Unheeded: What god has Greta Thunberg offended, I wonder, to be afforded so many opportunities to deliver so many chilling warnings of climate catastrophe to so many world leaders – to so little effect? Like the Trojan seeress, Cassandra, she looks into the future and sees the ruin that awaits her generation, bears witness fearlessly to the truth, and is viciously derided for her trouble.
IT WAS CASSANDRA’S divinely administered curse: to see the
future – but not to be believed. To secure the daughter of the King of Troy’s
affections, the god Apollo bestowed upon her the gift of prophecy. When
Cassandra, unsecured, refused his amorous advances, the angry god spat into her
mouth: corrupting his own gift and sealing the princess’s fate.
Poor Cassandra, when the people of Troy, delirious at their
“victory” over the Greeks, hauled within the city walls the mighty wooden horse
left behind by their erstwhile besiegers as a “gift”, the seeress ran at it
with axe and fire. The angry Trojans restrained Cassandra – calling her mad.
The Greek warriors hidden in the horse’s belly, fated to kindle the proud
towers of Ilium, were spared.
What god has Greta Thunberg offended, I wonder, to be
afforded so many opportunities to deliver so many chilling warnings of climate
catastrophe to so many world leaders – to so little effect? Like the Trojan
seeress, she looks into the future and sees the ruin that awaits her generation
– and bears witness fearlessly to the truth.
Oh how she speaks! Sometimes with the cold detachment of the
judge who looks down upon the convicted killer in the dock, conscious only of
her duty to pass the sentence mandated by Mother Nature’s, immutable laws.
On other occasions, such as her speech to the Climate Summit
in New York on Tuesday morning, Greta’s ice is mixed with fire. The pig-tailed
16-year-old’s voice trembles with emotions that threaten to overthrow her at
any moment. Somehow, she regains control of herself, of her voice. Enough to
pronounce her crushing judgement upon the generation who, by their obdurate
inaction, have stolen their children’s future.
“We will never forgive you!”
Greta Thunberg is not the only player in the Climate Change
tragedy upon whom has been laid the dreadful burden of Cassandra. Apollo has
also spat into the mouths of the scientists.
All over the world they have laboured to collect the data.
New Zealand scientist, Dave Lowe, started recording the slow but steady rise in
atmospheric carbon dioxide as far back as 1973. For more than forty years these
men and women of Science have watched the evidence accumulate. Knowing that the
possibility of their being in error was getting smaller and smaller with every
paper that was presented, every report that was published.
They have peered into the future. They know what lies ahead.
The melting ice caps; the rising seas; the deadly storms. The Four Horsemen of
the Apocalypse: Famine, Pestilence, War and Death have all acknowledged their
foresight with a studied nod of their terrifying heads. The scientists, too,
have cried out a warning but, like Cassandra – and Greta – they have not been
heeded.
Poor Greta. On Tuesday morning she told the assembled
leaders of the world’s nations:
“You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency.
But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that, because if
you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you
would be evil and that I refuse to believe.”
No, not evil, Greta. Say rather that we are enchanted. We
can hear you but we cannot act. In the fairy tales you invoked so angrily in
your speech, characters rendered so unaccountably immobile would be said
to be “spellbound”.
What sort of spell could possibly be powerful enough to bind
the whole of humanity: commoners as well as kings? To that question Greta’s
speech also contained an answer:
“People are suffering. People are dying and dying ecosystems
are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can
talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth”.
Ah, yes – the money. And more than the money. The dream of
wealth without consequences; power without restraint. That is the spell, Greta.
That has always been the spell. And we cannot break it.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, Edward Arlington
Robinson (1869-1935) was also captivated by the legend of Cassandra. In his
eponymous poem he writes:
The power is
yours, but not the sight;
You see not upon
what you tread;
You have the ages
for your guide,
But not the wisdom
to be led.
Certainly not by a 16-year-old schoolgirl.
This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily
Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 September 2019.
