Post on 28-Jan-2023
The Shadow of the Future – Witness against the Beast
2013
Dr Peter Critchley
From
Critchley, P. 2013., The Common Ground: Essays in Ecology vol 1 AGH – Anthropogenic Global
Heating: The Scream Piercing through Nature [e-book] Available through: Academia website
<http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Books
The Shadow of the Future – Witness against the Beast
2013
I begin by counting yet another white swan. In The Guardian of 9 March
2013, the headline reads ‘Large CO2 rise sounds climate change alarm’. John
Vidal writes that ‘the chances of the world holding temperature rises to
2C - the level considered "safe" by scientists - appear to be fading, with
US monitors reporting the second greatest annual rise in carbon dioxide
emissions in 2012.’ Read above and you’ll find that scientists have
been warning us about this for years. There has been too great a
reliance upon governmental action, international agreements, targets
and institutional tinkering in addressing the crisis in the climate system
and far too little attention paid to behavioural change on the part of
human beings. The attitude seems to be that human beings will not
change, politics and business will carry on as usual and that nothing
fundamental will change. In which case, the failure to meet the 2C
warming goal has been all too predictable. The big surprise is that this
should come as news to scientists. Did they really take the world of
government and politics at its word? Scientists are now said to be
‘gloomy’ about the prospects of achieving the 2C warming goal. At a time
when ambitious reductions in carbon emissions are required, the second-highest
increase in CO2 has been recorded. Scientists are in no doubt that fossil
fuel use is the cause of this increase. In an educational context,
learning means not an accumulation and acquisition of knowledge but a
change in behaviour. Nothing, absolutely nothing, has been learned.
Nothing has been done. We are in a worse position now than when the
first climate conferences began. We have more knowledge. But it has
been made plain that governmental, institutional and psychological
inertia is hardwired into the world of politics and business – and people
lack the nerve and the nous to create an alternative of their own. In
which case, we really are facing what Clive Hamilton called the requiem for the
species. (Requiem for a Species Clive Hamilton 2010 earthscan).
Pieter Tans leads the greenhouse gas measurement team for the US
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He states that
CO2 measured at Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii jumped by 2.67 parts per
million (ppm) in 2012 to 395ppm. The record is an increase of 2.93ppm in
1998. The 2.67ppm increase is the second highest on record.
The news of the increase comes at the same time as a study in
Science examining global surface temperatures for the past 1,500 years
warns that "recent warming is unprecedented". UN climate chief,
Christiana Figueres, is clear: "Rapid climate change must be countered
with accelerated action." One wonders to whom these remarks are
addressed. Past warnings have fallen on deaf ears. At this stage we
need to ask just who is listening anymore? Who are the game
changers?
Pieter Tans is in no doubt that an increase in fossil fuel use is the
major factor behind the increase. "It's just a testament to human
influence being dominant. The prospects of keeping climate change
below that [2C goal] are fading away."
Preliminary data for last month show CO2 at the highest level ever
recorded at Mauna Loa, a remote volcano in the Pacific. Last month the
level reached a record 396.80 ppm with a jump of 3.26ppm since
February 2012.
What is of most concern is the accelerating rise of CO2
concentrations in the atmosphere. According to the observatory, the
average increase in C02 levels between 1959 and the present was
1.49ppm per year. The average annual rate of increase for the past 10
years has been 2.07ppm – which is more than double that in the 1960s.
The trend is upwards, despite commitments by the world’s governments
to restrain fossil fuel emissions. And this in the middle of an economic
recession.
The Mauna Loa findings coincide with a new peer-reviewed study
which looks at the pledges made by governments to reduce CO2
emissions. This study, by the Dutch government's scientific advisers,
shows that for there to be even a medium chance of limiting warming to
2C, rich countries will have to reduce emissions by 50% below 1990
levels by 2020. That 2C warming goal has to be met in order to prevent
some of the worst impacts of climate change.
As Kelly Levin, a researcher with the World Resources Institute in
Washington, argues: "The challenge we already knew was great is even
more difficult. But even with an increased level of reductions necessary,
it shows that a 2C goal is still attainable - if we act ambitiously and
immediately."
