A letter

A letter read to the audience at ‘The Conference’ in Malmö, August 2023

Dear audience, 

Dear fellow living beings, 

I try those words in my mouth and they feel profound, almost pristine - ’living beings’. We rarely think of ourselves as living, we tend to think of ourselves as more practical beings of life. When I write this letter to you all it’s one of the last days of summer and the morning is beautifully quiet. Cuddled up next to me is my 6-year old, sleeping peacefully, her eyelids are flickering and it is clear she’s dreaming of something, a happy dream I hope. Then I do what I often do, but still know I shouldn’t. I pick up my phone and read the latest global news.

All around the world severe catastrophes are making a mark on the planet. The hottest July ever recorded. Fires, floods, storms and famine. Corruption, wars and greed. Extraction. Injustice. Every morning more people have died. Every morning more living beings have died. But somehow it feels like they all live in a different world, on a different planet or in a different time. I don’t know them, I’ve never been where they are, I’ve never seen what they see. And therefore, unconsciously, I compart and move them into a space that isn’t my own everyday life. Because where I live, in Sweden, the growing amount of global climate disasters aren’t that evident. They don’t affect anyone around me that I love, just yet. And therefore, somehow they seem to not exist. Or at least, that is what we tell ourselves. But at this very moment people suffer from climate change. At this very moment they breathe somewhere on this planet as I sit here and read to you. Why are we not more angry about that? 

Where I live there seems to be a lack of collective anger. Is it that people are privileged? Too privileged? Climate change is a topic to discuss, like the weather. People here feel a little apathetic and sometimes in a heavy mood when thinking about a warming planet. The privileged think it’s a hard time to be living, they don’t symbolise it. Yet, reports show we have a state of collective depression and persistent feelings of hopelessness. Are they  privileged feelings? While I look at them, while I look at us, my anger builds up. Our collective mechanisms of trying to stay sane in a world that is mad are too powerful. The urge for monetary profit is too powerful. Fear makes us hold on to what we already know. But if anger is what evolves action then we need to let pain be part of our lives. We can’t change our system unless we change our internal consciousness. 

I would like to take you all back to the main problem, the headache of the climate crisis. At some point in time, and definitely during the early days of industrialization, some humans on Earth thought they had the right to use a massive amount of shared resources for their own personal profit. I believe this is important to recognise and remember since it is the framework for what has happened since. These humans, and I need to say that they were mostly men, thought they had the right to take, use and make profit from not only shared materials but also from other living things and from other human beings. This created an enormous economic gap between humans, a gap that since then is massively growing every single day. But it also created a lifestyle of overuse, the end of natural resources, heavy pollution and carbon emissions that destroy the ozone layer which results in the warming of our planet. 

Today, many solutions to this dilemma are being created by the same type of people who started them. Western men are trying to come up with ideas on how to save the climate, while still making a personal profit. Those ideas mostly consist of technological solutions, digital tools or other profit bearing products. 

Western men are trying to come up with ideas on how to save the climate, while still making a personal profit.

However, if I were to ask a child to solve a problem of selfishness, a problem where someone has taken too many things and doesn't share, they would think differently than we grownups do. Never would a child reply that making more things is the solution. Young children are born naturally caring and instinctively know how to deal with problem solving through generous guidance. 

A child would likely answer something along the lines of ‘I think we should tell that person to share more’. Or ‘we could play together instead of them taking it all for themselves’. So, why is it that we adults can’t see what children see straight away?

The solution to dealing with someone who is selfish is not to give them a new digital platform. And, before I continue I just want to make it clear that I’m not against technology at all, there are some absolutely brilliant solutions that have an important impact on solving problems and making lives better. However, they are not the only solution. I believe that solving problems about egoism and selfishness needs a psychological and philosophical approach. Why do some people feel that they need a senseless amount of money to be happy? How do we shift those ideas? Should we teach our children something new, something we have forgotten to talk about? Can we put our 2640 billionaires into therapy? 

