A Place I Once Called Home by Cadmus Atake-Enade

A Place I Once Called Home

by Cadmus Atake-Enade              

            

Earth A Home for All

 

From the Heart...
It sometimes beats my imagination that we are created in the image and likeness of God, yet we as individuals are no way like HIM. God created us in His uniqueness and likeness, yet we are carried away by the things which are created by mere men like us. We are left without the main purpose and were created to have Dominion over all created things (Gen 1:26-30). He said I have made you a joint heir with Me, a co-creator. That means God has given us the ability and the ideas to make our dwelling place worth living, beautiful, calm, quiet and healthy. However, we don’t seem to live in line with these purposes.

We have rather taking it upon ourselves to create things that are harmful to us and our environment more than ever before. Man has so much developed himself technologically and scientifically that the place he once called home is now a threat to all and all that is within. It is amazing to know that God has urged us to keep safe that which He has kept in our care so that they will not be misused or destroyed yet we have altered His plans with profane knowledge based upon science (1st Tim 6:20-21).
Since the origin of man, the quest of a better earth and a developed society has it’s mentality and this has given rise to the introduction of science and technology (from the stone age to the ice age and now to the computer and jet age where everything is moving on a fast lane). Food and agricultural products have been manufactured in the laboratory, the earth has been manipulated and engineered to mitigate climate change/global warming.


Why Now?
The earth is now a place where humans are more dependent in the use of fossil fuels as a major source of energy rather than dependent on alternate and natural sources of energy. This in turn is increasing the food processing and mining industries which pollutes the environment more than the food and energy they tend to derive from it. Is this the place we once called home, is this original plan for us? I keep wondering in despair. This is a place where science and technology has caused more harm than good.
In recent times the issues of climate change / global warming is taking the center stage of global environmental issues which has given rise to man-made disasters such as flooding due to sea level rise and the melting of the ice cap, which is also increasing the volumes of oceans and seas around the globe. Regions located along coastal areas have been threatened with extinction if nothing is done about these issues. Some of them have been left desolate like the Sodom and Gomorrah. Life on planet earth is gradually becoming unbearable as the level of damages done to the environment keeps increasing daily, weekly and yearly. No possible solution is on sight.

We are now living in a world where the rich keeps getting richer by exploiting the poor, and the poor keeps getting poorer due to meager salaries. It is “a case of working like an elephant and eating like ants.” It's a case of feeding from hand to mouth without hope of where the next meal will come from.
In the face of these issues, world leaders are not doing anything to alleviate the suffering of the dying masses. Developed countries around the world like the U.S., France and others keep infringing on the rights and lands of developing countries where some individuals live on less than a dollar a day, grabbing their farm lands for plantation and mining purposes.

Therefore, the poor masses are left stranded and starving due to lack of food and livelihood. Multinational corporations from developed countries disguise themselves as investors, but in the true sense they are profit-oriented organizations, milking and draining developed countries in Africa dry of their naturally endowed resources and enslaving and depriving inhabitants of these regions of their resources and wealth. Is this the place we once called home?
I remember growing up in a clean, healthy, beautiful environment. No one dumped waste just anywhere or else you would have been dealt with by sanitation task force agents, known then as War Against Indiscipline and Corruption (WAIC). We had environmental sanitation officers and health workers, known to me then as “iko-iko,” parading from house to house inspecting the environment. What we have today is an environment where sewage water is disposed of off into public drains and streams. A state where gutters are now waste bin dumps, a state and nation where every where is now waste dumps.
This is not the place I used to call home because it was not made to be so from the initial plan but we have made it that way. We have no choice now but to live with it, and its impacts on our lives. For us to live in harmony and peace with mother earth, we need a change of heart and attitude. We need to restore the dignity of mother earth and to return to the initial plan and purpose of God for Man by living right and living an environmentally and sustainable life style (Green Living) free of greed and filled with satisfaction and dignity

www.voicesofyouth,org

Remembering Nelson Mandela and His Fight for Climate Justice

 Cadmus Atake-E              

             

Remembering Nelson Mandela and His Fight for Climate Justice By Brentin Mock Tue. December 10, 2013.

