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Stephen Lewis
Stephen Lewis’s remarks to the 5th World Environmental Education Congress, May 10, 2009, Montreal, are reprinted with permission from Our Schools Our Selves, Fall 2009, volume 19, number 1, published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The article has been edited to conform to ATA style.
Back in the 1990s, I had the privilege of organizing an international initiative called The Consequences of Armed Conflict on Children. I coordinated the work of an expert appointed by the United Nations. She was a magnificent African woman named Graça Machel, an astonishingly charismatic and intelligent woman given to immense generosity of spirit. She was the former first lady of Mozambique, the former minister of education in Mozambique, now married to Nelson Mandela.
For two years, Graça and members of her group travelled to every conflict imaginable around the world: from Cambodia to Gaza to Burundi. We all analyzed, as closely as possible, what was happening to children over the course of a conflict, and when we sat down to write the report, which became a centrepiece of the United Nations activity thereafter, Graça decided on the opening recommendation.
That recommendation was simply this: whether a child is in conflict or coming out of conflict, what a child most wants is a school. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a formal school or in a community centre, or a religious environment, or a school under the trees in the countryside. That’s what children feel most deeply about.
I hope, as educators, that you fully recognize that. This yearning to be part of an educational environment is immensely intense in the life and mind and curiosity of young people, and you have the opportunity to shape these minds.
You’re dealing with the most important issue on the planet—a subject that lies at the heart of survival of this planet.
In 1988, I was fortunate enough to chair the first major international conference on climate change. We had between three and four hundred scientists and politicians gathered together over several days. The debate was of enormous intensity and at the end of it, a declaration was drafted, the opening words of which read as follows:
Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war. The earth’s atmosphere is being changed at an unprecedented rate by pollutants resulting from human activities, inefficient and wasteful fossil fuel use, and the effects of rapid population growth in many regions. These changes represent a major threat to international security and are already having harmful consequences over many parts of the globe.[1]
More than 20 years later, that opening portion of the declaration is an adequate and entirely legitimate representation of the way people feel about the onset of climate change and global warming today. More than 20 years ago, the aspects of the impacts of global climate change were itemized thus:
These changes will imperil human health and well-being, diminish global food security through increases in soil erosion and greater shifts in uncertainties of agricultural production particularly for many vulnerable regions, change the distribution of seasonal availability of fresh water resources, increase political instability and the potential for international conflicts, jeopardize prospects for sustainable development and reduction of poverty, accelerate the extinction of animal and plant species upon which species survival depends, alter the yield productivity and biological diversity of managed and ecosystems, particularly forests.[2]
This itemization of the impact of global warming has been authenticated time and time again over the intervening 20-plus years. We have done little, I point out, to address those problems in a way that can be seen to confront climate change and to reverse the consequences.
Interestingly, the most vivid moment of the conference occurred when the minister of the environment for Indonesia took the platform. Emil Salim was a gentle and sweet man, and he looked out at the audience and said, “If you think that Indonesia is going to curtail its economic growth in order to compensate for the environmental degradations of the western world, you’re crazy. And unless you transfer the necessary technology to Indonesia, unless you give us the resources so that we can shift from our reliance on fossil fuels to alternative energy sources, we’re not prepared to accommodate your demands.” And that became the issue of the conference, and is precisely the issue today.
It’s why China and India are not onside with Kyoto 1, and why everything that happens in Copenhagen [December 2009] depends on the capacity of the world to come together to share the technologies and priorities.
That brings me, if I may, to a personal view. I am now in my dotage for heaven sakes. I’m limping into senility, I’m 71 years old. I no longer observe any of the diplomatic proprieties. I’m going to speak to you from the heart and as honestly as I can.
In order to avert the crisis that is looming, we have to create global citizens. We have to create citizens with acute environmental sensibilities, with a profound and honest understanding of the issues at stake.
In their preface to one of the volumes on education, UNESCO writes as follows:
This is an era in which some one billion people live in poverty while the majority of the world’s wealth is in the hands of just a few people. This is a time of considerable turbulence and instability—a time of financial and economic crisis, and social upheaval as well as persistent ecological degradation, global warming and the rampant consumption of finite resources. As the current crisis is likely to affect everyone, it is time to anticipate possibilities for profound transformation, toward more inclusive societies, more equitable growth and more responsible behaviours of consumption.”[3]
As I look at the advent and enormous propulsion of the process of global warming and climate change, three things come to mind.
