If you are feeling hug-starved, you could do worse than join your local Greenpeace group and don their polar bear costume on a busy late-night-shopping evening with a sign around your neck saying “Free Bear Hugs”. I know what I’m talking about, I did exactly that two days ago in Bridport. Not because I was feeling particularly hug-hungry, before you all start to take pity on me, but because I was helping on the Greenpeace street-stall and the job fell quite literally on my shoulders.
Immediately I was transformed from a hairy man to a hairy bear, and was quite amazed by the throngs rushing up to me to get their hug. We’re not just talking children here. I had the whole age spectrum from tots to grannies. I had to hug low, hug high, hug wide and narrow. I hugged a whole troupe of teenagers in one go. Even the occasional grown man stepped up for a hug, usually accompanied by a throwaway comment such as “not often you get to hug a polar bear”. And this was all before 7pm - any later and I’m sure alcohol would have driven far more into my white furry paws.
The polar bear is of course just a sympathetic emblem of the true awfulness of what is happening at the top of the world. The entire Arctic habitat is slowly disappearing, melting into the sea. Not just polar bears but narwhals, seals, Arctic foxes, snowy owls and many other unique creatures face oblivion in the wild. And the Great Arctic Melt itself is an emblem of the climate disaster unfolding everywhere, as the world’s average temperature inches upwards.
You might think humanity could solve this issue as we are, we like to think, pretty smart as a species. There are (at least) three big problems though:
1) The disaster is unfolding extremely slowly. Our attention span is too short. Three years ago the British PM could say that he wants his coalition administration to be “the greenest government ever” and expect it to win votes. Now the vote-winning policies are about easing the cost of living and environmental issues are slipping down and off our government’s agenda.
2) The cause of the warming is the very thing which makes our lives comfortable and which the globalised economy is driven by (namely, oil and gas). To completely remove our dependence on fossil fuels and switch entirely to renewables is a mammoth undertaking that would require all national governments to work in tandem to change the way everything works. Our corporo-democracies are unfortunately not up to it.
3) Fossil fuel companies have enormous resources at their disposal and have become adept at using their wealth both to lobby governments to allow them to continue extraction and exploration, and to quietly fund climate-change deniers who muddy the climate debate with half-truths and outright lies. When someone tells you that you don’t need to deal with the huge mess in front of you because it’s actually all ok really, the temptation is to believe them.
So is it for nothing that I hugged half of Bridport in a furry suit? Well at least I felt needed for a while! And maybe a few more people are reminded how humanity’s actions are impacting our planet. Change can only come when enough people stand up and make themselves count.
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