I’m going hungry

I’m going with­out food today, for the first time in my life, in sol­i­dar­i­ty with the seri­ous­ly hard-core folks doing the Cli­mate Jus­tice fast, some of whom have been more than 40 days on only water and elec­trolytes.

There was a pro­pos­al some time ago for Green­peace to call for a glob­al fast to ask heads of state to sign a fair, ambi­tious, bind­ing cli­mate deal, and a long wran­gle about the con­di­tions that make fasts effec­tive and the con­di­tions that make them use­less. I was opposed to it as an orga­ni­za­tion­al tac­tic, and I remain so.

What I do today is a per­son­al choice, one which I take out of respect for what the long-term fasters are doing. I’m in awe of their per­son­al com­mitt­ment to the cause of stop­ping run­away cli­mate change. They’ve engaged me emo­tion­al­ly, and I’ll proud­ly stand with them for a day with a tiny sym­bol­ic shad­ow of their action.

Green­peace Board Chair Lal­i­ta Ram­das made me think hard when in her blog, she came at it from the angle of per­son­al dis­ci­pline. Mak­ing a choice, and stick­ing to it.

And in some­thing I read this morn­ing, “Per­son­al Green­wash­ing” a psy­chol­o­gist makes some excel­lent points about how any­one con­cerned about this issue has to ratio­nal­ize the inevitable hypocrisies:

I shut the lights off when­ev­er I leave the room. Is that mean­ing­ful change? Not at all, but nei­ther is it mean­ing­less.

The real val­ue of small change is that it breaks down unman­age­able prob­lems into bite-size chunks, which is the way any­one real­ly is able to tack­le any­thing. As the famous Chi­ne­se philoso­pher Lao-tzu taught, a jour­ney of a thou­sand miles begins with a sin­gle step.… The prob­lems fac­ing the world are over­whelm­ing – so over­whelm­ing one won­ders that peo­ple can even scrape up the opti­mism to have kids any­more. But life has to go on. I see what’s hap­pen­ing now among peo­ple like [col­leagues who recy­cle, look after their tire pres­sure, wor­ry about cli­mate change, yet dri­ve SUVs] as an accep­tance that on some lev­el the world has altered irrev­o­ca­bly, and their small actions are an attempt to inch their way toward a new nor­mal.

In a world of things we can­not con­trol, this is one small action we can take which too may have no impact, but which is not mean­ing­less. It can lead to larg­er steps. It’s an action we can take which speaks to the hope that the big things that need to be done to stop this cri­sis can be done: a sin­gle tiny step among mil­lions of oth­er steps that even­tu­al­ly gets you a dis­tance which astounds you. When things real­ly do look over­whelm­ing, I like to remem­ber that big change looks impos­si­ble when you set out, and inevitable once you’ve achieved it.

As I go with­out food today, I will think about the real pos­si­bil­i­ty that a fast may some­day not be a choice for my chil­dren, but some­thing imposed by con­di­tions that I don’t want to imag­ine, but which sci­ence tells us are on the way if we don’t change. I will think about the cli­mate vic­tims for whom hunger is already the only choice. And I’ll think about activism, and how all of us who are shout­ing for action need to find or invent new ways to shout, new ways to pro­voke action.