ImagineFor1Minute what a better future looks like. Is it a world where we respect and honor nature? Where no more species go extinct because of humanity's i...
Fridays 4 Future
©Rohan Chakravarty
On GreenHumour.com and How Humour Can Change the Climate Conversation
“Like a welcome summer rain, humour may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.”
A good laugh makes any interview, or any conversation, better. He who laughs, lasts. A sense of humour is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.
That last one came courtesy of that noted comedian Dwight D. Eisenhower, and it’s hard to argue with someone who got as much done as Eisenhower did.
But climate change? The environment? Species extinction?
Is climate change too hot to handle?
Humour is a sense of intellectual perspective, an awareness that some things are really important, others not, and that the two kinds are oddly jumbled in everyday affairs, the poet Christopher Morley said.
Cartoonist and illustrator Rohan Chakravarty came by his work for the website GreenHumour.com honestly, then. Thoughts about climate change consume his every waking moment, but the importance of being earnest seems less important somehow if not everyone gets the message. Even the most ardent and committed climate crusader could use a light moment on occasion, and Chakravarty had just the tonic: Cartoons that make you laugh and think at the same time.
And so, the idea for GreenHumour was born.
“Every child is born an artist and I was no exception,” Chakravarty explains. “Cartooning was always my chosen means of expression, but little did I think of it as a career.”
Chakravarty hailed from Nagpur in the central Indian state of Maharashtra, a region noted for its wildlife. His relationship with nature — he calls it his “wild tryst” — began as a volunteer with the Sanctuary Nature Foundation’s Kids for Tigers programme in Nagpur, where he led nature walks for children. He derived little pleasure from drawing cartoons about life’s random miscellanies and vicissitudes but when he started to focus on wildlife, a light went on.
“I felt a spark igniting from within. Something connected with me deep down. A certain magic happened and I was finally beginning to find a flow. The fact that (these) cartoons featured an angle of awareness was an added advantage.
“Most of my artwork in school focused on adapting my favourite cartoon characters into my own stories, and I filled notebook after notebook with comics.
“My first serious cartoon on wildlife was on tiger conservation that appeared in Sanctuary Asia way back in 2009.
“I have always connected better with animals than I have with human beings. I think I understand animals better than I understand most people I know . . . and to make your first love your muse is only natural for an artist.
“Most cartoonists draw on politics and social issues, and I consciously avoided taking that route. Politicians generally make rather ugly subjects and my eyes are quite sensitive to beauty, so animals were always my first choice — not that I do not enjoy drawing ugly animals like the blobfish!”
Two years ago, according to Smithsonian magazine, the blobfish was voted the earth's most hideous species in an online poll conducted by the UK-based Ugly Animal Preservation Society.
“I had always wondered why, despite their glamour and allure, wild animals have never been on the front page of any newspaper, so cartoons became my attempt at popularizing wildlife and emphasizing conservation issues.”
And so followed, among others, a cartoon series about the helmeted hornbill (for IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature) with its “funky spiky hairdo, despite having to wear a helmet all the time;” the Darwin fox, aka Darwin’s Zorro, an endangered canid endemic to Chile and subject of the cartoon ‘The Legend of Darwin’s Zorro;’ the jaguar’s uses of its rosettes (“camouflage, individual identification — and apex predator style statement”); ocean acidification and how the dungeness crab lost his shell; the Himalayan griffon vulture’s wingspan (“about as wide as the difference between patriotism for a political party and patriotism for a nation”); and the brahminy starling, before and after its morning cup of coffee.
The ideas may be original and the work inspired, but that doesn’t mean making people laugh for a living is easy, even with climate change so much in the news these days.
“Although cartooning is the most enjoyable activity I have ever known, making a living out of it isn’t exactly a cakewalk, specially in India,” Chakravarty explains. “The fact that I’m hopelessly obsessed with my work has helped me keep discipline in my schedule, and the expansion of the web has helped by resulting in more avenues for cartoonists to supplement their income.”
Chakravarty is doing his part to help the planet, though, and that has its compensations.
Itʼs hard to see even a glimmer of hope behind the mushrooming cloud of depressing facts, so it may be time to make the facts a little less depressing. Humour fits the bill — or hornbill, if you prefer. Perhaps one day Jim Carrey will play Rohan Chakravarty in the movie.
