Isis arose in the shadow of climate change



Isis arose in the shadow of climate change.

Climate change played a key role in the rise of the Islamic State.

Humans instinctively search for order and stability, two things that climate change both threaten and which has been promised by Isis, even if it meant bending to a rather thuggish bureaucracy.

Such is our hunger for order and stability, and a sense of community, that is seems that we are prepared for forego many usual benefits to bring that sense of normality back into our lives.

Ironically, the “party” we have enjoyed to the past two centuries as we have gouged ourselves on the believed inexhaustible benefits of fossil fuels energy, have embedded our lives with a fanciful idea of normality and most of us have no understanding of what the “new normal” will be or why we should embrace it.

The idea of normal being implemented by Isis is not only wrong in the extreme, but so restrictive and limiting that the idea of a contented life is not on the landscape at all.

Escape from catastrophic climate change is most certainly going to require order and stability, but most certainly not that presently enforced upon people in those areas it now has in its control.

Even living with climate change is going to demand order and control and within that a powerful sense of community and an inner contentment that is absent in every way from the Isis idea of community – Robert McLean.

Read The Guardian story that discusses what is behind Isis - “The Isis papers: behind 'death cult' image lies a methodical bureaucracy.”