Climate Changed
Chatting with a friend, who is educated, reads the news, and has travelled the world, I wanted smack my hand down on to the table when she confessed:
“I have no idea of what I can do”
As if there was no alternative, no solution. No Internet. As if you could not take 5 minutes of your 24-hour day to check how you can destroy the planet a little less.
But I realised she was right.
Big companies are yet to make money from people spending less money and in a rational way.
The media is yet to get an audience from good examples and positive stories - boring!
I realised my friend needs to put in the effort.
I realised the bridge is not yet built, between her todays and her tomorrows.
I realised she hasn’t yet realised she is breathing dirt and dust and carbon dioxide and messing with her lungs whilst driving that motorcycle, and that she is literally swimming in plastic on that seaside Instagram photo.
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Her kids won’t realise there was a world before crazy heatwaves. Or that mummy’s taxes are to rebuild their hometown after the flood. Or that Calvino’s Venice was real:
There is still one of which you never speak.’
Marco Polo bowed his head.
‘Venice,’ the Khan said.
Marco smiled. ‘What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?’
The emperor did not turn a hair. ‘And yet I have never heard you mention that name.’
And Polo said: ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.
Rather than a mythical lost land like Atlantis.
Taking a breath, I recalled the last documentary that truly moved me on global warming, Before The Flood produced by National Geographic.
Yes, it’s Leo (concerned with a real-life ship sinking), quoting:
“This is the most important issue of our time”
I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He said [referring to Al Gore]:
“All our modes of transportation, boats, trains, planes, cars, the way we produce our food, the way we build our cities, almost everything we do, releases carbon dioxide, CO2. And that leads to climate change.
The polar ice cap will melt, the seas will start to rise, there will be more dangerous weather patterns, floods, droughts, wildfires.”
It sounded like some nightmarish science fiction film. Except everything he said it’s real, and it’s happening right now.
I will be screening Before The Flood for free this month here.
“The science is clear, but the future is not.”
