Developing nations are particularly vulnerable to impacts of global heating, including widespread destruction and death from storms, droughts, and floods. This is not just bad luck, it’s tragic climate injustice. Wealthy countries have run up a vast planetary and ecological bill with a century of resource extraction and greenhouse gas emissions. The bill has come due, but whenever possible we leave the bill at the door of developing countries – countries which are least able to pay, and which have done almost nothing, relatively speaking, to contribute to the climate and ecological crisis. Central to humanity’s attempt to save itself must be a massive effort by wealthy nations to take responsibility for paying the cost of the comforts they now enjoy.

Quicklinks to Article Content:
The Climate Crisis As a Bill That Has Come Due
Reparations for Climate Injustice
Seeing Our Connection to the Fate of Developing Nations
Taking Responsibility for Paying the Cost of Amassing Wealth

Pakistan floods – Displaced people fleeing Sindh streamed into Balochistan. PHOTO: Abdul Majeed Goraya / IRIN | www.irinnews.org

As of yesterday, September 7^th, 2022, almost 1/3 of the country of Pakistan was under water.[i] 33 million people are affected, 6.4 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, 1.7 million homes have been damaged or destroyed, and at least 1,355 people have died.[ii] As flood waters abate, it will take years for Pakistan to rebuild schools, hospitals, homes, and infrastructure, and for its agriculture and businesses to recover. Even before the flooding, Pakistan was in danger of economic collapse, appealing to the International Monetary Fund for a $1.7 billion relief package. The costs of the recent flooding are expected to be well over $10 billion.[iii]

The primary causes of the massive flooding in Pakistan are heavier-than-usual monsoonal rains and accelerated glacial melting. Both causes are exacerbated by global heating, making the people of Pakistan victims of the climate crisis even though they have done relatively little to contribute to the problem.

The Climate Crisis As a Bill That Has Come Due

Ironically, wealthy countries have driven global heating and ecological breakdown with their resource consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and pollution – but they now tend to be more insulated from catastrophic climate-related impacts due to their northern locations, wealth, and far superior infrastructures. Even when wealthy countries experience terrible climate-related events or conditions, they are far better able to prepare for, mitigate, and recover from them.

For a hundred years or more, industrialized nations have plundered our planet’s natural resources as if there was no cost to paid for this – beyond that incurred while extracting, processing, and consuming them. But there was a cost, just a delayed one. Our bill has come due, but whenever we can, we leave it at the door of developing nations. Not only that, as the developing nations struggle to cope, they fall deeper in debt to wealthy ones, thereby making the imbalance even worse.

There is more and more discussion about how wealthy countries owe reparations to the developing ones now on the frontlines of the climate crisis. This seems not only fair and just, but also, of course, humane. How wonderful it would be if the richest countries in the world – including the U.S., Canada, European nations, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Japan[iv] – quickly mobilized a massive rescue effort in Pakistan, just as they would for their own citizens. Because developing nations in particular are paying the price for the comfort the wealthy nations now enjoy.

Reparations for Climate Injustice

However, the discussion about climate reparations has largely remained just that – discussion. Starting in 2009, the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) set a goal of providing $100 Billion a year to assist developing nations by 2020 – not just for climate change compensation, but to help them develop in climate-friendly ways as possible. At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, it was acknowledged that wealthy nations had increased their contributions in this area but had fallen short of the $100 Billion a year goal.[v]

$100 Billion may sound like a lot of money, and we can hope that this kind of assistance will be happening soon, but consider that Pakistan’s recent flooding could eat up 10-20% of that amount – and that would simply be for recovery, not for investment in climate-friendly development. And that’s just one country facing unprecedented and destructive climate-related events (think also of millions of people facing food shortages in the Horn of Africa due to their worst drought in 40 years[vi] and recent floods in Bangladesh that some called the worst in 100 years,[vii] to name just a couple current situations in developing countries).

Seeing Our Connection to the Fate of Developing Nations

It’s human nature to care most about what it close to us – to feel concern about and generosity toward our families, friends, and people in our immediate communities. To be focused on what’s happening within our own country, or within the groups with which we identify. It’s easy to look through pictures of floods in Pakistan and feel sorry for the people affected, but then to stash our knowledge of this situation away in our minds, along with subtle, semi-conscious rationalizations like, “They always have monsoons in that area of the world,” or “They’ll get over it.”

