It’s finally hit me.
Of course, I’ve known in an abstract sense for many years that climate change is a coming catastrophe. But have I done anything? Nope, not really.
Sure, I’ve felt low-level anger at the self-interested actions of fossil-fuel companies and their decades-long campaign of lies and deception. I’ve been pissed off at their attempts to pass the buck by trying to get me to work out my carbon footprint and lower it. I’ve grown tired of politicians who mimic the language of vested interests.
But now, as Europe burns, ice continues to melt in Antarctica even though it’s winter, scientists tell us almost daily about their shock at the haste with which climate tipping points are approaching, and people are dying in their thousands across the northern hemisphere … Well, it feels like things are abstract no more.
Today, I looked at my son as he ate breakfast and read, so calm and content.
Where I live - the Kapiti Coast of New Zealand - is vulnerable to rising sea levels. The latest modelling shows vast swathes of our community will be reclaimed by the sea, the district unrecognisable by 2130.
Today, as I drove my son and daughter to school, ukuleles against their legs and books on their laps, my lips tightened and my heart sank.
They’re fortunate that their school is a lovely semi-rural one, where the arts and touching the natural world are part of their day-to-day experience. It’s helping them remain confident, curious, and playful. We have the absolute privilege of seeing them flourish in their own unique ways.
Today, as I drove home after dropping them at school, I heard on the news that Liverpool’s captain has moved to a Saudi club, the fossil-fuel money too big to say no to, I guess. Or maybe he’s seen the coming climate apocalypse and decided he needs all the cash he can get to build a refuge for his family. I don’t know. But I can’t help but think it would be nice to see someone like him grow and pair and publicly tell the fossil fuel merchants of death to go calculate their moral footprint.
What they’ve stolen is the stability all of us who are adults took for granted as we grew. That stability allowed us to make plans in a fairly predictable world. Up until this point vast swathes of people like me have been able to ignore the disequilibrium - the chaos out there on the edges - because it has been mostly experienced by the vulnerable. Conveniently, the language of meritocracy has allowed us the write them off as less deserving, as agents of their own individual chaos.
Two days ago I caught up with a friend who is a deputy principal of a secondary school in one of the poorest areas of Wellington. Trauma, she said, that’s what we’re dealing with here on a massive scale. Children raised by people brutalised after being raised in state care. Refugee children who have escaped the horrors of war and environmental destruction, their families torn apart, their mothers unable to get out of bed, crying most of the day. Children who need to be fed at school, not because they aren’t fed at home but because there is only so much left for food after rent and power and petrol. Children with fathers whose lives have been so marked by violence that it’s baked into their very soul, and struggle every minute of every day to control it.
These kids, near us, growing up in a world characterized by chaos. Nothing certain, everything tenuous.
What is an appropriate, natural response to this environment, to trauma?
Yes, I am saying the natural response is the appropriate response. There are plenty of people who would argue the opposite, saying these kids should know better and pull their socks up while simultaneously upping their achievement levels. But that’s the language of the bully, because the natural response to a world like the one they’re in isn’t to get with the programme and show respect to the world around them but to fight it or retreat from it.
This presents education with a big problem. More and more kids are coming into schools with a propensity to oppose or avoid. Historically we’ve been able to cope with them through punitive means, or in these more enlightened times by taking a restorative approach or through adding more teacher aide support. But I wonder about the relevance of these as the number of kids requiring access to them increases.
Because the number is increasing, and my bet is that as the world becomes more and more turbulent we will see more and more of these kids – fighting against or retreating from a world that seems unpredictable and out to get them. It’s the only natural and appropriate response.
I think of my kids. Today they don’t have to fight or hide; they can be and become in all their quirky, idiosyncratic ways. They can go to school and play the ukulele, and sing, and climb trees, and make huts, and pick up chickens, and read books, and laugh, and chase, and sit quietly. These are all normal responses to a stable environment. The systems and approaches we’ve got in education are built for kids like them.
But out beyond us, fires are burning, ice is melting, oceans are boiling. When I think of who they will have to be when that chaos comes for us, all I can do is cup my forehead with my hand and squeeze.
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Tika tēnā, Bevan. This is the constant subtext to everything we do now. How can we rise above fear and anger and selfishness ...and make some kind of difference?
Sadly, this is very well written, and extremely perceptive.
There is a systemic issue with how we organise schools that creates further harm. I think you’ve said this before, but time to breathe and just be - at school is so important now. There is a path of healing and enrichment for everyone in education. We have to trust and believe in every individual, But while we are stuck in the stupidity of attempting to speed up students and get them to produce data to show they are improving , so adults feel better , quickly! We are racing at top speed away from the catastrophe.
We must all walk towards each other and attempt to ‘see’ each other, and in the process we may be walking towards a better version of ourselves.