The 2C goal has always been attainable. It’s not even that ambitious
a target. A 2C global heating will itself expose large areas of the planet
to devastating climate change. The biggest problem, though, is that
these arguments have been made before and the warnings have been
ignored. The fact is that despite mounting evidence over the years, we
haven’t acted ambitiously or immediately. As Tans argues ‘the
prospects of keeping climate change below that [2C goal] are fading
away." The 2C goal remains possible, only less and less so. And it’s the
reasons why which count.
In an interview with The Guardian, David Attenborough warns that people
will finally wake up and take action on global warming only after having suffered
a terrible example of extreme weather (‘Attenborough accuses leaders of
ducking climate change issue’, Adam Vaughan and Camila Ruz, Guardian 26
Oct 2012). Climate scientists have long argued that a warming
atmosphere and rising levels of CO2 implies an increased frequency in
extreme weather. Well, that extreme weather which has been long
anticipated by climate scientists is here and has effected every part of
the world this last year. The USA has experienced record drought and
crop failure, China and India have endured their coldest winter in
decades, there has been a record loss of ice in the Arctic, and Australia
has suffered a four-month heat wave with 123 weather records broken
during what scientists are calling its "angry summer".
Records are being broken everywhere. As Tim Flannery, head of the
Australian government's climate change commission, said this week
"When you get records being broken at that scale, you can start to see
a shifting from one climate system to another. So the climate has in one
sense actually changed and we are now entering a new series of
climatic conditions that we just haven't seen before."
We are beyond the world of predictions, climate change is now here.
In which case, it may well be too late to act.
Sometimes, reality is just too hard to face. When the facts challenge
our most cherished beliefs, we are inclined to disbelieve them. When
they threaten to frustrate our wants and suppress our desires, we
contest them. But the facts are often so stark that they simply cannot be
denied. So we set about reframing them or we simply ignore them
thinking that, somehow, they will go away. But the problem of global
heating has not gone away. On the contrary, the evidence points to a
worsening of the crisis in the climate system. A few more people now
are showing the courage to face the facts about global heating, but in
nowhere near enough numbers to make a political difference.
If the scientists are right – and the deniers have never put a remotely
credible scientific case together to say otherwise - then not only is
climate change for real and proceeding at an accelerating pace, it is
about to reach a tipping point and become irreversible. For the
pessimists amongst the scientists, it already has. Hence the phrase
‘runaway climate change’, expressing the idea that it is now impossible
for human action to be able to stop the ravages of climate change.
It’s easy to overrate the damage done by those in denial of climate
change, the characters who are miscalled 'sceptics'. In face of mounting
and seemingly irrefutable evidence presented by eminent scientists
over the years, a systematic campaign of corporate-sponsored
misinformation was launched with the express intention of creating
doubt in the public mind, paralysing the political realm, blocking
concerted action. However, the fact that the deniers have succeeded in
achieving their objectives doesn’t mean that they are entirely
responsible for bringing us to the abyss. My view is that the power of
the deniers is exaggerated and that denial is so influential not on
account of the merits of its criticisms of climate science but on account
of the gap between scientific knowledge on the one hand and political
and institutional action on the other. I suspect that most people are not
sure either way about climate science and, on the whole, have been
inclined to accept what the climate scientists have been arguing about
the disasters likely to occur as a result of global heating. But there has
been a failure to translate knowledge about global heating into public
policy and it is that has proven fatal. The impasse has produced climate
crisis fatigue, with people yearning to hear an end to the talk of crisis.
Climate change denial has exploited this situation to full advantage.
Climate change denial builds upon a psychic reluctance to abandon
one’s life long beliefs and practices and embrace a new mode of life.
Accepting the case for global heating on an intellectual level does not
necessarily entail a psychological concurrence, let alone a positive
approval of the measures required to address the climate crisis. Further,
the psychological strain of knowing that the world as we know it is
coming to a terrifying ending is well-nigh impossible to bear over a
prolonged period. Once the alarm is sounded, something has to be
done to avert danger. If the alarm keeps being sounded and yet nothing
gets done, people shut down concern for the sake of their own sanity.
There ought to have been an eco-praxis in place years ago, involving
people in the creation of the new sustainable society, practical projects
which could show tangible benefits on the journey from here to there.
Instead, there has been an unbearable disparity between scientific
knowledge and political action.
