How to Love Thy Neighbor (No Exceptions)

In our blogs this quarter we’ve focused a lot on animals, but climate change is, as we interpret it, a human issue. One that is caused by humans and affects all humans. Seeing as this is the last blog I need to restrain myself and keep to the topic, so let’s skip to my point. Climate change has affected all of us, but in ranging and unequal ways.

The Green Revolution, or the Third Agricultural Revolution, beginning in the 1950s, emphasized mechanizing and trying to simplify farming. For countries closer to the equator, drought and flooding resistant seed strains grew vital (see what I did there?), as have longer lasting or more sustainable well and irrigation systems. However the Revolution also involved many pesticides and fertilizers that contaminated waterways and poisoned those who drank from them. And the increase of mechanized farming has taken away many jobs from the agriculture industry, forcing people to find new jobs. Famously, in India, the rise of the Green Revolution has brought incredible amounts of debt to farmers, through the price of irrigation and seeds, which has led to a growing number of farmers committing suicide each year.

So, to fight climate change, we need to retrace our steps and come back to the very beginning of the issues, us. With the rise of burning fossil fuels, which kicked up during the Industrial Revolution beginning in Europe (so many Revolutions you guys), global temperature has risen over one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, reaching a new high after 650,000 years of increase. As the globe connected and new ideas spread, industrialization became the name of the game. Once you were industrialized, things like trade and farming were an easy breeze, simply a couple buttons and you had a loaf of bread or a blue t-shirt. It was the best thing since sliced bread. And the thing is, humans are wired for change, addicted even. And by change I mean generally change that leads to a feeling of success. And the rate of change on the global scale over the past fifty years has simply increased our standard of success, requiring more change, more improvement, more drawing on fossil fuel sources.

Now I’m not trying to say the invention of the machine began the downfall of Earth as we knew it, but trying to shed some humanity on the issue. And we’ve not hardly gotten into the effects after the cause. Over two billion people live in water scarcity, a topic that’s gotten a lot of heat as we try to claim it is a human right, despite the rates of scarcity rising around the globe. And speaking of scarcity, food scarcity is on the rise because of climate change, both within the US, and internationally .

So, if we are growing into a world in which roughly a quarter of the globe is thirsty, and about a billion go hungry, how exactly will electric cars make a difference? 2% of the world’s population required medical assistance for hunger in 2020; if climate change is a human issue, then it requires a human solution. Rather than trying to fix a mess already made, what preventative measures can we instill to make sure that at some point within a couple generations, children will no longer go to bed hungry? Organizations are the world are at work trying to find solutions, but somehow polar bears are getting more leverage than actual humans. In embellishing the life-threatening effects of climate change, we forget that human life is always a fragile thing, threatened by numerous factors around the world. With the rise of Love Thy Neighbor and In This House yard signs, somehow human connection has fallen by the wayside. People feel like making gestures, hence the brightly colored signs, but the solutions we need for this world are not going to be garish or decorative, rather they are going to mundane, everyday solutions. Everyone deserves nutritious food and clean water, and hopefully someday kids everywhere will roll their eyes when reminded to do the dishes for the second time. Let's make human rights human.

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