Glaciers are collapsing, lakes are bursting, and rivers are changing, yet we keep hearing the same solutions:solar panels, electric cars, tree plantations, another summit. After decades of summits, emissions continue to rise.
So an uncomfortable question comes up: Are we treating the disease, or only the fever? We often treat climate change as a technical problem, too much carbon, so reduce carbon. But where does the carbon come from? Consumption. And why do we keep consuming more? Perhaps there is an emptiness within us that we rarely stop to examine, and we are taught to fill it with things: a bigger house, a better car, another holiday, the next upgrade.
But the emptiness never seems to disappear, so the next thing is always needed. The emptiness within is bottomless. The Earth is not. That is where the collision begins.
Banning CFCs was relatively straightforward, but carbon is woven into almost everything we love, the tea we drink, the cars we drive, the flights we take, the homes we build. Consumption is emission. Technology can make consumption more efficient, but efficiency doesn't necessarily end it, a better engine can simply allow us to drive more.
Perhaps the deeper crisis is not only in the atmosphere, but in the human mind that keeps demanding more. Before asking how to save the planet, perhaps we need to ask: who is consuming it? Maybe self-observation is where another kind of environmentalism begins, when we understand ourselves well enough that consumption becomes less compulsive. First know the one who is heating it.