As world leaders meet in Paris

Now, the main factor in life on this planet is the planet itself. Any logically conceived survey of existence must begin with geographical and climatic phenomena. This is surely obvious. If you say you are not interested in meteorology or the configurations of the earth, I say that you deceive yourself” – Arnold Bennett, 2009

If we all fully appreciated the implications of the Paris Climate Conference, November 30-December 11, 2015, we would hold our collective breath as the negotiations start and exhale only when they end. This meeting is perhaps the most important in human history. Several UN Climate Change conferences have held from the 1992 Rio Summit through Kyoto and Montreal to Durban in 2014. But seeing Paris 2015 as just another in the series is to underestimate its critical importance; such would not sufficiently recognize the urgency that attaches to it. This Paris Climate Conference is, at its very roots, about the very possibility of mankind’s survival. Now the world confronts the fundamental question of the very possibility of the continued existence of the earth as we have known it.

The emphasis here is on “the earth as we have known it”. The real issue is that, much as our science and learning allow us to pretend, we hardly know the earth in any fundamental sense. If we did, things would not have come to a head quite so dramatically. It is lack of understanding of the processes of the earth that has brought mankind to its present predicament. When elements of that understanding at last were available, the pre-existing patchwork of ideas and suppositions, much of it man-centred, ill-baked and unscientific, would not allow objective appraisal. We preferred what fed our parochial considerations, greed and ignorance to objectivity rooted in humility. Much ink has been spilled writing thousands of formulae, and many man-hours spent in laboratories in pursuit of what we believe to be science. But the concepts and the science from which they evolved have chiefly yielded results that have been more destructive than constructive.

Properly understood, science should not be destructive; it should rather be life-enhancing, a tool for man’s task of partnering with Nature to sustain and build up. For all the mystery that surrounds it and the mystifying language of its practitioners, science is really about discovering the processes that hold together everything we call Nature, and have held it thus for millennia before man incarnated on earth. The wonders of these should have made man humble. Instead, each morsel of knowledge he uncovered, after much labour and many accidents, only increased his conceit. It is only as man has succeeded in getting a glimpse of the immutable laws that uphold Nature that he has been able to make a little positive contribution to the necessary up-building.

How could it otherwise? Mankind is, at once, in and a part of Nature. As a part of Nature, man is subject to all its laws. But being in Nature and as the highest creature in it, he has a responsibility to participate in its preservation and promotion.  This is what its self-interest dictates. With respect to the laws of Nature, he is subject; with respect to the other beings in Nature, he is master. But he has misinterpreted his position to mean one of domination and destructive consumption. Believing that his mission is to dominate the earth, man has not, especially since the industrial revolution, been taking from the earth only enough to satisfy his needs. Rather he has been taking more than enough to feed his greed. This essentially destructive behaviour is what has arrogantly been called progress and development. It is the mechanism by which the global North dominates and intimidates the impoverished South, generally speaking.

The earth groans under the weight of man’s conceit, greed and arrogance. From our pattern of consumption we have spewed enough greenhouse gases (GHGs) and other harmful substances into the air, enough to give Mother Nature the “atmospheric ulcer” that has eaten away the protective ozone layer. So much for our playing masters of the earth! Lesser creatures would think that since man claims to have knowledge and to be rational, he would, at first sign of impending disaster, take every necessary and logical step to avert it. Instead we live in denial, and those who make profit from this deadly cocktail use their brand of science to convince the rest that all is well. Now we learn that 2015 has been the hottest year to date. Some of the data actually show that rather than keep the lid on the 2oC parties to the various protocols committed to, we may in fact be heading toward 4oC target! Obviously, man has made little progress in curtailing harmful carbon emissions since the Montreal Protocol.   

This is not surprising because our science has not been driven by curiosity but by profit, reinforced by greed. Otherwise how do we account for the fact that we produce much more than we need yet close to two of the world’s seven billion people are underfed and undernourished? We have set targets for reducing poverty but never made any impressive achievement. Yet the world appears immobilized by fear from taking necessary and urgent steps to slow climate change. Put simply, those economies that could set examples fear that profits will fall. This fear led to the doubtful attempt to seek market-based solutions to the problems of global warming. It is market-based thinking that got us where we are but these homo sapiens cannot see it. It seems that we are so blinded by the magic of the market that we fail to see that a section of humanity is profiting from disaster.

Perhaps one blames the market unfairly? Is it not the fact that each and every one of us is the problem? Those who build their empires on fleecing the earth and other human beings succeed because each of us is available for that. Most people with the means invariably over-consume, having fallen to the capitalists’ strategy of turning each person’s wants and desires into needs. Even those without the means want to join the over-consumption wagon. They want to be like the proverbial Joneses and the Alhajis. At the national level, poor countries want to be like Europe and North America. Shorn of its fake scientific and ideological covers, that is what it means to be developed. China, India, Nigeria, Brazil and many other countries want to achieve higher and higher gross national product targets. This means increasing per capita consumption. The populations of the earth seem locked into the iron-grip of mindless over-consumption. Mindless over-consumption is good neither for the natural environment nor for the individual’s health. Yet we persist, and in doing so push planet earth to the edge of a precipice.

Can we retreat from this precipice? That is the challenge of the Paris meeting. Contemporary experience suggests that mankind really has no choice than to seek ways of beating as fast a retreat as possible. The Paris Climate Conference aims to come up with legally binding agreements on reducing carbon and other harmful emissions. The pre-conference postures by the likes of China, India and the United States suggest that we should be hopeful of progress. But as they gather, these leaders will be wondering who among them will first make what sacrifice and how to protect so-called national interests (read the interest of the dominant few), as if there is room any more for looking at anything but the overall interest of humanity.

But that is where the real problems lie: in the actual mass of that humanity. Is each individual ready to consume less today in order to have any tomorrow? It is difficult to see how prepared each of us is to drastically review our consumption patterns and our material ambitions. What was learned over two centuries (at least since the industrial revolution) cannot be so easily unlearned; certainly not as fast as the occasion demands. But is there a viable alternative? There really isn’t! So, the world needs to pull itself up by its bootstraps and start moving in the right direction, even as some will be kicking and screaming.  Alongside the new protocols to be agreed at the Paris meeting, humanity needs to go back some 40 years and consider Ivan Illich’s idea about turning the material products that enslave mankind into “tools for conviviality”, and to do so through “deschooling society”.

If the Paris Conference should fail, we would have succeeded in sentencing a great percentage of mankind to death. Those who, like Pope Francis, believe that failure in Paris would be disastrous understate the issue. Failure will be worse than disaster. The earth will remain but not as we have come to know it and many of us will be removed from it because we failed to save ourselves when we still had some time. The law would have been fulfilled because mankind would have reaped what it sowed. It will be hardly any excuse that we blame others for what they did or did not do when we each did little or nothing to quit the individual lifestyles that support the culture of over-consumption which brought avoidable distress to Mother Nature. We are all in this together!

Eme N. Ekekwe