Section:GDN 1J PaGe:3 Edition Date:190830 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 29/8/2019 18:38 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Fr iday 30 Aug ust 2019 The Guardian •
3
Rebecca
Solnit
D
ear Greta, thank you for crossing the
Atlantic to North America to help us
do the most important work in the
world. There are those of us who
welcome you and those who do not
because you have landed in two
places, a place being born and a place
dying, noisily, violently, with as much
damage as possible. America has always been two places
since the earliest Europeans arrived in places native
people already lived in and pretended they were new
and gave them the wrong names. Right now the US is
the country of Donald Trump and of Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez , of climate destroyers and climate protectors. I
believe it is more than possible for Ocasio-Cortez and
the Green New Deal to win, for the spirit of generosity
and inclusion and the protection of nature to win, but
that depends on what we do now. Which is why I’m so
grateful you’ve travelled so far to galvanise us with your
clarity of vision and passionate commitment.
Something has changed, thanks to you and to the
young people who have brought urgency and vision
to the climate movement. Many people have become
concerned and awake for the fi rst time, and the
conversation we need to have is opening up. People are
ready for change, or some of us are. This is what’s being
born around the world: not only new energy systems
but new social systems with room for the voices of those
who are not white or male or straight or neurotypical.
The old energy system was about centrali sed control
and the malevolent power of Gazprom and BP, Shell
and Chevron, and the governments warped into serving
them rather than humanity. The new system must
not only be about locali sed energy but democrati sed
decision-making, about the rights of nature and the
rights of the vulnerable and the future over profi t.
I hope you have a chance to see some of the beauty of
the US landscapes , from rainforests to deserts; there is
also beauty in the passionate commitment around the
country. Coal miners in Kentucky have been blocking a
coal train for a month because their bankrupt company
stiff ed them on wages, and coal miners elsewhere
recently spoke to this newspaper about their clarity that
coal is over and that the Green New Deal and its jobs
are welcome. The gigantic coal-burning, sky-polluting
Rebecca Solnit
is author of
Men Explain
Things to Me
and The Mother
of All QuestionsILLUSTRATION:
THOMAS PULLINNavajo Generating Station in Arizona will shut down
later this year. It’s among a wave of super-polluters
headed for the scrapheap. Last year US coal plants
whose annual emissions were 83m tonnes of carbon
were shut down.
Several states – California, New York, Hawaii,
New Mexico, Nevada and Washington – have made
commitments to 100% renewable electricity in the
near future, and while the federal government tries
to push us backward, many states lean forward. This
summer Texas began to get more energy from wind
than from coal. Iowa in the midwest now gets 37% of
its electricity from wind, not because of idealism alone
but pragmatism: wind is cheaper.
Worldwide, we are in the midst of an energy
revolution that dwarfs the industrial revolution: human
beings will for the fi rst time not use fi re, will not release
carbon into the sky, to get most of our energy. We will
inevitably transition away from fossil fuels as a primary
energy source and the question is only when. If we do it
swiftly we minimi se damage to the climate; if we wait
we maximi se it. The damage is here, and it’s not only
destroying nature; it’s killing us. When the California
town of Paradise burned down last November, 86
people were burned to death or choked on smoke;
millions suff ered from the smoke that spread across
the region. But we know that there have been all along
so many uncounted deaths from fossil fuels. We know
that many of the refugees on the US southern border are
climate refugees, driven out of their homes in Central
America by the failure of agriculture from unpredictable
and violent weather, heat and drought.T
o be a climate activist anywhere on
Earth now is to stand at a crossroads:
heaven on one side and hell on the
other. Heaven because the transition
we need to make and are making – just
not big enough, fast enough – is not
only a power-generation revolution
but a decentrali sation of political
power, a shift away from the big energy companies that
used governments to make wars and make profi ts for
them, a shift away from the poisonousness of fossil
fuel hell because the destruction of what it took nature
millions of years to create – the exquisite balance of
ecosystems, of bird migration in harmony with seasons,
of symbioses between species, of the great Himalayan
and Andean glaciers whose waters feed so many people,
of rainforests and temperate forests – is hideous as well
as terrifying. The Amazon is burning because of one
right wing leader and because of a system that rewards
agricultural products in ways it doesn’t reward forest
protection, although we need rainforests more than we
need the soybeans and beef raised on the land stolen
from the rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants. I’ve
mentioned a bit of what is going on in my troubled,
complicated country, but of course these are global
confl icts and global situations, and the solutions are
advancing almost everywhere because they are good
solutions to terrible problems.
You have come to help us choose the former over the
latter and more of us thank you than you will ever be
able to see or hear. More than that we’re with you, trying
to reali se the goals that the climate demands of us, to
make a sustainable world for those who are young now
and those yet to come and for the beauty of the world
that is still with us.The Amazon
is burning. But
Greta Thunberg
gives us hope
Opinion
To be a
climate
activist anywhere on
Earth now is to stand
at a crossroads:
heaven on one side
and hell on the other
RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws