The contradiction era
“There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
The logical, goal-seeking part of my brain abhors contradiction and ambiguity. I want a creeping tiger or a fleeting shadow to be resolved decisively. I want to know if the world will get better or worse, not both.
In a late-stage capitalist world facing climate breakdown and ecological collapse, contradictions abound. I need to have hope, but not be fooled by it. I don’t want to be the downer, but I also don’t want to reach for the cosy blanket of denial. So, like Alice advises, I’m practising believing impossible things. Some days I believe one, other days the other, and some days both.
Covid-19
Covid-19 shows humanity can act urgently to make radical changes. Despite the glaring imperfections, we have acted collectively to reduce the deaths of our kin. We care for each other. Behavioural change can happen fast, the juggernaut of civilisation can be turned on the head of a pin. Once we really wake up to a threat, we can act with a collective purpose and urgency rarely seen in human history.
Covid-19 demonstrates that capitalism simply can’t stop. Faced with a threat where the impacts lag the cause, we wait until it is too late. We’re wired to deal with the immediate, prone to wishful thinking. We don’t believe in limits until we hit them; it’s not real until the hospitals are overflowing. Voices and institutions that call for inaction are amplified, because those institutions are wedded to a system of never-ending growth. Scientific debate loses to emotional tribalism, leaving many confused, incapable of distinguishing robust science from claptrap.
Energy
We’ve reached a tipping point. Renewable energy is the cheapest and easiest form of new capacity to build. Together with energy storage it is becoming an unstoppable force regardless of politics or subsidies. Coal is dying, oil and gas will follow. Changes will cascade: there is no longer a strategic interest in propping up oil dictatorships at vast military cost. The global South will leapfrog the industrialised North to avoid becoming locked into fossil fuel infrastructure. Assets will become liabilities overnight and the fossil fuel industries’ influence and power will evaporate in a heartbeat. Society will soon be powered by the wind and sun, utilising only the energy we can capture in a year. We actually have the technology and resources for humanity to satisfy its needs, using the same energy use as the 1960s. The foundations of a truly sustainable society have already being laid.
The inexorable rise of fossil fuels continues more-or-less unabated. Like ants who have discovered an enormous heap of sugar, nothing short of a colony collapse will stop us using it. The idea that we will voluntarily forsake using a concentrated fuel within a few decades is laughable. Power is power, those with it never relinquish it. We take great care to ensure climate models conserve mass, momentum and energy, yet present, straight-faced, scenarios with inflexion points unseen in human history, completely at odds with extraction rates of fossil fuels and the continued quest for economic growth.
Climate policy focuses entirely on the incremental displacement of fossil fuels. The fact we have no global agreement on limiting fossil fuel extraction shows climate policy for what it is: a sham, a distraction. We can declare a climate emergency, yet proceed to open a new deep coal mine.
Climate
Finally the penny is dropping. We see that this really is about the survival of a habitable planet. The threats are immediate enough that denial is becoming increasingly impossible. The pledges now made under the Paris Agreement could limit warming to just over 2 degrees. It’s a dramatic shift from ten years ago, who knows where that trend will take us in another ten? Things will still get bad, but the worst-case is off the cards. Limiting warming to below two degrees is still possible, and enhanced weathering, biochar, and seaweed will start pulling carbon back into the soil. The disruption and suffering at two degrees are real and awful, but on a geological timescale, merely a blink of an eye. Society will adapt. Nature will evolve, eventually. Things will shift, but beauty and complexity will still exist.
Each global convention, each pledge, each promise, witnessed as a tick on the Keeling curve. Not only is CO2 still rising, it is still accelerating. A year of lockdowns barely registers against the ever rising trend, offset by a weaker land sink.
But nobody likes a downer. Optimism is the only way to frame climate change. Despair leads to inaction. So we cling onto whatever we have: pledges, promises, models filled with vast amounts of Non-Existent Technologies (NETs). We pretend that somehow we will move from emitting almost 40 Gt of CO2 per year, to removing more than 10Gt, a quantity not so different to the total uptake by plants and the ocean. All while the ocean warms and stratifies, permafrost thaws, soils dry, trees die, and wildfires spread further than ever before.
Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees has gone; without a major rethink and the reorganisation of the whole of society away from economic growth, 2 degrees will follow. The physics are governed by real emissions, not mitigation plans and optimistic assumptions. As Richard Betts, always careful to stay safely within the scientific consensus, points out: 4 degrees of warming by 2100 is much more likely than most people realise.
Nature
A global shift in consciousness is occurring. We’re of nature, not separate. Rewilding resonates as the archetypal story: spring after winter, redemption after the fall, hope after despair, the resurrection. Where we make space for nature it returns in abundance, incredible in its resilience.
