By Laura Phillips, Resilience.org
Ten months since our major cities were blanketed by smoke from the Black Summer bushfires and nine months since the National Climate Emergency Summit considered the radical emergency footing that is now Melbourne’s COVID-19 reality, a quiet suburban revolution is taking place.
By Armando Davila, Resilience.org
We need to maximize our species survival fitness within a dual strategy: bring our world together to out-cooperate the world-ending dynamics we’ve set in motion to ensure the maximal just survival of humanity, wildlife and the ecosystems we depend on, and shift the global economy to a secure state of temporary rest until we are truly ready for transition.
By Dougald Hine, Bella Caledonia
It’s too late, of course – too late to turn aside from the language of emergency. I’m not here to argue that we should, only to invite my friends who are using this language to think harder and speak more clearly about what it means; to recognise that there is fire in this language and to have a care for what might get burned down.
By Jasmine Dale, Permaculture Association
Hear the language of the emergency? Is it to galvanise progressive change or engender fear? I’ve been in a few emergencies. I’ve even been in a house on fire. Clear thinking and quick strategic action were required. Fear and panic are highly contagious and are not helpful in an emergency. I’m noticing even committed permies around me are doubting whether our methods and principles are enough to avert catastrophe.
By Roger Hallam, Resilience.org
What does a real Climate Emergency action plan look like? The answer is defined by the science − by the physics and chemistry. Some find it hard to imagine this is actually happening. Some think it seems ‘unrealistic’. But ask yourself about the alternative of risking the collapse of civilisation, the death of billions of people and the extinction of much of life on earth? Is that ‘realistic’? No economy on a dead planet.
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
Last week a new paper in Nature caused a stir and world-wide headlines, and for good reason. “Climate tipping points - too risky to bet against” by Lenton, Rockstrom, Gaffney, Rahmstrof, Richardson, Steffen and Schellnhuber look at the “evidence on the threat of exceeding (climate system) tipping points, and whether we still have any control over them” because this “helps to define that we are in a climate emergency.”
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
Welcome to this “rough guide” blog series on the climate emergency and climate emergency campaigning. This series looks at some of the questions frequently asked about the topic: what does the science say, what is an emergency, does the climate crisis fit the bill, what can councils do, how can we talk about it, what needs to be done, what about business, can the political system deal with an issue this big? And many more.
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
By declaring a national emergency concerning the southern border of the US, Trump may have unwittingly given the next Democratic president an additional weapon with which to combat climate change.
By Molly Scott Cato, The Guardian blog
It simply makes no sense to allow something you can control – money – to be a limit on your ambition to deal with something that your future existence depends on, like the climate crisis.
By Jonathon Porritt, Jonathon Porritt blog
So it was with something of a sinking feeling that I decided to read both David Wallace-Well’s ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ and Bill McKibben’s new book, ‘Falter’, in the same fortnight. But I’m ever so pleased I did – not least because they’re both beautifully written, utterly compelling in their analysis, and, surprisingly, useful antidotes for premature despair!
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
What a climate emergency would mean for Exeter University, and what a genuinely low-carbon, resilient, localised, embedded, civic, ‘anchor institution’ would look like is a huge conversation, one that will need to cultivate an imaginative culture where anything feels possible, but on the strength of this event, that process has, hopefully, begun.
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
In a matter of months, the language of climate emergency has exploded into public space in a spectacular way, with national, regional and governments adopting the term.