There are still people out there that deny the climate change. People who think it does not matter to them. People who don’t feel responsible. People thinking in a way like – if the <Indians/Chinese/whomeverelse> don’t feel responsible for their dirty <rivers/air/lakes/oceans> – why should we care?
Because the climate change, as real or unreal as it might be (and in fact – the fraction of people denying it gets smaller and smaller), illustrates some of the big challenges of today’s world – and how everything is interconnected.
Feeding Europe, America, Australia and the rest of the (so called) 1st world takes huge efforts and a lot of interconnected processes and tasks. Big challenge: The 2nd/3rd world actually feeds the 1st world – which in turn is connected to the climate, because acres of rainforest are destroyed to grow soja and to have enough cattle for all the meat we eat. We are thus in fact eating our climate, in some ways.
Next topic: Education. As said before, a lot of people on this planet can either not afford or simply not access proper education; this not only includes education in numbers and letters (aka making people able to read and calculate), but also more basic education, like hygiene. This in turn leads to millions of people who don’t care about climate – not because they decided not to, but either because they simply don’t know, or because they can’t even start to imagine what this means. Recent example: I was shown a schoolbook in a monastery in Nepal; the schoolbook (originating from India) tries to teach the children about “pollution” – and shows large plants with heavy smoke. Now – in Nepal, there are no big plants – and to find some smog, you have to travel to Kathmandu (what these children cannot afford); pollution in Nepal is connected to cars and to large amounts of plastic bottles being thrown away. So not only we eat our climate – we even fail to make sure everybody is understanding that we are doing so.
Third topic: Made in China. How often do we buy things and care about where and how they were made? Have we ever though of actually NOT buying something – because we suspected that “made in China” not only implies cheap workforce, but possibly polluting the area around the plant were the product is made? Now, I don’t generalise, and I am sure that there are first signs of “green” production in China (or Hongkong or Malaysia) – but I am also sure that a lot of the cheap manufacturing is in fact only possible simply BECAUSE no one cares about the factors surrounding production. So – apart from eating our climate and failing to make everybody understand that we are doing so, we in a way sell our climate off.
We could go on forever like this and finding more and more examples and then ultimately end up with a large web of issues that are all somehow interconnected – and where nobody would ever find a path to follow and a starting point. It is however crucial THAT we start somewhere – and maybe the climate change is not the best starting point to do so, as the impact of one single person seems far too little to make change happen. But – as other people pointed out: YES, WE CAN, and change is all around us. So why not actually start with our behaviour in spite of the climate change – and not DESPITE it will have little impact, but exactly BECAUSE it will have? It’s the little things that will make the world a better place, because ultimately, they will sum up in the next big thing – and we all are part of the crowd that must ensure that it will be a good next big thing.
