Wednesday April 22, 2020 is the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day. It will be difficult to celebrate because of the Corona virus global lockdowns, but also because the climate catastrophe is getting closer. We all hope everything is back to normal soon, but as Greta Thunberg warns in her book No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, things will never be quite back to normal.
Greta warned in a January 2019 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that “Our house is on fire.” A year later in January 2020, Zimbabwe in south central Africa faced famine because of water shortages. Ethiopia was struck with a locust plague facilitated by warming Indian Ocean temperatures. Insect infestations were invading new climate zones and destroying coffee plants in Central America.
The cities of Sydney, Australia and Valparaiso, Chile, over seven thousand miles apart and separated by the Pacific Ocean, were surrounded by fires. Both cities are located near 30 degrees latitude in the Earth’s Southern hemisphere during their summer. The California and northern hemisphere summer burning season is only a few months away.
In August 2018, at the time only fifteen-years old, Greta started to boycott school on Fridays, protesting in front of the Swedish parliament building in Stockholm. As her campaign was picked up by other students and in other cities and countries, she was invited to deliver a TED Talk on the need for a global response to climate change and addressed the January 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland with a call for immediate, coordinated, and sustained climate action. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, humanity is less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our ecological mistakes.
In that time period, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to take place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50%.” At Davos, Greta accused political and economic leaders of bragging about their “success stories.” She argued “their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed.” Greta believes, and I share her belief, that “there is still time to turn everything around” because “Homo sapiens have not yet failed.”
Greta concluded her Davos speech, “‘Adults keep saying: We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
This fall I will teach a history class At Hofstra University focusing on the impact of climate and environmental change in the past on different civilizations including Mesopotamia, Rome, Maya, Norse, Anasazi, and Mali and their implications for understanding the current climate catastrophe. These societies did not understand what was happening to them as the environment they depended on turned against them. I only hope we understand and act before it is too late.
This summer, the in-coming freshman class at Hofstra University is reading Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. I review the book in a video posted on the Hofstra website.
Every day is Earth Day and that’s why I am a Greta Groupie.
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