A woman in white doing yoga in front of the tv news. Extreme weather and climate-related catastrophes succeed each other on the screen, above the piano hangs porträttfotografier of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.
What can the single woman do, there in front of the tv?
Everything and nothing, it turns out. Periodically, she leaves her quiet crack as the choir director to get out in nature with a robust angle grinder and blow up electricity pylons. She becomes ”Bergskvinnan”, a ekoterrorist who are trying to combat the climate crisis and environmental degradation, and receive an almost mythical status as his country’s most hated person. One day she has a loaded conversation with his sister in simhallens dressing room. How are we, as individual human beings act? Withdraw to meditate, or literally take up the fight?
is the main protagonist of the icelandic director Benedikt erling’s film ”Woman at war”, which had Swedish premiere on Friday. When the Car spreads out its ”manifesto” flyers from the rooftops spread the unrest in the country’s leadership, but she also realizes that her fight is lönlös. Halla wanted to awaken the nation from its slumber. Instead, she becomes the people’s enemy.
”Woman at war” is an outstanding and idiosyncratic film about a complex situation, which we all find ourselves in whether we want to or not. How to think and act when our civilization is in a serious existential crisis as the society’s leaders refuse to treat as a crisis?
the exception. One of them is newly elected u.s. congressman from the Bronx, a 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has in short time become a political phenomenon in the united states and attracted great attention with his proposal for a ”Green new deal” – a comprehensive package of measures for the conversion from fossil fuels to renewable energy, which borrowed its name from Franklin D Roosevelt’s reform program in the 1930s. The proposal has been met with enormous enthusiasm, particularly among young americans, but also led many conservatives to describe Ocasio-Cortez as a samhällsmarodör in the class with the term of the ”Woman at war”. Donald Trump described recently at one of their rallies her proposal as a kind of attack against the american way of life.
The ”green new deal” has still grown to a new reality in american politics – the popular presidential candidate Bernie Sanders stands behind it, as well as many of the leading democrats. A study from Yale university shows that the objectives of the proposal enjoys broad support among those who vote democratic and republican, when the content is presented in isolation, decoupled from party and political bias.
”Green new deal” render the hope of politics and democracy. It is not as individual consumers, we will solve big social issues, but as engaged citizens. Democracy is not only the political reforms it achieves, but also the process leading up to them. Nor does Franklin D Roosevelt’s ”new deal” in the 30’s was born in a vacuum – the program would never have come into being without the massive pressure from social movements, demonstrations, and strikes – all the tools that fit within the democracy.
To choose a vegoburgare is a drop in the ocean compared with the powerful political efforts against the mighty, but media invisible emissions in the steel and cement industries.
the Power of these measures is also shown in the wave of skolstrejker initiated by the 16-year-old Greta Thunberg and now are spread across the world. In Australia, Belgium and the united states is now a whole generation of ”mini-Gretor” on the march – tens of thousands of girls and young women requires that society’s leaders begin to treat the crisis as a crisis.
what this movement will lead to societal change does not happen linearly but have their own ”tipping points” where the unexpected leaps can occur. But what we do know is that the climate crisis can only be solved if we restore the belief in the policy of large-scale opportunities. We live today in a consumer culture that wants to convince us that the only impression we can make is by changing where we shop and what we eat. But also aware consumption is of course, the american author David Wallace-Wells recently noted in the New York Times, a kind of neo-liberal guise: a kind of surrogate for the necessary joint action. The individual’s individual lifestyle choices are ultimately negligible compared to what the policy can accomplish. To select a vegoburgare is a drop in the ocean compared with the powerful political efforts against the mighty, but media invisible emissions in the steel and cement industries.
It is only the policy that has the ability to ”multiply morals”. In this realization there is also a way to escape from the destructive privatisation of the climate change issue. There are strong economic interests that profit that we turn the us in the pangs of conscience over our inability to change our own lifestyles and hence in practice to accept a status quo of the state of things.
the new green deal and the ”mini-Gretornas” march across the world shows what is the purpose of the policy. They show that politics is not a finished project but a process. The vast majority of people want nothing more than to do the right thing. The policy task is to ensure that it will be easy for as many people as possible to make it.
Read more by Björn Wimans chronicles of the climate crisis – and about the book ”Late on earth. 33 thoughts on the world’s biggest news” .
