Well
everybody …
It
seems to me from recent postings (mostly on the warmest year
not being news theme) that there’s a strong view on this
list that climate change is too narrow a focus, and that we
should be widening out our concerns to issues that threaten
crisis in a broader sense. I very much concur with that.
When
I first came onto this list about 3 years ago I mistaken
called it the “Climate Crisis Forum” because that seemed to
be its singular concern. But it’s interesting to look back
on how that singularity came to pass. Nature is not a
follower of fashion. Nature operates according to life’s
adaptation to the physical realities affecting the
biosphere. Human beings, once beyond the level of basic
sufficiency in life, are dedicated followers of fashion. If
we don’t have to fight or flight we look for ways to twiddle
our thumbs. This produces a mismatch between underlying
biophysical realities affecting the planet and the human
perception of what is important, given that most people do
not think long-term (ask any politician about voting
realities).
The
prophets of a society – those who see and testify to the
bigger picture – are perennially faced with the same
problem. In Jeremiah’s time it was how to wake the
Israelites up to the fact that the Babylonians were at the
door and about to force them into slavery. The Israelites
tried to shut him up by putting him in the stocks and
throwing him down a well. They didn’t want to know. The same
is true of modern prophets – and I use the term in its
secular as well as its spiritual sense. The party-goers hate
the party-poopers, even when they’re right, especially when
they’re right.
As
such, modern environmentalism (i.e. post Rachel Carson,
Teddy Goldsmith, etc.) has had a marketing problem. The
materialistic eighties were an era in which war became
acceptable again as a tool of political policy (Falklands)
and massive deregulation undermined localism. “Greed is
Good” became disturbingly normalised. The idea that “Green
is Good” started to become a fading seventies dream. The
1972 Limits to Growth Report which had caused such a stir
began to pop with the Ehrlich bubble. There were no limits
that technology couldn’t fix. There was no need for a
“frugral” green movement that could be dismissed – often
with good justification because of its own indulgence of
neurotic fads – as “yoghurt knitters”.
Along
comes climate science in the late 80s and the sudden
conversion of Mrs T. All of a sudden “our” agenda re-opened.
Climate change became the presenting symptom of everything
else we’d been banging on about since at least the sixties
countercultural revolution and the wider need, arising out
of WW2, to seek to understand and resolve the authoritarian
mindsets of our parents pre-baby-boomer generation. Some of
those neurotic fads were understandable – all the cranky
diets and crazy cures and “energies” and what have you. They
were and are a visceral response from sensitive souls
injured by socio-psychological mores that negate whole
living, and render full incarnation into what it means to be
a human being a very painful process for some.
Climate
science packed all these concerns – both justified and
neurotically inflated – into one knapsack. In millenarian
terms such as ethnographers study the threat of climate
change served as a “folk devil” – the singular cause of all
our ills. We (I speak generically and not for the better
informed position) missed the point that it was not a
singular cause; it was, rather, the measurable thermometer
stuck in the mouth of the patient afflicted with multiple
maladies.
But
things move in fashions, and a thermometer reading was easy
for the media and public to understand. As one of my
ex-public school media friends keeps telling me, “Remember,
McIntosh, if you want to reach the ordinary person you must
pitch what you write for what you’d imagine to be the
reading level of an 8 year old.” As such, we all
constellated behind climate change. We didn’t have much
choice because it became the only show in town.
Biodiversity? As somebody said (was it on this forum?) a
recent survey suggested that most people think it’s a
washing powder. In any case, there is a sense in which
climate change is the only show in town. It is the most
systemic problem a biosphere can suffer.
For
a short time during the mid-nineties the green movement,
naively in my view but recognising the need to KISS (keep it
simple, stoopid) when communicating with today’s public,
pushed the view that mitigation was a) technically possible
and b) the only thinkable option. If adaptation was
mentioned at public meetings there’d be angry responses from
campaigners who’d get up and say, “To talk about adaptation
is to concede defeat and let the governments and the
corporations off the hook.” But those culprits in fair
measure, especially in democratic free market economies
reflect, at least to a substantial degree, the psychological
mores of the people. Yes, they may be demons, but to
demonise them alone is to deal with our own complicity by
projection and scapegoating. The bottom line, as Cop15 so
ignobly demonstrated, is that while mitigation might have
been technically feasible (e.g. Monbiot’s analysis in Heat),
it was never going to be politically so.
That
brings the movement – the movement of those who are
concerned about the world beyond self-gratification – to a
crisis point. As such, this debate we’ve been having makes
for an interesting meta-take on what a Crisis Forum should
be here for. The question is how do “we” – those who seek to
serve as researchers, policy-makers and opinion-leaders on
these issues – seek to steer matters henceforth? What is
worth researching, campaigning about, conforming our
lifestyles in accordance with (while acknowledging the
difficulty and our complicities – thank you, Michael)?
In
short, what is the greater purpose to which we can
meaningfully hitch our visions and serve?
My
sense is that climate change is going to go off the boil for
a while because it’s resolutely gone out of fashion – at
least in certain countries, like the UK. That doesn’t mean
we stop bothering about it. The science, if it is broadly
right, will continue to catch up. All the time it is
catching up, an what’s interesting is that a lot of that
catching up seems likely to throw us back onto the original
component concerns of climate change. (For example, I’m
interested in the Scottish fishing industry, and a BBC
round-up yesterday states: “Iceland and the Faroes said they saw the situation
differently. The countries argued that the mackerel stock
has gravitated north in recent years - thought to be due to
climate change - so they were now fishing in their own
zones.”)
The
question of “crisis” interests me in 2 respects. First, I am
concerned with the dynamics of love and the trauma that
lovelessness, a.k.a. violence, generates in scarring the
human condition. As such, matters that heighten conflict
between peoples are troubling … we are not that far away,
yet, from those dynamics of world war that so shaped today’s
elderly generation. Secondly, I am interested in the
dynamics of transformation. Crisis, as the old Chinese
pictogram has it, represents both threat and opportunity.
Whenever I see crisis I’m asking, “How can deeper insight,
deeper humanity, be drawn from this?” This is what I mean by
finding a greater purpose to which to hitch our wagons.
As
for the discussions on this list, personally I hope it will
continue to be a well-informed context for discussing
climate change, but also, that there may be a widening out
into other dynamics of global crisis. But above all, a
deepening of reflection about what the trends in global
crisis mean in an ontological sense. The role of a prophet
is to testify to situations in ways that might dig out
channels that the deluge can later fill and be directed by.
I think we are in an era of maybe not being heard as much as
we were 3 years ago, but of needing to beaver away digging
those channels. Jon’s missive on the Transition movement is
interesting in this respect. I agree with all his misgivings
about it, but also with his perception of why it is
important. Transition, without having to TM the term, is
what we need to be working on, but what is so often lacking
when words like transition or transformation are used is a
clear vision of what it is that we are moving towards. This
is why, in my view, the single most important thing any of
us can be doing in present times is to deepen our
reflection, and seeking out of embodied experience, of what
it means to be human: epistemologically, ontologically and
dare I suggest it, teleologically (concerned with
end-purpose). Such an agenda goes profoundly contrary to
dominant trends in the postmodern academy. But perhaps
Derridean postmodernism with its denials of reality, along
with the nihilistic forms of Sartrean existentialism that
have accompanied it, are part of our problem. Climate change
and associated crises has the great virtue of forcing us
back to biophysical properties. Who knows what can open up
from there.
Oh
dear … sorry to have generated such breakfast indigestion!
Alastair.
