Paris Demetriades
Human beings are strange and self-destructive creatures. Just when you think that, as a species, we are making progress and taking steps forward, something happens that makes you wonder whether self-destruction is, after all, an inseparable part of our existence and of the very material we are made of.
Take, for example, what has been happening in Nepal in recent days. Climate justice activists, environmentalists and scientists around the world have been warning us for years, apparently to little avail. They are often dismissed as eccentrics until disaster comes knocking on our own door. The horrifying, almost apocalyptic images from Nepal and Tibet that have filled our screens in recent days should not be seen as just another natural disaster with no connection to human activity.
On the contrary, it is clear that the destabilization of glaciers and the previously permanently frozen ground of the Himalayas is a consequence of climate change and rising temperatures caused by human activity. Experts have said that an increase of just one degree in temperature can be enough to trigger such disasters, increasing the risk of catastrophic landslides like the one that struck Nepal.
And this is no minor disaster. The sheer scale of what we watched unfold before our eyes in this Central Asian country, now facing an unimaginable ordeal, is almost impossible to comprehend. Put simply, an entire mountain moved. It became a torrent and, within a matter of moments, swallowed everything in its path, including thousands of people.
As desperately poor Nepal, a country with extremely low per capita emissions compared with wealthy industrial economies, counts its dead and missing and surveys countless homes and pieces of infrastructure buried beneath the mud, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether we should continue to speak about the climate crisis as either a neutral disaster that simply fell from the sky or a human-made problem for which we are all equally responsible.
No, we are not all equally responsible.
I do not believe that the millions of Nepalese people are the ones who spent two centuries filling the atmosphere with carbon. Nor do I believe they are the ones most responsible for creating the illusion that we can produce, buy, throw away, burn and consume endlessly. And yet, it is the Nepalese who are drowning right now, while the planet's tiny group of powerful people continues to behave as though we have a second planet waiting in reserve.
Perhaps they actually believe that we do, now that I think about all the recent spectacular news involving the Moon and Mars.
In a world that somehow finds astronomical sums of money for weapons, wars, space exploration and unchecked overconsumption, as if there were no tomorrow, phenomena that are far from unrelated to the climate crisis, “fiscal responsibility” becomes an excuse only when it is time to fund supposedly insignificant and third-rate priorities, such as protecting poorer countries from extreme weather events.
Nepal is drowning.
We can continue to be shocked by the images we see. We can feel sorry for a few minutes and call them “terrible natural disasters.” Or we can take the thought one step further: Our planet may have a shared atmosphere, but responsibility for destroying it is not shared equally.
And it is tragic that the people who bear the least responsibility, or no responsibility at all, are dying in such brutal and violent ways so that the more powerful can maintain a way of life and an economic system built on the illusion that the Earth is inexhaustible.
Let it be said, for the millionth time, that ecology and an unrestrained market are incompatible concepts, with all that this means for our present and our future as a species. And let us also remember that the unrestrained market naturally includes the insatiable war industry.
All of these things are inextricably connected.
