How to Look at Climate Change

28 Oct 2010 – Chris Guenther

50 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea, the Carteret Islands are sinking due to the accelerating effects of climate change, and with them the livelihoods of the 3000 islanders who make their homes there. You might have heard part of the story of the Carterets in a spate of news coverage leading up to COP 15 last year, or perhaps even seen video of or read about Ursula Rakova, one of the islanders who has been active in international efforts (by Oxfam and others) to spotlight ‘climate refugees’. Now the political, cultural and emotional dilemmas of the Carterets are deftly explored in the new documentary Sun Come Up, which I had the fortune of seeing the other night.

The Carterets have decided they must relocate their entire population within the next five years, when the islands will become uninhabitable, and the central drama of the film revolves around their already-desperate search for a new home. It is, predictably, a riveting story. Yet even as the film moves you to try to personally help the Carterets, its point is obviously so much larger and, for those of us used to confronting climate change in the rarefied air of international summits and corporate boardrooms, or in the form of abstract projections about average warming of 2° vs. 3°C, so much more challenging.

What I took away is that the future of climate change is already here, and yet too often (and for too many of us), it still seems a world away. The film also underscores what we often forget: that climate change is more fundamentally a social rather than environmental issue, that its urgency is much more about basic needs – food, water, equity, justice and community – than about hashing out conflicts between sophisticated economic and environmental values. Actual lives are already being turned upside down.

The more I reflect on it, it’s hard not to take the film as a shot across the bow for many of us in the world of ‘professional’ sustainability (e.g. myself, my colleagues at SustainAbility, our clients and partners, and, if you’re reading this blog, likely you). Honestly, how much does what we do every day really have to do with the realities now being faced by people like the Carterets (much less those that tens of millions more will face as climate change and other issues continue to unfold)? Have we started to become just a little too comfortable with the cottage industry we helped create? Are we too satisfied with what we know is incremental progress at best, or too quick to give praise for even the most nominal efforts by others? Are we being honest with each other, or with ourselves, about how far we still have to go and what it will cost to get there?

In our defense, it is easy to become somewhat numb to the import of the issues we work on every day, or to take solace in the comforts of routine, friends and family, or a good hobby. Sun Come Up is a welcome antidote to this kind of sustainability fatigue, and a reminder to, as Michael Sadowski put it in another post on this blog, “listen to the music all around us.”

Indeed, the gift of such films is their motivational force. Intentionally exposing ourselves to the stories rather than just the statistics of climate change is a way to make ourselves better, to trigger in us the latent motivation we need to get the important work of our generation done, and to set the bar where it actually needs to be. When the consequences of climate change are literally staring us in the face – with distraught and tired eyes, asking us humbly for enough land to live on – it is impossible to look away. And that is what we need more than anything now: to not look away.

(PS – The filmmakers have teamed up to co-promote Sun Come Up alongside a range of other energy-themed documentaries, under the banner “Reel Power: Films Fueling the Energy Revolution”. They have a pretty cool trailer, which you can watch here.)