Rebecca Solnit of The Guardian in late July penned a piece which misrepresents climate acceptance, realism and planetary hospice solely as a harmful defeatism and doomerism.
Renaee Churches wrote an important and thoughtful response that will not reach an audience as large as Solnit’s, and is excerpted below:
We have already lost the climate battle and it is stories or opinions like the one above, that are preventing others from grasping this, and stopping us from taking the kinds of collective adaptive responses appropriate on a local and global scale.
The not-too-late framing is a dangerous one. It means people are prepared to wait for global elites to roll out the energy transition, to deploy such ‘solutions’ as carbon capture technologies, or other flawed techno fixes, aimed at making those elites wealthy, while not stopping the baked in warming that is already here and accelerating. It is only when we finally break through the not-too-late taboo that we will begin the work in earnest of adaptation to reduce suffering as much as we can.
We need to normalise talk about collapse and have a broad, society-wide, honest discussion about how we can respond. These discussions are already happening behind closed doors by the Militaries of the world, by Insurance Agencies, and the Financial Sector elites. So we don’t need more writers like Solnit advising the masses to effectively keep calm and carry on. Rather we need a clear-eyed look at the reality of our situation — as a failing global industrial civilisation.
Then together, as ordinary people, we can adjust, grieve and determine how best to navigate the great unravelling as it continues to play out in our lives.
Renaee Churches, Medium
this is my response to Solnit’s piece, which will reach even fewer people:
Climate acceptance and Planetary Hospice involve the refusal to endorse,
and the honesty to resist, further extraction from and destruction of the Earth and injuries to indigenous and marginalized communities of People across the World and to the remaining, marginally or tenuously stable or life-supportive swaths or pockets of wildlife, forests, tundra, deserts, wetlands, lakes, rivers
and ocean.
to pursue temporary at best, and empty at worst, pretend “solutions” that entail mining more uranium, more lithium, more conflict minerals; damming more rivers; installing more wind turbines; producing more electric vehicles; filling living ecosystems and pristine environments with more solar arrays — in order to temporarily maintain and sustain the populations and lifestyles of the Western World.
Climate acceptance is not inaction, is not defeatism or doomerism.
Climate acceptance is care-giving, tending, maintenance, conservation, preservation, protection and support of land, wildlife and Peoples — and defense against further habitat and cultural destruction and against creating more light, air, soil and water pollution and contaminated waste streams.
Climate acceptance is also responsiveness to the current and next climate-fueled disasters — with adaptation strategies and resilience planning and actions; with physical, material, and economic assistance and aid when communities are displaced, destroyed and or become untenable; and relocation assistance and the welcoming acceptance, re-homing and restabilization of climate refugees.
Climate acceptance looks like deep mourning alongside deep empathy and the urgent and continuous need to work to try to mitigate the suffering of Earthlings with the generosity of our time, money, respect, appreciation, comfort, care, wonder and joy.
And with truth.
What a time to be alive, truly.
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 