Coming into this experience, a few people told me it would be overwhelming.
They weren’t wrong.
For the first few days of the conference, headlines were full of speeches from world leaders and activists. Watching these as they were livestreamed to audiences around the COP venue, I expected the carefully orchestrated uplifting music, beautiful pictures and calls to action.
I didn’t expect to respond to David Attenborough’s talk by pretty much tearing up.
I wasn’t the only one. There’s something so powerful about listening to someone who has spent their entire life advocating for the environment and calling so urgently for action to protect it – whilst knowing, at the age of 95, that they aren’t going to see it ‘fixed’. (To rephrase a line from Hamilton: “what is a legacy? It’s planting trees on a planet you never get to see”.)
I was reflecting on why this made me react how I did.
For me personally, it’s quite easy to get caught up in the numbers and targets and science of the whole thing. I’ve spent the last year studying what needs to be done, how much as been done, and how likely we are to meet the targets we’re talking about. My Twitter feed is full of people who research climate or work in climate action. I know it’s important.
What I miss, often, is to feel how important it is. The impacts of climate change are so devastating, it tends to be easier for someone in my privileged position to just focus on the numbers. To act on climate change because the statistics tell you to.
Christians do this thing where they talk about “head knowledge” (when you’ve read the books and learned the stuff) and “heart knowledge” (when you feel the truth of it on a deeper, emotional level). Whatever your beliefs, I think that’s pretty applicable to climate change too. For so many people I’m speaking to and have studied with, on a day-to-day level, we have that ‘head knowledge’ that climate change is pretty bad. But in a very comfortable Western lifestyle, I have to be reminded to feel the injustice of this issue on more than a purely intellectual level.
Whether it’s listening to Attenborough or to amazing young activists like Elizabeth Wathuti, who closed the opening session (look her up!), I was glad world leaders got to hear that.
I just hope they were as moved as I was.
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