©Rohan Chaklravarty. Originally published on RoundGlass Sustain
©Vanessa Nakate
Vanessa Nakate and the Fight to Keep Mama Africa Green
“It’s really amazing to see that the numbers are really big in Europe. And I wish that the young generation in Africa would also pick up and fight for their future. Because it’s our future. But I think the problem is that most of them are either not confident enough or they don’t have the knowledge about it. Or their parents can’t let them do it. And some actually fear the government. But I’m really impressed by Europe. I’m seeing on Twitter there are many, many activists. And I really look for activists in Africa, I’ve really been looking.”
This one is in praise of Vanessa Nakate.
Who, you ask?
Well, yes, exactly.
Nakate, who prefers to go by her Twitter handle of @Vanessa_Vash, is a 23-year-old climate activist from Uganda. She says, only half-jokingly, that she is the only climate activist from her home country, and while that may not strictly be true, chances are she was the only youth climate activist at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Davos is where the world’s elite, many of them flying in private jets, lecture Greta Thunberg and the other climate kids about how they should study economics before lecturing the rest of the world about what much of the rest of the world already knows.
Two days ago, Nakate posed for a now infamous news photo in Switzerland, alongside fellow youth climate activists Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg, Isabelle Axelsson and Loukina Tille.
The photo, by photographer Markus Schreiber for the Associated Press (AP)) news agency, was not the problem.
The problem was what happened afterwards.
The photo appeared online and in several news zines with Nakate cropped out of the frame.
Admittedly, Nakate was off to one side, and framed by a nondescript building behind her, while the other young climate activists were framed by snow-peaked Swiss mountains in the background.
It was one of those hurried decisions hard-news photo editors have to make all the time, where “Get It First” counts for more than “Get It Right.” (I worked much of my adult life in hard news, and I’ve seen from the inside how it works.)
The optics were bad enough — the young-woman-of-colour is edited out of the frame — but it wouldn’t have mattered so much if the decision hadn’t rattled Nakate to the core.
She made a video, which has since gone viral, in which she said she now understands what the word racism really means.
Worse — yes, the story gets worse — other news agencies, including Reuters, according to an account in, you guessed it, The Guardian, confused Nakate with fellow climate activist Natasha Mwansa, who’s from Zambia.
Africa is vast, as continents go; confusing Zambia with Uganda is a little like confusing Beijing with Tokyo.
Nakate shared another inconvenient truth — that while the industrialized world goes whole-hog on fossil fuels, it’s continents like Africa that bear the brunt of the worst effects of climate change. For now, anyway.
“Africa is the least emitter of carbons,” she said in her video, “but we are the most affected by the climate crisis.”
Residents of Kiribati, the Maldives and other low-lying tropical islands might disagree on that point, but she’s right on the broad strokes.
“You erasing our voices won’t change anything,” she added, sounding eerily like Thunberg on message.
“You erasing our stories won’t change anything.”
Nakate went to Switzerland hoping to shed a light on climate justice; instead, she inadvertently ended up in the harsh glare of the social justice spotlight.
AP scrambled to correct their initial oversight, and sent out a less hurriedly, more thoughtfully cropped version of the photo. In a statement, AP noted that Nakate was cropped out of the photo for compositional reasons, not anything to do with racism.
Photo editors work hurriedly and on-the-fly; there’s never enough time to do anything properly, especially when “Get It First” is the rule of the day. Corporate media organizations have fixed it, too, so that newsrooms are chronically short-staffed and over-worked. It’s perfectly understandable that a news photo might be cropped so that it’s easier to fit on a page, whether that page is a newspaper page or an image on the web.
It’s also true that, on a deeper, more subliminal level, race plays a part. One could argue that the photographer could have asked the five young women to move away from the building, so that he could get all five in the frame with the mountains in the background, but for all I know he could have been rushed, or they could have been rushed, and he had only a split second to get the photo.
This is why many hard-news photographers make the best nature photographers, because their job demands that they get the image quickly, sometimes in a split second, while it’s there.
This is also a teachable moment, though, about Nakate herself — who she is, what she’s done, and how hard she’s worked for her cause, and the world’s cause, and how she ended up representing her country.
In an interview last year with the group The Kids Are All Right published on the website Climate Kids — comments from which were extrapolated for an article in The Nation newspaper headlined Uganda’s Young Climate Activists Are Going on Strike, Nakate is pictured in the street in front of Uganda’s parliament, much like her spiritual mentor Thunberg, holding a hand-made sign about the climate, later posted on Twitter.
In some pictures, Nakate, like Thunberg, is sitting on the ground; in others, she’s standing.
