Where is our voice, the demands for change?

Chrissy Hamill

The times are changing.

Sometimes, I wish I'd been young in the 1960s.

A rather impractically ridiculous montage springs to mind, of sunflower fields, protests, bra-burning, communes, and Bob Dylan, the psychedelic swirl of a youth movement burning for justice, for freedom and for meaning in a world ruled by greed.

In my romanticised world of armpit hair and ankle bracelets, I would have fitted right in.

Perhaps it's only in my imagination, but it feels like my generation has lost something.

Underneath the constant buzz and throb of modern culture, there is an odd quiet.

The sterile vast expanses of the shopping mall and all its waste and excess linger eerily - the infomercials' inane chatter and vapid smiles all a sickly facade, while stick thin brown babies die quietly in the background.

Where is our voice, the demands for change, for justice? It's not as if we are lacking something to get fired up about.

Our planet's ability to provide for us is crumbling at our own hands, and the lives of billions swing precariously in the balance.

Yet along we speed, clinging grimly to the economic train of progress as the railway tracks rapidly run out beneath us.

Climate change, peak oil, water scarcity, poverty, population, the slow but sure breakdown of the very ecosystems that sustain us - these issues merge together in an infinitely complicated mess.

We are not entirely apathetic, but the problems are so deep, so all-encompassing, sometimes it's hard to find a place to start.

I truly hate having to mention climate change.

It carries with it about the same amount of awkward emotional baggage that I get when I say I'm a Christian.

But this has become personal.

This is not about a few extra days of sunshine a year, or the ice caps melting.

These are changes in our ecosystems so significant that even the most conservative estimates put the extinction rate of the Earth's species at 50% by 2050.

For humans, that looks like the disappearance of people's water supplies, widespread famine and flooding, and sea level rise that will leave many coastal areas and nations uninhabitable in the near future.

Scientists are telling us if we want to give ourselves even a 50% chance of avoiding catastrophic, runaway global climate change, we need to stabilise global emissions by 2015.

If emissions have not stabilised by then, we have little chance of avoiding a 2degC rise in temperature, at which point, changes will be significant enough to set off a process of runaway climate destabilisation without any input from human beings.

One would think, given the situation that we should be making some very serious changes right now, but taking action is not as easy as it might sound.