Despite the extremity of the situation in Pakistan, when I went to search for the latest reports on the flooding, I found the issue was no longer on the front pages of the digital editions of the New York Times, Guardian, or Washington Post. I had to search for “Pakistan Flooding” in Google and set the time frame for the search to the last 24 hours in order to get anything current.

Imagine having lost your home and livelihood in a flood, even though you lived in an area that has never flooded in living memory – even in the monsoon season. When the waters finally rose far enough to force you to evacuate, you were utterly shocked. Imagine huddling with your children and elders in a leaky, makeshift shelter, without enough food or clean water, skeptical that any help will be coming any time soon. All support systems are overwhelmed by the sheer number of people affected by the floods. You talk with other refugees, and some of them say the crazy weather over the last 5-10 years is caused by the greenhouse gas emissions from rich countries like the United States. You wonder if anyone in those rich countries is thinking about how their way of life has destroyed yours. You see no end to the difficulties you are facing.

Taking Responsibility for Paying the Cost of Amassing Wealth

Bearing Witness to the tragic injustice of the climate crisis is not meant to make you feel guilty, although guilt may be an appropriate emotion when we have participated in something wrong. However, as I’ve discussed before on this podcast, no one of us is responsible for our climate crisis.

I think it’s valuable for us to face the injustice of the climate and ecological crisis because it shifts our sense of the problem. We see it not as a merely physical matter of finding sources of energy that don’t emit so much greenhouse gas and mitigating the effects of pollutants we’ve already emitted while enriching ourselves. Instead, we see it as an issue of humanity, justice, and fairness. Almost any indigenousness culture of the world could have told us that carelessly and greedily plundering earth’s natural resources would have a cost, but we couldn’t help ourselves. Now that the bill has come due, it is our duty to pay it – to mitigate, correct, and repair damage caused by global heating, wherever it occurs. We do this NOT because poor people in a foreign country need our charity, but because it’s our responsibility – and to dodge our responsibility in this case is reprehensible.

Over the coming years, you will probably hear more about climate justice, climate reparations, or climate compensation. I hope any of us with blessings like shelter, food, safety, and education will be open to seeing these matters as part of our responsibility as moral and respectful global citizens.

[i] https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/07/pakistan-floods-dire-millions-children

[ii] https://reliefweb.int/report/pakistan/pakistan-floods-fact-sheet-3-fiscal-year-fy-2022

[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/07/opinion/environment/pakistan-climate-change-floods.html

[iv] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD

[v] https://ukcop26.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Climate-Finance-Delivery-Plan-1.pdf

[vi] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/7/droughts-and-hunger-what-is-happening-in-the-horn-of-africa

[vii] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/22/bangladesh-floods-experts-say-climate-crisis-worsening-situation

Photo Credit:

Pakistan floods – Displaced people fleeing Sindh streamed into Balochistan. PHOTO: Abdul Majeed Goraya / IRIN | www.irinnews.org. Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

Quicklinks to Article Content:
Nature as Eternal, Dependable, Ever-Present
No Longer Being Able to Depend on Nature
Bearing Witness to Our Loss

I missed giving you a new episode last week because I went on a short backpacking trip into the wilderness. That’s a lame excuse, I know, but it was very restorative. I am the teacher and executive director of a Zen center with 80 members and also maintain a Zen podcast from which I make part of my living, so I’m usually burning the candle at both ends in order to also do the Climate and You podcast. I really wanted this podcast to be weekly, but what I can actually maintain is probably three episodes a month. I hope you will continue to listen!

Nature as Eternal, Dependable, Ever-Present

One of the things I find most rewarding about getting out in the wilderness is encountering settings of striking beauty – like an alpine meadow, a cool forested glade, a quiet spot along a river, a waterfall, or a whole mountain when it comes into view – and contemplating how this scene endures serenely year after year, decade after decade, human lifetime after human lifetime. The character of the scene changes with the seasons, but seasonal cycles also continue in a steady and predictable way while all kinds of human dramas unfold elsewhere. At any given moment, wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, this waterfall continues to flow and put on a show, regardless of whether any human is watching.

