Climate Corner: No peace for Earth

Dec 14, 2024

Aaron Dunbar

editorial@newsandsentinel.com

In October of 1963, Bing Crosby released his iconic rendition of the classic holiday song, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” While the song’s lyrics are in clear reference to the Nativity, it was originally written and composed by the husband and wife duo of Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne, during the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Listened to from this perspective, it becomes clear that the mention of stars “with a tail as long as a kite” and pleas to “pray for peace, people everywhere” were a direct response to the very real nuclear fears of the age.

“I had thought I’d never write a Christmas song,” Regney once recounted. “Christmas had become so commercial. But this was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the studio, the producer was listening to the radio to see if we had been obliterated. En route to my home, I saw two mothers with their babies in strollers. The little angels were looking at each other and smiling. All of a sudden, my mood was extraordinary.”

At the time of its writing, Shayne confessed that the two of them were unable to even fully perform the song themselves due to the emotional intensity of its subject matter. “Our little song broke us up. You must realize there was a threat of war at the time.”

Six decades on, and this haunting holiday tune sadly maintains the same degree of relevance as the day that it was written. Last year on Christmas Day, the birthplace of Christ was literally being bombed with munitions manufactured and provided to Israel by the United States. This year, the same administration perpetrating the genocide in Gaza is doing everything it can to provoke nuclear conflict with Russia on its way out the door, funneling billions in weapons to Ukraine and twisting Volodymyr Zelenskky’s arm to try and lower his country’s draft age to 18. Our tragic failure to learn from history and to insist on imperialist conflict escalation over diplomacy makes a song like “Do You Hear What I Hear?” truly evergreen.

As someone who genuinely loves this time of year, I find myself increasingly shaken by the jarring contrast of the holiday season with the ongoing destruction of our planet, whether through war or environmental catastrophe — or, as is often the case, through the intermingling of both.

It may be that I’m out holiday shopping, my car’s radio tuned in to Christmas carols for the entire month of December, and apropos of nothing I’ll find myself contemplating a near certain future in which the Global North’s consumption of fossil fuels has locked the world into 2C or more of global warming. This in itself would be enough to kill off 99% of the world’s coral reefs, and likely lead to the deaths of more than a billion people — and yet it increasingly seems that this figure is on the low end of what we can expect in years to come.

Walking past a mall Santa, I can’t help but think of the North and South Poles heating faster than anywhere else on the planet, or the Antarctic Doomsday Glacier that’s been melting at an accelerated rate, threatening catastrophic sea level rise.

Santa himself, I’m reminded, was largely popularized in his modern-day form by Coca-Cola, a company which has been named the largest plastic polluter on the planet for some five years in a row at this point. Evidently not satisfied with limiting themselves to a single area of environmental desecration, in 2024 Coke decided to replace their widely celebrated and iconic holiday ads with a series of visually grotesque commercials created through generative AI. This technology, as I detailed in a previous Climate Corner column, is expected to contribute to a doubling of the world’s energy needs by 2026, accelerating the already disastrous rate of global heating while also guzzling down millions of gallons of water, leading to global scarcities of this most vital resource.

It’s strange to me, as well, to watch a nation that proudly labels itself as “Christian,” celebrating the birth of Christ while living as culturally divorced from His teachings as possible. Violence and overconsumption have become our national brand, and we’ve taken to worshiping the corrupt CEOs and arms dealers making billions from the engineering of mass scale human tragedy as their own kinds of messiahs. Jesus, in His teachings, is unmistakable in His condemnation of the rich to the fires of hell, as well as His uplifting of the poor, the meek, and the foreigner upon this earth. Why, then, in 2024, when the chasm between the wealthy and poor has never been greater, when the lies and corruption of the wealthy and those in power have never been of more tragic consequence to the world than they are now, are we taught by our culture to emulate those who have gone completely insane with greed, and to reject the poor, the vulnerable, and those in need from among our number?

Finally, as yet another year of climate inaction draws to a close, I find myself wondering how many “good years” we still have left before things truly start to collapse. Even this, I know, is a privileged notion to entertain, as I lie under warm blankets in a well-heated home, with plenty of food to eat, clean water to drink, and so far mostly insulated from the ravages of the climate crisis, which have already left so many with nothing in this world. I do my best to go about my business, making plans for a future I know the generation of children being born today will likely never have. I read about yet another “hottest year on record” in the books, knowing that this will only be true until next Christmas rolls around.

In spite of all of this, my love for the true spirit of the holidays remains undamped. Noel Regney’s “pray for peace, people everywhere” is a call to action that stays with me year round. Not just to pray for it, but to personally manifest it, and to try to give back whatever amount of light into this ever darkening world that I can.

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Aaron Dunbar is a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.