Delegates, civil society organizations, and thousands of other interested parties have descended on coastal Durban, South Africa to attempt once again to tackle climate change, in the 17th UN Conference on Climate Change. Despite the rising stakes, success is unlikely, with most of the world’s leading economies conceding before the start that no new global climate agreement will be reached before 2016 at the earliest, with a start date no earlier than 2020. This rapid backtracking trips over a new finding by the International Energy Agency that without significant changes in fossil fuel infrastructure within five years, the world will “lose for ever” the chance to prevent dangerous climate change. Impacts include the potential for mass extinctions and global food crises.
Out of crisis, however, comes opportunity. We know that our current laws aren’t helping us to stem climate change. Perhaps international agreements coming out of Durban can help buy us a bit more time. But we need to go deeper. As any relationship expert will advise, we need to practice “active listening” - in this case listening to our Earth neighbors. Climate change is just the most recent and powerful message from the natural world that we’re on the wrong path. Disappearing rivers and aquifers, eroding lands, and vanishing species and ecosystems are other messages that we’ve blocked out.
By intently listening to the messages we are getting from the natural world, we will understand intuitively the truism that what we do to the Earth – our home – we do to ourselves. We can then take action on that information in a way that reflects our new understanding of our interconnectedness.
One essential action is to revisit the core assumptions underlying our law and economic systems that reward treating the environment as property to be degraded for profit. We need new legal drivers and indicators of economic success that instead reward actions that create a net positive environmental impact – which will then reverberate to benefit us and the Earth as a whole. This blog will explore ways to do this in coming posts, and we welcome your thoughts and ideas.
