The morning of the climate strike I woke up exhausted by climate change, depressed by the cruelty of our politicians and generally dismayed by humans. I've come to accept that cognitive dissonance and confusion is part of facing the reality of climate change, its impacts and what to do about it. This is especially true when we look at the temporal and spatial challenges: it's urgent and huge but we're slow and small.
The reality is that politicians and governments are doing nothing and the systems of power are corrupt and unresponsive to the point of criminal neglect, if not ecocide. Working in the area of climate change can grind us down as we also face the barriers against action: the many levels of denial, our frozen collective imaginations, the poverty of our intergenerational connections and the lack of precedents to guide us through uncertainty.
But this is the reality. Change is rarely a sudden transformative wave of happy solidarity that rushes to metamorphose everything at a cellular level. More often change is slow, iterative, incremental, difficult and filled with moments of waking up to a grey, unspectacular loneliness that illuminates a circuitous dark path ahead. Climate change is a crisis of unprecedented proportions and impacts. It's not fun.
Despite feeling flat, the kids and I went to the climate strike. The question was already being asked by commentators and social media as to the point of the strike, especially when it's been touted that marches have little impact upon politics. The hope is that we live in a time where we're transitioning from transactional commodified politics and morality into an era of collective concern for our common future.
These strikes aren't solely sites of protestation but rather a chance to step out of the individual grey loneliness to come together for our collective future in intergenerational solidarity. As Judith Butler talks about, there is something powerful and visceral about putting your body on the street, in the public forum, with other bodies and being vulnerable and exposed together.
However, after the strike the question of what to do remains. It's naïve and reductive to presume all 300,000 Australians who marched on Friday agree on what we need to do. It's evident that what's increasingly needed and long overdue is the nurturing of healthy climate change politics where we can debate and explore different approaches.
Do we approach it via radical state intervention? More securitisation? Or do we fiddle with financial levers and insurance? How do we collectively invest in civil society solutions and how much do we focus on institutional adaptation?
"Once we jump over the persistent and harmful denial discourses that hold politics hostage, we're going to realise that climate justice politics is just as diverse and multiple as social justice."
Do we increase the legal liabilities of climate change risks? How would these be enforced — prison time or civil settlements? What collective sacrifices are needed? How do we decide what collectively matters and takes priority in the expensive costs of climate change yet to be incorporated into budgets? What levels of government, if any, can engage with these questions?
These marches are only the tip of the iceberg. Denialism and political neglect is stalling a mature, diverse and healthy climate change politics that is hankering to expand. Intelligent and mature conversations around climate change have been hijacked by the constant need to address the monsters of history that refuse to take responsibility for the major schisms that appear in all our futures.
Once we jump over the persistent and harmful denial discourses that hold politics hostage, we're going to realise that climate justice politics is just as diverse and multiple as social justice.
Climate justice is important, necessary and really difficult. Those working in institutions and with organisations and communities trying to address the climate emergency or climate change impacts know that the work is circled by a common anxiety: outcomes cannot be predicted with certainty, the scale of the problem is unprecedented and the availability of solutions varied, diverse and hard to match up. Institutional and organisational adaptation and mitigation aren't as spectacular as a strike, or as passionate as a rebellion, but that's where climate and ecological justice gets implemented and made real.
Critics of the climate strikes are not worth repeating. They were boring and based upon the outdated idea that the individual is solely responsible for the climate crisis. I think everyone left the climate strikes feeling less alone, for we had touched upon the possibilities of collectivism, of a public movement, and remembered that we are not alone in the really difficult labour involved in accepting that action is necessary. Everyone who marched knows the problem wasn't solved on Friday and there is a lot of work to do. This is a long, rocky collective ride.
Bronwyn Lay is Ecological Justice Project Officer at Jesuit Social Services in Melbourne.
Climate strikers in Melbourne on 20 September 2019 (Tim Kroenert)