The danger of exaggerating the importance of climate change denial
lies in the neglect of the deeper processes involved, particularly the way
that political, institutional and psychological inertia feed on each other
to induce a general paralysis. Climate change is an existential crisis
both at the level of individual personality and the wider environment. At
bottom, it concerns the health of nature’s life support systems and the
continuation of the Earth as a habitable planet. Before we can even
deliberate the conditions for human flourishing, we need to secure the
existence of the Earth as a planet fit for human life.
Climate change raises questions about how we live our lives in that
it makes clear the extent to which the ‘progress’ according to which we
have all been socialised is going into reverse. This is a crisis that
strikes at the very marrow of modern human beings, hitting at the very
core of their self-identity. To be told that progress is something other
than one has been taught is an unsettling and disturbing phenomenon.
In this context, one can understand the appeal of climate change
denial. It’s that psychic context rather than the intellectual claims of the
deniers that explains the power of climate change denial. Climate
change deniers have yet to put together any case that conforms to
standard scientific principles and can withstand normal scientific
scrutiny. What they have put forward has been found to be inadequate.
As the years have passed since the case for human made global
heating was first made, continuing research in climate science has
strengthened the original thesis markedly. The more the climate crisis
has been examined, the more alarming the picture of the future has
been painted. The clear, well-researched, soundly reasoned
conclusions drawn by the most eminent climate scientists is that the
world is facing ecological catastrophe. Most alarming of all is that many
of those scientists think that we have passed the key tipping points and
that it is now too late to avert that catastrophe. The growing interest in
geoengineering projects is a tacit recognition of our failure to change
our practices, actions and institutions to avoid climate catastrophe,
despite ample advance warning. The planetary engineers have
abandoned politics as a busted flush and it’s hard to disagree with
them. They argue that the only chance we now have is to gamble on
our technology. That’s a gamble based on dire necessity and bleak
pessimism. They can offer no guarantees. It could all misfire.
Personally, I prefer to apply John Ruskin’s assessment of the
Victorians to ourselves:
we shall be remembered in history as the most cruel, and therefore
the most unwise, generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth:
- the most cruel in proportion to their sensibility, - the most unwise in
proportion to their science. No people, understanding pain, ever
inflicted so much: no people, understanding facts, ever acted on
them so little.
John Ruskin The Eagle's Nest, Lecture II, § 35
We shall be remembered as the generation that had so much by way
of scientific knowledge and technical capacity, stable political
institutions, extensive democratic spaces for citizen information and
interaction, and yet did so little with them. We had the reason and the
capacity to act, and yet failed so to do. That’s a damning indictment. At
this point, it is best to show some moral courage, make our peace and
face what’s coming as the human species goes to a well deserved
oblivion. Instead, refusing to the end to abandon belief in a ‘progress’
achieved by the technical conquest of nature, we look set to indulge the
heroic aspect of our ego with a final technological assault on a nature
we had once thought we had conquered. Geoengineering is not a
solution to our predicament, just a mad gambling on a technology pitted
against nature. Our intellect and ingenuity in the service of ends
external to us – systemic imperatives to accumulate - is our
predicament.
“Technology” as such will not save us. Technology is us, technology is who
and what we are. We can only save ourselves by living lives rich in ends,
choosing our means appropriately and wisely. This is no mere technological fix
but a profound transformation that is both social and spiritual. Technology has
served us well, warding off disease, famine, the rigours of climate and
environment. The problem is that, in the process, we have been drawn further
and further out of our biological matrix and, instead of learning how to live well
through a productive engagement with the world around us, we have become
increasingly dependent upon on an all-embracing but indifferent, impersonal and
loveless technology to see us through. Marx wrote of how we become the “plaything
of alien powers”, by which he meant our own powers as social beings taking an
external oppressive form – capital, commodities, money, state, bureaucracy, the
world we have created is populated by these new idols. We now risk becoming
orphans of our own powers.
Technology is an expression of our powers and will be part of any solution to the
current crisis. But that solution can only be effective when considered in terms of
technics as Lewis Mumford conceived it - as technologies and techniques,
something which comprises more than hardware, a technological complex
encompassing tools, machines, skills, knowledge and arts.
