Who will solve the problem?
I want to talk about a problem that, if I think about it, makes me so angry. It feels like I have the knowledge how to do something in my left hand, and I am a right-handed person, so my right hand has the power to do something. But there is nothing in between that makes my two hands work together.
Or to give you another example: I grew up in a small village just at the border to Berlin, so some people might say that is actually Berlin. But time passes there like it is usual for every small village.
Anyway, we have a problem in that region with declining groundwater levels. You can see that for instance in all those dried out ponds and small lakes. Where used to be water but now just Urtica dioica is growing. Due to climate change, there are shifts in precipitation and higher evaporation during hot summers. But furthermore, a reason is that we drained the whole landscape wherever it used to be wet. First to do agriculture and now to build those one-family houses. And in addition to draining, we sealed the soil surface wherever it used to be green and water could seep into the ground to join the groundwater.
In my opinion a lot of those problems could be solved by small scale actions of municipal councils. But what happens when I go there and address this problem is that they will give me a long explanation saying, we care but you are wrong, and we are doing everything we are obligated to do, so there’s nothing to worry about. And it´s nice that young people like you are interested in what we’re doing here! But you´re wrong.
So, this is the actual right hand I was talking about before and the left hand is holding all those scientific reports that are existing about everything and sometimes about so specific things that will stay in a scientific bubble because most of them are not made for transferring into our daily business. And most of those municipal politicians claim that they know about climate change in general. They just don’t see that it has also something to do with their personal life and the decisions they make. And even if they take a look into a IPCC report it would be just too big and too far to transfer it to our small village.
To put it in a nutshell, I feel like there is a huge gap between scientists and politicians in general and especially on those small-scale levels. The problem is that there is no one and nothing to bridge between them and we’re running out of time. So my question is, who will build that bridge and who will solve the problem?Anmerkung:
03.10.2023 Abisko