From Climate Change to Omnicide - Tablet Magazine - 0 views
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As this decade dawns, we are confronted with the reality of climate crisis—both in the image of uncontainable fires raging across the Australian bush, and in the voices of young people speaking truth to power and calling out for their future and the living Earth.
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And as this future has arrived with smoke-filled air, its vocabulary has evolved: from the innocuous sounding “climate change,” to “climate crisis,” and now “climate collapse,” gradually awakening us to an accelerating disaster. Our seas polluted with plastic, air toxic, trees burning whether in the Amazon or Australia, we are also including other words to describe the nature of this crisis: ecocide, our deliberate destruction of the natural environment; and most recently: omnicide. Omnicide images a crime “we have previously been unable to witness because we have never imagined it.” Across Australia—with billions of dead animals and birds, and millions of people suffering ill health effects—we are witnessing what the world will look like with three or more degrees warming, “the killing of everything.”
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With almost a hundred homes destroyed, we waited in the smoke-filled air, just out of the mandatory evacuation zone, with our go-bags ready, for nearly a week without electricity.
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This insecurity, anxiety, is especially affecting young people, who rightly fear for their future, fear that the current system is pushing the Earth beyond its ecological limits.
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Understandably we try to place the future of climate crisis within the images of our present conditions—that this way of life will continue, saved by technological solutions or planting millions of trees.
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While this vast devastation unfolds across Australia, its politicians—paid by climate deniers—are in the process of developing a huge new open coal mine helped by Siemens, which also profited from the Holocaust as a leading corporate participant in Hitler’s “death through work program,” despite the protests of Fridays for Future activists;
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What will our world look like two, or three degrees warmer? We can already see signs of a future few of us want to imagine.