From water pilgrims to climate refugees, those who are suffering most from the climate crisis have done the least to cause it, argues this strong and inspiring analysis
The language around the climate crisis, the journalist Anne Karpf writes in How Women Can Save the Planet, can conceal as much as it reveals. Take “natural disaster”. There is nothing “natural” about the disasters that have struck our planet owing to global heating. They are not freak accidents, Karpf says, but rather the culmination of long-term environmental degradation caused by human activity. Then again, consider “human activity”. The slipperiness of language emerges once more. When speaking about the crisis, campaigners in the west commonly invoke a universal “we”, setting up an abstract notion of “humanity” harming a vulnerable planet. David Attenborough famously warned last year: “We’ve not just ruined the planet, we’ve destroyed it.”
But what happens if we dig further to discover the fissures within this “we”? To acknowledge, for example, that the world’s richer nation states are responsible for 86% of global CO2 emissions (compared to 14% for the poorer half) or that the average Briton emits more carbon in two weeks than a citizen of Uganda, Malawi, or Somalia does in a year. Besides, consider any number of leading governmental organisations addressing the climate emergency – those representatives of the supposedly undivided “we” – and the illusion of universalism dissipates fast. The UK’s initial senior delegation for the Cop26 UN climate change conference was composed entirely of men.
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