The Way the Oceans Bind Us
Christchurch, New Zealand
2019, Senior, Creative Writing
The greatest challenge facing young people today is that of climate change. Connected by the oceans, climate change not only affects us all, it also brings us together. As such, our only viable response is to reimagine the links climate change has forged between us and use these to work together to protect our environment. From challenges arise opportunities and, for this reason, there is a need for leaders and organisations in positions of power to reduce carbon emissions, foster sustainable cities, and propagate positive flow-on effects for consumer attitudes. It is up to us to drive this change, our governments to solidify it, and for each individual to act in ways that future generations can be proud of. In this way, the greatest opportunities and challenges facing young people today are those that must be solved through the collaboration and actions of us all. Our growing concern for climate change is a testament to the scale of damage we have already inflicted, signposting the crimes we are yet to commit. With this in mind, our action plan must begin firstly by understanding the past, why humanity is deaf and blind to the emergency posed before us; secondly, it must recognise the importance of unity in our global response to catastrophe; and finally, it must establish our immediate actions for tomorrow, how we as individuals can counteract the crisis humanity has assigned to its own agenda.
For many, climate change is difficult to picture. It isn’t like a flood, a rapid onset hazard, one which we plaster with the patterns of destruction.[1] We have seen it all before, and anticipate it all again, our emergency packs close to our chests. Climate change is more than that, but it is also so much less. Somewhere between the evacuation procedures and frequent false fires, a part of us houses this desperation. The sort that wears fear in its bones and safety on its skin because it only wants to feel in control. Looking to the past, climate change has been caused by our anthropocentric tendencies, the way we are blind to slow transformations of our ecosystems and weak to the recognition of our need to change. It has been caused by our appreciation, not of nature’s unmatched beauty, but the way it provides for OUR needs, OUR wants, and OUR aspirations. Little have we realised that an unprotected environment is an unforgivable one, retaining the scars we have already etched, retaining the warning signs never heeded. Look around. Watch as the Earth spins on its axis, the way it is always changing, the way it is now sinking into its skin and spitting out our toxic fumes. Arctic sea ice coverage has shrunk every decade since 1979, yet it fails to draw media attention to the scale of one earthquake.[2] Thirty seconds beats 30 years because, unlike an earthquake traveling at ten kilometres per second, climate change is slow onset, somewhat predictable and accompanied by a fair warning. Unfortunately, it’s a warning deaf to our ears.
Within this sound, the thickest of musical textures combines politics, people, and pretension, all masking a deadly denial. Politics plays procrastination, widening an already massive disconnect between science and public knowledge, a mismanagement of the human element. History tells us, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future.”[3] But with the USA withdrawing from the Paris
Agreement, it is becoming easier to question whether this really is true.[4] When the USA put its isolationist approach ahead of joining the League of Nations, the onset of World War Two was a catastrophic consequence.[5] This decision is all too familiar with the Paris Agreement, a decision destined to do paralleled damage. Connected by the oceans, our actions must emanate beyond our national borders and into the realms of unity. Be it through rising intakes of climate change refugees, becoming signatories to key treaties, or working together to develop biocentric technologies and ways of life, our actions must reflect the global scale of this “conflict” we have encountered and the global nature of our citizenship. Our responses should be scaffolded like our recovery from natural disasters. In my hometown of Christchurch, the 2011 earthquakes inflicted significant damage to our region’s natural and cultural environment, ranging from a $230 million loss for the tourism industry to increased flood risk for over 10,000 homes.[6],[7] However, the global response from governments and Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) teams, both financially and on the ground, were critical in minimising the eventual damage our city suffered. The USAR teams were the first responders acting immediately after the earthquake, searching buildings that had been destroyed or partially damaged. Arriving from Australia, Japan, Singapore, and various other nations, 150 overseas USAR personnel used their expertise to recover survivors and the deceased.[8] This represents the strength we hold as an international community, and it is of my belief that our approach to climate change should be no different. Climate change is important to me because it is a warning for our futures, the futures of those after us and the futures of those around us. And still, we do not hear.
