Homily: Green World Rising: The Climate Mobilization by, Daniela Gioseffi

GREEN WORLD RISING: The Climate Mobilization

Homily: 7/24/16: Delivered to First UU Society of Brooklyn: by poet, climate activist, American Book Award winning author, and speaker, Daniela Gioseffi. Author of On Prejudice: A Global Perspective (Anchor, Doubleday, 1993)) that included Al Gore’s early essay on Environmental Racism. Daniela also anthologized Petra Kelly of the Green Party in Women on War, International Writings from Antiquity to the Present (1988, 2003) Touchstone/Simon & Schuster & The Feminist Press, NY.)
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Imagine there’s a fire in the room right now. You’d yell FIRE! You’d help everyone exit! You’d call the fire department and grab a fire extinguisher! Your senses would be focused like a laser! You’d put your entire self into emergency mode. Climate crisis is now an unprecedented emergency, the biggest national security, public health, moral and social justice threat of all time ever, says. NASA, the Pentagon, The Union of Concerned Scientists, the United Nations, and even The World Bank! Climate Crisis is a dire emergency, as Dr. Margaret Klein Salamon, Psychologist, Founder & Director of The Climate Mobilization has explained, and we must now be in an emergency mode to save civilization. Bill McKibben, renowned climate and environmental activist wrote an article in The New Republic that thoroughly explains why we must now be in emergency mode to save the young from complete catastrophe.

 

     Climate change is moving quickly toward a tipping point of no correction possible—

 if we do not move quickly now toward all clean, renewable energy by 2025! Inroads are being made, but not fast enough. All life on Earth is already slowly dying off from climate change as hundreds of species are going extinct weekly. The oceans are warming and acidifying, killing coral reefs that sea life lives on, plastic trash is choking sea life and 20,000 square feet of glacial ice melts away weekly now, as we loose the “air-conditioners” of the planet. Wars in Syria and Egypt, Yemen, Afganistan were exacerbated by or caused by droughts and scarcity of resources. The young will suffer horrible thirst, starvation and wars over natural resources as they slowly and painfully meet their demise over the rest of the century. One must shout “Fire!” to save the young. There’s no time to dally! There’s no time to be soft about the issue. A dire warning is in order, and a huge mobilization must occur!

 

     The United States lags behind other European countries because of an insanely self-destructive, greed mongering right wing that continues to deny climate crisis emergency altogether. The lies about it’s non-existence are funded by the fossil fuel industrialists in collusion with the USA right wing, as is our major media, which has never reported adequately on the issues. Even our New York Times is not as clearly scientific on the issues often enough as is the ecology section of the UK Guardian, among major newspapers. The Guardian champions the KEEP IT IN THE GROUND movement. Still, superpowers like the USA and the USSR continue to dig for oil gas and coal when the only way our children will survive climate catastrophe is if we KEEP IT IN THE GROUND, now– the motto of our movement to literally save life on Earth is  “To Save Everything, We Need Everyone, NOW!”Some climatologists say, we’ve already reached a tipping point of no correction of the climate. Other scientists believe it’s less than a decade away, and nearly almost too late. We need to go into emergency mode!

     Humanity is careening towards the deaths of billions of people, millions of species, and the collapse of organized civilization into wars over food, water and resources,  already happening in areas of Mideast, and amidst Island peoples fighting for survival, as low lands drown. Indeed, the lower part of Manhattan is already doomed to flood by 2025, driving climate refugees inland and upsetting life here in New York City as people panic. But, there’s an inch of geological time to save civilization. States under severe climate stress, such as Syria, suffered a 12 year drought in its farm lands, causing a revolution to break out that failed. It was invaded by warring factions, bringing chaos, violence, and misery to the region. Wars over resources, food, water, are already happening worldwide while fossil fuel corporations engage some U.S. government officials in denial to keep profits high. Our political system is convulsing, with oligarchic corporatocracy. We need emergency action to avert catastrophe. according to top climatologists like Dr. James Hansen of NASA and the Union of Concerned Scientists. All the technology already exists to save us. ONLY the POLITICAL WILL is lacking and profoundly so in the USA, greatly controlled by fossil fuel corporations which fund our major media.

