By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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The UN has come out with a report which ‘proves’ that climate change is real. I find this surprising because as far as I know, climate change dates back to at least the last quarter of the 20th century as a phenomenon that has been spoken about publicly by people who tracked things like weather and carbon emissions.

I am pretty sure that this kicked off an environmental movement that had one major goal in mind: confronting consumption so that we could try to change our habits en masse, specifically by putting less heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere and less plastic in places it shouldn’t be.

Which sounds like we accepted the science of climate change a long time ago, right?

For a while it looked like there would be a generation for whom adjusting consumption downwards and caring about the environment would be a mundane part of life, unpleasant but necessary like dentist visits. But we still manage to act surprised to date.

To find out that not only have we proved it for real only now confuses me, is this what the early 21st century is going to be like on every big issue? Revisionist and post-factual?

Because climate change like other science that gets denied has company now. For example, on one hand we are getting out to space with more ease, on the other there are folks who believe that our planet Earth is flat. Yet somehow we must co-exist. It is a bit of a pill, really.

Anyway, let us take the climatologists at their word at least this time around. Part of the ‘alarming’ find is that we are nowhere near on track to reducing our carbon emissions as planned and hoped. I don’t know how anyone can be surprised about this — have you seen how we have adopted perpetual growth as the economic model?

It won, so the old environmental movement went dark there for a while, until Greta Thunberg thundered onto the world stage to give it a shot in the arm. It had become a dirty hippie concept, almost as badly understood and reviled as feminism is these days.

Both of these movements challenge power directly. Even worse, they ask us to change.

Take the issue of charcoal, the pollution it causes, where it intersects with women through cooking and fuel needs and the pressures this puts on our trees as the population grows.

Drive any long distances along our main roads and you will see the bounty of commodities displayed by the roadside for travellers to pick up. Everything from fruits to honey to extra-large bags of charcoal.

Charcoal is wonderful for cooking: it imparts food with a unique taste and is integral to nyama choma which simply isn’t the same cooked on any other flame. It isn’t cheap but it is affordable and best of all it is available absolutely everywhere, not just in the urban centres.

I’ve put in time with interpersonal charcoal advocacy, converting as many people as I can to the wonders of almost any alternative cooking fuel except electricity.

There is some success these days thanks to alternatives becoming cheaper over time and tastes also adapting, but the intimacy of that simple act of shifting from a trusted charcoal cooker to something else has stuck with me.

No amount of talking about tree cover and the horrible effects of charcoal fumes and residue on a person’s health touches that part of us that just knows what is familiar. It is visceral.

On a slightly larger scale cooking fuels seem to have come and gone with inconsistency maybe because of this intimate relationship to how we live our lives.

Everything from greasy blocks of what seemed like solid gas to environmentally friendly charcoal briquettes might still be available but they are a minority issue. Some are downright unpleasant, like the gas/kerosene alternatives.

And that’s just one small thing. Imagine the scale of what the environment is asking of us if we’re to combat climate change?

Consumption would have to be confronted on radical terms. That would mean rethinking big business and manufacturing, profits and lifestyles, and livelihoods.

Change on that scale has been resisted for as long as we have had civilisation, we’re not miraculously going to master it at this point.

Epidemiologists had issued warnings long before Covid-19 about pandemic preparedness and especially these flu virus but how well did we listen to their focused messages? Asking us to do something about a “crisis” as nebulous as the climate crisis is even more diffuse and difficult, but how much of a chance do we have?

I still stand with the environmental movement and hope for the best, but reality intrudes as does a glance at how humans are like. I still eat nyama choma off a grill after all, contradiction is part of life.

Maybe instead of us changing the climate, the climate will just have to change us on her own terms, as she always has.

Maybe that’s the real take-away here.

Elise Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report: E-mail: [email protected]