Climate change yearns to be understood as more than two words and acted upon with real changes. In the words of Al Gore, “Today we’re dumping 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the environment, and tomorrow we will dump more, and there is no effective worldwide response.”[9] Although we are all part of the problem, too often we lose ourselves in the statistics and forget the weight of our individual actions. Many of these 70 million tonnes of waste are produced by factories, banks, and major corporations; however, as consumers, every time we buy a product, we cast a vote for our futures. Buying products from sustainable and ethically conscious businesses is a vote stripped of climate change. Biking to school, recycling effectively, and turning off unneeded lights shows the Earth that we are listening to its warning. The ways in which we act, in our own towns and abroad, places us in a strained predicament, a volatile denial. In this role, tailor-made for failure, we distance ourselves from the problem, shifting our responsibilities away from the solutions and into a complex network of people and places, all running from the roar of an ever-changing landscape. However, by understanding the threats posed before our environment and acting upon them accordingly, we turn insignificant actions in our minds into significant impacts for the Earth. In doing so, we empower humanity to look past the illusion of helplessness and beneath the politics that envelops us. What we find beneath is a warning and a challenge: a different kind of change. We must shift away from fossil fuels, towards renewable energy. To switch to green transport and reduce our waste. This change looks like solar panels powering our homes and wind turbines powering our city. It means walking, biking, and busing; thinking twice before we buy the things we’ll never use and the clothes we’ll never wear. Add up the little changes you can make in your life, hang clothes dry, use energy-efficient light bulbs, and recycle what waste you make. Reshape your carbon footprint into shoes to walk by oceans. Then sprint, because the climate is running, it is changing, and our change must match it.
In conclusion, the way the oceans bind us and the way nature frames our capabilities should be used as our spark for combating climate change. As a connected planet, our approach to the issue must be multi-faceted, taking into account our past errors, our need for global unification, and the small steps we can take towards achieving our bigger goals. Climate change is our own anthropocentric making, and it is up to us to solve it using the other side of humanity: empathy, compassion, and resilience. We can work together to protect the environment, holding in our hands the air and sea that holds us together.
The Red Wheelbarrow, by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
The red wheelbarrow is our Earth. The rain? Our actions. The white chickens? Humanity. As Williams would have said, and as we must listen, so much depends upon these changes we make.
Works Cited
[1] Development Workshop. (2011). Slow & rapid onset disasters Retrieved from https://www.dwf.org/en/content/slow-rapid-onset-disasters.
[2] NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (2019). Slow & rapid onset disasters Retrieved from https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice.
[3] Age of the Sage. (2018). Understanding history – past and the present why is the world the way it is today. Retrieved fromhttps://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/history/understanding_the_past_present_future.html.
[4] Roberts, T. (2018). One year since Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2018/06/01/one-year-since-trumps-withdrawalfrom-the-paris-climate-agreement.
[5] Laderman, C. (2016). The United States and the League of Nations. American History. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.314.
[6] Wood, A. (2012, May 10). Quake cost to Canty tourism $230m. The Press. Retrieved from http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/6892054/Quake-cost-to-Canty-tourism-230m.
[7] Mitchell, C. (2017, October 7). NZ’s sinking city: Floods the new reality of life by the river. The Press. Retrieved from https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/97445060/the-sinking-city-floods-the-new-reality-of-life-by-the-river.
[8] Cheng, D. (2011, February 27). Christchurch earthquake: Search teams leaving no stone unturned. NZ Herald . Retrieved from https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10709161.
[9] Walsh, B. (2007, December 19). The Gore Interview. Time . Retrieved from http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1695388_1695516,00.html.
Reflection
Reflection
I was inspired by the sense of humanity drowning in our own actions and the way climate change has and will continue to radically change the makeup of our landscape. The Way the Oceans Bind Us reflects both the grief and hope we as a young generation have built up while watching this climate crisis unfold. The opening of the piece gradually evolved from one of disgust and fury to one of sadness and despair, before developing into an ending of hope and a call-to-action to the audience. This change was sparked by the realisation that it is not just anger that builds a movement but, rather, an appreciation for the beauty we have in this world. The incorporation of poetry and history was used to reveal how climate change is not a singular catastrophe; it is so deeply linked to many elements of this world and society around us. The linkages formed were used to convey the importance of expressing this climate urgency in ways we can all understand. Without understanding, action is too distant an idea to even start to comprehend.