Changing in Response to Climate Truth: Entered Emergency Mode

Gandhi pioneered the movement building strategy called “Satyagraha,” or “Truth force”, which carries intimations of love and inner strength. Rather than using violence to create change, practitioners of Satyagraha used their inner resources to march, fast, and otherwise withstand suffering to demonstrate that colonialism was inherently degrading. Ultimately, suggesting that India needed to govern itself. Once again, the truth won out; Satyagraha was critical in helping India achieve independence.
Martin Luther King Jr. utilized Gandhi’s teachings and preached about the need for ‘soul force’ in the struggle for racial equality. Before the Civil Rights Movement, America rationalized, ignored and passively accepted the brutal Jim Crow system. The Civil Rights Movement brought the ugly truth of Jim Crow to the forefront of American life. When non-violent protesters were met with hateful violence and these events were broadcast into living rooms across America, the truth could no longer be denied and defended against. The status quo was revealed as morally bankrupt. Major, immediate changes were undeniably necessary. When a powerful truth is effectively communicated, change can happen very rapidly.
Recognizing the social mechanisms for maintaining climate silence offer tantalizing possibilities for breaking the silence, in order to instigate rapid change. We can create a domino effect. Pope Francis offers a “conversion” process for Christians who fail to accept climate truth: “It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians, with the excuse of realism and pragmatism, tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. Others are passive. So what they all need is an ‘ecological conversion,’ whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”
Pope Francis agrees that “accepting” the science of climate change yet doing nothing is immoral. He states, “Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.”
Feel the pain of climate truth, Pope Francis argues, and let it change you; let it guide you towards engagement. Accepting climate truth can affect not only your civic and political engagement, but also your priorities, goals, and sense of identity.

Allowing yourself to fully accept climate truth ‘changes everything’, to borrow from Naomi Klein, Despite what American consumer culture suggests, you are not an isolated actor, living in a stable country on a stable planet, whose main purpose in life is to pursue personal success, familial satisfaction, and constant gratification. Rather, you are living in a country, and on a planet, in crisis. Your primary moral responsibility is to fight for your family, your species and all life on earth. You didn’t ask for it, you didn’t cause it, and you probably don’t like it. But here you are.

Here we all are, in personal and collective danger. Studies show that climate change is already killing 40,00,000 people a year, a number that we should expect to rise precipitously as climatic and civilizational tipping points—for example, the breakout of water wars and food riots— are breached. We must allow ourselves to be deeply affected and changed by reality.