Mia Mottley, Meaning Without Motherhood, Making Monthlies Greener and More
Stride into 2023 with these four women leaders who didn't sit around waiting for permission
Dear Human of Planet Earth,
It’s 2023 and we’re privileged today to be alive. Join me in taking a look at four women leading on different fronts! Each offers us something to consider or act on as we continue our journey through the early Anthropocene.
All four women hold a vision they articulate - and beyond words, a vision they are working towards.
Mia Mottley - PM of Barbados, leading on climate finance for ‘developing nations’
Mia Mottley first came to my attention with her responses to BBC interviewer Zeinab Badawi. Later I learned that Mottley had come to power with pro-active plans and proposals that didn’t await permission or guidance from larger conventional powers - because, well, leaders lead.
At COP 27 Mia Mottley was a leading voice on the ‘Loss and Damage’ discussions. But we’ll talk about Loss and Damage another day.
Today I invite you to listen to her words at the Glasgow COP 26 if you haven’t heard them before:
“National solutions to Global Problems do not work.”
“There can be no peace and prosperity if one third of the world literally prospers while the other two-thirds live under siege and face calamitous threats to our well-being.”
With reference to the unlocking of money towards solving the climate crisis, she emphasised that US$25 trillion was spent over the last 13 years by Central Banks of the wealthiest countries in quantitative easing, mostly in response to the 2008-2009 financial crisis but also in fighting the pandemic.
She proposes US$500B a year put away for 20 years as SDRs, put in a trust to finance the transition, rather than the $US50B proposed for adaption. She points out that 500 billion is merely 2% of 25 trillion.
Mia Mottley reminds us that the failure of climate finance commitments is measured in the loss of life. She doesn’t hesitate to describe this as immoral and unjust.
And what’s the money for, if not for serving people, for building resilience in the face of an unstable climate?
Consider Friederike Otto’s words on social resilience and climate change as a social issue
‘Fredi’, as Dr Friederike Otto’s friends call her, is part of a team of rapid reaction force climate scientists. Originally from Germany, she’s a senior lecturer at the Grantham Insititute for Climate Change and Environment at Imperial College, London.
You can read more about her work here and here.
Just as PM Mottley emphasises there can be no ‘national solutions to global problems,’ Dr Otto underlines that technical solutions are not sufficient. Drawing on her work and observations from Nigeria to Germany, she says:
“It is the vulnerability of a population and a region, Otto says, that is crucial to whether an extreme weather event becomes a human disaster.”
And so, she emphasises building resilience into our communities and systems.
Otto says she tries to avoid being engulfed by the overwhelming nature of climate crisis impacts.
“I am an optimistic person. It makes me want to do more to make an impact, to get the message across, so that the changes that we need will happen.”
Otto could be likened to Dr Randall Mindy, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the film Don’t Look Up. Mindy warns that an asteroid will hit the planet in six months, but finds no one wants to hear his message.
But Otto disliked the film’s metaphor. “I felt the analogy was wrong – that there is this big physical threat, which would be fine if only we could invest in technology to fix it.
“Climate change is not like that. It is a social issue we will only be able to deal with if we invest in social systems, make our societies more resilient, less vulnerable and change our economic system from burning fossil fuels.”
- Source
Little things are also essential aspects of the big picture:
Meet Ruby Raut of Wuka’s Wonderful World of Green Monthlies
Just joking. Sorry, Ruby.
Her company’s really called WUKA thankfully - and NOT Wuka’s Wonderful World of Green Monthlies - but they do use Wake-up and Kick-Ass as a slogan.
Ruby Raut is WUKA’s founder, a Nepalese-grown environmental scientist and entrepreneur whose business helps us reduce plastic pollution.
Founded in 2017, WUKA is a female-led start up, making the UK’s first ever reusable and leak-proof period wear.
WUKA stands for Wake Up Kick Ass because we believe that nothing should hold you back on your period.
We believe that periods should not cost the earth. Equality, social and environmental responsibility are at the heart of everything we do.
- Source
Ruby herself is an inspiration but I’ll leave you to read more about her here.
Meanwhile, consider this:
You may hardly buy plastic bags anymore but one pack of pads is equivalent to five plastic bags!
A year’s worth of disposable pads and tampons for one person produces 8.9kg of CO2 emissions, the same as charging a mobile phone more than 1000 times.
To date, WUKA customers have prevented an estimated 3500 tonnes of CO2, the same as planting 60000 trees, which is amazing but we can go much further.
If 15 million women and individuals who menstruate in the UK switched to WUKA Period Pants, we would save 4.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Or more than 2.5 million return economy class flights from London to New York.
Periods are personal but what could be more personal than our decisions to bring/not bring children into this world?
Children give meaning to life. But can childlessness do the same? Therapist Emma Palmer would say so
And I wouldn’t argue.
I’ve been reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning over the holidays. Frankl believed our search for meaning is an individual one. There is no answer to ‘what is the meaning of life?’ Instead, we must ask what life asks of us - and in this way we find our meaning. Naturally, what life asks of us is a personal answer to a person-specific question.
The love, responsibility and duty that becoming a parent can inspire, does give meaning to life. In a crisis, this meaning can propel a person to find ways to survive, to even choose to persevere with life under the pressures of suicidal urges and despair.
But can choosing childlessness in itself be meaningful?
The English Buddhist Emma Palmer believes so. For some people, the choice to be child-free is an answer to what life asks of them. To live and die, knowing that they have lived without choosing to bring another human into this world, who will by necessity, have a carbon footprint of their own, is a purposeful contribution in itself.
If that thought makes you cringe, remember life doesn’t ask the same thing of each of us.
Emma writes about ‘othering’ and childlessness in this short blog post:
On being childfree and other ‘othernesses’ (kamalamani.co.uk)
She also wrote Other Than Mother, published in 2016, about choosing childlessness.
Here’s a quote from Other Than Mother, and it’s a beautiful way to end my letter to you:
“What is increasingly clear to me is that the life work of each of us is to find out what to do with the time and health we have available to us. I do not think that we are all on the planet to have children. In fact, I am starting to wonder whether in our generation, a growing minority of us are here to start to redress the attention we pay to our relationship with the earth and other elements, and our effect on them as a human specifies, rather than creating more new lives.”
- Source: childlessbymarriageblog.com
Whatever your choices and however things unfold for you this year, I wish you a 2023 where you confirm, affirm and enrich a sense of your life being meaningful.
With Love,
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Radical,
Croydon,
London,
That patch of earth known today as the United Kingdom
Lat +51.51 Long, -0.118