Conservation comment: Fight for climate future

DR RALPH Chapman closed his talk to the Whanganui Science Forum last Tuesday with a modelled map showing Wellington's CBD after a metre of sea rise. It was disturbing.

Even more disturbing was his quiet, firm assertion that this would be a reality, based on changes we had already unleashed.

The youngest of those already born will live to see this redefinition of our coastal cities. How soon it will happen depends on the choices made now.

I write this before the planned international protests on November 28-29 that will call on governments around the world to commit to meaningful reductions in carbon emissions at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in Paris.

I hope that we will turn out in numbers in Whanganui, recognising that the effects of climate change transcend political allegiance and other factors that seemingly divide us.

It is odd, and disturbing to me, that our Government both accepts the science of climate change and refuses to do anything meaningful about it.

The target reductions that the New Zealand Government intends to offer at the UNFCC in Paris are pitiful.

And Deputy Prime Minister Bill English's "yeah, nah" response to the just-released report on sea level rise by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment is as baffling as it is infuriating.

About 50 people turned out for Dr Chapman's lecture.

The newly-formed Whanganui Science Forum deserves congratulations for organising speakers of this calibre.

I looked around me with respect and affection for the many familiar faces in that audience, people who are tirelessly working for a better world.

I was also saddened to realise that my friend and I were very likely the only people in the room under age 60.

I do understand the pressures on younger people who are likely juggling work and families, and week-night evenings are not an easy time to get out of the house.

But I fear an even younger generation is being lulled by the reverberating echoes of social media. Does signing an online petition to protest the latest environmental inequity accomplish anything? Almost certainly not.

Worse than its inefficacy is the risk that those signing feel like they've "done their bit" and nothing more is required of them. Exchanging expressions of woe and indignantly swapping links with our Facebook "friends" - who typically share our political and cultural views - is not going to bring about the change we need.

I recommend the readable and important small book Dr Chapman has just released, Time of Useful Consciousness: Acting Urgently on Climate Change. He has focused on the solutions that will keep global warming to a 2 per cent rise, the point at which its effects will be somewhat manageable.

And the University of Auckland's Dr Niki Harre has an excellent book, Psychology for a Better World , which can be downloaded for free. It has some keys to understanding how we can move beyond fearful inertia and encourage and inspire others to choose change. Better that than mocking or blaming those who don't share our views.

We are all in this together and we need to start talking - preferably face-to-face, where there is less chance of descending into the toxic vortex of internet commenting.

-R. K. Rose is a fermenter, formenter and gardener who likes permaculture thinking.