Putt Putting Along
The election is behind us, although what we do now will impact the next one. I’m gripped by the growing concern that the climate breakdown is not being understood by most of us at the level of threat that it is quickly coming. For those who may have at least tried playing the game of golf, it’s like finally getting your ball to the green, but then trying to guess both how hard to stroke the ball as well as guess which way, if any, the ball will break to find the hole. Even the best golfers in the world get this wrong … a lot!!
My concerns are accelerating for we in the ‘developed’ world are neither not responding anywhere near quickly enough to stave off a climate nightmare in the decades ahead, nor that we have little to no conception of the gross injustice we own for this global predicament. We like to think that if we all just put solar on our roofs and purchase the electric car, we’ve done our part and the world will go on as before. Just fine tune the existing system and all will right itself.
I don’t believe it.
But then how should I live what life I have left? Having reached my current age, according to the latest data, I might expect another 11-12 years, a bit longer than the expected life of my current pacemaker. But who truly knows which way the ball will break 😊. The problem for me is aligning those serious concerns listed above, with what should I and what can I do in the remaining time I may have to make a positive difference. Sit back and watch football, basketball, sitcoms, and block it all away, as if I am exempt from addressing the global injustice others must live with? Keep doing what I’ve been doing – a little of this and little of that and hope that things get better? Or something more thoughtfully connected with the concerns themselves?
And what, given my limited talents and energy, could I possibly do that would be most useful? I’m thinking out loud here as I type these thoughts. Not sure where this thought experiment is going or where it will end. But the pulse of it has been steadily increasing. I admit to a deep urge to understand the complexities and interactions of the human natural world interface. I suspect it was my studying geography that introduced me to various interactions between the physical/natural world and the human one. I used to think of those two as separate distinct worlds as our culture taught most of us, but now I clearly recognize that they are one intertwined system. Subconsciously it explains why I tend to read works that dance between them from a variety of fields -- from philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, environmental science, etc.
As I sit here thinking about this on November 27, 2022, here’s what I believe is both before us and what maybe I should do with the remainder of my time on planet Earth. I should review these thoughts in a year and see if any of it still rings true and did I follow my own sage advice, or should I redirect my attention and energies elsewhere.
Climate change and ecological destabilization are accelerating more quickly than most reporting portrays. Primary evidence for me is that even the quadrennial IPCC Assessment Reports, which because they are ‘consensus’ reports, they are more conservative than either the more scary or hopeful models they study. Even these more conservative summaries have continued to show increasing alarm with each ‘new report. In short, they continually soften the possible threat. Thus, the timetable for the arrival of very serious trouble is shortening. And yet while some progress on some fronts is being made, the current trajectory is too close to the disastrous ‘business as usual’ approach, in large part because we think we can grow our way out of it. That is the basis of our economic system’s gospel. That is, as long as we grow our economy as measured by GDP, we can innovate away from the abyss. Just produce more efficient technologies and grow renewable energy and we’ll be fine. There is little talk of doing with less.
Economist Kate Raworth, building on the work of the late Herman Daly and others, has helped us see that the economy needs to balance ecological boundaries of the planet with the social boundaries of human well-being. Currently we have overstepped both of those boundaries with the result of shrinking of both ecological and social health. More of the same foretells disasters unlike we have yet seen. This is magnified in regions of the world that are both less able to adapt and are less responsible for this unravelling. Therein lies a focus of how I think we need to direct our solutions. It can’t simply be focused on one narrow solution – e.g. carbon sequestration or income equality. There must be an intentional blend, akin to that in the Sustainable Development Goals, agreed to in principle by all member nations of the United Nations in 2015.
Anthropologist Jason Hickel in his recent very insightful book – Less is More, gives a clear-eyed look at our predicament, how we got here, how we should steer our way forward. To me, his work reawakened our (developed world) responsibility for creating most of the havoc the world is experiencing and therefore our overdue responsibility to assist our developing nation neighbors in mitigating and adapting to it. That means we have to consume much less so they can consume a little more. Technology alone will not get us there, for there are unavoidable limits as Hickel clearly points out.
My inclination is to look at the possibilities at two levels. One is how can I reduce my own consumption while supporting others who need more. And a second is, how do I affect how we change the ‘business as usual’ systems that are driving the dangerous and senseless growth. If I look at my nearly lifelong battle against war, what have I possibly learned that can be directed towards these challenges? First, is the realization that systems don’t change without feedback and that two, system change requires persistence – ask the women suffragists, civil rights and labor activists. We shouldn’t expect quick victories with our proposals for change. That reality is in deep tension with the accelerating threats. As Jackson Brown sang years ago, “There Are Lives in the Balance”.
And who can knowingly predict what series of future events might just trigger the possibility that could shift our ‘business as usual’ into more sustainable directions. Keeping ideas and possibilities alive is essential work. As economist Milton Friedman noted, “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
How I came to be someone enchanted with ideas of possibilities I haven’t a clue. But it feels like it is firmly part of my DNA at this point. Some utopian/hopeful gene was nourished somewhere along the way by others I have been exposed to. I think maybe I’m a late bloomer. I remember a decade ago when the editorial team I was part of for an encyclopedia of sustainability were discussing the possible entries we needed to cover in it. Among other topics, I pushed for addressing “power”. Like energy, power flows everywhere in our world. But unless we happen on it during some course of study, we spend little time trying to understand it.
You might think, given my concerns with climate change, that I’m referring here to the narrow thread of power we associate with energy. But I’m at least as interested in power in the broader social sense. It is essential, in my mind, that we learn the distinction of “power over” vs. “power with”. This is true from the interpersonal level to the larger social, political, and economic levels. I have little faith that our future can escape disaster if we don’t learn this soon. Just a week ago the world met in Egypt to find and build global responses to climate change. We saw the developing nations calling out the empty pledges of the developed nations from the last meeting. We have exercised power over them in many ways since colonial times.
In fact I would argue that our culture is steeped in the “power over” mantra. You see it in the thrill of competition in full bloom with today’s World Cup. Or when I asked a friend if they were rooting for the University of Michigan against Ohio State in American football this weekend, even though they were not affiliated with either team. They so despised their arch rival they wanted them to lose more than anything. While the competitive force is most visible in athletic endeavors, it is widely subsumed in our economy, our politics, even our schooling.
It operates in our foreign relations, in patriarchy, in authoritarianism, and in seemingly every area of life. As our learned naturalists have been telling us, nature is not simply a competitive, dog-eat-dog system. There is a symbiosis and cooperation woven throughout it. It is the glue that makes it possible for life to exist and flourish. We are not simply competitive creatures and sooner we learn this and challenge the dominant worldview that says otherwise, the better the future for our children and theirs.
Therein lies some slivers of hope from the COP 27 meetings just completed. There was some measure of cooperation established, although hardly enough in the agreements signed. So, too with the UN Sustainable Development Goals agreed to by all 193 members of the UN in 2015. As noted climate policy expert Michael Klare notes in a piece yesterday, there are hints that China and the U.S. could work together on addressing and leading climate change policies and actions. We should do all in our power to urge our government to seize this opportunity to seed a future built on cooperation. Not a time to sit on the couch.
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
