News & Articles

On Monday, April 7, The Guardian ran a piece titled “We passed the 1.5C climate threshold. We must now explore extreme options.” David King, a scientist, talks about the world struggling to face the “starkest realities” of climate change and that we’re not meeting our goals to keep global temperatures from continuing to rise. King wrote, “The climate crisis is worsening before our eyes.”

Two days later, on April 9, the phys.org website shared an article about the U.N.’s 2025 Interconnected Disaster Risks Report entitled “Turning Over A New Leaf.” The report states that many of today’s solutions are “surface-level fixes” that aren’t creating lasting change. 

It recommends that we need to embrace a more holistic look at what lies at the heart of our human actions and how true or transformative change can be achieved. 

The report also talks about “inner levers” where we adapt a mindset shift from just mitigating the harms of climate change and focusing only on preventing the worst to “striving for the best.” 

The climate news from around the world continues to be more alarming and discouraging. On April 9, the global CO2 level was 429.12 ppm. Just three years ago in April, the level was 418.53 ppm. 

Also, numerous news outlets reported that 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the 10 hottest years on record were the last 10 years. 

Between March 31 and April 10, the Daily Climate website, New York Times and  scientificamerican.com ran stories about the financial and insurance sectors expressing growing concerns about climate change. 

Morgan Stanley analysts proposed a 3 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures while a Allianz SE board member talked about a 2.2 - 3.4 degree Celsius increase. Also, the 2024 U.N. Emissions Group report stated that the world was likely to warm 3.1 degrees Celsius this century.

The April 10 climate report on the climateandeconomy.com website highlighted the rise in global sea-surface temperatures, rivers drying up in Pakistan, wildfires breaking out in the Far East and Caucasus regions of Russia, ice melt and double jet streams are making Europe hotter, and hottest days are recorded in India for early April.

Yes, most of this news is coming from other parts of the world. But all of these climate events will eventually impact our city by the lake. 

At this moment, can we learn anything from what Duluth’s city council identified as a climate emergency in April, 2021? 

In five days, we will have another Earth Day. It’s the one day on the calendar where we’re supposed to think about our relationship to this planet and how we can be better stewards in saving it for future generations. 

In their book To Our Friends, the Invisible Committee wrote, “That catastrophe is existential, affective and metaphysical first of all. It resides in Western man’s incredible estrangement from the world, an estrangement that demands, for example, that he become the master and possessor of nature - one only seeks to possess what we fear. It’s not for nothing that he has placed so many screens between himself and the world. By cutting himself off from what exists, Western man has made it into his desolate expanse, this dreary, hostile, mechanical, absurd nothingness which he must ceaselessly devastate, through his labor, his cancerous activism, his shallow hysterical agitation.” 

When we wake up on Earth Day, we could begin the day by reflecting on how we have estranged ourselves from this planet, how we have cut ourselves off from what exists around us, and how we’ve placed so many screens between ourselves and Earth. 

Instead of trying to be the master and possessor of the planet, we could look at Earth as our teacher, guide, elder, mentor, partner and companion. Instead of continuing to create more distance and a greater sense of disconnection between ourselves and the planet, we could rethink about how we choose to live on this planet which we call “home.”

How do we reconnect and readapt? How do we reclaim and recover our relationship with the planet? How do we come back down to earth? 

Here in Duluth, we can turn over a new leaf by exploring more transformative approaches to living on this planet. We can look at our inner levers and figure out how to shift our collective mindset to adopting a more holistic and humanitarian lifestyle. 

We can strive to remember that we belong to the Earth and not that the Earth belongs to us.