Month 8, Day 23: Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

I’ve never written to Ban ki-Moon before. His statements about climate change make it pretty clear that he gets it in a way that hardly any American politicians do.

It was extremely difficult to find any useful contact address. The UN has a generic email submission page which I finally used…but I’m going to try and get something more substantial once they open for business tomorrow.

SUBJECT:

Please forward to the Secretary General – RE: Geopolitical Implications of Climate Change

Dear Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon,
Your recent words about the disaster in Pakistan show that you are one of the few public figures who is willing to recognize climate change as one of the primary causal forces behind that country’s devastating floods. It is evident to any thinking observer that a steady increase in extreme weather events (as predicted for decades by climatologists) will lead to dramatic changes in the structuring foreign policy.

Humanity can go in two directions. The nations of the world can join together to develop strategies for resource allotment and the deployment of infrastructure as needed to combat the devastating effects of short-term weather events (thereby preventing food and water wars, or other political manifestations of climatic emergency) — or they can continue on the path of what the economist Naomi Klein aptly terms “disaster capitalism,” in which any crisis is used as an opportunity for exploitation and the curtailment of human liberties.

The first path will lead to our survival as a species, the second inevitably to our doom.

We have often wondered: if humanity could find a common adversary, could old national rivalries be set aside? In that respect, the climate crisis offers us an opportunity to transform our ways of thinking about ourselves as a species and our role on the planet. What is happening to Pakistan today could happen to one of the world’s wealthiest nations next week; the transformed climate does not play favorites in the long run.

This is the first time that humanity has faced a planet-sized enemy, an enemy that cannot be defeated by force of arms or by political maneuverings. We have created this threat ourselves, and to defeat it we must change ourselves at a deep level.

We can no longer waste time and treasure on the destructive distractions of war; there is a greater enemy to overcome.

Yours Sincerely,

Warren Senders