Nelson Mandela placed
climate justice high among his priorities in his
Long Walk to Freedom for all peoples. He recognized early on that climate change would
impact the most vulnerable first. He understood that the young and unborn must be protected and that we have a responsibility to generational justice.
This great leader, who now belongs to the ages, has left a legacy to be emulated. His great compassion extended not only to his fellow man but he had a strong connection to the natural world that supports us all as well.
In his
autobiography Mandela shared how his appreciation for the beauty and subsistence of nature helped to sustain him through his trying twenty-seven years of imprisonment. During his incarceration he fought to have a garden installed on the roof of his prison, where he and his fellow inmates could grow vegetables for their meals. "To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction," he wrote. "The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a small taste of freedom."
Please read more below the fold for more on Mandela's legacy.
Joe Romm, writing at Think Progress/climate, remarked on two great legacies that Mandela has left for Climate Hawks; that of persistence and the value of divestment. Bill McKibben has credited Mandela's success with financial divestment in South Africa as the inspiration for his divestment tactics against the fossil fuel industry.
“Two hundred colleges divested their holdings in companies that did
business with South Africa. And when Nelson Mandela got out of prison, the first place he came was not the White House—it was California to thank University of California students who had helped get their system to divest $3 billion in holdings in South Africa,” McKibben said.
“As Desmond Tutu says, this is the next great moral issue that we face, and the same kind of tactic is what’s necessary to face it.”
I would like to add another Mandela legacy that is invaluable to climate hawks: that of "idealistic pragmatism." As we inch forward in our fight to stop the destruction of the only planet which can sustain our species, we must keep the moral justification for our struggle foremost but we must also understand as Mandela did so well, that the struggle moves forward in fragmented events and not in completeness.
And remember that before Mandela was a revered global statesman, he was a visionary fighter against the status quo. This struggle against entrenched interests both financial and political is at the soul of the fight against climate change. And dogged persistence and focus, demonstrated by Mandela in his fight to free his people from apartheid, is necessary in our struggle.