The closing panel of this conference featured Winona LaDuke, Tim Ingold, Bron Taylor, environmental epidemiologist Colin Soskolne (who convened the preceding panel on public and environmental health regimes), and myself. We were each asked to provide five minutes of summary comments on the big issues of our concern (related to the conference). The following were the notes I prepared.
We all have issues to concern ourselves with — individual, local, community, regional, national, and global issues — and I don’t want to be the one to tell people that their issues are less important than a global issue defined by a distant group of scientists. They are not. But in some sense, it’s precisely such an issue — climate change and its associated social and ecological disruptions (biodiversity loss, massive social dislocation, and so on) — that is the one that we all face in our near future, and that will serve as a globally unifying issue for decades to come.
The challenge is for those of us who are aware of this to articulate a coherent and enabling, not disabling, understanding of it: a vision of what we can do — politically, economically, technologically, culturally, and spiritually — to deal with it. This involves three things:
