April 21, 2025
Humane Civilization Worldwide Presentation-Discussion Meeting (humanecivilization.org)
Questions:
1. Is it a climate crisis or climate change?
Should it not be “climate changing”?
2. How serious is the situation?
3. Regarding functions and tasks:
Individuals and families?
Organizations, NGOs?
Corporations?
Governments?
4. We may also ask ourselves how people respond to the crisis, or why they are hardly responding.
1. It is definitely a crisis.
It keeps changing and clearly getting worse – much worse.
2. The situation appears much more serious than is generally admitted by activists and climate journalists.
It has been argued that most recent wars and genocides, as well as migrations were related to actual or impending food shortages and sometimes maldistribution of food by governments.
3. Individuals and families should work on being ethical, living rather simply, with an attitude of wanting to give than getting-receive, forgive, cooperate and being compassionate. However, we think in us-versus-them terms, with lines between immediate family, family members we are less close to and close friends, other friends and acquaintances, strangers we have much in common with, etc.
Organizations and NGOs should largely avoid an us-versus-them attitude, try to be fair and be broadly considerate, considering aldo the very distant and future generations.
Corporations work by their own codes of behaviors, mainly oriented towards profits and growth; there is not much ethics in their planning.
Governments have to do what corporations and NGOs cannot and should not do; examples are an infrastructure that does not follow a principle of profitability but considers all people’s needs; secular schools; a military that hopefully is never used – there must not be private armies and individuals owning military-type weapons; etc.
4. People generally think only in narrow terms, short-term, and they do not like to discuss and think about bad news. Activists may discourage “doomism” since it “turns people off” and leads to zero actions. But that is actually not true.
As the late Pope Frances told J. D. Vance. “For leaders there are no concentric circles.” Being humane and caring must cross all borders of us-versus-them thinking. Governments are responsible for all people, not a constituency, and for peace and welfare worldwide.
David Brooks, conservative commentator of the New York Times, wrote an opinion piece on 4/18 about the need to cooperate against Trump, compromises encourage his behavior, piecemeal actions will not work. Rather radical approaches will be needed, mass demonstrations, boycotts, civil disobedience.
Avoiding a dictatorship in this country may be less important than always pursuing compromises that concern the climate: buying into the idea of an all-electric luxurious future that is not much different from today will not work.
We have to work towards a nationwide movement that demands radial, effective government actions
Further questions:
Why is there no progress towards reversing global warming?
What can you do, if you care about our future, the world of our children and grandchildren, the people in poor countries? Is it possible to reverse global warming?
Are our outlined proposals the only way we can save our civilizations, the world as we know it?