Climate change is often perceived as a single event that
will happen at some point in the future, whereupon all the world’s weather
systems will suddenly, simultaneously go haywire. All the ice will melt, and sea levels will
rise and instantly flood through our city centres; tsunamis, hurricanes and forest fires will
terrorise the coasts and countryside;
and we’ll finally know – once
and for all – that this anthropogenic climate change thing scientists have been
warning us about, was real all along.
Except that won’t happen.
Climate systems are more complex than that, and changes will probably
occur over long periods of time, and even rates of change won’t be constant. We’re currently living through a period of
gradual atmospheric shifts, witnessing the biosphere mutate around us. But it’s very difficult to see this
happening. The interplay of different
geological cycles and systems means we’ll never be able to draw a line in the
sand and say: “All past hurricanes were
just bad weather. This one, (and all those yet to come?) was a climate change hurricane.”
(Though some people, famously
including the mayor of New York, have done just that.)
This is dangerous, because if we’re always waiting for the
‘aftermath’ of some grand catastrophe, we’ll end up waiting forever, whilst the
harmful consequences of global warming and unstable weather patterns continue
to build incrementally around us. There
will be no ‘after’ – only an increasingly unpleasant ‘during’. In order to take effective and timely action
on climate change, we must build social movements that re-imagine the
apocalypse.
Short-term human
imagination
Why is it that we find it so hard to conceptualising gradual
change over long periods? Why do we
think in terms of the ‘normal’ present, versus the post-apocalyptic
future? Why is it, to paraphrase Fredric
Jameson, that we’re so readily able to imagine a future earth as an apocalyptic
wasteland, but don’t have the imagination to avert this by re-thinking the way
we organise our society in the present?
It’s often suggested that humans are simply incapable of
thinking in the timescales needed to avert long-term climatic change. That our psychology is evolutionarily
hard-wired to let us solve problems that will help us immediately – how to find
food, shelter, etc – but doesn’t let us comprehend bigger, more abstract things
like the future, quantum physics, and the popularity of Robin Thicke.
But I’d argue that there are loads of everyday things that
would be really useful to understand but we have no clue about how they work – like
consciousness, and love. On the other
hand, there are loads of examples of humans having a very good grasp of
phenomena that operate across huge scales of space and time. We understand (pretty much) how stars work –
how amazing is that? And – under the
right circumstances – people have conceived projects designed to last for centuries.
Bazalgette’s London sewer system comes to mind (famously
over-designed to accommodate a potential population boom in the capital), as
does a lot of other Victorian civic architecture. But even simple objects: in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell regards a stone water-trough,
which he claims was made at least 100 years ago. He muses, “That country had not had a time of
peace of any length at all that I knew of ... But this man had set down with a
hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand
years”. [OK, the water-trough is fictional - but you get my point.]
Media simplification
The mainstream press doesn’t lend itself well to long,
nuanced, multi-stranded narratives. A
related but separate problem is that discussions around risk and uncertainty
are very difficult to convey succinctly or punchily. Scientific uncertainty is often misunderstood
as meaning “scientists don’t know what’s going on”. It’s also not usually possible to go into the
detail of how scientific consensus is formed, or what it even means to say
‘scientific consensus’ in the first place – so when people say ‘scientists
agree climate change is real’, it’s not always clear what that means.
The media is happiest when it can explain a whole story in a
single bombastic headline, then supplement this with some background detail to
add a bit of colour. Where there is room
for debate in a story, it is generally presented in black-and-white terms, with
two rent-a-quotes who are framed as being from two diametrically opposing
camps, who say the opposite to each other in order to provide a sense of
‘balance’. This echoes the archaic, adversarial
traditions of debate so beloved by our law courts and parliament.
[Of course, the above is an equally simplistic and unfair
characterisation of journalism, and there’s a huge amount of variety and depth
in the way that climate change and other stories are covered in the national
media, depending on the news outlet, context, the format of the piece,
etc. But I do still think that these
concerns remain a barrier to a better public understanding of climate change.]
This approach leaves limited room to air more subtle shades
of critique between different parties.
It gives little scope to tease out the whole web of issues that usually
underpin a story. Questions as broad as
climate change are particularly adversely affected by this style of reporting.
In particular, it is the black-and-white (in fact black versus white) approach that seems to
lend itself to arguments over whether climate change is happening or not. Discussions over the extent of the capacity
of oceans to absorb CO2, or the pros and cons of different policy
approaches to minimising deforestation, are too vague to make good headlines. They’re also less suited to the topical
immediacy on which most news items are pegged.
