Climate action? State or civilization.

#3047

Changing society to cope with climate change is demanding. I am looking for the implications for how to approach climate change with the idea that civilizations can change fundamentals, but nation states cannot.

I spent some weeks in Bali  years ago. When a person dies, they are carried in a paper mache animal sculpture and danced the body down to to the cremation  ground. The purpose of the dancing is to  get the dead person’s body into the rhythm of the universe so they can join in.

This is culture. No state could do this.  And what we need for climate change is something like that in scope and depth of belief, belief  in a universe, not in science. This is  why we  hear so often demands that the leaders lead, but the leaders have no idea what to do. It’s not their fault. They are the level of the state and the state, cannot mobilize the energy to cope with climate. Many proposals that we hear are both too much and too little: for example, no more airplane travel or no more heating homes. These acts of the state are not sufficient but a culture can have an ethos that leads people in directions such as the idea that we all should feed anybody who is starving. The word ‘ethos’, the ethical environment we live in.   This is not the product of the state, but is civilization. Great  religious leaders have almost gotten there several times, Lao Tzu, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Jesus, Epicurus -   but the task is still open.

I spent the morning listening to a Norwegian conference on melting ice. 1.5 degrees gets us a meter sea rise by 2050. The pleas was “Where is the money? Where is the technology?”

Th shift in human society is not toward finance and projects but toward something lager, more pungent. Civilization