We cannot make a scapegoat of the technological revolution that has
pampered us yet passed by the emaciated victims we see on television. It is an
extension of what we are. If we are greedy and selfish technology will be a
faithful mirror. Left to its own dynamics technological and industrial innovation
trashes products, places and people. Technology is at once social shredder,
racial churn and political furnace. It is for the children of technology to
humanise their parent or, like Saturn, it will consume them. Self-made Man
and his society will be undone. If the twenty-first century sets out to build a
new sense of family it has powerful tools to help in the task. If it doesn't, its
antithesis - increasing conflicts between haves and have-nots - is inevitable.
The study of natural processes, so long confined to the laboratory, has now
moved on to the broad stage of international politics and raises issues that
must engage us in new struggles.
Only if we begin to understand the processes will there be any chance that we
graduate from being maladroit apprentices to being competent sorcerers. The
metaphor of the sorcerer's apprentice is not entirely appropriate, because it
implies the existence of a sorcerer. The sorcerer is supposed to know what he or
she is doing while the apprentice is just meddling with forces he cannot contain
and understands only incompletely. By this criterion there are as yet no
sorcerers, only rampaging apprentices but there are many among the latter
who would have us believe they have graduated.
Jonathan Kingdon, Self-Made Man and His Undoing 1993: 316/7
Behind the dispassionate science they offer, the mood of the climate
scientists varies between panic and resignation. The press is full of a
certain kind of journalism that routinely abuses scientists as ‘eco-
alarmists’ and ‘climate fanatics’. In truth, the public pronouncements of
the scientists has been quite sober. Indeed, the problem with a body
like the IPCC is that the need for compromise blunts the edge of the
science behind the public statements. The errors that the IPCC
routinely make are not ones of exaggeration but of underestimation.
Few scientists state explicitly in public what the climate science is
clearly revealing - that we can no longer prevent a runaway global
heating that will bring about an environment that is inimical to the
survival and flourishing of life. The governments of the world are
committed to carbon reductions that will keep temperature increase the
safe side of 2C. Scientists no longer think this target is realistic. A 4C
increase is more likely. Others are even more pessimistic. We have
gone beyond feasible targets. The age of compromise is over.
Governments were given goals that were well within reach, and they
failed woefully to achieve them. We are beyond inducements to
governments and people to act, presenting scenarios of what could
happen if we don’t act soon. We didn’t act when we should have acted
and now those windows of opportunity have been closed for good.
The job of environmental prediction is to spur changes in behaviour
to falsify the dire outcomes predicted. The language is conditional and
affirms the indeterminacy of the future. This will happen if current trends
continues and if human beings fail to act to change direction. I’m afraid the
scope for such indeterminacy is narrowing all the time. There are little
windows left. But beyond the tipping points, climate change becomes
irreversible. And at this stage the language ceases to be conditional.
Now this will happen, no matter what human beings do. In that shift, we
have moved from the sense of making history to the sense of being
present at the end of human history. The future is still in our own hands,
just, but, with every passing day, more and more of is slipping through
our fingers.
The Kyoto Protocol committed governments to reduce the emission
of greenhouse gases. Conferences have come and gone, with
ministers, scientists, non-governmental organisations and concerned
citizens gathering together and agreeing that something should be done
about climate change. Precious little has been done. In the middle of
the biggest economic depression for eighty years, carbon emissions
have hit record levels.
In light of this, the Copenhagen Conference (2009) was the human
juggernaut’s last stop before the abyss. The Conference was hopeless.
There wasn’t even a dramatic last stand, just the same old lies and
misinformation beforehand by the climate change deniers, the same
political bullying from the rich and powerful during proceedings, the
same prevarication and posturing. And it all served its purpose in
blocking a binding commitment from the major polluting nations to shift
their economies onto the path of substantial reductions in carbon
emissions.
Diana Liverman, director of Oxford University's Environmental
Change Institute, said she would prefer to 'immerse myself in academic
work' so as to distance herself from the implications of climate science.
However, she realises that climate scientists have an obligation to make
their research public so that politicians and the people cannot claim
they did not know. In the run-up to the Copenhagen conference she
urged other scientists to make their voices heard. Unfortunately, the
voices of those who knew the most were drowned out by barking of the
industrial lobbyists and were simply ignored by the pusillanimous
politicians. The people? Industry means investment and jobs. It’s
unenlightened self-interest driven by necessity and desperation in an
ailing economy. Those who complain of a lack of democracy should
look long and hard at the relations of dependence within the capital
economy, relations so strong that people lack autonomous voice and
instead are driven by economic constraints to plead necessity.
