Folks ... I'm just catching up on these communications after being away, and
this question from Chris Keene caught my eye:
"Does anyone have the figures on how many were killed in the second
world war, and how many are likely to die from climate change?"
It's an issue I see raised time and time again, and I fear it's a red
herring within NIMTO (not in my term of office) political time horizons. I
find saying that very disturbing, since our main hope must be that a few
shocks will shift consciousness, but I think there's very real issues of
scale, of timespans, and of human psychology. Here's how I've dealt with it
in part of "Spirit of the Blitz" which is Chapter 4 of "Hell and High Water:
Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition". These paragraphs come from
the typeset PDF and so apologies that the fomatting is lost. It's a chapter
where I set up various "green hopeful" arguments, like "we dealt with
slavery and so can deal with climate change", and I argue, dismally and
reluctantly, that we're just sticking out heads in the sand because there's
no comparison of scale. I'd be interested if anybody thinks I'm wrong on
that and can show why - indeed, I'd love to be proven wrong on it!
Alastair.
‘Then what about the spirit of the Blitz?’ ask the green hopefuls. ‘Climate
change is an even bigger threat to security. If our parents and grandparents
accepted austerity under the Blitz, then surely . . .’ Well, is climate
change really going to hit Britain like the Blitz did? It probably will,
long term, as a slow holocaust, and on a world scale. But will it do so
within the political time horizons or even in the lifetimes of most of those
of us who are around now? Let’s remind ourselves of what happened in the
Blitz.
The first four days of September 1939 are often described as having seen
‘the biggest and most concentrated mass move¬ment of people in Britain’s
history’.18 In response to the terse order, ‘Evacuate forthwith’, issued
from Whitehall at 11.07 a.m. on Thursday, 31 August 1939, nearly 3 million
people, mostly children and their teachers, packed their bags and fled to
places of safety from the bombing. For those who stayed behind, the
Clydebank Blitz over just two nights in 1941 saw Luftwaffe bombs kill 528
people and completely destroy 4,000 homes. Between September 1940 and May
1941 Britain as a whole, with London as the main target, saw 43,000
civilians left dead and over a million homes destroyed. The conse¬quences
linger on quietly to this day. Only in 2006 did Britain finish paying off
its war debts to America. And every night, and perhaps still for another
quarter century to come, old folks who never married go to their beds with a
prayer on their lips for the loved ones lost in those ‘darkest hours’.
‘Lest we forget’: that’s the visceral challenge to the cultural immune
system that drove the spirit of the Blitz. That’s how pressed to the limits
people were. Even then it was a struggle to get everybody to comply with
environmental measures to eke out rationed resources. I have in my files a
couple of cuttings from the ‘Down All the Years’ reminiscence column in the
Stornoway Gazette. One of them, originally published on 7 August 1942, had
the caption ‘Keep Your Waste Paper Separate’. It reported on the efforts of
the Waste Paper Recovery Association - a public agency that we could
prob¬ably do with reinstating today - and said: ‘Housewives and office
workers are still not keeping their waste paper separate from other salvage,
and this is causing serious stoppages in paper mills engaged in work of
national importance . . . Even old boots and bits of machinery were found in
the sacks of waste. As a result production in this mill has dropped 15% and
damage to machinery has been very serious.’
The other, originally published on 7 March 1947, described how Stornoway’s
town council was considering a system of ‘rhythmic control’ for its street
lights. This would use an elec¬tronic signal to turn the lighting on and off
in accordance with need and thereby save energy. The article bemusedly
con¬cluded: ‘With such a handy system in use, it will be easy for the
Council to revert to the old idea of switching off the street lights when
there’s a moon - an idea which once gained for Stornoway the world-wide fame
- or notoriety - of a mention in “Believe it or Not”.’
My point is not to disparage such measures as recycling and energy
conservation. They are imperative. It is simply to say that even when people
are as hard-pressed as they were in wartime, disciplined compliance still
takes effort to achieve. The rhythmic lighting story is particularly
interesting. It shows that social pressure was making a mockery of frugality
even in the early twentieth century. In Chapter 7 we will examine how
pressures of that nature were deliberately cultivated to drive consumerism.
For now, let’s see where it takes us if we face up to the fact that climate
change highlights a profound systemic problem. Comparison with slavery or
the Blitz only masks the complexity of that problem in simplistic rhetoric.
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