I heard the term “grandchild-just” in a context that is occupying me heavily these days. That’s why the double-word caught my attention right away.
I have no grandchildren. I’m just an uncle.
But that doesn’t change much about the fact that justice ought to be well-deserved or, well, deserved.
The context?
Well, the current and unwilling-to-disappear catastrophe that the climate is handing us.
Wrong, sorry.
The catastrophe that we humans are handing the climate. That’s how the math works. And the just treatment of grandchildren and other people hangs there by a thin, probably green, thread.
The climate, in the end, couldn’t care less how it develops. It hasn’t taken it upon itself to have any understanding of good or bad in its own development.
Climate is a situation.
That’s all.
But the people of 2040 and beyond will ask themselves whether their world is still just.
Whether they can still put food on the table tomorrow.
Whether the heat or the flooding water makes their life harder.
My godchildren and their children belong to this group of people who have to live with the climate and adapt to the changed circumstances.
And that isn’t just, when the very thing takes its revenge.
What keeps me up isn’t fatalism, nor cynicism.
It’s more the passivity in the face of the biggest, no-longer-correctable scenarios of a future in which grandchildren and other people will have to live.
How do I mean, not correctable?
Well, the rising warming of planet Earth can’t simply be reversed. At best it can be slowed. Which means heat waves and floods will keep increasing.
But what can be changed — and this is where hope and activism come into play — are the human-made corrections.
I think of the solar field that went up last year on the decommissioned landfill — waste turned into electricity. For instance.
Images like that keep hope upright, to make possible a just future for the life of our grandchildren. Yes, with an overheated and catastrophe-laden climate.
Grandchild-just.
Grandchild-just?
And yet we cling to oil, gas, and nuclear, as though that were still an intelligent solution.
Isn’t it more intelligent to draw from the sources that, first, are available free of charge, and second, do no damage to people and nature?
Not intelligent enough?
But at least grandchild-just. Or?
