Bleeding Edge

Despite the incredible groundswell we are now witnessing around the youth-led environment & climate movement that includes school strikes, UN protests, and the Climate conferences — the anger, the vision, and intelligence of children and teenagers like Greta Thunberg — many young people, hear the words that we have 18 months to tackle climate change or it will be too late and they think that in 18 months they are all going to die…

Maybe this thought is what inspires them to join the youth climate movements, the monasteries, or even the Extinction Rebellion — or more crucially, maybe this is the thought that actually paralyzes them, anesthetizes them, and keeps them away and asleep, only watching their small screens for solutions.

Indeed, young people can’t or won’t discuss climate change, not because they are too privileged, preoccupied, or intertwined with their phones, but because they are just not interested in hearing how we are all gonna die off, in ten months or ten years, or whatever length of time the latest wack job spouts out there…

Chill out people…

Things aren’t terminal as such, but we’ve got work to do to prevent a global warming beyond the 1,5 degrees that we’ve already managed to incur with certainty in the near term.

Don’t be sad, and instead celebrate that we at least have the current level of awareness to  measure that which we need to manage…

Of course these young people, the adolescents, the GenZers, the college-goers, the GenXers, and almost all of the youth of today, won’t want to discuss this environmental warming and the global consequences of inaction, with any environmentally sensitive and reasonable adult scientist either — simply because what we have been doing for the last few decades — is scaring them to death.

And if all we are capable to think of is to ask them to confront their own mortality — we deserve to be getting blank stares in response.

So asking people to consider dying is indeed a bridge too far, when you are in your teens, or your twenties or even thirties… and you listen to those types who wear a sandwich board and go around saying that the Sky is Falling.

Chicken little and his cries of gloom and doom never had much success with rousing up people and that is why, whenever I speak in public, and have to explain to the young folks, that the planet is not going to spontaneously combust, or even change in any significant way over the next 12 months, or twelve years, or even twelve centuries — if we do not “solve” climate change, or even if we do nothing but engage in adaptation and mitigation — but as scientists we ought to recognize that a change of 1, 2, 3, or 5 degrees Celsius of global warming was never a scientific predictability, but rather it always was a social, economic, and political choice, as correctly extrapolated from the scientific data of the vast majority of Earth & Climate scientists the world over.

And in the event that some of us, want the future to even remotely look like what we have today, weighed against whatever we need to sacrifice to get there, and how fast we can do it — then this set of policies merit discussion and direct action.

But as of now — the people don’t want to do anything, because we are constantly bombarding them with messages of “climate catastrophe,” “cataclysm,” and “climate apocalypse” and that awful shrill “noise” gets old fast… and people are quite adept at tuning it out.

Permanently.

But as anyone who has ever raised an army or a tribe in order to fight for an issue or cause, or for a campaign, knows that in order to get people out onto the streets agitating and demonstrating — we need engaging stories of resilience and goodness with a Happy End, and we need fresh narratives that are optimistic about the future of our species and about all others who inhabit this planet alongside us.

Yes.

We need Optimums in the face of Disaster.

Because that is the only way that we can give Courage and Confidence to our People to get them to fight for what is Right, Proper and Correct.

The risks are known.

But where are the rewards?

Therefore and in order to shift the dialogue to a happy place that engages people we desperately need new stories and fresh narratives that move the needle past is the apocalyptic end as an endpoint, and get us to the promised land.

Ask old Moses and he will tell you that he didn’t get his people trekking through the desert for forty years by promising them a desert upon arrival, but the Israelites stayed on with Moses because he promised to lead them to the Land of Milk & Honey.

That’s Leadership and not the gloom and doom brigade of chicken littles out there harping catastrophe at any breath…

And am saying this not only because we suffer form a dearth of leadership in the West, but because there are people and societies around the equator, and other places, that are already living in the version of climate apocalypse on a daily basis, and they also lack leadership to guide them out of the catastrophe mode of existence.

Human species is =known for our extraordinary resilience, flexibility, and adaptation potential, but because looking at the climate crisis as an apocalypse can only inspire a helpless waiting for the post-apocalypse to arrive, suddenly, we all cleave to the long gone past, instead of pining for the beautiful future.

Climate is not our enemy — we are.

Climate is not weather, weather is not climate, and we don’t do ourselves any favors by thinking that climate scientists can provide us with an appropriately optimistic or apocalyptic forecast for our zip or postal code, in 18 months, in 18 years, or in 18 centuries from now.

