We’re about to overshoot 1.5°C. Soon. That’s not activist rhetoric; it’s the conclusion of a new UN report that Ayana Elizabeth Johnson dug into so the rest of us didn’t have to, and what she found is both sobering and, in its own strange way, clarifying. The UN isn’t hedging anymore. Carbon removal won’t save us. Fossil fuel infrastructure has to be phased out, not just slowed down. And adaptation can’t mean tweaking around the edges; it has to mean rebuilding the systems we live inside.
If you read one thing this week, make it this. Not because it’s comfortable, but because it’s honest, and honest is what we need right now. Johnson has a gift for taking dense, hedge-everything UN language and turning it into something you can actually act on. She outlines who’s responsible, what’s working, where the money should go, and what each of us can still do that matters.
But here’s the thing I keep sitting with when reading pieces like this one: even the boldest climate reports rarely name the beliefs underneath the crisis. We talk about emissions, grids, financing, agriculture — all real, and all necessary, but we don’t talk enough about the story we’ve been telling ourselves for more than century: that a good life requires a growing economy, and a growing economy requires more extraction, more production, more consumption, forever. GDP growth has quietly become the closest thing modern society has to a shared religion. If you question it, you’re accused of wanting people to be poor. But endless growth on a finite planet was never going to be a plan. It is a story we mistook for a law of nature. Real transformation, the kind this report calls for, has to include rethinking what we’re actually trying to grow: things like wellbeing, resilience, connection. Not GDP.
And there’s a second, quieter shift that has to happen alongside it: we have to get over ourselves. Humans have spent a long time acting as though we’re the main character of this planet and as if everything else, things like the forests, oceans, soil microbes, glaciers, and the billions of other species we share this world with is either scenery or resource put here for us. But none of us are separate from any of this. We are one strand in an almost incomprehensibly complex web, and every strand we fray, every coral reef, every tree in a rainforest, each permafrost layer holding a glacier in place, pulls on threads we didn’t even know were connected to us until they snap. The climate crisis isn’t just an engineering problem or a policy problem. It’s a humility problem. It’s what happens when a species forgets it’s part of something larger than itself.
None of this is a reason to despair. In fact it is an enormous opportunity. It means there’s real leverage in changing how we think, not just what we build. So read what Johnson has to say about the report, the fossil fuel companies and banks and billionaires who could be doing so much more, and the very real solutions already sitting on the table. Then find your role, whether political, financial, communal, or personal, and play it. This is genuinely all-hands-on-deck work, and it needs your hands too.
If you’re not sure where to start, you can heed Ayana’s suggestion and join something – namely us here at Sustainable Orillia
Sarah