Returning to Job 1

I’m just back from a week on the road at film festivals, promoting Brick by Brick: A Civil Rights Story. Getting away from the day-to-day of American politics sometimes helps a person gain perspective on what really matters, even what matters politically.

What comes to mind as I return to the blog, aside from imagining some of the other things I might do with all the hours I spend thinking about politics, is that we need to concentrate some serious grey matter on dealing with climate change.

Recently, the President of a small Pacific island nation, Kiribati, delivered a message that sounds like the opening of a ‘B’ science fiction film of the 1950’s. His plaintive call to an international conference is to protect his nation, which might soon cease to exist, unless something radical is done to stop the rise of the sea level over the 33 coral atolls that make up Kiribati.

President Anote Tong told the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that, “It's not an issue of economic growth, it's an issue of human survival.”

"Villages that have been there over the decades, maybe a century, and now they have to be relocated. Where they have been living over the past few decades is no longer there, it is being eroded."

Tong’s problem isn’t theoretical, nor is it inconsequential, but it does offer a harbinger of things to come if we don’t act now and with vigor.

Tong’s most poignant quote wasn’t data-packed, but it reflects the feelings many people carry about the global increase in extreme weather and the various unmistakable signs in the environment that something is amiss.

He told the gathering, “I am not a scientist but what I know is that things are happening we did not experience in the past."