Necessity is not an argument, it’s an excuse. And it’s an excuse used
by many.
In light of the considerable scientific evidence that had been
marshalled to underline the dangers posed by anthropogenic global
heating, the Copenhagen Conference exposed political failure in all its
shabbiness and ugliness. It’s a failure of institutions and structures, a
failure of leadership, ultimately a failure of the people who all too easily
line up with vested economic interests against the politicians and
governments who, at least, attempt to act and legislate for the long term
good.
Many climate scientists are starting to think that their cool,
dispassionate stance has been a mistake. Climate scientists have been
accused of being politically motivated whereas in truth they have
confined themselves to stating the scientific case according to the facts
and the evidence. They have been abused by people who pay no
respect to scientific principle, just load their arguments and cherry pick
their data. Perhaps the climate scientists should have been political all
along, as political as those in denial of the climate science.
But to what effect? Politics is politics, a field where victory goes to
those with sufficient material and organisational resources to be able to
shout the biggest lies loudest and longest.
To move into politics would have been a self-defeating strategy on the
part of climate scientists. Climate change deniers want to shift the debate
from the science to politics for a reason. The wealth of research and the
array of facts and evidence is the biggest asset and strongest card in the
hand of the scientists. The deniers lack any scientific wealth, hence their
concern to draw the conflict onto the terrain on which they are strongest,
politics, an arena characterised by murk and bias, where, in the words of
Orwell, lies sound truthful and murder is respectable.
We are dealing with a political failure here, not a failure of science. And
this political failure is, ultimately, a failure of democracy. Far too many
individuals within the demos have been all too willing to have their egos
massaged, wants serviced and beliefs reassured. Despite the name homo
sapiens, the human species is only one part rational. Reason is always up
against more powerful, more elemental, forces. Underlying the institutional
inertia – the corporate capture of the state, the influence of industrial lobbies,
the systemic determinism of ‘the economy’ — is a psychological inertia, the
tendency of human beings to disbelieve facts and evidence that contradict
what they have brought up to believe to be normal, right and proper. In this
respect we can start to understand the main reason for political failure.
Governments and politicians are caught between two stifling pressures,
systemic pressures from the world of economics and psychic pressures from
the world of everyday life.
And so the warnings from the world of climate science are ignored. For
all of the celebration of industrial and technological progress, climate
change and the response to it has exposed the Achilles’ heel of the human
species, revealing the extent to which the institutions and dispositions that
have delivered progress have also set us on a self-destructive path. The
technological mastery of nature is both our triumph and our downfall. An
inherent optimism, an overrating of abilities, has fostered the illusion that we
may transcend natural limits. In truth, the idea that we have transcended
nature is nothing but an hubristic fantasy. Instead of rising above nature, we
have transgressed its limits and undermined the life support systems upon
which civilisation depends. And now our planetary engineers are telling us
that we have become as gods. H.G. Wells wrote the book Men as Gods back
in the 1920’s, a time when men were very ungodlike indeed. He spent a
lifetime prophesying progress through technology. His last book was Mind at
the End of its Tether. When the likes of Stewart Brand and Mark Lynas tell us
that we have become gods in charge of the planet, I can only think of the
Robin Williams character in the film Baron Munchausen, a king so split from
nature that that his head detached from his body and flew into space, his poor
abstracted mind becoming so deluded as to think that it alone was the origin
of the universe and everything in it. Well, many people only see what they
believe rather than believe what they see.
There is a dialectic of hope and disaster at work here. Climate crisis is a
challenge to humanity to find within itself the resources to finally live up to its
potential as a wise and rational species. Such a development would be based
upon our conscious recognition of our connection to Nature and the
interconnection of all things within Nature’s web of life. At the moment,
abstraction from nature has confined us within an economic machine that
systematically and institutionally compels egoism, greed, competitiveness,
aggression and in general encourages the worst aspects of human
behaviour. And that includes the kind of short-sightedness that will assuredly
doom the species to extinction, at least in large parts.
