The Climate Crisis and the Skills of Peace (part 1)

Climate Crisis and the Skills of Peace (part 1)

The challenges of the Climate Crisis are formidable. Getting enough awareness, then political will just to begin addressing it here in the U.S. has been difficult enough, and still is. Then there are the conceptual challenges previous posts here have alluded to, and the challenge of overcoming the either/or mentality to accept the "Fix It" need to address now-inevitable effects that global heating will cause for the next generation or more, at the same time going forward with the "Stop It" efforts to severely scale back greenhouse gases and taking other steps to save the farther future from what could become an unstoppable apocalypse.

But the greatest challenge may be the one that nobody wants to talk about. It is the possibility, and perhaps the likelihood, that while conflicts among politicians, corporations and various interest groups prevent effective action or even attention to either track of the Climate Crisis, human civilization will add to its woes with warfare precipitated by effects of global heating. That warfare could easily become so severe that it would swamp positive efforts to address the crises themselves.

Why is war possible? For one thing: water. The Climate Crisis is shifting precipitation patterns, so more places are mired in floods and droughts which threaten to become longterm. Historically, changes in climate that affect food production and living conditions cause migration and warfare as one group moves in on the territory of another. That may well have been behind the fall of the Roman Empire before barbarian tribes, driven away by cold and drought. And spreading drought--probably related to global heating-- may very well now be a contributing factor to the genocide in Darfur.

But consider this as well: all over the world, high mountain glaciers are melting and disappearing. They are the source of water for billions. As Al Gore points out in An Inconvenient Truth, melting of the Himalayan glaciers, among the most affected by global heating so far, threatens the water supply of fully 40% of the world's population. Most of the countries in the world that now possess nuclear weapons are threatened by climatic changes already beginning to occur, and border each other or are near neighbors.

But in order to address the Climate Crisis, the world needs to do more than avoid war--it must engage in unprecedented international cooperation. Some countries are starting to engage in directly addressing global heating issues together, beyond Kyoto, with the notable exception of the U.S. But when the U.S. joins the international community again, that won't in itself solve the problems. One major issue that will soon arise is the role of the developing world, both the growing economic powers of China and India, and the poorer nations. Indeed, in his essay "An Inconvenient Truth Part II,"Tom Athanasiou writes that addressing global poverty is essential to addressing the Climate Crisis (the 2 degree line he refers to is the total temperature rise point of no return--beyond it, civilization is toast):

It will take a heroic effort and almost unimaginable internationalcooperation to hold the 2°C line, but it is still physically possible to do so. This is because already existing technologies, if developed and disseminated with true “global Manhattan Project” urgency, would support huge, rapid efficiency increases and emissions reductions, and buy us time to decarbonize our infrastructures, adopt fairer ,lower-consumption lifestyles and, of course, develop better technologies.The real need here is what Americans, in particular, might call a Global New Deal.

Like the original, it would focus on stabilizing and improving the lives of the vulnerable, restless poor. But this time the institution building and the politics would be global, and this time the background crisis – the threat that demands cooperation and, by so doing, animates the whole effort – would be as much social-ecological as it is socio-economic.

These issues of international cooperation are going to become more and more acute with each passing year, and the need to avoid climate-based warfare could arise at any time, but almost certainly will in the next 30 years. Apart from the conflicts sown by the greedy and the fearful, we have a couple of basic problems here. We don't have the skills. And we're still moving in the wrong direction.

"We don't have the skills" is a bit of an overstatement, because just like people who have been working diligently, even when reviled and mostly out of public notice, on alternative energy and on the Climate Crisis science itself for decades, there are thousands of people who have been working on developing the Skills of Peace--the skills of resolving conflicts through knowledge and communication, of ways of becoming more conscious of the personal and societal psychology that fosters unnecessary violence and ways of dealing with it, and of the skills of cooperation, and dedicated service to the common good.

But in terms of our leadership, and our institutions, we have largely ignored those skills, including even the possibility of developing, acquiring and using them. We don't for a moment dispute that skills are necessary for conducting warfare. We spend vast treasures on developing those skills and training people to use them. We know that war requires strategies, knowledge and communication of all kinds. But when it comes to peace, we seem to think it arises by magic or not at all.

This is partly a product of a dominant view of human nature derived from a perverse Social Darwinist interpretation of natural selection: the dog eats dog, survival of the fittest view. Such a view may even add to the violence, providing excuses to those who foment it, or who enable it with trade in weapons that constantly become more deadly and easier to obtain and use. But that dark view is unbalanced--it simply ignores the contrary evidence we see everyday in our lives and in the natural world, where cooperation, nurture, giving and compassion are as natural and at least as necessary as anything else.

Even science has not escaped the blinders of this bias, which is why these days are suddenly discovering animal behavior they thought impossible, everything from animal empathy to tool use. It's not like animals have just started doing this stuff. It's that human scientists weren't looking for it because they didn't believe it was there.

But this post is getting long, so let's take a photo break and meet on the other side.