The spectre of failure has hung over climate conversations for years. In an interview last July for the Toronto online journal iPolitics, Canadian ecologist David Suzuki declared that the battle to contain global warming was lost. The return of Donald Trump, he said, was “the dagger in my heart”.
Suzuki’s right: we’re screwed. Trump officials and acolytes around the world can rewrite science to suit their self-serving world view, but real science says we’ve missed the window of opportunity to stop a heating atmosphere from destabilising the climate. The mayhem of today will get a lot worse, and we can’t stop it.
Now we must “hunker down”, said Suzuki, who’s 90 next month. “Governments will not be able to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for emergencies, so Finland is telling their citizens that they’re going to be at the front line of whatever hits and better be sure you’re ready to meet it.
“Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that. Who has wheelchairs? Who has fire extinguishers? Where is the available water? Do you have batteries or generators? Start assessing the routes of escape. You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now.”
Inequality, a driver of ecological breakdown, was in Suzuki’s crosshairs. The lavish Venetian wedding of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos in June, he said, was “a disgusting phenomenon”. One of so many.
Suzuki’s deep and enduring commitment to Earth’s natural systems is beyond question. Equally, the Finnish government’s letter to its citizens warning them that when the bad weather hits they’ll have to take personal responsibility is something all countries should do. At the very least.
Climate change captures the headlines, but there are many environmental threats. Of the nine planetary boundaries identified by science as the safe limits of human impact, we’ve already crossed seven, are about to cross an eighth and have succeeded with only one, saving stratospheric ozone. That says only one thing: global ecological collapse is happening around us, now.
It’s a challenge to stay sane in the face of that grim diagnosis, on top of the daily media barrage of human craziness. That challenge is only intensified by advertising, a key component of modern capitalism that offers pretend solutions to the awful predicament it’s done so much to create. You want to be free from fear? Here, buy some more hope!
Promises of hope are just promises. Hope is a chimera that does nothing to stop global climate change and environmental collapse. It’s long past time we focused on reality.
One reality to bear in mind is that civilisation, however much we might value it, is a mere blip in the human story. We started cultivating plants, raising animals and building cities just 12,000 years ago – less than a twentieth of the time our species has walked the planet.
Before then we were part of nature, gatherers and hunters (or sometimes hunted), our fortunes rising or falling with natural cycles. Agriculture seemed to be a pathway to breaking that dependency, a pathway that the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels turned into a paved multi-lane highway.
But the highway leads to a dead end. We have always needed the biosphere, the community of life in which our species evolved. Our troubles began when we imagined otherwise, and the excesses committed under that delusion have now brought the biosphere to a state of collapse.
Times of plenty are disappearing fast. Today’s droughts, fires, storms, floods, collapsing hillsides, rising seas will get worse. In coming years we will see cascading climatic and ecological shifts that will devastate communities and the economies of whole countries, Australia included.
This won’t be the end of everything, just the end of things we’re accustomed to. We’re entering times of scarcity, with occasional, sometimes frequent breakdowns of order, and the loss of familiar services and supply chains. For a sizeable chunk of the world’s people life will return to what it was long ago, tougher and shorter.
The shifts – sometimes gradual and hard to see, sometimes sudden and shocking – will get worse before they get better. Political leaders who’ve been saying it’s just ideology will eventually be forced to accept that it’s real.
It doesn’t have to be miserable though. If we can accept that living will be harder and catastrophes will happen, if we can trust and support each other, beginning (like charity) at home and working outward, and if despite everything we can find joy in small things – we’ll manage. Like we used to, before we got drawn into this cul-de-sac.