Over the years the disparity between the actions demanded by the
science on climate change on the one hand and the measures takes by
political institutions on the other has grown so wide as to be glaring. Part of
the growing appeal of planetary engineering stems from a stark awareness
of the extent of political failure. The appalling truth has slowly dawned that
governments – and not just politicians but also the people who vote for them
– lack the wit, the imagination and the courage to act with anything like the
resolve required given the scale of the problem. Humanity's technical
‘conquest’ and exploitation of nature for its own material gain is now
rebounding dramatically. Indeed, I suspect that the principal emotional
appeal of geoengineering solutions to the climate crisis is an unconscious
reassertion of technological mastery over recalcitrant nature. Nature was
supposed to have been conquered by technique a long time ago. In
indicating that nature is so very far from being beaten as to threaten the
very conditions of human civilisation, climate crisis is an affront to
humanity’s Promethean dignity. The climate crisis is an existential crisis for
the human species, challenging us to establish our relations to the planet on
a sustainable foundation. We have, through our political organisation, fallen
far short of meeting that challenge, hence the superficial plausibility of
planetary engineering.
The process of human extinction may already be underway, despite the
growth in human population. The forces for extinction are firmly in place.
How long this process will take is anyone’s guess, but how it will proceed is
easily comprehended. There is a Jewish curse which runs, "May he inherit
a hotel of a hundred rooms, and be found dead in every one of them." For
the heirs of industrial and technological progress, the curse is coming true,
as our efforts to ‘master’ the planet are backfiring on us spectacularly. We
may think we live in a first-class hotel, with running water from the tap, air
conditioning at the push of a button, good food, but have a look at some of
the other rooms in the building. Here, the temperature is rising
portentously. The sixth great extinction spasm of geological time is now
underway, care of humankind. Through its technical capacity, humankind
has acquired sufficient force to unbalance the ratio between biology and
culture and, in the process, to break the crucible of biodiversity. Human
‘progress’ has become so turbo charged that other species cannot keep
up. The nonhuman guests in the cheapest rooms have been the ones to
die first. And for a while now it’s been the turn of the poorer humans in the
cheaper rooms to die. The same order prevails in death as in life, with the
rich and the powerful insulating themselves for the longest period from the
consequences of their ecologically harmful activity. The poor and the
powerless on the planet suffer first and most. Those who have done the
most harm, suffer least and last.
Primo Levi said something about the Holocaust that is pertinent here:
'We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses…. We, the survivors,
are not only a tiny but also an anomalous minority. We are those who,
through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have,
and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned
wordless.'
The species being driven to extinction as a result of human action are
voiceless. The poor and the powerless, too, are denied a voice by deniers
who claim that they are merely using climate change as a means of guilt -
tripping the west. But they are not voiceless. The people from the small, poor
countries may only have the tiniest of voices, but the message they convey
rings loud and clear. Their message is of the greatest import. The voices of
those who face extinction first must be heard and recorded for posterity so
that those who have seen the face of the Gorgon can give humanity a
message that will last beyond the ruination to come, a message that will
last for all eternity – that this is what happens when the best amongst us
lack the courage of our convictions, fail to act, and thus let the worst
amongst us drive the world to extremes and living beings and species to
extinction.
The human species will survive, mind, in lesser numbers, but enough
to start again. The survivors will be charged with the task of rebuilding
civilisation anew. There will be a need to build on the strongest of
foundations – realities, ideas, values, relationships. So there is a sense in
which I am writing not for the generations who will come and go as we
proceed inexorably to eco-catastrophe. There is nothing to stop them
heeding the message and acting on it now, mind. My central argument,
however, concerns principles, the first principles for the new sustainable
civilisation. Those principles which will form the basis of the ecological
civilisation of the future are available to us now. It’s up to us whether we
have the nous and the nerve to practise them. The difference is that we can
choose to do so; future generations will have no choice.
In the end, the recognition of finality is quite liberating. There is no
more need to invest precious emotional and intellectual capital in the false
promises of politics; no more need to dissipate energy in futile campaigns;
no more need to demand action from governments and institutions
congenitally incapable of taking such action; no more need to waste time
on politicians, lobbyists, industrialists, and climate change deniers who,
together, have dissembled and deceived, misinformed the public, stalled for
time, obstructed and prevented the action that needs to be taken to deal with
global heating; no more need to read and respond to journalists whose ink is
the same colour as the Black Death, only twice as deadly. Well, they’ve got
what they wanted and we now stand on the verge of runaway climate
change. We often hear that our problems stem from a lack of democracy. My
view is that we will have democracy when the individuals who compose the
demos learn to lead themselves by their own nous rather than let others –
the rich and the powerful, and their lickspittles the journalists and their
sycophants the economists - lead them by the nose. Not enough individuals
in the demos have heeded the warnings of scientists on the climate crisis
and not enough have been brave enough to demand and/or take political
action that proceeds outside the old sterile grooves.
