This is one I’ve seen cropping up on climate Twitter, and now we have
From Climate Change to Omnicide
As this decade dawns, we are confronted with the reality of climate crisis—both in the image of uncontainable fires raging across the Australian bush, and in the voices of young people speaking truth to power and calling out for their future and the living Earth. This man-made crisis, caused by carbon emissions and our treating the Earth as an endless resource to be exploited, is no longer an image of a potentially dangerous future, but is our present reality.
And as this future has arrived with smoke-filled air, its vocabulary has evolved: from the innocuous sounding “climate change,†to “climate crisis,†and now “climate collapse,†gradually awakening us to an accelerating disaster. Our seas polluted with plastic, air toxic, trees burning whether in the Amazon or Australia, we are also including other words to describe the nature of this crisis: ecocide, our deliberate destruction of the natural environment; and most recently: omnicide. Omnicide images a crime “we have previously been unable to witness because we have never imagined it.†Across Australia—with billions of dead animals and birds, and millions of people suffering ill health effects—we are witnessing what the world will look like with three or more degrees warming, “the killing of everything.â€
Until now, for most of us, two or three degrees of warming was academic. We may have heard Bill McKibben and others stress the importance of keeping the warming of our Earth at 1.5 degrees Celsius, and the exponential impact of rising to 2 degrees. We understood that cutting carbon emissions to keep within this level is essential to the future of humanity and the living biosphere of the planet. But this belonged to a future we could not see, or touch, or feel, could not even really imagine. Until now. Until we saw and felt the Earth burning, and witnessed the vastness of this destruction, this omnicide.
Most of these issues are actual environmental issues that have nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change. And, let’s not forget the hundreds of people arrested for starting fires in Australia. There have been reports with no proof provided that many of the fires were set by environmental extremists. The author even links the California fires, which, while man-caused, were not due to CO2, but downed power lines and such from negligence. Anyhow, the author, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, really loves the word omnicide
This insecurity, anxiety, is especially affecting young people, who rightly fear for their future, fear that the current system is pushing the Earth beyond its ecological limits. More awake than their parents, they feel that something essential to life is being destroyed, that possibly they won’t die from old age but from climate change. We cannot imagine their future—what it means when the fires continue to burn, the sea levels rise, a world becoming increasingly toxic. Those who counter these dystopian feelings with visions of a green economy, a carbon-neutral world full of new possibilities, do not understand the depths of their fear, of a 20-year-old who finds herself crying during the day and awakening at night in panic. Omnicide points to the end of a way of life—both for humanity and the web of life that supports us.
Unhinged.
To list the level of neglect, shortsighted concern, misplaced focus on profit and power, and outright greed and corruption shown by corporations and politicians is too painful, too distressing. To sell our shared sustainability and life’s multihued diversity, beauty, and wonder—created over millennia—in just a few short years, is too heartbreaking, too vast a crime. “Earth Justice†is a phrase that speaks to this crime, that the Earth itself has rights and needs to be protected.
We can give the Earth justice with a tax, you know.
But as images of raging fires and burning bush fill our screens, it is important to remember that omnicide has already arrived in poor parts of the world. It is vital that we bring racial justice into our understanding of climate collapse, that we recognize what is happening in war-torn Somalia as much as in New South Wales. In a country described as a “failed state,†home to warlords and al-Shabab, climate emergency has already arrived, with the rains and crops failing—extreme weather a direct result of our global climate imbalance.
See, since the climate crisis movement is overwhelmingly dominated by middle and upper class whites, they think blacks can’t take care of themselves, including in areas that have always had issues. Kinda racist. Anyhow, all this justice stuff is meant to take money from your pocket and give it to other people because you owe them. But, these Warmists never give from their own pockets. Weird, eh?
Anyhow, omnicide or something.