     Other developed countries have no debate about climate change as human caused. Germany will be fossil free in a couple of years. Despite China and India producing record levels of carbon pollution now, as the US did, China and India are producing MORE green energy jobs than the USA. Our country put the MOST green house gases in the atmosphere, and such gases take a century or two to dissipate. Humans have created a carbon dome of pollution in the delicate thin veil of atmosphere that surrounds Mother Earth. The sun’s hot rays cannot reflect into outer space enough through that carbon dome! Instead, the hot sun’s rays are deflecting down onto the glaciers, melting them and onto the oceans warming and acidifying them. We will face Extreme Weather now, for the rest of our lives, like the record killing heat waves in India, Pakistan, England, and Arizona this summer, the droughts in California and Africa, the increasing wildfires in California and Australia that exacerbate pollution,record floods in West Virginia and Louisiana this summer 2016. There’s still an inch of geological time to save the young. To give some authority to what I offer, I tell you I’ve studied with chief climatologists, and been invited to give talks on climate justice, around the country and locally and for The UU Community Church Midtown, the UUWA Retreat on Long Island, as well as around Massachusetts and on public radio.

     According to NASA chief climatologist, Dr. James Hansen, and other climatologists worldwide, the fact is we Earthlings cannot survive unless we get carbon and methane emissions down to 350 parts per million of Earth’s atmosphere. The delicate veil of atmosphere surrounding our Mother Earth, our very life’s breath,  is now polluted with more than 400 parts per million of carbon and methane gases. Scientists say we’re NOW close to the tipping point of NO Climate CORRECTION possible.  Poor communities and indigenous peoples of color, and especially children everywhere will suffer first. Those who did not create the problem are suffering most. We need an EMERGENCY strategy for the GREEN WORLD TO RISE QUICKLY ENOUGH TO SAVE THE YOUNG. The educated young know this! That’s why they’ve joined in a HUGE “Peoples Political Revolution.” Nobel Laureate Poet of Poland, Wislawa Szymborska, (included in my American Book Award winning women’s studies book for World Peace, Women on War, wrote Children of the Epoch: “We are children of the epoch/ The epoch is political. All my daily and nightly affairs, / all your daily and nightly affairs, / are political affairs,// Whether you like it or not, / your genes have a political past, / your skin has political tone,/ your eyes a political color, / What you say resounds, / what you don’t say is also/ politically significant.// ….You walk with political steps/ on political ground.// Apolitical poems are also political, / …. To be or not to be,/ that IS the question. / Oh darling, what a question, give a suggestion. / A political question. // You don’t have to be human/ to acquire a political meaning. / It’s enough to be petroleum/ cattle fodder, raw material. / Or just a conference table whose shape / was disputed for months. / In the meantime, people were killed. / Animals died / houses burned / fields grew fallow, / as in distant /and less political epochs.”

     Climate crisis has been politicized in the USA more than anywhere. We Americans bear a bigger responsibility as citizens of the country that put the most lingering pollutants in the atmosphere. Our country has been moving more slowly to address climate crisis than developed nations like Germany, Norway, The Netherlands, France and Kenya in the forefront of renewable energy. Ithaca NY and Burlington Vt. are totally green energy cities now. We could go green quickly if only the political will were there.

     Home-grown Exxon-Mobil is under investigation by 17 state attorneys general for knowingly hiring scientists and politicians to lie about the dire consequences of continuing to burn coal, oil and gas. Our NY State Attorney General Schniederman leads the investigation. Investigative reporters who unearthed the evidence to initiate an indictment of Exxon are RIGHT HERE IN BROOKLYN on COURT ST. Our own, Brooklyn Pultizer Prize winning, global climate newsletter INSIDECLIMATENEWS.COM is right around the corner. Corporations like Exxon-Mobil, Shell, BP, Koch Bros. have known for over 25 years, from their own scientists, that fossil fuel pollution is a threat to all life on Earth, but instead of developing green energy industries, they continue, today, to spend multi-millions hiring politicians and scientists to lie about it.  

     That’s why millennials go to alternative media like DemocracyNow.org, EcoWatch.com, or InsideClimateNews.com for truth. The major networks greatly funded by oil, gas and coal commercials rarely link extreme weather to Climate Crisis Emergency as they should. Teenagers all over the country are using the U.S. Constitution to sue local, state and federal governments for the right to live into their future. Defend Our Future.org will tell you these young people, grasping for the right to a future, have been recently awarded favorable decisions by state judges in Oregon and Massachusetts, for two examples. Our commitment to stewardship of Earth must now take priority as it affects all other social justice issues from environmental racism to our children’s right to a future on Mother Earth! Nothing can be accomplished for Black rights, women’s rights, gay rights, Muslim rights or children’s rights without a livable planet.