First, the bulk of environmental education today tends to address the greening of society. Whether it’s suggestions from Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, or whether it’s the greening initiatives set out in the various UNESCO documents, everybody talks about recycling, using the right light bulbs, driving hybrid cars, taking shorter showers, travelling on public transit, building solar panels, planting trees or setting up wind power. All the apparatus of environmental education focuses on the importance of greening society and becoming more aware and more sensitive to environmental priorities. It is tremendously admirable for its consciousness-raising and for creating a more liveable community, both locally and internationally.
But it’s not sufficient. And it seems to me that it’s almost an exercise in irresponsibility to pretend that having kids go out into the countryside, and dwell beside the water, and fish in the ponds, and plant trees, and see the beauty of nature—it’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough because, in truth, all of that will not prevent the growing crisis of global warming.
That leads me to the second point I want to make. The only answer to this crisis is the most dramatic reduction in the dependency on fossil fuel and the discharge of carbon; everything else is incidental. We are not going to rescue the planet with environmental education that focuses on greening possibilities—without at the same time acknowledging that we’re in a tremendous race against time. What is involved here is the need to focus young people, who are being educated at whatever level, on the reality that unless we deal with the discharge of carbon, we are dooming the planet. This isn’t some abstraction.
What has happened between 2007 and 2009 is absolutely catastrophic. All of the projections, all of the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are proving wrong. They understood that we were in a precarious position, but they never fully understood the rapidity of the changes that are occurring, particularly the changes that are occurring with the melting of the polar caps.
These changes simply unsettle everyone—and it seems to me that we must be prepared to engage in environmental education that says: We’re in a crisis unlike any other; we’re facing the possible catastrophic implosion of humankind; we’re going to have an apocalyptic event somewhere between 2030 and 2050. It may be 30 million Bangladeshi environmental refugees as a result of rising sea levels and the inundation of coastal sea regions, or it may be an incredible calamity at the southern end of the African continent where there isn’t enough food to feed people. But the truth of the matter is that we have unleashed forces that are not being curtailed, and everybody recognizes that what is required is political will to reverse the process.
One of the co-chairs of the 5th World Environmental Congress, Lucie Sauvé, writes in the introduction to the conference program, “In the wake of preceding environmental education congresses, this 5th Congress becomes a political act.” I repeat:
This 5th congress becomes a political act. Education and the environment have a strong political dimension. This congress aims to contribute to the recognition that the socio-political importance of environmental education and to strengthen this field with the support of the decision makers.
And there was a remarkable piece of writing just a few months ago in the London Review of Books by John Lanchester; please forgive my quoting, but I think it’s important:
The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did—a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse.”[4]
We know all this, but whether it will actually happen is a different question. There is simply not the political will yet in evidence. In Canada, with the exception of some initiatives in some provincial jurisdictions like Québec and British Columbia, and to a much lesser degree Ontario, it’s simply not happening.
Canada is becoming one of the grossest international violators of the prescriptions for climate change. We have a federal government (forgive me for being political for a moment; I’m just going to have an ideological spasm, and then attempt to contain myself) that refuses to react to the reality of global warming, and permits an increase in the discharge of carbon that accelerates with every passing year. Even though Canada pretended to be a part of Kyoto 1 and signed on to reduce emissions by 6 per cent, instead emissions are up 26 per cent. It is a travesty, but it’s also, historians will say, a matter of criminal negligence because the way the world is moving is a nightmare. We simply have to find an alternative way, whether it’s a carbon tax, whether it’s cap and trade, whether it’s sophisticated measures of sequestration, whether it’s the tremendous embrace of the alternative renewable energy, solar and wind in particular. However much nuclear power unsettles people, the Swedes, the French and the British are now looking at the nuclear option. All of this has to be reviewed. Why? That leads me to the third element that I want to explore briefly.
It may be too late. I want to be honest. I think it is too late. Sir Nicolas Stern said that there’s nothing we can do now that will influence what will happen between 2030 and 2050 because climatic factors are in process that are irreversible and cannot now be changed. I think that environmental education now consists in large measure of explaining to the students that we’re heading for catastrophe and that we have to find unusual responses to address that catastrophe.
