Family Literacy Fosters Ties Between Nations and Responds to the Climate Emergency
Family Literacy Fosters Ties Between Nations and Responds to the Climate Emergency
The following is an excerpt from the report, “Family Literacy Fosters Ties Between Nations and Responds to the Climate Emergency”. Download the full report.
Family literacy is a research based, capacity building concept, based on ancient traditions, that has a proven global record of projects and initiatives that can result in rapid transformative change. Surprising to many and unnoticed by most UN Member States there are multilateral initiatives taking place right now that unite people in local communities in many countries of the world.
The Climate Emergency
Everybody is Worried
Of course, it’s hard not to worry.[1] Everyone is worried. We know there is no point in panic, but many of us are filled with doubts about the ways we live. Nagging at us is the slow realization that our vision of the world is delusional and the persistent doubt that torments us is that we’ve got everything wrong.
For years now the story ‘The Daughters of the Moon’ [2] by Italo Calvino has given me a jolt when it enters my mind, arriving unannounced to warn me about what is happening to us. Written at the beginning of the 1960s, the story takes place in New York City where I live and could have been written today. Calvino describes the skyscrapers gleaming like the nylon bristles of a brand-new toothbrush – that’s exactly what they look like on Central Park South where spindle thin new nylon bristle skyscrapers are going up.
In the story Calvino mingles literature with science as he writes about the crowds of people on the city streets with their arms laden with parcels from shopping in the big department stores, and of how the items they have bought will become “the layers of things that had been thrown away” changing the geology of the planet.
Calvino writes of the plight of communities living in “the amalgam of wreckage of piles of battered fridges and burnt-out light bulbs,” of the discarded people who have been marginalized by a consumerist society, and of people who have willingly discarded themselves because they are tired of racing all over the city to sell and buy new things that go instantly out of date and have to be thrown away.
At the end of the story young mammoths gallop across the savannas once again, and forests cover the Earth as they did before, burying the decaying cities and roads and obliterating all trace of us.
It is hard not to worry. Calvino has always left me in no doubt that we will all end up on the scrap heap – in jagged, rusty territory -- if we continue to live the way we do now. We have changed the climate and the anatomy of the planet, but there is so much we can do to prevent the complete collapse of the biosphere that we call home.
We can change the way we live now. It is not too late, but first there must be a reckoning, a moment of gut wrenching honesty when we refuse to flinch and do not shy away from appraising the state of the planet and the state of humanity. Only when we are prepared to look the future in the eye will we be able to move beyond the violent anguish many people are experiencing as they try to figure out what we can do to push down the existential risks we have caused that threaten our kids.
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[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1986/11/24/the-way-we-live-now
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/23/the-daughters-of-the-moon
View and Download “Family Literacy Fosters Ties Between Nations and Responds to the Climate Emergency” Report
View and download the full report here.