A commentary by the former legal director of the UVic Environmental Law Centre. This is from his farewell speech.
Our work is unfinished. Climate change bears down on us like a runaway train, with ever more catastrophic fires, heat domes, and atmospheric rivers. The question presses: Can we turn this around?
It looks very grim. But hope remains. One can still imagine a path where we slash greenhouse gases, endure some rough decades, and great grandchildren eventually inherit a safe climate.
We must cling to that hope. We cannot surrender to climate fear. Pessimism is a luxury we cannot afford — the stakes are too high for despair.
Your generation confronts Plato’s age-old question: “How then shall we live?” How do we live a meaningful life in a world shadowed by fear? The startling fact is that you have a unique opportunity to lead lives of great purpose. For there can be no greater meaning than to work together to save the future of the human race.
In the struggle ahead, ancient wisdom counsels us to choose hope over fear, love over anger. Indeed, I would argue that pragmatism demands that we be guided first by love.
A famous Vermont environmentalist summed up the secret to a meaningful life on her 100th birthday: “There are just three things: Love yourself; Love others; Love nature.” Similarly, Martin Luther King used his book Strength to Love to transform a nation.
King called everyone to join together in a beloved community. Even after the Ku Klux Klan bombed his family home, he stood on the ruins and called on followers to love their enemies. He proclaimed, “They are not our enemies, we will change their hearts.”
King advocated the philosophy of the great Mahatma Ghandi — the lawyer who freed India from Empire while asserting “My goal is friendship with the world and I can combine the greatest love with the greatest opposition to wrong.”
Ultimately, King’s call for a “beloved community” dismantled the powerful segregation system, and defeated the same reactionary forces that plague us today. Once again, we need King’s creative approach — this time, to heal the social divisions that prevent united action on climate. Fortunately, the idea of a “beloved community” is one of the most compelling in history.
We in this room have a beloved community. For we have been drawn here because we have fallen in love with the earth – and with each other.
We fell in love with nature in different ways. For some, it was photos of earth from space — a fragile blue-green emerald with a thin layer of air, water and land that supports the only life in the universe. For others, it was beholding orcas leaping out of the ocean, a heron silently stalking fish in a lagoon at dawn, the tragic joy of a salmon run.
And we found community with each other as we hiked alpine meadows, sang at campfires, and lay on the earth chatting under a canopy of stars.
But now, if we are going to save our grandchildren, we have to extend that beloved community to Conservatives, Republicans, and a whole bunch of people we may not agree with on other issues.
Like Martin Luther King we must win them over with a true and beautiful vision of a Common Future for everyone’s kids – a healthy planet, with a healthy climate, jobs, houses and food for all.
If we are going to deal with the environmental crisis, we must share our love for nature; our love for our grandchildren; and our love for all people — including miners, loggers and oil patch workers.
At the same time, we must share one immutable truth — that we must all stand together on climate, or we will all fry together. We simply cannot afford to allow fossil fuel money to fan divisive culture wars that bamboozle people into voting against their own climate future. We can only defeat industry-funded “grievance politics” with the politics of a shared beloved community and shared destiny. We must adopt Ghandi’s goal of “friendship with the world”.
And here’s the hard part, folks. This means we have to abandon finger-pointing, sneering, cynicism, and blaming other people – and invite all to work together. The fact is that we are all in the same boat, all on the same earth. We need a little less calling people out — and a whole lot more calling people in. We need to invite and persuade everyone to work together and keep this fragile boat afloat.
In the existential quest to save the future, we need loving and persuasive leaders. Nature not only needs you to give voice to the river and forest — to speak for the grizzly, the marmot, the caribou and the falcon. You must also speak for every child, and for every human heart that loves a grandchild.
All of you now have a grand opportunity to work together to save the natural world. And no life can be more meaningful and satisfying than to work to save our earth in this time of its greatest peril.
Indeed, if we can reach out to the broader community with a positive message, humanity has a shot. If we fail, it will be tragic. Yet, still, we will have had moments of beauty, moments of loving each other, of building community, of a noble quest more consequential than Star Wars. At the least, we will have led lives of purpose.
On the other hand, if we succeed we will be heroes to coming generations. A future Shakespeare may write of our beloved community:
“This story shall every good parent teach their child;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters…”
Now that would be a life worth living.
