Becoming Aware of Climate Change and Inequity

Many around the world, particularly in the United States, live and work in highly artificial environments, cooled in the summer and heated in the winter, engineered with electricity, running water, and high-speed internet connections for work, communication, news, and entertainment.

We live in a world where petroleum, plastics, and refined sugar are legal. People rely on automobiles, buses, and airplanes for transportation. Most of us are typically unaware of where our food originates, how to use a map, where our water and electricity are sourced, or who lived on the ancestral sacred lands prior to us. Few know where our waste ends up, except perhaps in having some abstract notion of landfills, treatment plants, and recycling facilities. Furthermore, many of us live unaware of or unconcerned with the lived experiences of those who continue to suffer the deep injustices and inequities that pervade our society and others around the world.  

The U.S. is witnessing a significant rise in anxiety and stress, as well as a continuation of racial, societal, and economic marginalization. The stressful pace of life, rigorous schedules, inflated expectations to accomplish, and chronic screen time are contributing to feelings of burnout and a diminishing sense of well-being.

Reading all of this can certainly feel heavy and distressing. In our programs, when we discuss such topics, we choose to slow down, get both feet on the ground, and take some deep breaths together.

If thinking about all these challenges we face is triggering in some way, we encourage taking some time to breathe and perhaps journal about what is showing up for you, maybe talk with a friend or find some moments outside. Simply resting in a chair with both feet on the ground is a natural way for us to feel grounded and supported.

If you feel like reading more, we welcome you to continue.

The U.S. numbers among the most extreme consumers of industrial products and among the most egregious producers of waste and climate warming gasses. Polluted air, warming and acidifying oceans, toxic waste, abnormal temperature and precipitation variations, species loss, deforestation, desertification, environmental injustice, as well as rampant poverty and food insecurity resulting from inequitable socio-economic structures are among many of the mounting challenges.

Continuing research at the Stockholm Resilience Centre indicates that six of the so-called nine planetary boundaries involving factors integral to sustaining life on Earth have been crossed.

The UN Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established by the World Meteorological Association and the United Nations Environmental Programme in 1988 recently released their 6th Assessment Report (AR 6), including a helpful summary for policymakers. In the headline statements, the IPCC reprorts, “Continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increasing global warming, with the best estimate of reaching 1.5°C in the near term in considered scenarios and modelled pathways. Every increment of global warming will intensify multiple and concurrent hazards (high confidence).” And further, “Adaptation options that are feasible and effective today will become constrained and less effective with increasing global warming. With increasing global warming, losses and damages will increase and additional human and natural systems will reach adaptation limits.”

Naturally, this information serves as a striking reminder of the challenges all living beings face, particularly our youngest generation and their future children.

Again, if you are feeling some heaviness, maybe you will enjoy taking some deep breaths or spending some time outside. Here is a talk with the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, one of our inspirations for MBEI, on the topic of mindful walking, and know that if you use a wheelchair, you can experience the delight of mindfully rolling!

You are welcome to read on if you like.

The world is now likely to hit the watershed 1.5 °C rise in average global temperature over next five years, and climate anxiety is on the rise, having doubled in the past five years. Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered, and civic awareness of what is happening is beginning to grow.

Yet this data fails to capture the levels of inequity and injustice in the world, particularly in the U.S. where environmental, economic, gender, age, and racial injustice are clear and present. As reported by the Pew Research Center, income inequality in the U.S. is the highest of all the G7 nations, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; the black-white income gap in the U.S. remains chronic; and the wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016.

The Indigenous traditions and world’s wisdom keepers around the world have known this all along. These issues continue to pose profound challenges for our present and future generations that have equally profound implications for the security, safety and health of our children and flourishing of life on Earth. We are all in this together.

Yet, in the Western tradition, such climate and environmental challenges have been cast in terms of “crisis.”

George Willis Pack Professor Kyle Whyte in the School for Environment and Sustainability argues that crisis thinking is fear-based and a particularly Western way of framing environmental issues, setting climate narratives on a timeline beginning with the Industrial Revolution and then promoting contemporary agendas that threaten to further marginalize and harm traditionally exploited, excluded, and displaced peoples. We resonate deeply with Professor Whyte’s work, and as you can read in our People section, we at MBEI move from a place of equity thinking, well-being thinking, and flourishing thinking.

Thank you kindly taking some time to read through this discussion of the heavy stuff. On the next page, we will share more about our work and that of some visionaries who influence our approach.