Wildfire season is starting earlier and lasting longer due to global warming across the world. What will we do to save the world on fire? How can we cure our addiction to fossil fuels which is verging on pyromania?
Simon Dalby is author of Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World and Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University. His other books are Rethinking Environmental Security, Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability, and Security and Environmental Change. He’s co-editor of Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and Reframing Climate Change: Constructing Ecological Geopolitics.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
It's quite possible this renewable energy utopia will free us up. With AI and the new technologies we can redesign our future. You also outline in your book the differences between the Global North, which has benefited fossil fuels, and the Global South. How do we make the transition, which luckily in the south can benefit from a lot of renewable energy that's right on their doorstep. We have to address our moral, ethical responsibility to pass on the benefits we've received to help them with the transition so that they are not dependent on dirty fuels.
SIMON DALBY
We also need to note most people move locally rather than globally. In the discussions about climate refugees, people are going to be dislocated. There are obviously going to be places that are going to become quite literally uninhabitable because they're too hot and too dry, or they've been flooded so frequently that they're just not sustainable. That said it is also worth pointing out that this climate change process is playing out in a global economy, which is also changing where people live and how people live very rapidly. the migration from rural areas to urban systems has been massive over the last couple of generations. We became an urban species.
Fossil fuels have made most of the Global North rich. Now it's time to use a bit of that wealth to build a better world and to do so in ways that also help those who are most vulnerable. And the people that are most vulnerable to this are, in many cases, parts of what we call the Global South. And thinking about our responsibilities to those who are being made vulnerable by our actions is at the heart of notions of climate justice. And we need to focus on how to help people rather than seeing them as threats.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
We're living in the century of the city and in a decade of tremendous transformation if we can accept the challenge. Cities are the main drivers of creativity and innovation, consuming 75% of the world's natural resources and 70% of global carbon dioxide emissions. What have you come across in terms of integrated thinking? How do you think the cities of the future are going to look like in the sectors of energy transport, resource, waste management, food, and pollution.
DALBY
It's crucial because of how we design cities so we can live better together. If we are going to be sustainable: less personal car ownership, a lot more public transport, a lot more bicycles or scooters - they dramatically reduce pollution and they allow everybody to breathe easier because there's much less pollution from internal combustion engines actually in cities. All of this suggests that we need to reimagine cities as public spaces that are not dependent on the individual use of cars.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
We're seeing a lot more internal migration, and we'll see a lot more of that within the US and Canada. You may be having climate migrants from the United States coming your way.
DALBY
We have got to stop and think carefully about how we integrate our education systems so that we think across these silos and think about literally how to make a better world. And then we can extract ourselves hopefully from those little silos that we do our studying and thinking and learning in, and begin to think about our role as ecological beings. If we're going to think about well-being linked to planetary health, we need to get out of the silos that we traditionally thought about and think across the disciplines. And this should allow us to be much more creative in terms of how we design curriculum and how we organize our educational process.
