SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

By Sean Weaver

Palm fronds rustled in the breeze sounding like distant applause. Below, a tense village meeting was unfolding. The lapping of waves signified something different ever since the high tide came and stole the houses.

Sera was frustrated by the attitudes of her cousins who came up with all kinds of emotive reasons to stay. Children squealed and played outside the open-walled house where the meeting took place.

Her cousin Tomas retorted “But our life will have no meaning or purpose over there. We were all born right here, got married here, had children and grandchildren right here on the island – as it has been for countless generations. Our ancestors are buried right over there.”

Hmmm, she thought, they just don’t get it. Sera’s appeal to reason was an attempt to convey her concern for their plight. “Life will be better and more secure. There will be more work opportunities, and the government is not going to keep offering to pay for this relocation. This is your chance for a better life.”

“Our life is perfect right here!” he erupted, thumping his fist on the mat. “Even you would always say that you would come straight home if it wasn’t for your government job.”

“I know, I said those things but it’s different now. The sea is going to take this place and there will be nothing here for you.”

“Grandpa has said that he wants to die here and be buried beside Grandma,” offered another voice.

“But Grandma’s grave will be washed away too” Sera whispered, turning her eyes to the ocean.

And on the discussion went, for hour after hour. They broke for lunch and ate together on woven mats outside in the shade of a breadfruit tree. The kids chased each other and threw sticks into the sea as over their heads in the distance one could just make out the silhouette of the neighboring high island on the horizon, beneath the billowing clouds of a tropical sky.

Why couldn’t this be a high island too?, she thought.

The sea is challenging this small community that has lived on this island for numberless generations. Its culture and its self-identity are intangibly but powerfully inseparable from this sandy place, barely a few meters above sea level.

The scientists had come from Australia to explain that the spring tide that took the houses was the start of things to come. The tides are rising because the warmer ocean is expanding, and more ice is melting, and low islands like this will eventually be swallowed up by the god of the sea.

Science came and sat uncomfortably on the mat to explain things, but science can do nothing to help these people. They need to make a decision on how to die as a culture: death by the god of the sea right here, or death by the god of modern life on the mainland of Papua New Guinea.

Science and the arts. Two competing realms. One produces information, the other produces culture and meaning. And behind them lies a changing world – one that is warming and sometimes threatening the survival of communities here and there. During these early stages of global warming small communities like this one will suffer. If left unchecked, climate change will cause much bigger communities to also contemplate an end of their way of life.

Wielding its ”drought sword” the climate has killed civilizations before, and is saber rattling once again. Only this time – so the scientists tell us – some of our own actions are conspiring against us: fossil fuel emissions and deforestation. First small communities in border territories fall, then the breach, advance, and momentum.

Like this small island community, our global society needs to make a decision on how to act in response to this great challenge. What then is the role of science? What is the role of art?

Science produces information about problems and solutions – but science is not designed for implementing the solution. That takes place in a messy, sticky, social, economic, and political realm. Technology builds us tools for clean development – but it is not capable of motivating an ordinary hand to pick up that tool or to change behavior.

Other drivers are needed. Someone needs to help the hand to learn new tricks. Someone needs to communicate the need for new tricks in a way that is compelling. And the message needs to be crafted to warm the left and right ventricles of the political heart. This is clearly a task for those skilled in the arts of education, communication, media, stories, values, of pouring all of this into collaborative actions. And together these actions encompass a creative process of becoming a culture capable of living with this wonderful interconnected world.

We dwell on the historical peak of a culture that has celebrated and rewarded a fetish for domination and control – of people and of nature. But the remedy is not more poison. As Einstein reminds us: we cannot solve a problem from the mindset that created it.

People who are controlled are not motivated. Freedom does this far better. Such freedom includes being entrusted and empowered to mutually choose new rules for our common game, so that we can play together on and on for generation after generation. Because the way we play now determines the opportunities of our own descendents.

It is simple enough. It is simply a bigger form of Self-interest where we take care of our own offspring, their offspring, and on it goes. We take care of them by taking care of what they need for a good life: sufficient water, soil, food, fuel, and shelter. We look after the factory that produces these things and scientists call this factory the “Earth System.”

And the leadership that can deliver such a Herculean result is one that is capable of reconciling the great opposing forces of our time: Left and Right (brain and politics), Science and Art. It is Herculean (impossible) only when viewed from a 20^th century lens. It is the 21^st century.

This article also features as a chapter in a book released this week entitled: Dialogues With Tomorrow. For other Happyzine posts by Sean Weaver, just type: ‘Ekodo’ in the search field at top right of this page to locate his collection of Happyzine articles. ‘Ekodo’ turns environmentalism into a martial art and is the name of a training programme for sharply compassionate environmental practice that Sean leads with his wife Jo. Sean is a forest conservation consultant through his company ‘Carbon Partnership’. He and Jo live in Golden Bay with their two young boys Leo and Ruben.

Tags: ekodo