The upshot is that climate change debate is often limited to
the question “Is it happening or not?”
Or at best, demanding to know exactly what concentrations of atmospheric
CO2 will cause specific temperature rises, and what precise meteorological
effects these will correlate with.
(Spoiler: we can’t predict it
that accurately.)
Missing middle, but
no end
In the face of an oppositional discourse where climate
advocates are pitted against climate deniers, we end up with all the climate
campaigners focusing solely on the most harmful effects of climate change – the
devastating end-times that humanity must strive to avoid – just in order to get
the public and policy-makers to take it seriously enough to act. But in only telling the end of the story, we
lose all the action in the middle, and skip straight to the denouement in the
final chapter.
The trouble is, if we wait to witness a disaster before
we’re satisfied that climate change is real and problematic, it will not only
be too late to mitigate its causes, but we may not even notice it going on all around
us. If we’re searching for an
‘aftermath’, we’re never going to find it – because we’ll forever be living in
the present.
Linear narrative
I suspect the media question isn’t just about presentation of climate stories, but the
way we’re trained to process narrative
itself. The way culture is produced
and consumed often relies on being able to sell a simple linear narrative arc,
with a beginning and end, and often with goodies and baddies. Books, films, and TV series all leave us with
the expectation of a resolution, to end on a perfect cadence. (Of course there are exceptions to this rule,
like The Prisoner – but they are indeed exceptions). Likewise, when we engage with narratives on
climate change through these same media, we’re presented with a view that has
to be easily packaged into the standard format.
If our brains are trained to think in terms of rigid
narrative arcs, with a beginning and end, it’s more difficult to think in terms
of a never-ending process that will continue to play out indefinitely. We’re always searching for a mental milestone
to signify where the story ends. (Even
if there’s a sequel planned for afterwards).
Disaster movies and
hell on earth
Climate change is imagined as an impending disaster (which
it pretty much is). We’re already very
familiar with what disasters look like, because we’ve seen them in hundreds of
films. Disasters look great on the big
screen, because they come with big explosions, a lot of human suffering, and
often a topical moral message.
The trouble is, disaster movies almost always portray the
apocalypse as a one-off, traumatic event.
But climate change is a bit more like 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with successive
generations of a village living through years and years of small, cumulative
disruptions and developments. This makes
climate change very hard to put on screen.
Films featuring the aftermath of epic, world-changing phenomena such as nuclear winters and zombie outbreaks, are our main fictional frames of reference for imagining post-crisis landscapes, which means that when climate-perturbed futures are mapped onto these expectations, something gets lost in translation. Films featuring individual extreme weather or geological
events (Perfect Storm, Twister, etc) maybe relate to some of the local
disturbances that could be thrown up by climate change, but they don’t give the whole picture of
everyday life.
There aren’t a lot of fictional films explicitly dealing
with anthropogenic climate change and its effects (The Day After Tomorrow is
one), though a few touch on general themes of ecological collapse (Wall-E
springs to mind). The Day After Tomorrow
depicts climate change as a singular event – a tipping point that creates
instant global devastation at a single stroke presumably – due to the
constraints of Hollywood narrative requirements mentioned above. But it seems unfair, and almost beside the
point to pick this one example – we’ve already learned, through exposure to decades
of apocalyptica, to think about time by dividing it into epoch-defining moments
of crisis.
In modern Britain, beliefs in traditional notions of Hell –
an eternity of literal fire and brimstone – are less prevalent than they once were. However, it has been suggested by some that
Hell is a concept that has not been lost, but secularised. It has migrated to Hollywood cinema screens
depicting floods, explosions, and wastelands;
to crudely constructed, orientalist portrayals of regions in the world
that suffer armed conflict, genocide, and famine.
Yet these secularised visions of ‘Hell on
earth’ retain something of the transcendent;
the abject; the infinite and
unknown, that have always characterised Hell as an unsettling concept. Perhaps by tapping into this portion of some cultural subconscious, disaster movies speak to some buried anxiety of eternal
devastation brought about by our own wrongdoing, closely aligning with the same
visions of moralising and hellfire preached by many in the environmental
movement. [Not that there's some homogenous, universally held version of Hell, but I do think a hazy conception of Hell is recognised widely enough to carry significant resonance for many people.]
Borderlands and
D-Days
Naomi Klein’s theory of the Shock Doctrine – the creation of
perpetual emergency, a present moment that is permanently ephemeral and ‘now’,
as a mechanism of domination – is partly reflected in the quick-fix lifestyle
interventions necessary for consumer capitalism. So-called retail therapy; comfort eating and crash-dieting; get ripped in 4 weeks; the ‘before and after’ shot.