Instead we need stories that showcase a variety of possible futures, from the bleak to the hopeful, and all the way to the very beautiful Utopia of the land of milk & honey — if we work towards that Visionary dream.

We desperately need narrative stories of hope, that can help us move past apocalypse as an endpoint of all of our climate and environmental issues, and boldly look at the future with hope and love for a resilient humanity that will live in a beautiful world for all human beings, and all other species of creation and nature.

That is my kind of Leadership and that is is why I pushback against the environmental pessimist’s trend of apocalyptic, dystopian climate future, and instead I offer Hope and Love for a lifestyle and a cultural movement that focuses on a bountiful and beautiful green and eco-friendly future made possible by eliminating fossil fuel energy in favor of renewable energies like solar-wind-wave power, of sustainable resource usage, and of a cradle to cradle bio-inspired design of all of our systems and Cybernetic governance in Policy and Government together entwined with proper Science and Resilience mechanisms that include all of our ecosystems and subsystems around this good Earth that needs to regain it’s green living skin soon as possible.

Lets all go out there and built some forests and that is how we will win this game. And my leadership principles, may or may not be wholly utopian, but my style of Ecological Leadership certainly aspires for all of us to live inside a beautiful, green, and colorful world, as aesthetics that frequently mash together the elegance of Art with the craft of local culture, and the wildness of permaculture, in our streets, in our lawns, and in all our yards.

Hopeful stories that are not specifically climate-focused and, more importantly, stories that do not necessitate hopeful worlds are necessary in the age of Trump, so that this basic act of extending to another person love, hope & kindness — rather than disdain or vitriol, becomes a political narrative… that unites all of us to wish to struggle for a better tomorrow…

Because much like the melting polar ice and the dismal fate of the Arctic — I find the negativity in all of today’s news, of Hate, Impeachment and Division Politics, almost like science fiction stories conceived from the tripartite of those losers who write always about their rage, sorrow and dystopia… and drive people to depression.

But that cannot last…

Depression is not healthy and being bipolar is totally off, and especially if you become depressed because of the 24/7/365 negative narratives that the Mass Media News outlets construct for you.

Therefore we need to start constructing, the beautiful Happy End stories that we need to tell ourselves, in the hope that with a smiling face, we look at the sun and then we carry through the effort of designing the future that we want to see in this world, and then going out there boldly and building it by taking power away from both camps of the chicken-littles and from the dinosaurs of our political leadership today.

And while there’s a scientific consensus that the atmosphere is warming due to our fossil fuel emissions, many aspects and extents of climate change remain uncertain.

Therefore, writing non-apocalyptic climate change narratives can make room, intellectually and emotionally, for our failure to act sooner, and thus some things will be lost, and some more species will be gone as many already has been.

Yes, we ought to remain optimistic in the face of this giant adversity staring us in the face.

Because that is how we will get the Courage necessary to fight against it.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

I always say in my speeches that “even if it is already too late, we have no way yet of knowing it is, because I am afraid the young people will certainly give up.

Because I suspect that young people still, are understandably afraid to engage, since they feel deep in their gut, that to recognize that climate change is here, that it will change their lives, and that indeed some people will die off — it means to accept the end of those lives, some of which will be from people of their generation…

And it is indeed an end to a certain way of living, to a certain mindset, and to our delusions, but it is not the end of the world or for the earth by a ing stretch of the imagination.

And that is why we need to counterbalance the catastrophology colloquium with the optimistic stories that we need to carry us all beyond apathy…

And that is why I hate the word Apocalypse and phrases like “The End of the World as we know it” and consequently my leadership style promises a future free of fossil fuels and full of the goodness of the Sun that can give us all the energy we want and need in every part of the world daily and without fail…

And that is the platform that I ride upon fore my bid for the United States Presidency in 2020, because we need a Leader who can decarbonize our future, adapt and mitigate our lifestyles and also rid us of our reliance and addiction to fossil fuels that go hand in hand with dealings with the most awful terrorist and tyrannical regimes.

Because our addiction to oil & gas coming from the lands of the desert sun, is the only reason that we had to befriend the tyrants and the despots of these terrorist heavens, because they happened to have oil hidden under their sands.

Enough of that.

Ennui… has ensued.

So if you want to see that kind of hopeful and loving leadership at the top pf the World in 2020, come join the Lincoln Party and be counted in the US elections where we will be fighting for a better world to come.

Capice?