Today, on the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month we commemorate the end of the First World War, the “war to end all wars.” Twenty-one years later that statement was hubris. What is now commemorated as “Remembrance Day” across Europe, and Veteran’s Day in the United States, was not an end. It was only the end of a beginning.
The election of President Obama a year ago generated great enthusiasm that a strong, new climate deal would be struck in Copenhagen in 2009. Yet as we get closer to the start of this meeting in December, my mind is brought back to Remembrance Day.
To paraphrase Churchill, Copenhagen will not be the end of greenhouse gas emissions. It will not be the beginning of the end. It will not be the end of the beginning.
Now it can be, at best, only a start at a beginning.
That is no reason for us to abandon Copenhagen or for the President to stay away. As the trenches, cemeteries, monuments and memorials across Flanders remind us, the consequences of allowing political forces unwind on their own can be far, far worst than we want to imagine. It would be well on this Remembrance Day to recall not only the end of the war, but the beginning. To reflect, for a moment, on whether there was a point where different choices could have been made, but weren’t.
Historians of the First World War usually focus on the “inexorable forces” that brought the actions of a small band of Serbian nationalists in Sarajevo to a bloody collision of the world’s major powers. As H.G. Wells noted, many sensed the impending danger. As “business as usual” takes us to higher and higher atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases going “over the top,” may be for us, as it was for so many on Flanders” fields, a one way trip.
Today, it is hard to think of a place further from hell, than Passendale, a Flemish village surrounded by rolling, green fields. Photographs and words from the war supply what imagination does not:
“There was not a sign of life of any sort. Not a tree, save for a few dead stumps which looked strange in the moonlight. Not a bird, not even a rat or a blade of grass.”
– R.A. Colwell, Private, Passendale, 1918
Yet there is no photographic evidence from the future to “prove” the dire forecasts where temperatures have increased by 3 or 4 or 5 degrees. It calls upon imagination.
Herman Wouk wrote, “The end of war is remembrance.” The beginning of concerted global action on climate change may be the ability to imagine that places, like Passendale, could be hell again – this time in a more literal sense.
We have a historic opportunity to make peace with future generations. Let’s take it.
Mark Griffin Smith is professor of economics at Colorado College and currently a Schuman-Fulbright EU Scholar studying European climate policy in Brussels. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
