From Taking to Giving: Why the Climate Emergency Demands a Human Transformation

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Since our inception on this planet, many of us — not all, thank goodness — have taken from others. This is not a comfortable truth, but it is a truth worth facing plainly, because the times we are living through demand honesty more than comfort.

The Oldest Story We Have

From the time of cavemen and cavewomen, we have taken what others hunted and gathered — sometimes out of genuine scarcity, sometimes out of a lack of responsibility to hunt and gather for ourselves.

This isn’t speculation. The oldest known evidence of organized human violence is a cemetery at Jebel Sahaba, in what is now northern Sudan, dating back at least 13,400 years. Archaeologists found 61 skeletons — men, women, and children — with broken bones, smashed skulls, and stone projectile points still embedded in their remains. What makes the finding grimmer is that this wasn’t a single battle. The injuries show decades of repeated raids, ambushes, and sneak attacks between neighboring groups. And the likely driver? Around 13,000 years ago, the once-lush Nile Valley began to dry up. Researchers now believe what may be humanity’s earliest known war was driven by resource scarcity tied to climate change. (Read more about Jebel Sahaba)

Let that sink in: one of the first chapters of our story may have been a climate-driven fight over shrinking resources. We have been here before.

Why We Built Moats

Throughout history, taking things from others has been a de facto reality. Why else are there moats around castles? A moat is simply a deep, wide ditch — sometimes filled with water — dug to keep raiders, siege towers, and battering rams away from the walls. Entire villages and cities have been devastated for resources and, yes, for ideology too. The ideology part is a different blog post, as much of its roots lie in religion. Here, I’m talking about the taking itself.

Every wall, every moat, every locked door in human history is an admission: we have never fully trusted one another not to take.

The Modern Face of Taking

Fast forward to today. The taking continues — robberies, burglaries, outright stealing from others. And no, it isn’t always scarcity or irresponsibility. Sometimes it’s a measure of how well-off others are and how we are not. Sometimes it’s bling, bling — I want to be cool and have the things so-and-so has. Status itself has become a reason to covet and to take.

But here’s the pivot point of this post: times are changing, and Earth’s resources are dwindling. We probably won’t be able to dazzle each other in the future by sporting what we have and others don’t, stoking jealousy and envy. When the wells run low and the harvests fail, status symbols lose their shine. We will have to respond from our hearts and with sincerity, because the Climate and Ecological Emergency is worsening — and it is going to require us to need each other on a deeper and more meaningful level.

The Climate Refugee Emergency Is Already Here

This is not a distant forecast. It is unfolding now.

• The World Bank’s Groundswell report projects that by 2050, climate change could force 216 million people across six world regions to migrate within their own countries — including up to 86 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 49 million in East Asia and the Pacific, 40 million in South Asia, 19 million in North Africa, 17 million in Latin America, and 5 million in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Even under the most climate-friendly scenario, some 44 million people could still be displaced. (World Bank Groundswell Report)

• Syria offers a sobering preview. Between 2006 and 2010, the country endured one of the most severe droughts in its recorded history. Agricultural production collapsed, rural families migrated en masse to cities, and the overwhelmed urban centers became tinderboxes of economic distress and dissent. (Read the analysis)
• America has its own memory of this. During the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, drought and dust storms — worsened by poor land stewardship — drove roughly 2.5 million people out of the Plains states in what became the largest migration in American history. Families packed everything they owned into cars and headed west, only to be met with suspicion and scorn, branded “Okies” and “Arkies” no matter where they came from. (PBS: Mass Exodus from the Plains)

Notice the pattern: when people are displaced, the receiving communities often close ranks. The displaced become “the other.” That is the scavenger dynamic in reverse — not just taking from others, but refusing to share with those who have lost everything.

The Human Faces Behind the Numbers

Statistics can numb us. Stories wake us up.

Jorge A., a farmer in Guatemala, watched his land turn against him. For five years it almost never rained. Then it rained all at once, and the river flooded his sprouting corn. He signed away his tin-roof hut for a $1,500 advance in okra seed — a last, desperate bet. The rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die too. (Read Jorge’s story)

Betsina Petikotik, a fisherman from Lermatang, Indonesia, put it simply: the weather used to be manageable, and now it has turned against the people who depend on the sea for their living. (Climate & Migration Coalition testimonies)

And from Shishmaref, Alaska, a village being swallowed by the sea, one resident facing relocation spoke of the sadness of leaving the only home they had ever known, a place where everyone knows each other.

These are not scavengers. These are people who worked hard, lost everything to forces beyond their control, and now must depend on the goodwill of strangers. The question the Climate Emergency asks of us is: what kind of strangers will we be?

The Other Inheritance

Here is what gives me hope: taking is only half of our inheritance. The other half is cooperation.

Over a century ago, the naturalist Pyotr Kropotkin argued in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution that cooperation — not competition — was the true engine of survival for species, including ours. Mutual aid, he wrote, is the surest path to safety and progress for a community, body, mind, and spirit alike.

Rachel Carson, whose work helped launch the modern environmental movement, reminded us that humanity is part of nature, and that our war against nature is, in the end, a war against ourselves.

And as UN humanitarian leaders have said of our present moment: millions of children, women, and men have been driven to the edge of survival by conflict and disaster, and they desperately need our help.

The Transformation We Need

I believe we need a real human transformation in each of our lives — one where we become a better version of ourselves by helping others. We should be empowering and encouraging one another through these dark times, and make no mistake: they are, in fact, dark. The Climate Refugee Emergency is starting to underscore where we are headed, and we definitely don’t want much of society to become scavengers — picking over what remains, taking what others worked hard for.

The alternative is older than Jebel Sahaba’s violence and more durable than any castle wall: we help each other. We share what we have. We meet the displaced not with moats but with open gates. We measure ourselves not by what we’ve accumulated but by what we’ve given.

The age of taking is running out of things to take. The age of giving — if we choose it — never will.

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