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