The signs share a similar theme: Green love, peace and continuing the fight against single-use plastic, polythene and pollution.
Nakate, a business major and recent university graduate from the Kampala suburb of Nakawa, explained she’s afraid for the future of her country.
Uganda sits on the equatorial belt of Africa, in a region made green by the bands of year-round rain that extend through the heart of the continent and across coastal West Africa — hence the name “rain forest.”
Like much of equatorial Africa, though, Uganda is feeling the effects of desertification, which manifests itself in drought and higher temperatures, exacerbated by man-made deforestation.
According to a 2016 country report by the group Future Climate for Africa, the total number and frequency of unseasonably hot days in Uganda increased by 20% between 1960 and 2010.
Temperatures are projected to rise a further 0.9 to 3.3 degrees by the 2060s.
Ironically, developing countries like Uganda contribute the least to the fossil-fuel emissions that are accelerating climate change worldwide, and yet are most vulnerable to its consequences.
Entire regions of Africa have already suffered the widespread loss of farmland and resulting mass starvation, which in turn leads to political and social instability.
Foreign-affairs analysts across the world warn that many of the next wars will be fought over water and dwindling natural resources.
Nakate has said she wants more people in her home country to know what ’s going on, and why.
Right now, she says, too many of the people she knows don’t know enough about climate change.
Climate activism is — or rather was — virtually unknown in Africa. Nakate first learned of it when she came across Thunberg’s #FridaysForFuture movement on Twitter.
Most young people in urbanized areas of Africa now connect, communicate and get most of their news from social media.
“When it comes to my friends, most of them support me, but then of course there’re the ones that laugh about it,” Nakate said. “They say, how can I go and just hold a poster — like, how can I do that? But there’s always people who put you down. You just have to stand your ground. My parents, they don’t even know about it. I do it alone.”
Not anymore.
@Ejaugsburg-Pixabay
Climate Crisis a ‘Challenge of Civilization’
“Nature reserves are often islands of biodiversity. If they are cut off from each other, there is little opportunity for wildlife populations to spread. They need connecting corridors . . . Most of us – 83% – live in towns or cities. This has helped foster a sense that nature is what happens elsewhere, in the countryside, so we donʼt recognize wildlife in our own neighbourhood. More species could thrive if we helped; and creating greener, more biodiverse cities would improve our wellbeing too.”
We have woken up to the climate emergency — well, most of us, anyway. In an impassioned plea this past week in the Guardian newspaper, Green candidate for Brighton Pavilion and former UK Green Party leader Caroline Lucas argues that the threat to nature and wildlife is equally urgent, and the issues are inextricably intertwined.
That may seem obvious, but on the eve when voters in the UK appear poised to elect a party of right-wing climate deniers and pro-Brexit political agitators — and by substantial majority — that connection can’t be emphasized enough. Climate change and species extinction are linked, as they have been since life has existed on Earth.
A report earlier this year on the state of nature in Britain — and, by implication, everywhere else in the post-industrial world — paints a bleak picture. Nearly half the plant and animal species assessed showed a decline in numbers over the past decade; fully 15% of the UK’s wild species are threaten with extinction. Birds and animals familiar to today’s parents and grandparents, such as the curlew, water vole, adder and common toad, are now rare sights. The common toad is no longer so common, it would appear.
With less than a week to go, the polls point to a decisive win for Boris Johnson and his like-minded right-leaning partners-in-climate-crime; Johnson himself refused to even turn up at a leaders’ debate focusing on the climate emergency. Those same polls suggest climate change is high on the minds of voters, but it wouldn’t be the first time that hypocrisy — or an unwillingness and/or inability to connect the climate dots — led to an election result that didn’t make sense.
Lucas gave a shoutout to conservation organizations, helped in no small part by committed volunteers, that are doing yeoman work, from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust to the Marine Conservation Society, but it is not enough. “They have not been able to halt the precipitous decline in our wildlife,” Lucas wrote. (Lucas herself has been an MP in the UK parliament since 2010 and her seat seems safe; in politics, though, especially in these febrile times, nothing is certain.)
The Green Party, much like Green parties across continental Europe and in my own country, Canada, has always laid claim to the most ambitious policies on nature of any of the major parties — no surprise there. The Greens perform best, do the most good and effect the most change, where there is proportional representation; the UK — and Canada’s — first-past-the-post system makes it hard for political parties on the outside to gain electoral traction in real-world terms.
