2019
The rapid release of carbon dioxide driving climate change is wreaking havoc with our world as we know it. Heat energy that once escaped from the Earth's atmosphere is being returned, mostly into our oceans, causing unprecedented extreme weather events from droughts, forest fires, and hurricanes of previously inexperienced ferocity, rising sea levels, causing seawater to become more acidic, and melting the Arctic, where frozen methane beneath the Arctic Ocean and permafrosted shores waits for release like a ticking time bomb. These events will increase in frequency and intensity. These events will cause people to migrate. When migrants collide with others, in some places, conflict will result.
We, including our best scientists, are incapable of agreeing on when it will get so bad that our societies will collapse. Perhaps within ten years, before the end of the century, or never. Prediction is impossible because nature, ecosystems composed of living organisms, is responsive, adaptive and resilient in unforeseeable ways.
An example of the unexpected are deep sea sulphur-emitting hydrothermal vents, underwater geysers, located in the deepest, most foreign parts of the ocean. Their release of much sulphur gas was arrested by billions of microbes that in turn support long robust food chains of organisms (vent clams, sulphide copepods, gyre snail, glob snail, maia snail, split limpet, pandorae worm, sulphide worm, ampharetid worm, vent fish, fathead sculpin, rattail fish, and vent sea spider, to name just a few.)
When in the Arctic, frozen methane starts sublimating into the atmosphere little is known of what anaerobic and aerobic microbes will flourish, what food chains they will feed, and how much will all the lifeforms, a.k.a. nature, slow the escape of methane into the atmosphere.
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Jem Bendell
Strong convincing arguments have been made that near-term social collapse due to climate change is imminent, within a decade. Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war. If not within a decade than within our lifetimes.
Whether the probability of apocalypse within the decade is 95% or 37%, now would a be a good time to act, to help develop an approach and an ethic of deep adaptation that transcends short-term economic self-interests.
Deep Adaptation, as articulated by Jem Bendell, refers to the personal and collective changes that might help us to prepare for - and live with - a climate-induced collapse of our societies. Four questions guide the work:
- Resilience: what do we most value that we want to keep and how?
- Relinquishment: what do we need to let go of so as not to make matters worse?
- Restoration: what could we bring back to help us with these difficult times?
- Reconciliation: with what and whom shall we make peace as we awaken to our mutual mortality?
These questions invite exploration of Deep Adaptation to our climate predicament in order to develop both collapse-readiness and collapse-transcendence.
Click here for more information about the film and Jem's work.
Your $10 gift right now will keep giving when others view the film you financed.
Gifts of $14 or more will be recognized in the film credits, unless you request anonymity.
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Guardian News reports: Sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg has criss-crossed the continent speaking at rallies in four countries in just eight days in a bid to spur politicians into action. She also made a brief stop at the European parliament in Brussels to address EU leaders. The Swede has become a social media sensation this year with her campaign of school strikes sweeping across dozens of countries and tens of thousands of teenagers participating.
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