Old chestnut growing

The personal is political. This old chestnut from the early New Age years continues growing from the multiple crises facing the whole darn world today.

How striking, for one, to hear President Aquino at Letty Magsanoc’s wake making small talk on the last big storm, recounting an Albay mayor’s first reflex to ask for millions of pesos in rehab funds, a figure pulled out of a hat. P-Noy had to point out a basic error in the mayor’s guesstimate of the cost of replanting coconut trees vis-à-vis his town’s land area that he’d just seen for himself from the air.

This math-challenged mayor is not alone. Much the same thing happened to the Bangsamoro Basic Law, with centuries-old, inherited anti-Moro prejudice among

“Christians” whipped into frenzy by history-challenged demagogues in social media, no less than in the halls of Congress.

Not one had bothered to update him/herself on Mindanawon history, blind to the peaceful coexistence among cross-cultural communities, promising the harnessing of frontier energies. Much less did they see how badly needed national unity is against the looming imported threat of the global terror-spewing Islamic fundamentalist movement Isis.

Such grave mismatches between new challenges and human response are today’s runaway theme in global warming, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and killer storms all paralleled by Isis. Meanwhile, economies collapsing from overspeculation, millions of refugees fleeing war in Syria and a threat of another world war beggar disbelief in how much worse things could be.

Vital to this turbulent picture is the Internet that began linking the whole world a generation ago. The large picture that began emerging for the first time in history, along with the facility to communicate instantly, had altered human consciousness immeasurably.

Sharing emotions and insights on war and natural disaster in growing empathy, people increasingly recognized their grave common problems and challenges to survival.  But asking one another what they could do, the old chestnut—“The personal is political”—became “The political is personal”—a whole planet impact on each lone human existence.

It’s been easier for some, harder for most to act accordingly. After the Paris meeting on climate crisis a European woman made a telling comment in Facebook: “I think there is a condition built into our current level of consciousness to not be able to understand this.”

“Abstract but scary information requiring sacrifice has produced apathy and denial among citizens of wealthy nations… [We] need to harness ancestral human drives to this task,” she said, quoting the Norwegian ecopsychologist

Espen Stoknes in his new book, “What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action.”

Triggered by Syria in the longstanding powder keg of the Middle East, the same denial is recognizable in war noises between the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Iran. As oceans rise in speeded-up global warming and the world navigates an uncertain transition to renewable energy, burying heads in the sand was becoming the reflex of many governments.

The most striking thing, however, was the parallel emergence of powerful lone voices of clarity over a global sea of troubles. The most outstanding one I found belongs to Peter Cohen, a globe-trotting visionary sociologist/activist closely tracking the climate change debate. In Paris for COPOUT 21, he wrote in Facebook:

“What I think some are celebrating is not any real meat or teeth in Paris, but a sense that more people are finally waking up to the seriousness of this issue… It is not so much about substance as about the sense of a turning point.

“The real debate today would lie somewhere between the self-censored moderation of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the NTHE (Near Term Human Extinction) scientists. The IPCC are unquestionably over-conservative. Their models generally ignore data less than

3-5 years old, including data on critical feedbacks … ultimately beholden to a political process; constant attacks from industry-fueled deniers cause them to err on the side of understatement.

“The NTHE people, on the other hand, seem to mistake strong probability for inevitability, and hold to the idea of assured extinction as axiomatically as the mainstream holds to the idea of a sustainable business as usual.

“So while we don’t know for sure that the tipping point toward ecocidal climate has already been reached, we do know that our collective fate has essentially come down to a race between the human capacity for awareness and change and physical processes we have already unleashed in our unconsciousness and inertia.

“Yet this is the moment when we must prove ourselves to be more than a bacteria colony in a petri dish… We must show what a planetary society of conscious beings is capable of or die of our unconsciousness.

“The spreading of global awareness, on climate change is already underway, actively opposed by the forces of human unconsciousness. It is up to each  of us to be ambassadors of light and do whatever we can to spread awareness around us… The sum of all our efforts may just be enough.

“We are the generation that Destiny has chosen to preside over the epic—possibly the final—battle for our living planet. Like no generation before us, we are the gatekeepers to the future of not only our children, but all complex life on earth. This is our responsibility and part of the challenge lies in each one of us realizing that we are not here now for nothing, that we are not spectators, but somehow selected, as if in a cosmic reality show, to participate in this show-to-end-all-shows.”

Sylvia L. Mayuga is an essayist, sometime columnist, poet, documentary filmmaker and environmentalist. She has three National Book Awards to her name.