A Climate Activist is a Human Rights Activist, an Animal Rights Activist, an Environmentalist…

Ever since I woke up to the danger of climate change, I have been trying to bring people together to do something about it. I thought it would be relatively easy; approach various groups and show them how ‘their’ issue would be mooted by climate change, and they would make fighting climate change the lead plank in their battle.

It didn’t work out that way. While many of them admit intellectually that climate change is a big problem, nobody wants to give up their piece of the pie. I slagged these groups elsewhere for this reason; egos and fear of losing their donations are making them insular. However, divided we are falling.

It seems straightforward enough. Concerned about starving children in Africa? Won’t matter if we don’t stop climate change. How about AIDS/HIV? Global warming will wipe most of it out.  Human rights of moral importance to you? Remember the massacres of Darfur? Exacerbated by global warming, which dried up the water and dried out the land, and starving people were driven to move.

We’ll see lots more of that with climate change. Europe is rightly worried about tens of millions of climate refugees flooding across their borders from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. India is building a giant fence to try and keep out anticipated Bangladeshi climate refugees, as Bangladesh is looking at perhaps 17 million people driven from their land within the next 40 years. India will have millions of her own people to resettle. The Pentagon is looking at 111 million Mexicans and wondering how to stop them swamping the border as their country runs out of oil and deserts expand.

Perhaps animal rights is a concern? In one of their stupidest moves, PETA attacked Al Gore immediately after An Inconvenient Truth became a big hit – because he didn’t advocate vegetarianism in the movie. Al Gore and PETA should be on the same side; as climate change progresses, animals and their rights are going to be forgotten.

This is a key lesson the social justice/animal rights/environmental activists have yet to learn: cooperation. Without it, each group will continue its battle to save the baby seals or protect a swath of wilderness, and then watch the results of their struggle swept away by the overwhelming destruction of climate change.

If you are fighting for animal rights or human rights or nature or any other individual goal – while it may be a very worthy goal – you are wasting your time unless you put climate change first. It is quite possible to feed starving Africans and fight climate change simultaneously, and we must do so.

If you are fighting for climate change, you are helping every other one of these groups, and if they had more sense (or less pride) they would make the battle against climate change their primary target. If you are a climate change warrior, you are also fighting for human rights, for preservation of nature and species, for social justice, for animal rights, for the poor, for civilisation – for everyone and everything we know and hold dear.