The notion of there being an ‘after’ to take an ‘after shot’
of, is significant. It’s an everlasting,
effortless ‘after’ that follows a single burst of energy needed to create a dramatic,
one-off change that will not relapse.
The greener pastures promised by lifestyle-advertising repeatedly create
in our minds miniature milestones in our lives, on the other side of which lies
a blissful ‘after’, a future of release.
Of course, in reality there is no ‘after’ a diet, where you
can stop working and revert to your presumably slovenly, primordial, default state. You have to keep it up indefinitely. This is why the very concept of ‘going on a
diet’ is problematic – because although it might be possible to moderately
adjust to a healthier lifestyle, who could face going on a permanent diet? (And how could you sell it?)
The same consumer logic of one-off crash diets and quick
fixes is well suited to the attraction of climate technofixes, where one
catastrophic singularity is mitigated by another, one-off intervention of high
technology, without addressing any of the interconnected underlying problems of
energy production and consumption, resource depletion, social inequality, etc. Our tangled global crises are instantly
solved with the same simplicity of Bruce Willis nuking an asteroid.
That isn't to say we should reject technology altogether - but we need to think about what technology we deploy, who controls it, and whose priorities it serves. To return to Fredric Jameson (sort of), why is it that many individuals and governments are prepared to accept the validity of madcap geo-engineering schemes, but dismiss large-scale solar and wind energy generation, and global emissions treaties, as implausible?
That isn't to say we should reject technology altogether - but we need to think about what technology we deploy, who controls it, and whose priorities it serves. To return to Fredric Jameson (sort of), why is it that many individuals and governments are prepared to accept the validity of madcap geo-engineering schemes, but dismiss large-scale solar and wind energy generation, and global emissions treaties, as implausible?
Re-imagining
capitalism and re-imagining the climate
Nina Power once said in a talk she gave for Auto Italia that
the anti-capitalist revolution isn’t going to be a ‘grand rupture’. This is the revolution figured as the
‘glorious day’, as imagined by so many on the left, and captured exquisitely in
the romanticism of Silver Mt Zion’s lyrics about barricades, and the grand ‘parade’
that repeatedly serves as the metaphor for their insurrection.
Power didn’t mean that a revolution wouldn’t entail great
upheaval. She meant that the world the day
afterwards wouldn’t look so very different to how it did the day before. Our personal relationships, our streets, will
still feel just as they did the previous Tuesday. Even following times of major transition, the
everlasting questions remain, ‘What do we do now? How do we build from here?’
These questions can’t just be asked after the event. Although many find romanticism in ideas of
grand, radical upheavals that suddenly uproot centuries-old systems of
inequality, real, peaceful and lasting change must come through slowly building
social movements that can address these challenges. And in fact, most of our daily experiences of
participating in politics – however radical – are not about planning for some
far-off glorious revolution, but are about small actions – raising awareness of
particular issues; holding debates; staging demonstrations that don’t expect to
immediately bring the government to its knees, but that hope to challenge
institutions to behave a little bit better, or will inspire others to take more
small actions of their own.
This slow-burning, building impetus, for me offers hope for
ways in which we might seek to re-imagine approaches to climate change. Because climate change also requires a
radical sea-change in the way society operates, but won’t manifest itself suddenly
and completely. It therefore requires
solutions that are visionary and groundbreaking to create a new, different,
more liveable world, but that don’t expect to see these changes take place over
night.
Having earlier mentioned Godspeed You Black Emperor’s
‘parade’ revolutionary aesthetic, their daughter band, Silver Mt Zion, offer a
different vision of resistance in the title of their 1999 album, “Slow Riot for
a New Zero Kanada”. I can’t pretend to
know the sentiments that lay behind this name, but for me it speaks of a sustained
but powerful response to a late-capitalist, brutal world order that has created
a landscape where – in the words of Wikipedia’s translation of the biblical
quote in the liner notes –
“The earth… was waste and
void…
There was no man, And
all of the birds of the heavens were fled...
The fruitful field was
a wilderness,
And all the cities
thereof were broken down…
The whole land shall
be desolate,
Yet I shall not make a
full end.”
*****
Climate change is indeed a real and serious problem. Although it won’t make its full effects known
in a single day, its impact will be enormous – and ongoing. Likewise, we need to develop solutions to
re-organising the economy, society, and politics, that can’t happen overnight,
but do need to be profound and radical – and sustainable in the long-run. There will be no ‘after’ – only an endless
‘during’. We need a slow riot.