       Great feats can be achieved, as they were during WWII to defeat the Nazis when FDR retrofitted the entire country into a war economy, within two years, to help defeat the Evil Axis. All the technology exists to save us, ONLY the political will is lacking. An FDR style WWII fast mobilization is what’s sorely needed now. A NEW GREEN DEAL! That’s why our motto in the climate justice movement is TO SAVE EVERYTHING, WE NEED EVERYONE, NOW! So, whether you’re a marching, or civil disobedience type of activist, or a telephoning, letter writing educating, e-mailing sort, there’s work to be done by all of us to help the GREEN WORLD TO RISE and SAVE OUR MOTHER EARTH’S sustenance of life. What we need is a coalition now of all social, environmental and Green Faith organizations like young people are forming with TheClimateMobilization.org.

       It’s not just a matter of recycling our individual garbage or composting and putting solar panels on our homes or buying all green energy for our homes, putting in LED light bulbs, conserving our home energy use, or eating far less meat, though all of that is very important, but it won’t suffice alone. It’s a matter of demanding taxes on carbon emissions and an immediate move to a governmental NEW GREEN DEAL. The fossil fuel companies have been using our breathable air as a garbage dump for their pollutants, for free, for too long. Our taxes are still subsidizing their obscene profits! We are funding our own demise! We are literally being forced to pay for killing our own children’s future, and we are forced to pay for giving them asthma, cancer, heart disease from air, water and food pollutants. In order to fund the rapid rise of a green economy, we need taxes on carbon for our local, state and federal governments to convert to a green economy. Forty percent of American children now suffer debilitating asthma caused by fossil fuel pollutants, and many of these fuel corporations are paying no taxes for our healthcare systems, while lung diseases are rampant! Fossil fuel corporations pay nothing for using our atmosphere, our children’s very breath, as a garbage dump for their sickening filth! They must be made to pay to save the lives they’re destroying daily by putting profits before people. www.350.org has a www.GoFossilFree.org campaign that has managed to divest trillions of dollars out of fossil fuels. Many celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, now United Nations Ambassador for Climate Crisis, devotes millions to the cause through his foundation. He produced, with renowned journalist and author Thom Hartmann www. GreenWorldRising.org a series a beautifully directed short videos that explain the problem and solutions that exist. Only the political will is lacking!

       Mother Earth’s air conditioning glaciers are melting exponentially, faster than was predicted. Her oceans are bound to rise now and are acidifying, killing barrier reefs, sea life and seafood that many countries depend upon. Farming of livestock and meat consuming is a whopping third of the problem of climate destruction due to methane from livestock, meat processing plants and clear cutting of rain forests for grazing. Forests are the lungs of the planet in atmospheric balance. We all know that trees give off oxygen and soak up carbon dioxide. How many of us are aware that one hamburger costs 60,000 gallons of water to produce? It may cost us a few bucks, but it costs Mother Earth dearly. I feel Her great pain. I feel Her nurturing ways leaving us.

       When that grief is felt, it motivates. I joined The “Divest from Fossil Fuels:” movement with millions of others and we’ve succeeded in removing over two trillion dollars from coal, oil and gas stocks! Pope Francis with Laudato Si has taught us the connection between the climate, environmental racism and poverty, the Dalai Lama and Buddhists understand as does Bishop Shora of the Episcopal Church, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Rabbi Lerner of Tikkun and First Unitarian Universalist Society of Brooklyn, Reverend Ana Levy, as well as Keith Ellison, our first Muslim in the US Congress, Native American environmentalists, Deborah Parker and Winona La Duke, and The Unitarian Universalist Association of America have all committed themselves to divestment and the climate justice movement— because they know that it’s an economic, health and social justice emergency affecting all in a world where 1% of the population, now controls more wealth than the 99% of us, worldwide, combined. The robber barons of our Climate Crisis Era are corporate C.E.O.s destroying Mother Earth, robbing her bounty from the children.

