Paul Strome: Where Are Our Leaders?

A growing school of psychologists believe the trauma of the climate crisis is a key barrier to change. You might think of it as being “like a deer caught in the headlights”. One suggestion to combat climate change trauma is to do something positive for yourself or others that has to do with climate change, like putting pressure on our politicians and corporations.

The “leaders” of our society have some of the most highly educated advisors in their fields of expertise. They have known about climate change for decades and they know the causes. As “leaders” they have collectively not done their due diligence and the public should hold them accountable.

From a fairly young age, our children are taught about climate and the various aspects of climate such as tipping points. In climate science, a tipping point is a critical threshold that, when crossed, leads to large, accelerating and often irreversible changes in the climate systems. If tipping points are crossed, they will have severe impacts on human society and will accelerate global warming.

Scientists and Indigenous people from many disciplines have documented the facts about how the climate crisis is affecting every aspect of our environment. More and more people realize that everything in our environment is related one way or another with everything else and that when mankind tampers with Mother Nature there are consequences. The “web of life” is an ecosystem and it is made up of all the living animals and plants and the non-living matter in a particular place, like a forest or lake. All the living things in an ecosystem depend on all the other things - living and non-living for continued survival - for food or shelter or other needs. Humans are responsible for throwing the ecosystem out of balance. We need to recognize that and take ownership of that fact. Once we do that we need to dedicate ourselves to correcting what we have done if we want to have any kind of descent life in the future.

We do not need cultures that favour exploitation, resistance, rivalries or rigidity. Society needs collaboration, stewardship, integration and the application of “Two-eyed Seeing” because leadership and positive relationships are key factors in achieving the outcomes we so desperately need. All of humanity needs to support proven, well-researched, economically viable approaches and solutions and we need the public to get behind every single one of them.