As the climate kids — my label for the youth-driven Fridays for Future movement, and meant in a respectful and hopeful way, with boundless admiration — have shown, the old way of doing politics is no longer good enough, not when a 16-year-year-old Greta Thunberg or 14-year-old Alexandria Villasenõr wake up in the morning and realize that they and their generation’s future is finished.
Lucas commissioned a report earlier this year from half a dozen leading conservationists and environment writers in the UK to produce a blueprint for how best to ensure the survival of what little nature is left in Britain, titled A New Deal for Nature.
The resulting proposals covered the usual basics, though even the usual basics seem beyond the capability of the Boris Johnsons and Jair Bolsonaros of the world to understand: namely, a holistic, connected approach that links farming, biosecurity, food security, the role of wetlands, fishing, the state of the marine environment, fossil fuels v. renewables, you name it.
A refreshing — refreshing both figuratively and literally — add-on this time is a renewed focus on education to do with the outdoors, by giving children access to nature, putting them more in touch with the natural world, to give them a sense of meaning, to be able to feel nature firsthand and understand the need to protect it. (Lucas’ specific recommendations include a GCSE in natural history and setting aside an hour of outdoor learning every day in primary school, even in inner-city neighbourhoods where outdoor learning might seem like a bit of a stretch; with determination and a little creative thinking, such as urban gardens and observation of urban wildlife, anything’s possible.)
“We need to be pushed out of our comfort zone of weekend walks in the country, occasional visits to national parks, or curling up on the sofa in front of Countryfile — which give the impression that all is well,” Lucas wrote. “It isn’t.”
Lucas has said throughout the UK election campaign that this election is the climate election, and that nature and the climate crisis are tightly linked.
“We need to have a healthy natural world if we are to have any chance of tackling the climate emergency.”
That ship may have sailed, but still. As one commenter noted, if we don’t act soon, sound recordings and David Attenborough documentaries will be all we have left.
©Jeon Sang-O - Pixabay
©Thanapat Pirmphol-Pixabay
Fridays 4 Future in China
“The seasons have changed. In the middle of the 8th lunar month it used to be already quite cold here. Now it’s warm until the 9th and even 10th month.”
If it’s true, as Lao Tzu said, that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, it may also be true that the Fridays for Future movement in China, population 1.43 billion, might begin with a single16-year-old girl.
Mind you, in a nation state noted for its wanton destruction of the environment, the authoritarian nature of its omnipresent, all-controlling government, and the ruthlessness directed toward any form of dissent, no one is holding their breath that Howey Ou, age 16, can change the minds of more than a billion people. Then again, much the same could have been said of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was unknown little more than a year ago. Howey Ou has vowed to plant osmanthus plants around her home city of Guilin.
As reported just days ago by the German state-owned news agency Deutsche Welle, Howey Ou has started her very own school climate strike, choosing to plant seedlings of a plant noted for its ability to absorb carbon dioxide rather than attend school. She has not been to school for four months, according to Deutsche Welle.
And if you think China’s government — not to mention her parents — are fine with that, you’d be wrong.
As she told the news agency, plainly, “Protesting needs a lot of courage in China. But planting trees is something we can do.”
China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which is saying something given the voracious appetite for consumption and the casual disregard of environmental protections in the US today.
Howey Ou learned about climate change and the effect of man-made pollution on the world’s
delicate ecosystems after coming across a copy of National Geographic at a local library in her home town on Guilin. The issue in question featured an article about plastic waste in the sea.
This past spring, students in more than 100 countries marched against man-made global heating and the growing climate crisis. China was not one of them.
She protested outside her local city government’s office with a hand-written cardboard sign this past May. She stood there for seven days. And after seven days, the police took her away.
She was lectured about the legality of protests — basically, they’re not legal, period — and police contacted her parents and told them in no uncertain terms to tell her to stop protesting, or else.
So she is planting trees instead.
“I am not that courageous,” she explained, though some might beg to differ.
Guilin, pop. 4.748 million (2010), is in a region of southern China noted for its dramatic backdrop of limestone karst hills. There is little if any land around Guilin that has not been cultivated; it is all spoken for. A sympathetic farmer, Tang Xiaodi, granted her permission to plant osmanthus fragran seedlings in front of his house, along a nearby canal.
“Fridays for Future are being ridiculed and cursed a lot on the Chinese internet,” Howey Ou told Deutsche Welle. “But I do get some positive comments. People say: ‘Look, the Chinese students are planting trees, while the foreigners just speak empty words.”
A forest, after all, begins with the planting of a single seed.
©Twitter 2019