Sunset reflections: Stand by the girls!

A few days ago, on the warmest day yet this spring, outdoor café’s and bars in Gothenburg were filled with people enjoying the weather. It was a sunny day, almost 20°C in early April so I choose to take a long walk in the nature reserve adjacent to the Botanical garden. Sitting on a hill, only a few km from the city centre, the traffic noise of the city was reduced to a slow humming in the background, almost drowned out by the sound of blackbirds singing in the treetops. 

In a moment like this, looking at the sun setting over the water in the distance, everything looked almost normal. The distant flash from the Vinga lighthouse becoming visible as dusk was setting; the spring sky still too light for any stars to show.

Yet we know… 

• 3 million years are slowly catching up with us. 
• 3 million years of change that we have compressed into 2 centuries since the start of the industrial revolution.
• 3 million years of change that were hidden in the deep sea and the slowly melting glaciers.
• 3 million years of change that will transform the world as we know it.

This brutal message can be found in several recent studies. 3 million years, that’s how far back we need to go to find a time when carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today. If we could send a scout back in time, he or she would find a world very different from ours, with sea levels 15-20 meters higher than today and trees growing on what are now the ice covered plateaus of Antarctica. Globally, temperatures were 3-4°C higher than today, but in Antarctica, temperatures were 20°C higher, changing it from glacier to tundra. And since that time, the global temperatures have not exceeded 1.5°C over the preindustrial baseline, a level now considered a warning threshold.  

Surely on the return to our time, our time traveller would waste no time to speak before governments and the world, telling us that our coastal cities are about to become the modern versions of Atlantis and a new era of massive migration is upon us. The message would be clear, change path and prepare for a different future or succumb to the climate disruption that we have started.  

But alas, this tale of the imagined time traveller has already been told to us again and again by the scientists that have spent their lives investigating our climate system. For each passing year, their warnings have been more and more stern, their call upon us to act more urgent. So even a truth speaking time traveller might not be enough break through our obsession with “growth and progress”. 

Still, maybe this winter we have seen the arrival of a storyteller persistent enough to break through media wall. But rather than storyteller I would call Greta Thunberg a catalyst that for a movement that might become strong enough to shake us enough to make us understand that change is coming, wether we like it or not. The tool used by Greta and her fellow activists (and there are many around the world) has been to strike from school, using the hard to refute argument “why study for a future that will be denied us?”. What is really amazing and a potential game changer is that Greta has inspired so many other young girls between 13 and 18 years. This is a group that has been looked down upon, almost ridiculed as Generation Z. Instead they have shown to be smart, knowledgable and well organised, making global connections and inspiring each other. 

These kids have like the child in HC Andersens tale about the naked emperor unmasked the various attitudes so many of our political “leaders”; slow or faked engagement, hidden indifference or even climate science denial. Many of the remaining climate deniers or climate delayers are also fiercely opposed to other aspects of a just society, like women’s and LBTQ rights as well as immigration. That the same persons refuse the action on climate change that will lead to the very migration waves they are so scared of is parodic, had it not been so tragic. 

It is unlikely that the young and vocal girls now leading the climate movement will accept to step back and let “older and wiser men” take command again. But to the people in power they are a threat, one reason being that they are not yet entangled in the normality of mortgages and consumption that has subdued so many of us. So we, who call ourselves grownups, need to shake us loose and stand behind and support these young activists. Each and everyone of us should do all that we can in our own lives to live a low carbon life, there is no conflict between personal change and activism. But as I have written before, the valiant quest is not a simple journey. So we need to understand, accept and embrace this task, because it is what we need to do save our humanity.  

Beyond the olympics: Saemangeum, the Korean story you never heard about

For a Swede, the 2018 winter olympic games got of to a good start with Swedish cross country skier Charlotte Kalla being awarded the games first gold medal. But while we salute her and continue to watch the olympic competitions, there are other things to think about. Sadly, it might be hard to host winter olympics in the future due to climate change. But I want to tell you about another story, little known but of great significance.

Even though it’s still winter, the light is slowly returning at northern latitudes and we start to look forward to the coming spring.  One of the most revered signs of spring is the return of migratory birds on their way to breeding grounds high up in the Arctic.  The long summer days will help them as they feast on the abundant food they need to bring up their offspring and prepare them for the long flight southwards when autumn comes. It is hard to understand how a bird, 15 cm in length can endure a journey of 5-6000 km. A crucial factor is the availability of “refuelling stops” on their journey. For wading birds, such as the spoon-billed sandpiper these pitstops are found along the shores and especially on tidal mudflats, where the coming and going of the tide both replenishes and makes available food in the form of snails, mussels and other invertebrates.

So what has this to do with Korea? More than 10 years ago, on the altar of economic “development”, a man made ecological catastrophe occurred in South Korea. To foster “economic growth” an area of “useless land” was reclaimed from the sea. Across the mouth of the great Saemangeum estuary a sea wall was built that closed it of from the sea. Many square kilometres of the estuary's tidal mudflats were turned into a desert of dry grass. Where previously the calls from hundreds of thousands of wading birds had been heard as they made a stop over on their way to and from the Arctic, there was now silence and rotting carcasses of birds that had starved to death. At the end point of their flight to winter quarters, ornithologists found numbers of birds suddenly plummeting. 

I was myself completely unaware of this catastrophe until I started reading Michael McCarhty book “The Moth Snowstorm”. McCarthy grew up by an estuary close to Merseyside in England and fell in love with the wilderness and the birds coming to feed on the mudflats richness of food. Knowing in his heart what the Saemangeum estuary had looked like and witnessing how it now had been turned into a deadscape was nauseating for him, causing a combination of grief and anger. All the more since it was a both a manmade and a totally unnecessary accomplishment, since the reclaimed land still lay barren a decade after the sea wall had killed it. 

 

The Saemangeum sea wall is an unseen tragedy since the effects are mostly felt far from its origin. It is also one of many causes for the ongoing thinning of biodiversity and species. Long before a species goes extinct, it starts to decline in numbers, but we often don’t notice it. Only when a species like the spoon-billed sandpiper becomes critically endangered do we act, putting breeding programs in place if this species its deemed important or attractive enough for us, humans, to keep. Then it is often to late and even if we “succeed” we don’t know how many other species that disappear unseen.  

Saemangeum is on the east side of the Yellow Sea, a semi enclosed bay with China on one side and the Koreas on the other. Both China and South Korea have been very active in draining and building in their coastal zones, turning them into ports and industrial parks. Paradoxically for the migratory birds in Asia, North Korea might be their best hope for the future, because the lack of industry and low tech agriculture has left large areas of the North Korean cost in a more natural state. Therefore, a future democratic North Korea must be given guidance to protect what is left of nature in order not to succumb to the growth and development paradigm. 

We should not put all the blame for the Saemangeum tragedy or what has and is happening in other areas around the Yellow Sea on South Korea and China. We are complicit. As we watch the olympics on our Samsung mobile, we are fuelling the powers of consumerism, growth and economic development. We have a choice. Do we want future children to grow up and like Michael McCarhty be awed by the contact with nature, or do we want to show them what nature once looked like on our new flat screen TV? In order to even be able to make that choice, stories like that of Saemangeum needs to be told.