- denier (perhaps the happiest group)
- defeatist (I recycle and cycle to work, but what can I do? I'm just one person, its all so bad, I'm depressed)
- activist (I'm going to do something about this now, they can't do this to my children)
I think one of the biggest problems facing us on climate change is somehow making better use of people who care than letting them fall into defeatist mode.
Trust me, even taking small actions against an impossibly large problem feels about 1000 times better than sitting there wringing your hands over it.
What are some things that you are doing?
I don't mean to suggest that I have The Best strategy or tactic that you should deploy right now. These are hard problems we're talking about, and my long-term aims are plotted over 10-30 year timescales, and realistically the chances of achieving those are very tiny. I pursue a political approach because that's where my knowledge and skills seem likely to have the most effect.
I'm not sure that we need to necessarily go back to pre-industrial lifestyles in some sort of neo-primitivism movement. Perhaps I'm wrong and this will be forced upon us, but I believe that our capacities for invention and redeployment of our resources make it possible to change direction as a species. That has never been done before, and it will be fearfully difficult, even dangerous. But I prefer failure to passivity.
I've mentioned the 'deep green resistance' group partly because this thread is focused on ecology and partly because it's a good overview of the different theories and techniques of activism. Maybe if I were talking to one of the authors I'd get castigated for being too focused on political considerations and not putting the environmental issue at front and center of my efforts. But that's where my bets are placed for the time being.
Lets assume we're going to survive climate change. After all, we have to.
And lets assume we're going to survive it without needing to go back to our pre-industrial lifestyles:
- we're going to drive around in our EVs, charged from renewable sources
- we're going to sit at home playing video games and living in VR (because that's a nice energy efficient way to spend our days)
- we'll hopefully have access to modern medicine and the other benefits of our existing economy
I think once we start viewing survival from climate change more positively, we can start making better decisions.
For example, if we're going to survive, do we want to do so inside some sealed dome, hooked up to a desalination plant, where our day jobs are manually pollinating the few species of plant that have survived?
Or do we aspire for nature to remain at least somewhat intact, and for our plants to be pollinated in the current way - magically, by insects?
They're rhetorical questions of course. I hardly expect you to come up with a solution for the globe's ills (hats off to you if you can; I certainly don't have a clue). But the exclusive focus on climate change is itself one of the biggest dangers we face. It tempts with the prospect of a narrow technical fix while leaving current ideologies and institutions intact. We know where that road leads, with or without further climate change (in addition to that already locked in).
But I feel we might make more progress if we can tell people that they will be able to keep playing their video games, rather than have to fall back to some peasant existence where they till fields from dawn to dusk.
Because we do have technology on our side, we will need to travel, and its impossible to imagine us living in anything other than a capitalist structure where people are still working, enjoying themselves, competing with others. Even if its competing for the best quarters within the biodome rather than the biggest beachfront house.
I feel that talk of the death of "current ideologies and institutions" is probably scary to many, and (I don't know if you're suggesting this) starting from the point of having to stop all economic growth will alienate many.
> (I don't know if you're suggesting this) starting from the point of having to stop all economic growth
I sort of am, except that I put "economic growth" in scare quotes not as a childish jibe, but because I believe it is a fiction. The 'growth' is just a transfer of matter from living ecologies to dead technologies. A certain amount of that could clearly have been managed, but as (from most accounts) we're already roughly at 200-300% of the earth's carrying capacity, degrowth (ie. reducing matter transfer out of real complex ecologies so they can re-establish themselves) is now the only thing that could save us. And it won't happen, presumably.
Facebook as one example has seen enormous growth. Was it bad for the planet? (apart from the incalculable cost of being an attack vector against the more easily manipulated members of society, leading to an anti-environmental administration).
Maybe not. Facebook users sit quietly, hunched over their phones, sipping small amounts of energy. Comparing them to someone who drives their 4WD for a hobby, they look good.
There was much talk in the 90s of decoupling economic growth from 'resource use' (sorry about the scare quotes again: I also think the term 'resource' masks a related myth). There were even individual companies that claimed to be getting there (eg. IIRC a carpet company that leased carpets to offices so they could control the whole lifespan?).
But evolution has had millions of years to explore state spaces using recycling. Carpet companies notwithstanding, on a planetary scale I doubt we can do it any more efficiently than evolved systems do, without developing systems of comparable complexity. And we're clearly centuries (at least) away from being up to that, and we don't have centuries to play with.
It's a shame so much political activism is protest rather than construction. That's probably inevitable given the configuration of political power and the sheer speed of the destruction (locally for example I certainly don't want the Adani lunacy to go ahead). And protest can develop community which can be a usefully subversive form of construction. But there's something slightly unsatisfying there, and it doesn't suit everyone's predispositions.
> I do recognize that it's not enough and we all need to basically go back pre-industrial lifestyles to really make enough of a change to matter.
Bah. Charge a dollar per kg of carbon released and the problem will almost solve itself. It's much more a problem of political will than it is a problem of technical capability.
Sorry, if humanity allows it to come as far as requiring mineshafting for pure self-inflicted ecological overexploitation, it does not deserve survival.