Something We Lack, Something We Need

Being honest about climate change is something that has eluded our species, our culture, our economies and our behavior for a long time.

Camping out in a coastal forest on the Åland Islands during Easter vacation.

I was once perhaps a bit too grandiose in framing the context merely by looking at the science.

To approach an issue which is essential and imminent to reach an ideal target in some non-binding international treaty on the future of the human race, we should look closer by.

People should first come to terms with what the actual situation is, orient their behaviour by finding meaning and then approach the enormous tasks ahead as part of the deliberate systemic action.

It is obvious that social realities, politics, economics, technologies and entire cultures of consumption have not adjusted, are not adjusting and will not adjust unless honest, ambitious leadership emerges.

Climate change begets system transformation. Society has not taken any meaningful, deep action on total greenhouse gas cuts, even though decision-makers have known the urgency of the problem for decades.

Finding Meaning

It is hard to make sense of what is going on right now. None of us wanted to live in a predicament like this, most of us did not ask for it, and we did not deserve it.

Young people did not deserve the present or the future.

All of this is forced upon us by short-sighted governance systems and rearranging biosphere. We need to cope because old people, nations, and corporations did not take action.

The society I’ve been living in has arrived in a bizarre situation.

We have material wealth, excellent education and healthcare, but climate change and degradation of nature haunt us.

It could have been something else like running out of the stuff we need to produce industrial food or overpopulation. The problem turned out to be a strange global rearrangement of the biosphere, caused by invisible…