Climate change, an opportuniy to connect with our values

Engaging with climate change is about engaging with who we are as human beings.”Renee Lertzman

Climate change. Big issue. If you google these two words, more than 800 millions results pop up inmediately. It is about extreme weather events, wildfires, lack of resources, pollution, devastation, hunger, poverty, inequality, refugees, …and the list can go with your own concerns . It is overwhelming.

While some people are anxious about climate change, many are caught in “a state of arrested mourning,” what Renee Lertzman calls “environmental melancholia.”

And can paralyze.Fear paralyze us. And apathy comes as a result, as a way to distract one’s mind.

We are taking first mundane anxieties of family, job and life — the quotidian worries that distract us from larger fears about the fate of the world. Acting on climate change represents a trade-off between short-term and long-term benefits, which is the hardest trade-off for people to make.

So we have to make the issue specific, so people “feel it in their bones”, recognize their part of the fault, and finally take their own role in addressing it. Most of us have trouble recognizing our faults. We are reluctant to take responsabilty over our actions.

I am not saying that we must feel guilty about it- which would probably lead to anger and denial-. What I am saying, is that ultimately, we have to stand up for the values we are acting on. And if we choose to live in the present at the cost of quality of life of our neighbors, children and grandchildren, that is a choice of values that we will have to make explicitly. When asked, we will have to face that selfish value.

It a matter of CHOICES based on VALUES. Of what makes us human beings.

Environmental protection is an urgent moral issue and not only an economic or political one. Without science, people lack the knowledge on how to solve environmental or social problems. But we need values- founded on faith from all traditions- to support scientific expertise, to generate greater courage and commitment among people to address this big challenge.