The US SOTU and Missing the Point of Climate Change

President Obama mentioned climate change in his SOTU speech the other day.  He said that it is undoubtedly the greatest challenge facing this generation and future generations and that his administration is making strides to address it: the landmark agreements between China and the US on reducing fossil fuel combustion and carbon pollution.It was an  admirable speech and yet it was also another example of missing the point on "climate change."

"Climate change" is Nature speaking to us, and the language that she is using is what we are calling climate.

Climate change is the mother of all feedback loops in the vast system we are calling climate, but which is indistinguishable from the vast system we call life.  It is life that maintains the climate of life - trees in the forest, plankton in the ocean, birds, land animals, fish.

Climate change is merely the symptom of our indifference to life, our willingness to pollute our own habitat and poison life, including our own life.  

That indifference to life is learned as a norm in a culture that places little value upon invisible, immaterial, unquantifiable necessities - life and nurturance, love and community. 

We do not learn to see life.  We are not taught to become connoisseurs of life, as we taught to be connoisseurs of material things.  

We do not learn to see life in the foreground, to take pleasure in life, in its beauties and its miracles, to value life above all else. 

Which is a mistake.  A fault in our logic as a civilization, which is creating the symptom called climate change.  

What else is more important than life?  It is the most basic, the most necessary.  

When we forget this, when we allow ourselves to forget and discount and degrade life, we lose our way.  Lowell Catlett says it this way: “You cannot have healthy human beings without contact with plants and animals.”

If we are not surrounded by life, the core of our being is empty - we are plagued, individually by neuroses and illness, and we become a civilization heading inevitably to the destruction of our own life-support system, to the degradation of our environment and of our souls.  “We fall back into the biological category of the potato bug which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself,” says Aldo Leopold. 

Climate change is Nature saying to humans: Change!  Re-orient yourselves to what is most important, stop and think about what is necessary for your own existence and health.  Re-define civilization in light of life.  Reach deep and see what you are.

Such a re-orientation is not a revolution.  It is not about political power, although it can be expressed in politics.  It is not a religion, although it might speak to what we hold sacred. It is a choice.  It is a shift in fundamental values that we can make going forward, it is a change in how we can make decisions and choose life paths and trajectories.  It is a way to imagine and define oneself and one’s relationship to the world.  It is a way to overcome the blind selfishness that our civilization teaches us and which spawns our irresponsible consumerism, our worship of dead things and empty symbols, and our implicit sanctioning of rapacious economic development, predatory wealth and power based on brutality.  

To value life is also selfishness because there can be no self without life.  It is simply a broader and more logical kind of selfishness.   To see life in the center of one’s being is to come home to what is most real, to wake up after a long, strange dream.