Have I wasted my time working to promote an ecological message all
these years, all these articles, essays, talks and letters? That depends. Even
if a cause is hopeless this side of Heaven, there is such a thing as bearing
witness. I have plans for a book entitled Being and Place, emphasising the
extent to which place-based social meaning and a moral sense of identity is
essential to human flourishing, a book on the methodology and philosophy of
social science, on the Platonic trinity of the true, the good and the beautiful in
art and architecture, on cities and civilisation, on philosophy, on a critical
realism which combines ontological monism and epistemological pluralism…..
Whilst I have been busy gathering materials, I am aware of the shadow of the
future hanging over the present. All the grand themes and projects pale into
insignificance given the magnitude of the climate crisis about to befall us. In
light of the facts, I don’t know whether to call on people to wake up to the full
horror of climate change or to organise a wake. Sartre said somewhere that
when the good keep quiet, the world is filled by the chattering of imbeciles.
When reason sleeps, the world becomes a very noisy place indeed.
Goya The sleep of reason produces monsters
Goya’s message is ambiguous. Is it the absence of reason that produces
the monsters? Or is it the sleep that a certain kind of impersonal, abstracted
rationality induces, a reason detached from its moral and ontological
component, that produces monsters?
Reason comes in many forms, some which enhance life, others which
inhibit life. ‘Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form.’
(Marx Letters Early Writings 1975).
Weber anticipated an era of ‘mechanised petrification, embellished with a
convulsive self-importance’, human beings confined within a steel hard cage
mind, body and soul, continuing until ‘the last ton of fossilized fuel is burnt’.
(Weber 1985:181/2). It won’t end there. The planet is being plundered for
further energy sources, gas, oil, anything the expropriators of the global
commons can lay their hands on. And there’s always nuclear power to fuel the
mechanistic prison we have been confined to. Humanity will have been
exhausted long before the energy supplies. I suspect we will see a moral
implosion long before economic collapse and ecological catastrophe.
As I write, what is described as a ‘new frontier’ in mining is opening up.
British firm UK Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of Lockhead Martin, is joining
the growing rush to exploit minerals in the depths of the oceans. There are
plans for major prospecting operation in the Pacific. Yes, the fever of material
‘progress’ continues, the prospectors are still digging for gold. The company
claims that surveys have revealed huge numbers of ‘nodules’, small lumps of
rock which are rich in valuable metals, on the ocean floor south of Hawaii and
west of Mexico. And far, far East of Eden I might add, in honour of the down-
to-earth wisdom of John Steinbeck. We are a long way from the Garden and
hell-bent on plumbing the depths of our fallen nature as much as the Earth. In
books like The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men and The Pearl, Steinbeck
revealed the mad delusions of this endless pursuit of material riches and the
greed and stupidity of the already too rich and too powerful. Steinbeck
continued to affirm the plain, humble sanity and decency of ‘the people’ who
have continually had to suffer the consequences of this idiotic gold fever. “If
you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only
ones that'll help - the only ones,” Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath.
“Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone.
Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why,
we're the people - we go on.' Says Ma Joad.
'We take a beatin' all the time.'
'I know.' Ma chuckled. 'Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come
up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But, Tom, we
keep a-comin'. Don' you fret none, Tom. A different time's comin'.”
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“We’re the people.” “We keep a-comin’.” We’re going to have to. In the
words of Robert Waller’s book, ‘Be Human or Die’. It’s Shakespeare’s question ‘to
be or not to be’. ‘Choose life’ said Moses. It’s time to wake up and start building
the new Eden, the new Jerusalem, the city of peace, of peace with nature and
peace with each other. “A different time's comin'.”
It’s a time for some genuine exploration, a self-examination so that we come to
know our place and ourselves for the first time.
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half- heard in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding