Maybe now is a good time to revisit Ted Trainer's books of the 1980s and
1990s, e.g. The Conserver Society, and his work since them:
http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/
They are still highly relevant.
Tom
At 11:12 30/03/2009, Torsten Mark Kowal wrote:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sanjay-khanna/pessimists-die-quickly-gu_b_177808.html
"Pessimists Die Quickly" (Gulp)
Bruce Sterling,
sci-fi author, essayist,
design thinker, and one of the founders of cyberpunk, delivered a
closing keynote at the South by Southwest
Interactive Festival (a.k.a.
SXSWi), the jewel in the crown of U.S. grassroots tech bashes held
annually in Austin, Texas.
He said, "In times of real trouble like today, pessimists die
quickly."
Sterling's pithy quote, picked up via Twitter
(Mickipedia), raises the
salient issue of what might constitute a meaningful optimism, given the
tectonic shifts that are undermining the world and the planet we
know.
"In times of real trouble like today." Scientists and
economists are prone to conservatism. According to the March emergency
summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, 2,500 climate experts agreed that climate
change might surpass the worst-case scenarios outlined in the 2007 report
issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). At the
same event,
Sir Nicholas Stern, economist and author of The Stern Review on the
Economics of Climate Change, said he had "underestimated the climate
crisis." As a writer, it's safe for me to go out on a limb and
project that climate change will continue to exceed worst-case scenarios.
Here's why: Scientists measuring the retreat of ice cover in the Arctic
and West Antarctic are discovering new mechanisms that accelerate climate
change almost every year. Furthermore, incomplete climate models are also
contributing to the pace of climate change being continuously
underestimated.
Despite time running down on the climate front, the economic crisis, not
the climate crisis, remains at the center of government agendas around
the world. This is based on the premise that governments need to reignite
economic growth to recoup the trillions lost so they can eventually get
around to making climate change the priority. In the midst of this, many
governments want to institute a new Kyoto-style cap-and-trade mechanism
as a key part of mitigating climate change. But as
James E.
Hansen, leading climate scientist and director of NASA's Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, has
pointed out, "The worst thing about cap-and-trade, from a
climate standpoint, is that it will surely be inadequate to achieve the
sharp reduction of emissions that is needed. Thus cap-and-trade would
practically guarantee disastrous climate change for our children and
grandchildren."
So, barring literal, Bible-style miracles, we're on direct course to
Disaster. Full. Steam. Ahead.
"Pessimists die quickly." There are two kinds of
pessimists: First, there are those who are pessimistic about how things
will unfold (James Lovelock, 90, author of just-released
The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, and The Revenge of Gaia:
Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, is a pessimist of this
variety). Next, there are those who are pessimistic about human nature.
Hard evidence of accelerating climate change would behoove us to
eventually adopt a Lovelockian pessimism, but to remain optimistic about
our inherent goodness. Times of great turmoil and struggle -- such as
those implied by climatic and economic disruption (food,
water, shelter, money, and reliable information would be in shorter
supply) -- demand that we awaken optimism. That optimism aids in survival
has been shown in refugee camps, among disaster survivors, among those
living in poverty, among the wrongfully imprisoned, heck, even among tech
entrepreneurs burning through cash and looking for exit strategies. I
concur with Lovelock that things aren't going to turn out well from an
economic, ecological, or climatic perspective. Nevertheless, I believe we
need to place trust in one another and create community-based responses,
whole or piecemeal, in the face of constraints that are bound to grow
over time.
A few more thoughts:
Wishful thinking turns all-too-readily into pessimism. When the
bubble of wishful thinking bursts, it transforms into pessimism. Today,
it represents increasingly wishful thinking to assert we can do battle
against the entire planet's climatic response to industrial and
agricultural activity. Why? Because the synergistic effects of falling
aquifers, melting ice sheets, receding glaciers, declining biodiversity,
a toxic atmosphere, and polluted rivers, lakes, and oceans, are proving
too awesome to address, in part because pursuing wealth has historically
been accorded more value than safeguarding nature in the collective
societal and corporate imagination. Taking constructive action regardless
of the outcome, however, and avoiding being ruled by either fear or hope,
could make a difference: At minimum, working together would help us to
envision and build an ad hoc human network for mutual support.
The twenty-first century will constrain choice. Given accelerating
climatic, economic, social, and technological change, the twenty-first
century will demonstrate the limits of human agency. Severely limited
choice and a destiny of hardship would be a massive shock to those of us
who have been inculcated to experience identity and self worth through
consumerism. The question is, what positive steps can individuals and
communities take before climate change becomes distressingly tangible and
before we're attuned to its irrevocability? Under regimes of water
shortages, extreme pollution, climate catastrophes, and an economic
Darwinism virtually unimaginable 30 years ago, we would need to find the
inner strength to
go DIY,
grow food, forge community relationships, and share resources, such
as they are, so that kindness and generosity could touch as many people
as possible.
Kindness matters. The twinned effect of a shrinking global economy
-- and a dawning realization that a future of climate chaos is real --
would contribute to a mass psychology of fear, which represents a
fundamental threat to human kindness, the most important tool we have for
maintaining a social fabric. As it becomes clearer that survivability,
not sustainability, is all we'll be able to prepare for, I believe a
concerted effort to be actively kind with our intelligence, our
inventiveness, and our resources can help to build a storehouse of
community goodness that may well become our most valuable asset.
Tom Barker BSc, PhD
SWIMMER (Institute for Sustainable Water, Integrated Management, and
Ecosystem Research)
Nicholson Building
University of Liverpool
Liverpool
L69 3GP
0151 795 4646
[log in to unmask]
See The Age of Stupid (at FACT, Liverpool, and elsewhere now)
http://www.ageofstupid.net/ and support Contraction and Convergence -
the global response to climate change
http://www.gci.org.uk/briefings/ICE.pdf