Alec Loorz is a guest contributor to Green Scene. He is currently participating in a National Geographic student expedition to Iceland. Alec’s posts are his personal observations of his experience and of his commitment to climate change awareness.

What We Need to Save the Planet for Future Generations

For many reasons, the climate change movement has not been able to bring about the changes we need to actually solve the climate crisis. Even though there are many people putting hundreds of millions of dollars and years of time into the effort, I am not sure we are any better off now than we were ten years ago.

If anything, we can say we’ve made climate change a mainstream topic. So, that’s something.  Most people I talk to today have at least heard about climate change, and most have an opinion.

But we’re still not anywhere close to a sustainable society, which is what we need to survive.

I think I have an idea why. In comparing this movement to other social movements in the past (civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, independence movement in India led by Gandhi,) there’s one main difference that sets us apart: we are not suffering. Our lives are not personally affected by climate change.

In other movements, a specific group of people whose lives were personally affected by an injustice stood up to make their voices heard. Their suffering held them together as a movement.

For most people, at least in the United States, it’s still abstract and distant, and too ‘scientific’ to fully understand and be passionate about.  It’s a political issue without passion, without suffering.
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