The other day, I was happily writing up a post about, basically, how we can overcome religious division and then the news came that the United States and Israel had started bombing Iran. I just chucked the tablet aside.
Why is unity so important today? Because, as Antonio Guterres said a few COPs ago, we unite, or we perish. It makes you feel sick in the gut knowing the toddler next door is facing a horrific future. You feel foolish to believe that people can overcome their differences and rise to the challenge of addressing climate change. You feel anger and that the human primate deserves what’s decidedly already here and can only get much worse. All species have an expiry date; most often, I believe, it’s about 200,000 years. We may have reached it, but we can drag other species to the brink of extinction. It’s an old theme: in the early fifties movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, the alien is shocked when humans refer to Earth as “our planet.” We share it with other species, and the human primate is duty-bound to keep its activities well within the limits of what the planet can sustain. Planetary boundaries, as the scientists call them.
From nature’s point of view, all our industrialised civilisation does is grab everything we can get our grubby little hands on and turn it into toxic waste. Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything transforms. As said by French scientist Antoine Lavoisier. All toxic waste created by reckless polluting is there, piling up, and will snuff out, not just us, but also many other life forms.
That brings me back to what I was writing about, and I still feel it is useless. And yet on a train, a cheeky little boy walked past and gave grandpa a tap on both knees. The first tap is, yes, the challenge exists, the second tap, a reminder that we, the adults, have work to do, and it’s not dropping bombs on his peers.
Bless him.