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The Situation is very serious

I am deeply worried about what is going to happen.

What worries me mostly is that so many people seem to not to be worried. In spite of all we know about what is happening, very few people seem to realize that there is an urgent need to make fundamental changes in the way we conduct our lives. If we want to continue to have what we like to call our "civilization". In media much is said and written about all the problems that are awaiting us if we do not manage to reduce the climate emissions in a sufficient degree, and parallell to this the same media are filled up with advertising for travelling to the most exotic places. The amount of plane traffic in the world only continues to increase.

Søren Kierkegaard once wrote that when the world is coming to an end people are not going to undertstand it. He compares it to the the situation when a theatre starts to burn, the curtain goes down, and somebody from the staff comes out on the stage and tells the audience that a fire has broken out, and everybody has to leave the theatre. "And the Audience believes it is a part of the performance, and is screaming with laughter."

As early as fifty years ago I thought that the way the way people were living at that time could not continue in the long run. Sooner or later there would come a breakdown. But what I was unable to realize was that that breakdown would be so evident already in my own lifetime.

I was among the students that made the exhibition named "And after us..." which was set up at the University square in Oslo the summer of 1969 and travelled around the country later the same year. It was about the same problems that are just even more evident today, with over-population, over-exploitation of the planets resources, pollution of the cities, the air and the oceans. To make that exhibition was a very meaningful thing to do, but it has to be admitted, it did not lead to anything in the field of political changes.

Some people critisize the youth who in our days skip the school and instead make actions against non-existent willingness of the authorities to make the necessary changes. In my opinion those critics have obviously not understood how serious the situation is. Instead of critisizing them we should recognize that those young people take responsibility and engage themselves in how we are going to deal with the problems we are facing.

On the other hand, some of these young people have responded to the critic about skipping school by asking why they should need an education when they have no future anyway. That is wrong. The future is in no way cancelled, and they will need all the education they can get in order to deal with the problems they are going to face.

This is the only planet we have. Look how beautiful it is. Believing that mankind can move to for instance Mars (which is an ice cold planet dominated by desert landscape) is completely unrealistic.

Still there is a tiny possibillity that the world will manage to keep the increasing temperature under the proposed 2-degree target. But even then, and even more if we do not manage, the young generation is going to meet great challenges in their lives. If there is one thing that generation will need now, it is first of all education. If the world is going to keep at least some of the standards of living that we are having now, necessary infrastructure and instititions, it is a propostion that there are educated people who can deal with these challenges.

Some people think that it is no point in it if a only few of us try to change the way we are living, quit plane traveling, quit eating meat, quit buying so much clothes etc, as long as so many others continue to do those things, and besides that, big nations like China and USA continue burning coal and driving big Suvs. That is right, it is not sufficient if you and I do what we can, if we do not also make the authorities and dominating companies all over the world to do the same thing. But it is also clear that every human beeing has a personal responsibility, and the more of us who try to do something with these problems, the more increases the possibility that we will be able to change the direction of the development. But we do not have much time, far less than the majority has realized.