I watched a TED talk by popular Nigerian-born author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the other night, and what she had to say really resonated with me.

Adichie introduced the concept of the “single story”: the tendency to uncritically embrace received wisdom. She talks about how she found her authentic cultural voice; she speaks of the inherent risks of limiting perspective by only listening to or reading the “single story” and warns that we risk a critical misunderstanding if we hear only a single story about another person or country, as she did many times, and as her college room-mate in the US did.

With the Western Cape in the grip of unprecedented drought and warnings of “only 100 days of water left” abounding, my thoughts turned to climate change and how we understand it. Essentially, we have the climate-change deniers on the one side (I am not one of them), and those who believe that climate change is happening on the other side.

The question though is: are we misunderstanding or simplifying climate change too much? A few years ago it was all about “global warming” and even though we now refer to “climate change” instead, the underlying reasons still seem to be the same “single story”: “Climate change is global warming caused by too much CO2 in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. If we cease burning fossil fuels for energy and instead use renewable energy, we can stop climate change from happening.”

The truth though, is that climate change is not a single story; it is not happening just because of the CO2 levels, there is a lot more to it and once more people realise this, we may be able to truly grapple with the environmental challenges with which we are faced and really do something constructive about reversing the problem.

We need to shrug off the belief that changing to renewable energy alone will right the problem, and look further, look to nature and how nature handles various scenarios and take our lead from the environment as to how to restore environmental balance and thereby sustain our climate.

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