Isn’t it interesting that in [a recent issue of] Nature magazine, the debate was intensified when a group of scientists concluded the world had little chance of holding temperature a rise of two degrees Centigrade—a level widely regarded by scientists as the limit of safety beyond which climate change becomes irreversible and potentially cataclysmic.
The Financial Times, which I think you’ll agree with me is hardly a left-wing rag, had a most remarkable article called “Changing the Planet Might Help Preserve It,” in which they begin to explore approaches to dealing with global warming that were originally thought to be completely off the wall, completely scatterbrained, geoengineering solutions that no one would take seriously. Listen to the way this article starts:
A giant mirror drifts slowly through space between the Earth’s surface and the sun, intercepting the rays of sunlight before they reach the Earth, and deflecting them safely away. The mirror, made up of millions of silicon chips, is situated at a point in space where the sun’s gravity and the Earth’s cancel each other. This vast structure, assembled painstakingly for years by spacecraft, drifts naturally away from its starting point over time, but complex on-board systems nudge it gradually back to resume its vital role in keeping us safe. This space mirror is—so far—science fiction. Such a structure would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, even if it were technically feasible. But soon many scientists say we may need to start building space mirrors, creating artificial clouds or altering the chemistry of the sea to prevent the worst effects of global warming.[5]
Suddenly all of the science fiction scenarios become potential pragmatic responses to a looming cataclysm, and therefore it seems to me that there is nothing more important than environmental education. I mean, in a way, it’s a privilege to be at the heart of an intimate struggle internationally over the preservation of the planet. But the very real question is: can we reverse it now? Have we unleashed Armageddon? Has it gone too far to be coped with? Must we now begin to contemplate measures of geoengineering that were formerly thought to be faintly lunatic in their scientific prescriptions?
There are many credible scientists who think that geoengineering will inevitably be the alternative on which we’ll have to rely, because it is clear that the world will not diminish its dependence on fossil fuels. It is clear that no matter what we contrive, China will continue to build one coal-fired power plant every week, with the dirtiest coal discharging the highest measure of carbon in the world. It is equally clear that even with financial turbulence, we’re going to be building more and more runways and airports and ever larger planes and there is no fuel in sight that will diminish the consequences of carbon discharge from flight.
It simply becomes clear that even with the best will in the world, Kyoto 2 may not be enough to reverse what is under way. And therefore environmental education has to explore every one of these aspects. It’s thrilling in one sense because it’s such an extraordinary intellectual exercise; it’s rather depressing in another sense because it’s a commentary on how paralyzed the international community has been in its response.
In 1987, Gro Harlem Brundtland warned us (in the commission on environment and development), and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has warned us time and again about what we’re facing. We have failed to pay serious attention to it and now we may have inherited the whirlwind. Along the way there are going to be some grievous consequences for humankind.
Let me briefly enumerate them for you: The shifting agricultural patterns, as a result of global warming, will make life virtually unbearable in many parts of the planet. In particular, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicated in its most recent report that southern Africa would feel most forcefully the consequences of global warming.
It’s like some kind of conspiracy. All of these countries in southern Africa are wrestling desperately with HIV/AIDS. They have prevalence rates that are a nightmare. The pressures on these countries are overwhelming. I spend a lot of my time in Africa. You can’t imagine how people struggle with such resilience and courage to keep their lives and communities together. One of the truths about Africa is the tremendous sophistication, intelligence, generosity of spirit and fundamental human decency evident at the grassroots, at the community level. Then on top of all the poverty, where more than half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, and on top of the pandemics of AIDS and tuberculosis and malaria, Africans are likely to experience ever more severe droughts. There will inevitably be a reduction of agricultural productivity, a reduction of household food security, more famine, more hunger and the possibility of conflicts over water. It’s a nightmare.
I read the compendium of news stories that come across my computer screen every morning, and I saw this, back in January, from the Science and Development Network: “Billions face food shortage this century, warn study. Harvests of maize, and other staple crops could drop by up to forty per cent by the end of the century.”[6] Forty per cent: the staples on which people depend! I’ll be long gone, but our kids and our grandchildren, how in God’s name are they going to cope with the apocalyptic dimensions of what is occurring? Just last month [April 2009], in the Times in the United Kingdom, there was a story: “Billions of people face famine by mid-century, says top U.S. scientists.” Let me simply read it to you:
Famines affecting a billion people will threaten global food security during the 21st century, according to a leading U.S. scientist. Nina Fedoroff, the U.S. State Department chief scientist, is convinced that food shortages will be the biggest challenge facing the world as temperatures and population levels rise.[7]
What are we doing in this world? Why are already vulnerable populations thus expendable? Where is the moral anchor of the international community? How have we allowed this to go on this far? I spend a lot of time in countries where people are already impoverished. The soaring food prices have put another hundred million people below the poverty line of a dollar a day. It’s beyond conscience to imagine that our passivity and negligence on global warming will result in further compromising so many millions of lives on another continent.
