The blending of ideas. Three things read this morning coalesce into this brief thought. The final chapter of a book by German climate scientist Friederike Otto, Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms and the New Science of Climate Change(2020), An essay by Greek scientist and author George Tsakraklides “The Never, Never, Neverland of Degrowth”, and the introduction to a new book I stumbled on to at MSU library, Geoff Mulgan’s Another World is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination(2022).
I suspect the chances of another human being having read
all three of these is so remote as to approach zero. And even the happenstance
that brought all of them to me today would be hard to describe. But each is
worthy of review. I won’t even attempt o adequately summarize them, although
the essay by Tsakraklides is short enough you can read in a few spare minutes.
Let me just cite a few sentences that captured me this morning to give you a
flavor of what you might expect and then jump to what they collectively suggest
to me.
The Lucifer heat wave that transformed the Mediterranean into a veritable furnace in summer 2017 would have been extremely rare in a world without climate change; today however, we cqn expect a summer like that almost every eight years. If the global temperature were to increase by another 0.5 °C, making it 1.5 °C warmer overall, a heat wave of this magnitude would occur every four years. If it were to rise by 2 °C, we would experience these extreme temperatures almost every second summer – and those are the most conservative estimates from all of our model calculations. With a 3 °C increase, most summers would be even hotter: 2017 would feel cool in comparison. (Otto, 2020; pp. 199-200)
The problem therefore is profit itself, the very notion of money, and an economic system which keeps humanity hostage to its own incoming Armageddon. We are addicted to profit. At every turn, this civilization consciously opts for meaningless short-term lifestyle benefits, at the expense of existentially disastrous future consequences. These are the exact same priorities as those of a drug addict. Our system of necrocapitalism is indeed the thief, the oligarch who still operates at large, and who never got caught. It has been running a negative balance for centuries, living on credit from the BOE. Humanity aggressively took over the formerly sustainable company called Earth, ascending into CEO with the sole purpose of devouring capital, ripping off stakeholders, and liquidating what’s left. The Leadership Board, composed entirely of humans, is a criminal organization. (Tsakraklides, 2023)
I’m convinced that we’re suffering from an ‘imaginary crisis’. By this I don’t mean that the various crises around us aren’t real, but rather that there’s a deep malaise affecting our capacity for imagination, whether social or political. We can more easily imagine the end of the world than a better future. The places that once were sources of exciting new ideas – universities, think tanks, and political parties – for the most part no longer produce them. A sullen depression has swept over elites, commentators and much of the public, and you are more likely to get a hearing if you try to explain why progress is so difficult, or why decay, collapse and decline are likely, than if you attempt the opposite. (Mulgan, 2022; p.5)
These thinkers have resurrected for me three key intersecting realities. First, that we don’t recognize the enormous threat of climate change can have in the not too distant future. And that most of what we non-scientists don’t grasp is that the consensus models of climate change are ‘conservative’ – it could be much worse (Otto’s book was translated into English in 2020 with data only through 2018). Global greenhouse gas emissions were still going up in 2022, not down as agreed to by the Paris Agreement!!!
Second, even many of those who grasp the seriousness of the ecological overshoot and what it portends, tend to have a technological optimism that we will invent our way out of this dystopian future, with little to no thought that we may have to reduce our overall consumption. This faith in progress through growth of renewable energies is the magic ticket to a utopian future underlines the third reality.
Third, our inability to ‘imagine’ a better world through different social, political, and economic arrangements limits our chances of thriving together and certainly passing on a habitable home for our children and grandchildren.
When I started this blog almost a decade ago under the title of ‘Possibilitator’ it was with the hope that we could imagine possibilities that would lead us to what my friend, Sir Richard Bawden calls, ‘Betterment’ or Getting to Better Together). I have written on the power of imagination a few times including for example here in 2014 and again in 2019 when triggered by other thoughtful thinkers and authors. While I’m only a few chapters into Mulgan’s recent work, the combination of his erudite base of knowledge, thinking, writing and possibilities, has been the most inspiring new read of this year. I look forward each morning to sitting with him and letting his ideas inspire my own. You may, too.
Inspired by a thoughtful piece sent to me by a good friend I read after writing this I want to share the following poem by Denise Levertov that continues to reverberate in me over decades. As the article my friend sent me notes, perhaps we should look again to poets for the wisdom to steer us toward betterment.
Beginners — Denise Levertov
A poem by Denise Levertov,that echoes themes from Laudato Si’
Beginners
Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla
“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea—“
But we have only begun
To love the earth.
We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?
— so much is in bud.
How can desire fail?
— we have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision
how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.
Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?
Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet—
there is too much broken
that must be mended,
too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,
so much is in bud.
~ Denise Levertov ~
