I hope that visitors to Forourgrandchildren have read the Blog commentary “Natural Disasters displaced 42 million last year”. This Blog identifies a major implication of simply allowing climate change to go on and on.
Life is glorious but unfair! The parts of the planet that have contributed the least to climate change will bear the first horrors of rising water levels. Climate refugees will surface in countries where human contribution to climate change has been the least!
Unlike cancer, it is not an individual situation. One can stop smoking and refuse to enter rooms where smokers continue. The climate warming one cannot avoid as an individual change of lifestyle.
In order to stop other people smoking and undermining my health I can take actions that minimize or not! That choice does not exist with climate change.
That is why denial is so easy – there are no immediate individual implications!!!!
The efforts of “forourgrandchildren” is directed at achieving a new level of personal morality – it demands that we take communal responsibility for a situation that will damage “others”, make “them” refugees with little to live for!
Can we take individual actions that demonstrate that new level of planetary ethical behaviour and caring? Can we communicate this new level of concern effectively, at least to those of our age group who realize that climate destabilization has already changed our future in areas unaffected dramatically by global warming?
That is our challenge!
Walter Pitman
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