Slow Down: It’s The Best Way To See Climate Change Solutions
The urgency of the climate crisis cannot be overstated. However, being too hasty may make us miss the best long-term solutions.
“How much better off would we all be if we just slowed down a little, took a good look around, and allowed ourselves to truly see what was right before us? The possibilities are endless. We might even stumble upon a possible solution to climate change that was just staring us in the face.” These were the thoughts that flashed through my mind when I happened upon a strange thing the other day.
The strange thing in question was the sight of my neighbour in Taipei walking his pet giant tortoise named Goliath. What shocked me the most was the discovery, following a brief exchange of polite words, that we were actually neighbours and our paths had indeed crossed, but I had never previously noticed him or his pet tortoise. It’s a sad reflection on the increasingly frantic lives we lead in the 21st century.
Mr. Chen (not his real name) is a high-flying executive at one of Taiwan’s top ten semiconductor companies. He shared with me why he chose Goliath for a pet; apparently, it was to help him slow down. Mr. Chen’s happiest moments, he told me, apart from his family, of course, were taking Goliath for a walk. “The glacial pace at which we walk helps me see things I would otherwise never have seen before; I am a lot more observant. Moreover, it’s good for my blood pressure,” he said.
I could not help but recall one of Aesop’s fables, the race between those unequal partners, The Tortoise and the Hare. It has much to teach us in these desperate times of climate change. I recite it here courtesy to the Library of Congress:
“A Hare was making fun of the Tortoise one day for being so slow.
“Do you ever get anywhere?” he asked with a mocking laugh.
“Yes,” replied the Tortoise, “and I get there sooner than you think. I’ll run you a race and prove it.”
The Hare was much amused at the idea of running a race with the Tortoise, but for the fun of the thing he agreed. So the Fox, who had consented to act as judge, marked the distance and started the runners off.
The Hare was soon far out of sight, and to make the Tortoise feel very deeply how ridiculous it was for him to try a race with a Hare, he lay down beside the course to take a nap until the Tortoise should catch up.
The Tortoise meanwhile kept going slowly but steadily, and, after a time, passed the place where the Hare was sleeping. But the Hare slept on very peacefully; and when at last he did wake up, the Tortoise was near the goal. The Hare now ran his swiftest, but he could not overtake the Tortoise in time.”
The tale ends with the moral:
“The race is not always to the swift.”
Applying the lesson to ourselves, it suggests to me that if we want to discover practical solutions to the climate crisis, we must accept that, while the worsening climate emergency may, for all intents and purposes, appear bleak, the race to solve it is not necessarily to the swift. Yes, it is accepted that the urgency of the climate crisis cannot be overstated; indeed, it cannot. However, there is absolutely no need for us to be hasty in our search for possible solutions. The first step, therefore, is for us to slow down in order to see things around us more clearly.
Let me tell you a tale from my own life to illustrate the point. Several years ago, my wife and I foolishly decided to visit an elderly friend of ours on an English public holiday (known as ‘a bank holiday’ in the UK). Our elderly lady friend, Mrs. Fair, now long deceased, had relocated to a village called Martock, following the death of her second husband in Buckingham. Martock is situated on the edge of the Somerset Levels, north-west of Yeovil, in the South Somerset district of England, UK. We could not have chosen the worst time to travel, as bank holidays in England are notoriously busy, with the south-west of England more so than probably any other part of the country. The south-west of England is a popular tourist destination in England during the summer.
Travelling from Buckingham, where our home was located at the time, we took the A303, a busy trunk road in southern England, running between Basingstoke in Hampshire and Honiton in Devon via Stonehenge. Stonehenge is significant to this embarrassing tale because we had travelled along the A303 many times before, but for the life of us, none of us had ever laid eyes on Stonehenge. Evidently, on the occasions we travelled on this trunk road, we probably drove a little too fast (not that I’m a speed merchant, you understand) that we took no notice of this incredible prehistoric megalithic structure on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. It’s unmissable, really.
So, imagine our absolute shock when we saw it for the very first time. We saw it all because we foolishly chose to travel on a busy August bank holiday. The bank holiday in question was both extremely busy and hot. Jemima Puddle-duck, our old VW Jetta GTI did not have air conditioning. We were compelled to get out of our car to stretch our legs and cool off as traffic had ground to a halt on a single carriageway, which passes through the Stonehenge World Heritage site. We have never lived the incident down after we told friends about how we came to see Stonehenge for the very first time.
The concept of slowing down when an eminent scholar compelled Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, to write a paper about it. Referencing a phenomenally successful podcast, Acquired, he said: “What interests me about Acquired, however, is less what they’ve accomplished than how they did it. The conventional wisdom surrounding new media ventures is that success requires frenetic busyness. You need to produce content perfectly-tailored to your audiences’ attention spans, master The Algorithm, exist on multiple platforms, and above all else, churn out content quickly to maximize your chances of stumbling into vibe-powered virality.”