We know a given tree might die and fall, or a fire may temporarily alter the ecology, or successional changes may result in a different mix of species in a given area, but as a whole, nature endures. Compared to our human sense of time, nature seems eternal and dependable – a vast field surrounding and supporting us at all times, whether we’re aware of it or not. And when we’re able to set aside our human affairs for a while and enter those places where nature takes up more space than humans do, the alpine meadow and forested glade are there for us, calming our hearts and expanding our perspectives.

Of course, nature isn’t always serene and pleasant. There have always been terrible storms, fires, droughts, floods, and other natural disasters. We understood that nature could be cruel sometimes. However, if we survived these relatively rare disasters, we knew nature would settle back down and make her bounty available again, as she has for as long as humans can remember. Nature’s occasional departures from the expected, however distressing, happened in the context of climate and weather patterns that had been more or less stable for millennia. Whatever misfortunes befell us in our personal lives, or to our families, clans, or societies, nature went on – implacable, predictable at least over the time scale of multiple years, ever-present, more or less unchanging.

No Longer Being Able to Depend on Nature

I think it’s important we Bear Witness to the fact that we are no longer able to depend on nature the way we used to, and that this is deeply traumatic – although the trauma is happening to us relatively slowly, and we’re not yet sure exactly how it is going to manifest for each of us, or in our wider societies.

Farmers can no longer count on water from lakes, streams, and water tables that have been providing for centuries but are now drying up. Farmers can no longer be sure that the crops they have grown for generations are suited to the new climate of their farmland. Extreme droughts, floods, storms, and heat waves are coming too often for people to cope with and still maintain their homes and livelihoods. The forest and grassland ecosystems that filter water, sequester carbon, and provide humans with lumber and grazing land are unraveling. The vast ocean is permeated with garbage and plastic and is acidifying, threatening the survival of the fish populations on which so many people depend. Whole villages – inhabited by people and their ancestors for as long as anyone can remember – are being lost by rising water and melting permafrost. We can no longer count on our favorite birds passing through our yards every year, and the flowers and trees that used to be just right for our area are dying.

When I contemplate making a trip to the wilderness ten years from now, I fear I will see the breakdown of natural systems even in the remote meadow and glade. I fear I will watch a trickle of water over a waterfall while hearing people reminisce about how it used to be a torrent. That the rivers will be empty of insects, frogs, and birds. That the forests will be dying, diseased, or burned. That the seasons will be nothing like what we remember, and that even the mountains will start wearing away, deprived of their blankets of snow and vegetation.

Thinking of this loss of nature as we have known it, this loss of stable and predictable natural systems, I touch a grief more profound than I am capable of embracing. It’s just too big. Integrating such a grief leaves you facing an abyss of further loss, rather than allowing you to recover and appreciate the steady ongoing pulse of life. There’s not only grief, there’s also a sense of being disoriented, adrift, lost, without context. And, of course, there’s fear.

Bearing Witness to Our Loss

We can hope that humanity is going to course-correct quickly enough that not all will be lost. That we will put the brakes on this accelerating climate and ecological breakdown and give nature the space to recover. She has amazing powers of recovery! I plan to talk about just that in some future episodes.

In the meantime, though, in many ways we have already lost the luxury of depending on nature the way we used to. The term “solastalgia” was coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in his 2003 book Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity. He defined it as “the homesickness you have when you are still at home,”[i] because your environment is changing in rapid, negative, and probably permanent ways. It’s often used to talk about the experience of people and populations dealing with the loss of their homes, livelihoods, communities, and culture due to climate change or destructive practices like mining.

People who are less directly connected to and dependent on the natural environment in their daily lives are less likely to report experiencing solastalgia, but I wonder if anyone is going to be able to escape it in the coming years.

It’s important to acknowledge if we’re feeling something like solastalgia. Turning our mind toward such an experience can be painful… but we can’t avoid our feelings by ignoring them. Ignored, our grief, anxiety, anger, fear, and solastalgia can fester quietly until they undermine our health, decrease our openness to life, and compel us to speak or act in ways that don’t necessarily reflect our values. Bearing Witness to our feelings, though, can encourage us to connect with others who are feeling likewise, and motivate us to help protect what we love.

[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solastalgia

Picture Credit

Image by Hermann Traub from Pixabay