MyEnviroMind

 And so it feels as if the world is slipping from beneath our feet. Or burning. Or melting. Or freezing. All at once. And it’s not just a feeling anymore. Apart from a privileged few in the Global North, the effects of climate breakdown affect us all, as our life-support systems crumble under the footprint of the Global North. It has been like this for decades, centuries even. As the Global North pined over foreign lands for their own colonial expansion, subjugation, suppression and extraction stole from sustainable livelihoods and churned out mainstream Western ideals of consumerism, individualism and growth. The resulting crimes led to environmental injustices, where degraded lands, pollution and health problems became enlaced with racism, sexism, albleism and other forms of othering. Now, the scale of climate change and biodiversity loss has encroached so far as to alarm people in the Global North, but the culprit remains the same. I came into the climate movement about 5

Knowing what we know now, what would you give to go back in time and stop fossil fuel extraction? If you had the chance to reverse it all and go straight into a just system of renewable energy distribution, is there anything you wouldn’t do? Dwelling on the road not taken is no doubt unproductive; stirring up climate apathy and an encroaching sense of doom. For that reason, it can be best to hold onto the future visions generated by grassroots communities and activists rather than facts of the past. Yet if there’s another lesson to be learned from climate activists, especially those from marginalised backgrounds and Indigenous peoples, it’s that we mustn’t forget our past. Rather, we can take our horrors, our fears, past traumas and mistakes, and channel them into more considered and decisive action. And now we are faced with the opportunity. Yesterday, the United Nation’s International Seabed Authority (ISA) met in Kingston, Jamaica, to discuss the potential of deep-sea mining (DSM).