Climate Justice Dancing with Mountains

Atmosphere flirting with the sky

"The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars".

From Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

A friend posted a picture yesterday about hurricane Eta with a caption that read something like 'this is climate injustice'. The post highlighted how time and again, those who have done the least to cause climate change, are the ones who are impacted the most. As a designer working for social and environmental justice, this is the definition of climate injustice I follow, seeing it as the emblem of our times. The executive summary in the report of modernity. This is what we are doing, what we are allowing to happen, what we are complicit in, ‘we’ being to a certain extent those of us humans who enjoy the ‘comfort, cleanliness and convenience’ of extractive capitalism, but especially the corporations, governments and business ‘leaders’ who invest so much of their power in preserving the status quo.

Dancing with Mountains (the course I am doing and that prompted me to start this blog) encourages me to stop and look again at this familiar narrative, in ways that perhaps may seem controversial. To try to see 'with a blindfold on', as this week’s homework asks us to. Are we the only agents here? Is it all our (ie humans) doing, and for us alone to 'solve'?

Here are some of the musings that resulted from allowing myself to soften the grip on my convictions.

I remember a story I heard Bayo Akomolafe tell about a trickster testing two lovers' claim to eternal love. I wonder if similarly, climate injustice is a trickster’s response to humanity’s claim to enlightenment, development, modernity, ethics, human rights. ‘You think you’ve got it all figured out?’ ‘You think you’re so much better at creation than your God?’ ‘Well here’s a gift for you, let’s see what you do with that’.

Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it is destruction doing what destruction does. Maybe it is clouds dancing with the land and getting carried away with the thunderous sound of the drums. Maybe certain parts of the Earth really don’t get on with certain parts of the Sky and they’re always fighting, perhaps because they both want to be with the oceans and some of us are caught in the middle of their love triangle. Or maybe the atmosphere is carbon-holic. She just can’t get enough of that carbon—even more comforting than chocolate, smoother than alcohol—and we're just the bartenders serving her. Maybe the atmosphere loves all the attention she’s getting as a result of her being hotter than ever. ‘Oh yes thank you, I'd love some geo-engineered mirror earrings, I'll wear them to flirt with the sun.’ *

Maybe it is a conspiracy of the death. All the dead plants, algae, bacteria, plotting for millions of years, waiting for their time to come, to become ‘Earthseed’, to fulfil their destiny, and ‘take root among the stars’.

Maybe.

I continue to wonder about this injustice that doesn’t go away when I put a blindfold on. What is my response-ability as a human being alive today, and as a 'designer'?

The invitation to let go of expectations is a precious gift I also take from the offerings from the course's last session. The invitation to stay with not knowing.

To challenge the transactional approach with which I, and many activists move in and with the world. To stop ‘doing’ activism in order to get the results we want, or to arrive at the promised land. Save the planet. Make a difference.

Allowing that expectation to break, has a slight taste of liberation.

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May we release our need to control, and our expectation to achieve specific outcomes.

*These are speculative, awkward musings by no means intended to be an endorsement of geo engineering.