Who is responsible for dealing with climate change? It’s easy to say ‘all of us’ but individually we feel helpless. Our little energy saving or water sparing can hardly make a real difference, we think. Of course, if everyone did it…but then, everyone doesn’t. And others are more profligate than we are, aren’t they? Mea culpa non est.
The Walrus and the Carpenter were walking hand in hand.
They wept like anything to see such quantities of sand.
‘If this could just be cleared away,’ they said, ‘it would be grand’.
Whether or not humanity’s behaviour is responsible for the changing climate is irrelevant. Human beings must deal with it. The prognosis is that trying to handle it will cause pain and deprivation immediately. How much is not clear but more than we thought a year ago. We must use the best estimates we have to assess present pain and future agony. The issue has divided the planet’s population into those who want to make money to be able to protect themselves from climate pain and those who know they cannot do so but whose comfort and lives will be seriously threatened. But both rich and poor suffer – cf Los Angeles wildfires.
Lack of, and cost of, energy is the same as lack of, and cost of, food and water. The haves and the have-nots will both fight to survive regardless of the damage their efforts inflict on others. Survival is their objective. The wish to survive is quite normal. All living creatures exhibit it. There is one difference between most animals and humans. Humans sense responsibility for other creatures. Few animals do, to the same extent, except when protecting their young.
‘If fifty maids with fifty mops swept it for half a year
do you suppose,’ the Walrus said, ‘that they would get it clear?’
‘I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter, and shed a bitter tear.
Working on farms in my childhood I would be faced with having to hoe by hand a field of some crop to remove all except every fifth plant. Then the plants that were left had room to grow. Back breaking and slow work it was. If I looked at the whole field of two or three acres I was defeated before I began. So I learnt to hoe one row first, then another, then another. That way I had a series of beginnings, middles and ends and could count each completion as a triumph. It didn’t change the scale of the work, just the scale of the individual target.
It ended up hoeing the whole field. Mission accomplished.
‘How then,’ the Walrus asked of him ‘our efforts here to rate?’
The Carpenter, a lazy chap, was leaning on a gate
while both observed, to their dismay, that it was now too late.
Or was it?
Good morning
John Bittleston
The poem is from Alice in Wonderland. All, that is, except the last verse which I wrote to fit the call to action that I hope this Daily Paradox will encourage. Please tell us if you think it already is at [email protected].
18 January 2025
