A Book, Bees and the Climate Crisis

I was 10 years old when I came across Al Gore’s book, An Inconvenient Truth. My father brought it home, after being handed it for free at an airport he was traveling through.

I remember poring over it and even though it was something beyond my ability to fully understand, I would come back to it very often. The book had a huge presence in my life at that time. I didn’t know it then but nearly twenty years later I’ve come to understand that it was fear that gripped me every time I read the book. The thought that our planet was heating up, that no one seemed to care, pushed me into a state of anxiety that still hasn’t left me.

Even as I write this, words like ‘fear’ or ‘anxiety’ feel too small for what I felt then. It wasn’t just worry; it began shaping the choices I made.

In some of the climate aware spaces I’ve engaged with, a prompt that often comes up is, where did your climate journey begin? My reflections on this prompt brings me to what it really means for such a journey to “begin”. It reminds me just how much capitalism has separated us from our naturalness, as if we aren’t a part of the earth. To think that a connection to the climate must start somewhere is a reminder of how far removed we’ve become.

If we think about the recent series of cloudbursts and floods in northern India, it’s not just “bad weather.” Decades of deforestation, mining into precious ecosystems in the mountains, building wherever profits can be made – all this has weakened a life-sustaining system. The balance has already tipped, and its effects are landslides, overflowing rivers, homes, livelihoods and food lost, families forced to find elsewhere to live and entire communities left more vulnerable than before.

This is not something happening “somewhere else”. These disasters travel as food shortages, rising prices, broken supply chains and the grief of what was lost. It is a matter of time before some form of climate disruption touches all of us.

I often wonder, if a ten-year-old was able to grasp the seriousness of the planet warming, what stops adults from seeing this larger picture? If your responses are something like the following, they are understandable, but they also may require deeper questioning –

• “I didn’t cause this, I won’t/can’t fix it” – that’s perhaps defensiveness or arrogance, masking fear or guilt - fear about our futures and guilt from the discomfort of knowing that we are a part of and benefit from the same systems causing harm.

• “The earth will heal itself” - That’s wishful thinking or naïve hope, a way of protecting ourselves from the responsibility of making changes.

• “It’s too late” –that’s maybe a way of numbing the overwhelming reality of the situation, masking despair or grief.

• “Technology will save us” – that’s probably displacement, placing our faith in something external, to avoid sitting with uncertainty or vulnerability.

• “My actions won’t make a difference anyway” – when the systemic scale feels too big, this could be a sense of powerlessness, making us retreat from responsibility.

Every response you have is valid, it all makes sense given the overwhelming reality that is beyond our bodies to hold. But if we don’t look deeper into them, we may continue being locked in a state of inaction.*

I was recently a part of a bees workshop. There is so much about bees that I had no idea about before this. Did you know that bees do a waggle dance to communicate with each other? The angle that they move in shows the direction their food source is in and the time they waggle tells them how far they need to fly to reach it. This was one of many amazing things that I learned that day. 

It is so important to learn how to re-engage with the rest of the natural world. Perhaps that can be a starting point for all of us. Whether its bees, ants, birds, or trees, I think we need a reminder that there is so much in this world that deserves loving. And in doing so, I think it can help us remember to stay present in these times, rather than disappear into despair and distraction.

I leave you with this – you may not be so affected by this change in your lifetime. But the rest of the natural world will. And that means the children around you, whether your own, a relative’s, or a neighbour’s will be affected. And so will their children. If that’s not enough to shake something in you, then perhaps distraction has numbed the part of us that’s most needed now, our shared humanity.

Please disrupt the comfort of routine. Be involved in something that is beyond the self. Perhaps that is how we’ll relearn the lost act of caring. After all, YOLO.**

*For those who’d like to explore these emotions more deeply, here’s a Climate Emotion Wheel (below) we’ve been working on.

**YOLO – You Only Live Once, popularized by the rapper Drake as a carefree slogan. Here, it’s a reminder that we literally only live once, so maybe choose to live with the courage and the love to care?

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If you'd like to explore more about climate psychology or your own emotions about the climate crisis, please check the resources on our website, ACE.