A decade from now we will wonder how we ever let the uplands be burned, trapped and poisoned so a few wealthy people could shoot grouse. We will wonder why we tried to farm every marginal nook and cranny. Why we cultivated vast tracts of soy and cereals to feed to cattle and pigs.
Regenerative agriculture will be the foundation of future society. With a change in diet, we can easily make space for nature to return and shift in response to the changing climate. Apex predators will return, ecosystems will restore themselves in the blink of an eye. In a world facing converging, restoring nature is that rare thing: an achievable story of hope.
The scale and pace of the collapse of nature is terrifying. By almost any indicator nature shows rapid decline. Insect populations dropped by more than three quarters in 27 years. Shifting baselines mean we no longer notice what we’re losing: moths clustering around a light, flocks of lapwings calling and displaying in the fields.
Agriculture has transformed the world beyond recognition. We’ve already removed more than half the trees on the planet. Humans, cattle and pigs outweigh all wild mammals. There is more concrete, metal, brick and plastic than all living matter on the planet. The trends continue, material production doubles every twenty years. Nature may be resilient, but only so far. When enough threads are gone the tapestry unravels.
Over consumption in the industrialised North is to blame. But human psychology means the same tricks will work the world over. Declines in meat consumption in Europe are dwarfed by the new wealthy in China. As soon as people pull themselves out of poverty, advertisers move in.
The nature crisis is by and of itself a crisis perhaps more pressing and serious than climate change. Together, the two are catastrophic.
Democracy
Collectively people are waking up as capitalism eats itself. Even the relatively few wealthy Western consumers atop the global consumption food chain see it’s not even making them happy. The youngest see it most clearly: in debt for their education, in debt to a rentier class, and facing a catastrophic future climate. Neoliberal economics is dead, exposed as the fraud that it always was: a mathematical justification for injustice and endless consumption build on foundations of sand.
Grassroots democracy is booming, people are become ever more organised. Each new movement builds on the last. We’re reaching a social tipping point where things happen fast. Struggles that now seem disparate will soon be united against a common cause: the subjugation of everything for the pursuit of profit. The innate desire for truth, fairness, and a deep connection to others and nature and will feed a revolution made joyful by love and art, supplying a group identity which cuts across race, class and gender. A revolution is in the air, and it won’t be lead by the middle-class, the middle-aged or the middle-of-the-road. New movements, new media, and new parties will sweep away the old, confounding well-paid political commentators. The foundations of a new, truly regenerative culture are already being laid, and it will succeed because it is our interest. We may be short-sighted as a species, but we’re not blind.
Democracy is dead. The system is rigged, the media owned. We’ve reached the point Einstein warned of where:
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands … the result is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society…
…private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
A stable system has emerged in Western “democracies”, whereby every once in a while you swap the red team for the blue team as long as they first subscribe to endless economic growth, endless war, and assure Rupert Murdoch that they won’t rock any super-yachts. The difference between the red and blue teams when it comes to climate breakdown and ecological collapse is a choice between no action at all, or too little too late. Neither really admit the scale or pace of the challenge; with climate change winning slowly is the same as losing.
On foreign policy — stopping war, ending imperialism, ridding the world of nuclear weapons, stopping the arms trade, there is no discernible difference at all. Any individual or party who attempts to step outside that narrow Overton window is shot down in an instant propaganda blitz.
To say all we lack is the “political will” to tackle the converging crises is to fail to understand the constraints of the system. Getting political will entails tackling inequalities in wealth and power, media ownership, and defeating the vested interest currently profiting from the status quo. Whatever we have tried so far isn’t working.
What gives?
That’s the contradictions I grapple with every day. I’m not naturally good at activism. I’m too shy to inspire people. I don’t want to get involved in activism if all I do is stress myself and burn out. Yet I don’t want to give up hope. Neither do I want to fly to a luxury Greek resort for a week of yoga with wealthy individuals to help me face the emotions of an unravelling society.
Then I read Active Hope which put names to the competing stories in my head. The Great Unravelling and The Great Turning. And the idea that both are happening, and we have a choice as to which story we participate in.
The most telling choice of all may well be the story we live from and see ourselves participating in. It sets the context of our lives in a way which influences all our other decisions.
In choosing our story, we not only cast our vote of influence over the kind of world future generations inherit, but we also affect our own lives in the here and now. When we find a good story and fully give ourselves to it, that story can act through us, breathing new life into everything we do. A great story and and a satisfying life share a vital element: a compelling plot that moves towards meaningful goals, where what is at stake is far larger than our personal gains. The Great Turning is such a story.
To participate in the Great Turning is not simply to pull on a cosy blanket of denial, to avoid the stream of bad news, to try and unsee things. The story of hope within the Great Turning will change with time, as some things turn and others unravel. But it is to recognise that a collective story of hope is of central importance to humanity; there is a reason why hope springs eternal. Some days I feel the Great Hope may be a myth, yet I know that nothing is more central to humanity.
