Circa-2002 environmentalism begged for more bikers, lower thermostats and less polystyrene. The jets of today’s movement make a braver thunder: they hinge on justice. A decade ago, your shopping-mall forays, half-hour showers and globe-trotting airfare was under scrutiny, but now are your ears, which scarcely register the running snow-melt and decline to hear the ongoing environmental organizing lobby.
Climate organizers are a countervailing strain, but they are winning. With the grit of Othello’s Iago, they are netting legislators who practice and preach a flawed, globalizing logic. They are demanding that industrialists take responsibility for subjecting their emissions and self-interest to those who are less fortunate — the indefensible Desdamonas of the world who are not tooled for cooperation, response or rebellion. They are calling on those “up in corporate” to descend from their towers, their dry archipelago of city blocks, and have a more equated glance (at sea level) of the wet, waning coasts. The implications, microplastics, and methane plumes of a warmed world bubble beneath.
Extreme climate has burned onto our era’s memory, and in the hotness, we walk a wobbly wire with infirm grip. The third world is dipping, and let me be clear: the first world is next for remotion. “How does that make you feel?” asks the shrink. Inspired or impotent? Really, what does it take to fulfill a transcontinental vision for rational, wholesome, productive urban centers, an industrial growth free of wastes, petroleum addiction and never-saturating sprawl? The worn adage that sustainable development undermines healthy economies squashed, a new troupe of players — social scientists, landscape architects and lawmakers — is necessary to completely reimagine our human presence. The alternative, if one exists, knocks the death knell.
With the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set to expire this year, engineers of the new system must be wont to the weighty cultural responsibility they carry. In cultivating healthy, sustained growth, regional cultural values, heritage and precedence must reign supreme. Global climate organizing orbits the frontline: the indigenous, out front, disproportionately bear the brunt of “shocks” to the system caused by climate chaos. In the aftereffects, their domains are not a tabula rasa for the West. Locals need to drive the global urban planning conversation; they are to define their post-transition modes of life and labor.
The abrasions of the private sector are smoothed by collective commitment to “goodness.” Environmentalists are no longer fey particles in a crowd, but a human ribbon crouched en masse on the boulder-field, marching to make history. A politics of sound bite and short-range gain is under fire; the glare permeates, nowhere a shadow. From our urban-most cores and out toward the jerkwaters, a growing number of people understands that our cities and settlements foster a reflex of wanting and grasping by which to live. This reflex is the purest form of suffocation. It is our poison pill.
True human resilience does not stem from artist’s metaphor or sticking veneers over the same flailing, dam-dig-drill industrial model. In its realization, our kind’s ecology and psychology must legitimize a capacity to endure, adapt and maintain a dynamic stability in the face of uncertain, unruly environments. We need to prepare for new values, habits and expectations – uplift, not show contempt for, our generation’s organizers, the livewires of the millennial environmentalism who are ensuring a just transition. Significant estrangement and repentance to “enmesh” us by midcentury, what we will gain is so much more than what we will give up – “out of her own goodness.”
