Why I Can’t Look Away From the Climate Crisis
It is personal
Every day I see more news about the climate crisis, and every day I feel a more urgent need to be involved in collective action. Every day I see personal connections to climate injustice, and I am called to be part of collective resistance.
Am I alone in this? Why does it feel that way? Why does it seem like everybody else is able to look away?
I can’t look away.
It was the rainiest night of a week of solid rain in the coffee growing mountain village of Las Moras. Winds rattled the sheet metal roof as Patrocinio Sanchez, Osiris Gutierrez, their son Patric, baby Melany, and their dog huddled together around candles. Fleeing in the night was out of the question. The roads were washed out and the rivers swollen. As the family hunkered down in the dark, below their farm the muddy streams grew and spilled over banks. The streams soon carried whole sections of the stream banks away, sometimes causing the land above to slump and then eventually give way in massive landslides that the family could hear as occasional roars and feel as earthquakes. It was a sleepless night, as the roar and earthquake pattern was repeated over and over, including a small landslide that crashed into their house, collapsing the uphill wall and filling the house with mud and water.