In the case of water, the World Health Organization (WHO) points out that roughly 1.5 billion people back in 1990 will increase to 3.6 billion people in 2050 living under water-strained situations. Around air pollution the WHO says that extreme high temperatures can kill directly. It has been estimated that over 70,000 excess deaths were recorded in the extreme heat summer of 2003 in Europe. With respect to disease transmission, the mosquitoes that carry malaria are moving into countries that never had malaria before as warming patterns accelerate.
And one of the things that absolutely throttled me, while I was reading the World Health Organization’s analysis, was their reference to the probable acceleration of sexual violence.
When societies are destabilized by disease or poverty or acute hunger, when there is a tremendous amount of internal turbulence, then that turbulence is often expressed through violence, and increasingly sexual violence. Whether we’re talking about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or the crushing of independence in East Timor, massive campaigns of rape and sexual violence erupted. And I remind you that the military leaders in the Balkans, white western countries, are now serving time for crimes against humanity rooted in rape. This pattern of physical and sexual violence is likely to careen right out of control when there will be destabilization as a result of climate change and global warming.
During the electoral violence in Zimbabwe, Mugabe unleashed the so-called war veterans and youth core to engage in a campaign of politically orchestrated sexual violence. If you worked for the opposition, and you were a woman, you were raped and tortured.
I’m part of a little NGO in the United States that is taking affidavits from women who were subjected to sexual violence in Zimbabwe. The whole world knows what happened and refuses to do anything about protecting women from the marauding militias. And that, let me tell you, is a manifestation of gender inequality. Anything in the world that accentuates this inequality is so profoundly wrong that it should rally all of humankind. The most important struggle on this planet is the struggle for gender equality. You cannot continue to marginalise 52 per cent of the world’s population and ever expect to achieve social justice or equality; it’s just not going to happen.
So, the reality is that the phenomenon of global warming is inciting a myriad of implications and complications and this is, or ought to be, the stuff of environmental education.
It is absolutely unbearable that young people are going to have to live with the consequences that we have created. I’ve often thought, in my own life, that I should have spent a lot more time working on environmental issues. I feel a kind of insensate guilt and shame that 20 years ago I was part of a conference that forecast what was coming, and I chose to do other things and find other priorities in life.
I have two grandsons of seven years of age and four years of age and I can’t stand the thought of what they’re going to inherit. But, you are collectively at the heart of it. You can conceivably turn around an apocalypse. I’m not sure it’s possible, but if it is possible, it will come through environmental education. It will come through your collective, skilful, principled and uncompromising leadership.
You are extraordinarily privileged to be an environmental educator at this moment in time. I salute you for it.
End notes
[1] World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in Toronto. 1988. The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security. www.cmos.ca/ChangingAtmosphere1988e.pdf
[2] ibid.
[3] UNESCO. 2009. Second Collection of Good Practices: Education for Sustainable Development. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/001812/0018181270e.pdf
[4] Lanchester, J. 2007. “Warmer, Warmer.” London Review of Books 29, no. 6 (March). www.1rb.co.uk/v29/n06/lanc01_.html.
[5] Harvey, F. 2009. “Changing the Planet Might Help Preserve It.” Financial Times (May 8). www.ft.com/cms/s/0/121f650e-3bea-11de-acbc-00144feabdc0.html
[6] Antony, N. 2009. “Billions Face Food Shortages This Century, Warns Study.” Science and Development Network (January 2009). www.scidev.net/en/news/billions-face-food-shortages-this-century-warns-st.html.
[7] Smith, L. 2009. “Billion People Face Famine by Mid-Century, Says Top U.S. Scientist.” Times Online. March 23. www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5962238.ece
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Stephen Lewis is a professor in global health at McMaster University and chair of the board of the Stephen Lewis Foundation. Among several senior United Nations roles that spanned over two decades, Lewis was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, deputy director of UNICEF and Canada’s ambassador to the UN.
