Why Climate Matters.
Today has been an unusually hot day, one in which you wish you could drink a gallon of water and it not be dangerous. It didn’t yet occur to me the importance of a rising/volatile climate until I looked outside and saw grass beginning to turn yellow on my neighbors lawn. Seeing this decrepit scenery, it made think of our garden at KPU and it filled me with concerns about watering it. While being worried about the garden is an entirely valid concern, the threat of global warming becomes a lot more profound when we look at it in the macro-context. According to Rob white “Global warming is rapidly and radically transforming the biophysical world in ways that will continue to have massive ramifications for humans, specific ecosystems, and animal and plant species” (White, 2018, pg. 124). These ramifications are certainly tangible, as I sweat while typing this article and not too long ago, a vicious heat wave claimed the lives of 619 people in British Columbia alone (https://science.gc.ca/site/science/en/blogs/science-health/surviving-heat-impacts-2021-western-heat-dome-canada). I scarcely remember my time during the event, however what I do remember I would not wish on my worst enemy. The heat was so intense that fans became ineffective, and event to an extent counterproductive as they instead of blowing cold air, they blew hot air.
I have to credit gardening to this green criminological perspective because, without the garden I would have never given consideration to the powers of global warming despite bearing the discomforts of it myself. By bearing the responsibilities of gardening it has opened up diverse perspectives for me to events that might not otherwise would have connected to me. I also have to admittedly say that I much enjoyed the rainy days of the gardening project, so it comforted me to the idea of the project not requiring particularly a lot of maintenance. The unusually hot day has sort of shattered that expectation and has helped me to become more Intune with the criminological harms that occur within the context of green criminology.
This also then leads to another important consideration, that being that climate change does not happen by it self, as accordingly “Because the level of natural resource production is declining as we increase production, the biosphere will not be able to sustain current production levels, even while technology innovations make production more sustainable (seen in the manifestation of global problems such as climate change). The idea that we are increasing the footprint is highly consistent with the treadmill analogy. That is, ecological disorganization is accelerating over time under capitalism”(pg. 14). So really the small, maybe even menial concerns that we may have come from large macro factors.
To conclude, having the responsibility for the garden at KPU has opened my horizons for new perspectives and has helped me to understand harms at a much larger macro perspective.
References:
https://science.gc.ca/site/science/en/blogs/science-health/surviving-heat-impacts-2021-western-heat-dome-canada
The Treadmill of Crime (2 Treadmill of Production for Green Criminology)
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