Nelson Mandela, who died last week, is best known for his fight against South African apartheid. But his long walk to freedom also included steps toward solving this mammoth problem called climate change. He envisioned a world where all people are able to live a fully dignified life, with clean air to breathe and clean water to drink—and where poor countries are not left with the repercussions of rich nation's dirty ways.
Six years ago, Mandela founded The Elders, a cross-cultural group of leaders from across the globe, including former President Jimmy Carter and former United Nations Chief Kofi Annan, to forge human rights-based solutions to worldwide problems. One of the group's top priorities is climate justice, which is not only about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also about ensuring the protection of those people and regions most vulnerable to the worst of climate change's impacts.
The morning of Mandela's death, the first thing I read when I woke up was a New York Times op-ed from Bjorn Lomborg stating that what the world's most vulnerable "really want" is something that would leave them even more insecure under a destabilized climate: cheap, dirty, coal-based energy. Lomborg cited South Africa—where Mandela lived, fought, was imprisoned, and bled for a better life for his people—as an example of a place where people want this dirty fuel.
Mandela never bought into that line of thinking. He was fully aware of how global warming had already been causing havoc on his continent, destroying through oppressive heat what Europeans hadn't already decimated through the oppressive regimes of slavery, colonization, and apartheid.
While Mandela and countless other peers such as Kwame Nkrumuah and Steve Biko were able to help Africans overcome some of these regimes, the heat created from them still remains. The pillaging of Africa's natural resources through mining (oil, coal, diamonds, etc.), deforestation, and other European industrialized forces led to the ramped up blasts of carbon dioxide and methane that trap heat in the atmosphere, reconfiguring ecosystems and destroying habitats all over the planet. If Europe's quest to exploit and export Africa's most valuable goods wasn't enough, the continent must now suffer the import of the worst of climate change's assaults to boot. It's for these reasons that Mandela aligned himself with other South African leaders who want to move beyond the oppressive extractive industries of the past and toward a cleaner, more sustainable economy, as I explained in my response to Lomborg on Thursday.

In an op-ed last month, Kofi Annan wrote: "It is essential that governments start phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, which currently account for about $485 billion a year, and are far greater than the global investment in renewable energy. While cutting subsidies is an issue for developed and developing countries alike, it remains true that the Group of 20 countries accounted for 78 per cent of global carbon emissions from fuel combustion in 2010."

An appreciation for the beauty and subsistence of nature is not something that occurred to Mandela in just the final years of his life. During his 27 years in jail, he fought to have a garden installed on the roof of his prison, where he and his fellow inmates could grow vegetables for their meals. "To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction," he wrote in his autobiography. "The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a small taste of freedom." This thinking was consistent with the African freedom fighter, Amilcar Cabral, whose liberating ideology was grounded in giving Africans agricultural and sustainable development skills, so that they could subsist from their own work.

Over the past decade, one of Mandela's prime missions was giving Africans access to clean water. In his 2002 "No Water, No Future" speech to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, Mandela said, "That our government has made significant progress in bringing potable water nearer to so many more people than was previously the case, I rate amongst the most important achievements of democracy in our country." This spirit was championed by the Nobel prize-winning, Kenyan environmental leader Wangari Maathi, who had the opportunity to address Mandela on his birthday in 2005. In that speech, Maathi said:
During the last thirty years of working with the Green Belt Movement I saw the need to give our people values. The man whose birthday we celebrate today exemplifies these values. For example, the value of service for the common good. How shall we motivate our men and women in the region, willing to sacrifice and volunteer so that others may have it better? The values of commitment, persistence and patience, to stay with it until the goal is realized…The love for the land and desire to protect it from desertification and other destructive processes.

Maathi said that Mandela's life was inspiration for her own work, as did fellow Kenyan (or American of Kenyan heritage) Barack Obama in his statement on Mandela's death last week. Mandela's influence continues to captivate many other climate justice, environmental justice, and social justice leaders across the globe. 350.org leader Bill McKibben cited the divesture campaigns against apartheid as the blueprint for his movement's own strategy against the fossil fuel industry.
But it's important that, in considering Mandela's legacy with climate change, we remember the justice component. In The Elders' strategic framework plan for 2014-2017, under the goal of eradicating poverty and increasing sustainable development, is a strategy for achieving climate justice. It reads: "We will highlight the impact of climate change, and the degradation of natural resources, particularly on poor people, and emphasise the need for inter-generational justice—not expecting future generations to pay for present irresponsibility." For world leaders to disregard this would be a dishonor to what Mandela lived for, as would any call to increase fossil fuel use in South Africa or anywhere else in the world. Those who continue to fight for climate justice should feel proud that a giant like Mandela included it in his steps in that long walk toward freedom for all people.

This story first appeared on the Grist website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
source: http://m.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/12/nelson-mandela-fight-climate-change-justice Domenico/Flickr source: http://m.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/12/nelson-mandela-fight-climate-change-justice