Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Corner (Photo Illustration/MetroCreative)
On Feb. 25 of this year, United States airman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C., refusing to be complicit in the American-backed genocide of the people of Palestine. On the morning of his self-immolation, he shared the following message via his Facebook account: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Bushnell was neither the first nor the last case of self-immolation in protest of our country’s bipartisan genocide in Gaza. In December of last year, an unidentified woman set herself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. And earlier this month, Boston resident Matt Nelson did the same outside his city’s own Israeli consulate, adding to the nearly 200,000 to 300,000 casualties of our indiscriminate extermination campaign against the people of Palestine, based on estimates from The Lancet journal and The Guardian.
Nor has the so-called “Israel-Hamas war” been the only impetus for such desperate acts of protest within recent memory. On Earth Day in 2022, just months after his home state of Colorado experienced its most destructive wildfire ever recorded, climate activist Wynn Bruce set himself ablaze outside the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.
In the months prior to this action, Bruce shared a quote from Vietnamese peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, regarding the self-immolation of Buddhist monks: “To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance.” He later added another quote attributed to Nhat Hanh: “The most important thing, in response to climate change, is to be willing to hear the sound of the earth’s tears through our own bodies.”
In more ways than one, we find ourselves the inhabitants of a world on fire. Seldom does a day go by that I don’t reflect on Aaron Bushnell’s sentiment, “What would I do if I was alive during ____? You’re doing it right now.”
I certainly experience these feelings with regard to the escalating genocide in Gaza, but also quite profoundly against the backdrop of the climate crisis — the most devastating global catastrophe ever engineered by humanity, for which the U.S. bears a disproportionate responsibility.
I spend every day doing everything I can think to do as an individual to try and take meaningful action against the climate crisis. But for every opinion piece like this that I write, I’m struck by a seemingly endless barrage of the bleakest headlines imaginable:
* “Antarctic ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Heading for Collapse,” Newsweek, Sept. 23.
* “AI Boom Is Driving a Surprise Resurgence of US Gas-Fired Power:
* New gas plants just keep on coming, defying expectations that their rapid growth was nearing an end,” Bloomberg, Sept. 16.
“Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows:
* Ocean acidification close to critical threshold, say scientists, posing threat to marine ecosystems and global liveability,” The Guardian, Sept. 23.
To be quite honest, I’m at a point where I genuinely don’t know how to live as a human being who exists in the age of the Anthropocene. I have no idea how to think about the future in a world whose biosphere is on the brink of collapse. I’m fully aware of the crisis we’re in, I know the scale of it, I know that it’s irreversible and that, for all intents and purposes, we’ve basically run out the clock when it comes to preventing utter catastrophe. Every day, it seems, we learn that collapse is happening faster than we realized, that it will affect hundreds of millions or even billions more people than we believed, and that global temperatures will skyrocket to previously unfathomable levels due to our failure to curb emissions. How, then, is it possible to know all of this, and still do nothing? Or even worse, to know it and to continue adding fuel to the fire?
Increasingly I find myself questioning whether humans are even capable of thinking in such a way that we might hope to survive the coming storm. So many of us feel like we’re doing everything we can, yet remain plagued by the guilt that it still isn’t enough — that indeed, nothing could ever be enough. It’s like we’re an old-timey bucket brigade, attempting to extinguish an out of control industrial fire on a planetary scale.
It’s not merely that our political and economic systems are uniquely ill-equipped to face the challenges of the climate crisis, but that they are in fact entirely predicated on a foundation of ecological destruction and a wanton disregard for life, human or otherwise.
Should civilization survive long enough for future generations to exist, they will surely be asking the question of us: “What did you do when our world was falling apart?”
The only honest answer that most of us can give to that question, myself included, is “not nearly enough.”
Our society’s ongoing tolerance for so many catastrophic, system-wide failures are directly responsible for the fate of individuals like Wynn Bruce and Aaron Bushnell, who sacrificed their very lives to beg for justice through the angry red flames of a burning world. We cannot go on like this.
We cannot accept that the bare minimum is enough. We cannot throw up our hands and accept that the world must burn. We all need to be doing so much more, every single day, to fight back against this deadly machinery fueled by the kindling of the innocent. We must find new ways to resist our own extinction, and keep resisting as if our very lives depend on it. Without this there can be no hope.
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Aaron Dunbar is a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.
