{"id":2783,"date":"2019-09-16T09:22:39","date_gmt":"2019-09-16T09:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simonings.com\/?p=2783"},"modified":"2019-09-16T09:22:39","modified_gmt":"2019-09-16T09:22:39","slug":"human-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=2783","title":{"rendered":"Human\/nature"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Was the climate crisis inevitable? For the Financial Times, 13 September 2019<\/a><\/p>\n

Everything living is dying out. A 2014 analysis of 3,000 species, confirmed by recent studies, reveals that half of all wild animals have been lost since 1970. The Amazon is burning, as is the Arctic.<\/p>\n

An excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, meanwhile, has not only played havoc with the climate but also reduced the nutrient value of plants by about 30 per cent since the 1950s.<\/p>\n

And we\u2019re running out of soil. In the US, it\u2019s eroding 10 times faster than it\u2019s being replaced. In China and India, the erosion is more than three times as bad. Five years ago, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization claimed we had fewer than 60 years of harvests left if soil degradation continued at its current rate.<\/p>\n

Why have we waited until we are one generation away from Armageddon before taking such problems seriously?<\/p>\n

A few suggestions: first, the environment is far too complicated to talk about \u2014 at least on the tangled information networks we have constructed for ourselves.<\/p>\n

Second, we\u2019re lazy and we\u2019re greedy, like every other living thing on the planet \u2014 though because most of us co-operate with each other, we are arguably the least greedy and least lazy animals around.<\/p>\n

Where we fall down is in our tendency to freeload on our future selves. \u201cDiscounting the future\u201d is one of our worst habits, and one that in large part explains why we leave even important, life-and-death actions to the last minute.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a third reason why we\u2019re dealing so late with climate change. It\u2019s the weirdest, and maybe the most important of the three. It\u2019s that we know we are going to die.<\/p>\n

Thinking about environmental threats reminds us of our own mortality, and death is a prospect so appalling we\u2019ll do anything \u2014 anything \u2014 to stop thinking about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time,\u201d wrote Ernest Becker in his Pulitzer-winning meditation The Denial of Death in 1973.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are \u2018right\u2019 for us because the alternative is natural desperation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Psychologists inspired by Becker have run experiments to suggest it\u2019s the terror of death that motivates consciousness and all its accomplishments. \u201cIt raised the pyramids in Egypt and razed the Twin Towers in Manhattan,\u201d is the memorable judgment of the authors of 2015\u2019s best-selling book The Worm at the Core.<\/p>\n

This hardly sounds like good news. But it may offer us, if not a solution to the current crisis, at least a better, healthier and more positive way of approaching it.<\/p>\n

No coping mechanism is infallible. We may be profoundly unwilling to contemplate our mortality, and to face up to the slow-burn, long-term threats to our existence, but that anxiety can\u2019t ultimately be denied. Our response is to bundle it into catastrophes \u2014 in effect to construe the world in terms of crises to make everyday existence bearable.<\/p>\n

Even positive visions of the future assume the necessity for cataclysmic change: why else do we fetishise \u201cdisruption\u201d? \u201cThe concept of progress is to be grounded in the idea of the catastrophe,\u201d as the German philosopher Walter Benjamin put it.<\/p>\n

Yes, we could have addressed climate change much more easily in the 1970s, when the crisis wasn\u2019t so urgent. But the fact is, we\u2019re built for urgent action. A flood. A drought. A famine. We know where we are in a catastrophe. It may be that our best is yet to come.<\/p>\n

Will our best be enough? Will we move quickly and coherently enough to save ourselves from the catastrophes attendant on massive climate change? That\u2019s a hard question to answer.<\/p>\n

The earliest serious attempts at modelling human futures were horrific. One commentator summed up Thomas Malthus\u2019s famous 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population as \u201c150 pages of excruciatingly detailed travellers\u2019 accounts and histories\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009of bestial life, sickness, weakness, poor food, lack of ability to care for young, scant resources, famine, infanticide, war, massacre, plunder, slavery, cold, hunger, disease, epidemics, plague, and abortion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Malthus, an English cleric driven up the wall by positive Enlightenment thinkers such as Godwin and Condorcet, set out to remind everybody that people were animals. Like animals, their populations were bound eventually to exceed the available food supply. It didn\u2019t matter that they dressed nicely or wrote poetry. If they overbred, they would starve.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been eluding this Malthusian trap for centuries, by bolting together one cultural innovation after another. No bread? Grow soy. No fish? Breed insects. Eventually, on a finite planet, Malthus will have his revenge \u2014 but when?<\/p>\n

The energy thinker Vaclav Smil\u2019s forthcoming book Growth studies the growth patterns of everything from microorganisms to mammals to entire civilisations. But the Czech-Canadian academic is chary about breaking anything as complicated as humanity down to a single metric.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the mid-1980s,\u201d he recalls, \u201cpeople used to ask me, when would the Chinese environment finally collapse? I was writing about this topic early on, and the point is, it was never going to collapse. Or it\u2019s constantly collapsing, and they\u2019re constantly fixing parts of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every major city in China has clean water and improving air quality, according to Smil. A few years ago people were choking on the smog.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the same thing with the planet,\u201d he says. \u201cThirty years ago in Europe, the number-one problem wasn\u2019t global warming, it was acid rain. Nobody mentions acid rain today because we desulphurised our coal-fired power plants and supplanted coal with natural gas. The world\u2019s getting better and worse at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smil blames the cult of economics for the way we\u2019ve been sitting on our hands while the planet heats up. The fundamental problem is that economics has become so divorced from fundamental reality,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to eat, we have to put on a shirt and shoes, our whole lives are governed by the laws that govern the flows of energy and materials. In economics, though, everything is reduced to money, which is only a very imperfect measure of those flows. Until economics returns to the physical rules of human existence, we\u2019ll always be floating in the sky and totally detached from reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Smil thinks we\u2019d be better off planning for a good life in the here and now, and this entails pulling back from our current levels of consumption.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut we\u2019re not that stupid,\u201d he says, \u201cand we may have this taken care of by people\u2019s own decision making. As they get richer, people find that children are very expensive, and children have been disappearing everywhere. There is not a single European country now in which fertility will be above replacement level. And even India is now close to the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family.\u201d<\/p>\n

So are we out of the tunnel, or at the end of the line? The brutal truth is, we\u2019ll probably never know. We\u2019re not equipped to know. We\u2019re too anxious, too terrified, too greedy for the sort of certainty a complex environment is simply not going to provide.<\/p>\n

Now that we\u2019ve spotted this catastrophe looming over our heads, it\u2019s with us for good. No one\u2019s ever going to be able to say that it\u2019s truly gone away. As Benjamin tersely concluded, \u201cThat things \u2018just go on\u2019 is<\/em> the catastrophe.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Was the climate crisis inevitable? For the Financial Times, 13 September 2019 Everything living is dying out. A 2014 analysis of 3,000 species, confirmed by recent studies, reveals that half of all wild animals have been lost since 1970. The … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,1],"tags":[151,727,331,625,729,77,728],"class_list":["post-2783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-uncategorized","tag-climate-change","tag-energy","tag-environment","tag-financial-times","tag-population","tag-psychology","tag-thomas-malthus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2783"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2786,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2783\/revisions\/2786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}