Historically, rich nations have been responsible for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions. Still, the impacts of climate change are felt acutely in developing nations, creating a severe injustice and inequality. A common thought of addressing these disparities is that it requires international cooperation, financial assistance, and technology transfer. But rarely do we talk about the shift in meaning of life for the privileged to make sure inequalities flattens out. 

This brings me back to the fact that many of us privileged feel lost, and that we believe the climate crisis is happening somewhere else. The truth is that the crisis is right here, in this room, in your own lives as you walk back home tonight. One climate injustice somewhere is a climate injustice everywhere. But we often think of these things as two different spaces, our own lives and the climate crisis. Somehow we behave as if they are not connected. So we live our lives, we eat breakfast, go to work, hang out with friends, buy food, argue with each other, pay bills, cry sometimes, feel stressed about the huge pile of laundry, and go to the gym. 

Simultaneously, there is a societal pressure to work and live sustainably on the surface, most of us try to live a little better by consuming organic products and the word sustainability has entered most of our workplaces. Still, the huge divide between us and them is both clear, and hidden. We are not doing enough, and they suffer. The idea of changing ourselves to be less selfish seems to be non-existent. And herein lies my point in this letter. If we are to behave generously towards other people in other parts of the world, then we need to be genuinely caring as human beings. Always. And everywhere. You can’t be rude to a bus driver on your way to work to then sit down at your desk and write a report on sustainable materials. 

To  successfully revert or at least halt climate change demands us all to bridge the gap between individual care and global care. 

We need to talk about systemic care, kindness and compassion. A supply chain of kindness. If you say you feel stressed about the climate crisis and that you don’t know what to do, then at least be dramatically kind. Now. Start as soon as this session is over and you leave this room. Hold the door for someone else to pass. Smile to an unknown person that you meet on the sidewalk. Say something nice to a neighbour. Invite them for coffee. Invite stillness to your life. Be kind to yourself too. All of those small actions have a massive ripple effect on society. They can easily grow and inspire the larger actions and impacts that can have a truly great effect on climate solutions. Like the butterfly effect and chaos theory, minor perturbations of a butterfly flapping its wings can influence a tornado several weeks after. 

How we share things, emotions, knowledge and hope is part of how we make a society. Through small ideas grown from local everyday life we can impact the global machine with instant effects. I often think of the beautiful phrase ‘We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are’. Then who are we? And how can we help each other to change? I believe in the kind power of support, inspiration, bravery and care. I believe in humble anger. I believe in children to inspire us to see better. We need more attention with intention. We need a collective transformation. 

So, now you are all wondering, why was I invited to talk about this in a session on economy? Well, if you go back to definitions on economy you will find that they say something about careful management of available resources. Economy is linked to everything we do. A common idea is that this means a system by which goods and services are produced, sold and bought in a country, region or globally. But long before this happened at the mode and scale that we see today, we also had other common types of economies. Barter economy was for a long time a common way of managing resources, we swapped one thing we owned for something else that we needed. But an even more interesting type of economy is the gift economy that in many cultures was a beautiful way of using resources. You would give away what you had when you could, and then based on trust you knew you would get something else back at some later point in life. This type of economy was, and still is, used in many matriarchal societies where a female view of economy sits at the core of the societal infrastructure. 

Some researchers argue that all human societies were matriarchal up until about 5000 years ago. And by looking at the few matriarchal societies we still have today, the structures are completely different from patriarchal societies. They are not hierarchical but rather based on circular ways of co-existing and where every single living thing has a role and is equally important. I believe we have a lot to learn from this way of thinking and being in the world, a female and sensitive approach to each other. 

I will end this letter to you with some imaginary maths on care economy. If we estimate that there are 400 of us in this room today. And that we all do 3 kind actions every day, actions that we normally would not do. Like thanking the busdriver for driving you to work. Then, let’s also imagine that we tell 3 friends to do the same. Within a week that would have resulted in 874 800 kind actions. A number worth thinking about when you feel paralyzed to act on the climate crisis. Let it inspire you, let it be the wings of butterflies, and let us all create a powerful storm of angry kindness that can transform the world. You can have an impact and you can create change. It’s not as complicated as you might think. 

With love!

Jenny