OPINION: At last, a bureaucrat in a three-piece suit who speaks for the trees

We are in need of water or have too much of it; in need of heat or desperately need to cool down; we need the winds to blow far more gently. The dilemma of extremes, soon to be your dilemma, my dilemma, our dilemma. What’s the greatest risk to humanity? According to the World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Risk Report: “extreme weather events.”

Perhaps. What we are certain of is that researchers are cranking out doom and gloom reports in the extreme. Extremely disturbing. And I had thought that nuclear proliferation in a world governed by thin-skinned autocrats would surely top the list. (But then again, look at who produced this global risk report.)

Regardless, Elon Musk won’t save us. I am beginning to believe that David Lammy, though, might. Lammy is the U.K. foreign secretary and he has boldly placed the preservation of (Mother) nature as the centerpiece of the U.K.’s foreign policy. “While I am Foreign Secretary, action on the climate and nature crisis will be central to all that the Foreign Office does.” He then planted his heels with added conviction, “the threat may not feel as urgent as a terrorist, or an imperialist autocrat, but it is more fundamental. It is systemic, pervasive and accelerating towards us.”

Anyone listening? How about you, Anthony Blinken?

While there is nothing novel about pandering to the environmentalist electorate, what Lammy has done, along with other cabinet members, is shift the menu item from a side order of cheese and crackers to the coveted main course. U.K.’s Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, underscored this shift, informing a group of energy executives that “the government is prepared to take on the blockers, the delayers, the obstructionists.”

To my mind, that posture is not at all extremist, but long overdue pragmatism. In a very real sense, we are already too late in steering policies and culture away from the unfolding environmental calamities. We have an entire generation in their 20s and early 30s with very little sense of belonging and an obsessive drive towards escapism. Handy access to a stream of distractions is essential when the main course is gutted buildings, forests, and bodies, and entire species of animals that are no more. In their minds, the human species will not be exempt.

By calling the collapse of the biosphere what it is, a “systemic threat,” Lammy is injecting a sense of resilience and the possibility of hope into what is now a void.

I have hope that other leaders will step out onto the same political limb. There are temptations to retreat into the safe cocoons of empty rhetoric — which tend toward either the cerebral or the wallet. On the one hand, the academics immobilize us with ponderous theories of “ambiguous loss” that we must learn to live with losses that keep coming and will never be resolved. Hmmm … how sagacious. And the more prominent rhetoric about the need to prevent climate change because of its economic impacts, the burden on public debt, the end of America’s financial prowess.

These are slogans, speeches, intended to comfort and reassure us all that we will and must end what is harmful to nature, while at the same time increasing the oil-drenched comforts and conveniences so dear to our hearts. Those with courage to follow will avoid the fairy tales.

After years of globetrotting, Broadman finds himself writing from his perch on the Palouse and loving the view. His policy briefs can be found at US Renew News: https://www.usrenewnews.org.