A metaphor for a burning planet…
Our hearts go out to Paris, and all French people in the wake of the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral.
Today, we do not think of what that church represented in any historical, imperial, or colonial sense.
We just mourn the loss of beauty, we weep for the rare and beautiful artifacts destroyed, and either consciously or unconsciously we are reminded of our collective fragility.
But what strikes me – most fiercely – is how we cannot muster that same immediate global sorrow and collective response to climate change.
For our planet, far more beautiful, a thousand times more beautiful, than a Parisian church, is also on fire, and most of us simply shrug our shoulders (if we think about it at all), get into our cars and go off to work.
We have destroyed 60% of the wildlife and 2/3’rds of the forests and 60% of sea life just in the past 100 years, yet we ignore these statistics when we see them.
Within 24 hours of the church fire, 600 million Euros have been pledged to its restoration. It is expected to be more than a billion before the end of the day.
It’s truly heartening that we do indeed know how to come together for a common cause.
But I have to say, at this point, we may be doing nothing more than re-organizing the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Notre Dame isn’t going to mean much one hundred years from now when there is no planet left to live on.
The global reaction to the fire really highlights the human-centric myopic understanding we have of ourselves and the planet. Our achievements are hugely magnified, while that of the planet is taken for granted.
And, as some Indigenous organizations have also noted in the wake of the fire, what a difference in reaction when a European sacred site is destroyed, and how we react when the sacred sites of Indigenous peoples are destroyed – as in the South Dakota pipeline that was bulldozed through the sacred burial grounds of the Standing Rock people.
You may want to ask yourself how you reacted to those protests to save their sacred site, and how you reacted yesterday, when you heard the news about Notre Dame.
Colonial attitudes, I don’t need to remind you, die hard.
How do we get people who reacted in the way they did to the Notre Dame fire, to similarly feel about the planet being on fire? This is the key question of this next decade.
Increasingly, the young are taking to the streets, trying to make their voices heard about the burning of the planet. They are still peaceful marches. But as things become more desperate, how long can they remain non-violent?
The establishment – political, social, economic – both here, and around the world – men mostly (but as women like Nancy Pelosi has shown in her dismissal of the Green New Deal – it’s not just men) – mostly over the age of 50 – who have no real stake in the future – addicted as they are to power and greed – doing everything in their power to dismiss the concerns of the young – who will remain after they are gone – to deal with the wreckage.
If we don’t soon figure out how to take that collective energy we see and feel over the burning down of a church in Paris – a church that 99% of the people on the planet will never see or experience – our whole house will burn to the ground.
Sisyphus 