ClimateFast and Peace

2013 09 24

Tuesday was a quiet day on the hill.  The tone is set for us by the pro-life activists who sit daily at the bottom of the hill.  They are anti abortion, anti-pill, and anti assisted dying and they are there almost every time I visit the hill.  People turn their heads from them and then from us.  What we have in common is that we are both standing vigil on ethical issues around the meaning and value of life. 

We had lots of wonderful visits from friends and supporters and a very special visit from Citizens for  Public Justice who are just releasing a new book:  Living Ecological Justice:  A Biblical Response to the Environmental Crisis.  They presented us with a copy.  I’ve just dipped into it but it looks excellent.

One of the questions I got was – Why is ClimateFast on the same dates as the Ottawa Peace Festival – from September 21 (The UN Day of Peace) to October 2^nd (The UN Day of Non-Violence and Gandhi’s birthday.)  And why does the Peace Festival support our events and put us in their calendar?  (Our big thanks to them for that.)

This is very complicated or very simple.  Everything is interconnected.  Who are the people who are most affected by climate change?  --The people in the world who have little energy to build an economy and are therefore very poor – yet suffer the worst consequences from drought and flooding.  Where are the majority of conflicts in the world?  In poor countries where people don’t have enough work or enough to eat, and must fight over water and other resources. 

As the climate gets warmer, and the arctic ice melts, we expect the tundra to be exposed and thawed, releasing much methane gas.  We expect an increasing number of extreme weather events.  We are seeing these already.  It is estimated it will cost Calgary $5 billion to recover from its floods this year.  We heard stories of people in France who have been told they cannot return to the land they have lived on for over 100 years because of recurring flooding.  Where will they go?  Where will the people of Bangladesh go when the seas rise and their land goes under water?  Who will take them in?

Surely these effects will be a recipe for chaos and conflict for limited resources.  Meanwhile, the world, including Canada, becomes increasingly militarized.  1.7 trillion dollars was spent on the military around the world last year while food aid budgets are cut.  And many of our military services are contracted out to private corporations.  It is easy to imagine how governments and corporations are planning to manage the conflicts when they come – and it won’t be good news for democracy.

But another world is possible.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  We do have the resources to do something different.  We don’t need to let big oil companies and big money control our public agenda.  Our vision is one of diversified, localized, renewable energy projects that give people a quality of life while using the energy nature freely provides.  The movie, Energy Autonomy: The Fourth Revolution shows us how it can be done and is in fact, being done around the world.  The poor countries don’t need to build an industrial revolution economy based on coal and oil.  They can build the renewable energy infrastructure right away.  And we can make the transition.  In world war II we converted our industrial production to making airplanes and tanks for war in a matter of three months.  Why can’t we convert our energy infrastructure to renewable energy in the next few years?

It will be hard, but if we work together, if we take on this task as a whole community, as a country. If we are of one mind and focused on the goal, we can do it.  And we will receive the benefits of getting to know our neighbours, putting our creativity to work towards a sustainable economy in harmony with the land that nurtures and supports us.  We can make the transition peacefully and I believe people will be happier, more satisfied, and less anxious than the world we have today.