     Emergency mode is contagious. The Climate Movement is now advocating for a WWII-scale, FDR style, climate mobilization.  The Peoples Climate March Sept. 2014 mobilized 400 environmental groups and half a million people marching during the UN Climate Summit, but it was not enough to make our federal government devise a clean energy transition as good as those in Germany, Norway or Kenya, Ithaca New York or Burlington Vermont. The current U.S. administration headed by President Obama has drilled for more oil and gas than any in 40 years. It secretly issued hundreds more licenses for drilling in public lands and offshore areas even as the need to save life is to  “KEEP IT IN THE GROUND” –our global movement’s slogan!  Right wing politicians and insanely ego-manic, political candidates like Donald Trump continue to deny climate crisis as human caused! Yet, if the climate reaches a point of no correction, it means a slow dying off from lack of water, food, resources and much suffering of unbelievable magnitude—such as we’re already seeing with the climate refugees of Syria, the Philippines, Pacific Islands, California and Africa. Five million climate refugees are expected worldwide before long. Should we not be yelling FIRE!

     Individuals and nations can respond to emergencies with reason, dedication, and amazing success, as when FDR mobilized the entire U.S.A. retrofitting our industries and factories within about 2 years to defeat the Nazi threat. A couple of years may be all that’s left to hold climate change back from the tipping point of no correction. So, whether it’s making calls to officials, or messaging or writing to representatives to demand taxes on carbon emissions, whether it’s marching, whether it’s educating, whether it’s demonstrating or committing civil disobedience—there’s something for everyone to do. Imagine if everyone in America called their representatives or wrote a message taking a few seconds everyday, what difference it could make! Imagine if we make CLIMATE CRISIS ACTIVISM the CONVERSATION wherever we go. This is the biggest social and moral issue ever. Nothing can be accomplished without a livable, solvent planet.   

      Extreme weather is already costing multi-billions of dollars from flooding, super-storms, tsunamis, earthquakes from hydro-fracking, poisoned water aquifers and rivers, droughts and wildfires are occurring worldwide in the hottest summers in climate history, costing trillions in damages. Already this year, we’ve seen West Virginia experience the worst flood in its history, floods in England, prolonged wildfires raging in California and Australia, droughts in Africa. We’ve seen Hurricane Sandy cost over 65 billion in our City. Hurricane Katrina over 75 billion! Science tells us we’ll experience extreme weather for the rest of our lives, even if things seem peaceful around us today. Women’s Rights, Black Lives Matter, Gay Rights, Muslim Rights and most of all  Children’s Rights depend on fighting climate crisis now. TO SAVE EVERYTHING, WE NEED EVERONE in EMERGENCY MODE. Personal gratification can come from joining the Climate Movement Mobilization and focusing on the joy that could be achieved if our GREEN WORLD RISES FAST ENOUGH TO SAVE LIFE FOR THE YOUNG! Every day, I think of  Mother Earth as one large living being, Mother Gaia, one eco-system of interconnected life: I feel her pain. Our pain as Earthlings! It is time for Ecological Spirituality. It is time to join http://www.350.org or www.TheClimateMobilization now!
 
             Chant the Navajo Chant like a mantra that we Eco-Feminists have been chanting since the 1970’s. Let Native American understanding of Earth’s Sacred Bounty lead us: Chant it daily like a mantra: The Earth is our Mother. We must take care of Her. The Earth is our Mother. We must take care of Her. Hey Yonna Ho Yonna Hey Yana. Hey Yana Ho Yana Hey Yana.The Ground we walk is sacred with every step we take. The Ground we walk is sacred with every step we take. Hey, Yana, Ho Yana, Hey Yana, Hey Yona Ho Yana. Hey Yana!

      “It’s better to light one candle than rage against the darkness.” Please go out into the world refreshed and renewed in our resolve to save Mother Earth, Her bounty, Her beauty for the young! EARTHLY BLESSINGS!
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Copyright © 2016 by Daniela Gioseffi. All rights reserved. This editorial was partly inspired by a paper written by Margaret Klein Salamon, Ph.D. Founder & Director of The Climate Mobilization. www.TheClimateMobilization.org and Bill McKibben, award winning ecological activist and author, founder of the most globally activist organization on climate crisis emergency, 350.org. Please see McKibben’s article in The New Republic, Summer, 2016