And yet, he continued, “Acquired did none of this. Gilbert and Rosenthal’s podcasts are very long; the two-part treatment of Nintendo I just finished clocked in at a little under seven hours. They also publish on an irregular schedule, often waiting a month or more between episodes. Combine this with the reality that they largely ignore YouTube and have no discernible social media strategy, this venture should have long ago crashed and burned. But it instead keeps growing.”
As a podcast host myself, my interest was naturally piqued, and I wanted to find out more, as my podcast follows more or less a similar strategy. But can this strategy be effectively applied on a problem as serious as climate change, particularly in nations like Guyana that have lately found significant amounts of gas and oil, casting doubt on their ability — or willingness — to combat the issue?
Sebastiao Salgado and his astonishing work at the Instituto Terra suggests that the answer may be a resounding ‘yes!’. Instituto Terra is a not-for-profit civil organization founded in April 1998 focused on “environmental restoration and sustainable rural development of the Doce River basin”, in the Brazalian municipalities Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo. Many of you will know Sebastiao, its founder, as a world-famous Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist. I first came across his work when he documented the horrors of the 1994 Rwanda genocide in black and white. His photography is powerful, some of which appears in the following short video from Doctors Without Borders:
But, few people are aware that Sebastiao is also a successful environmentalist. In the 1990s, Sebastiao and his wife, Lelia, embarked on a project to restore part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. And in 1998, they successfully turned 17,000 acres into a nature reserve and, in the process, established Instituto Terra.
During their interview with Al Jezeera for a documentary about their work, I was astonished to learn that Sebastiao and Lelia attributed their success to slowing down and being able to see — that is, really see! And when they looked, they said they were amazed to see the answer right in front of them, staring them in the face. Their initial rushed attempts to reforest their arid ranch saw most of their early plants and seedlings die, washed away in the loose soil. But slowly, they learned the natural ways of the forest — including where the root structure can form best to add strength to the slopes. Some 25 years later, it is a paradise of dense forest, seeing native plants and animals alike return and flourish.
Now their son Juliano Salgado, himself an award-winning filmmaker, has taken on their legacy. His words in the Al Jezeera feature again stand testament to the importance of a long-term approach:
“We’ve proven that we can bring life back to places that are completely dead. And this gives us a lot of hope. All this region is having its water going away, we have a situation now where it only rains half of what it was rain, only 15 years ago, the [ground]water is disappearing as well, because of the cattle farming… creating a situation of complete aridification of the region.” The Salgado’s found that the way to bring water back was to plant trees where they used to be water sources, “we create little pools in key places where the water will accumulate and penetrates the water table underneath… we restored about 2000 water sources in the last 15 years. And we’re going to restore 4500 water sources in next five years.”.
This not only changed the landscape, but also mindsets — equally crucial if we are to solve environmental problems. “In a country like Brazil”, continues Juliano, “people are used to deforest[ing] to create value… that in order to create value, you have to cut [down] all the trees. And so at first it was very, very difficult to even you know, start chatting with [locals]. But when they realised that we bring water back, and we start changing their life back with these regenerative techniques, their mentality changes… it’s not only going to bring the rain back, it’s going to increase massively the richness of this region.” That, he says, is the “magic and power” of slow, thoughtful conservation. You can see the full Al Jazeera piece here:
But isn’t global climate change an entirely different beast to an accidental road trip to Stonehenge, or a restored valley in Brazil? Yes, but also no.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said in a recently released report that there is a “high probability” that 2024 will be another record-hot year, warning that the world’s efforts to reverse the trend have been inadequate. It is now beyond dispute that the climate emergency is upon us, and solutions to it must be found urgently. The climate emergency is, therefore, a self-authenticating crisis. It is a good crisis that we must not allow to go to waste. There’s no better time for meaningful change than this crisis, when the world is hyperventilating in a desperate search for a quick solution.
If history teaches us anything, it’s that meaningful change is often slow and difficult. It rarely unfolds through absolute victories but through partial gains and subtle shifts in our collective consciousness. History also teaches us humility and a sense of perspective. As my wife and I discovered nearly twenty years ago, when we failed to see the unmissable prehistoric megalithic structure on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, Stonehenge, it is only by slowing down that we are better able to see clearly what has always been there.
We should all take a leaf out of the tortoise’s book; who knows, the race to solve the climate crisis may be ours to win after all. All we have to do is slow down and look. The answer, like long-dried up water sources waiting to be replenished and spring forth again, may be staring us in the face.
Published in The New Climate. Follow for the latest in climate action.
