Peter BoyerClimate emergency demands changed mindsets, pacts with enemies.
Facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions, we are headed for disaster unless we can break out of old mindsets and cast aside old antagonisms. In the context of climate change, these are suffocating, futile – and dangerous.
This is about how we think – the mindsets within which people consider the things that matter in their lives – and why we now need to think differently, to look afresh at ourselves, our societies, our economies, our governance, our alliances, our individual and collective responsibilities – everything about the human condition. In doing so, we must accept that some cherished but dysfunctional mindsets will have to be abandoned.
We’ve come a long way, we humans, since a species of great apes took to living on the ground. Our prospects then wouldn’t have looked great. We weren’t especially big, fast, agile or strong. Many competing species beat us hands down in hearing or seeing or smelling. But with brainpower and handcraft on our side, we learned to exploit other species.
We became numero uno – the most dominant species in the history of our planet. You could see this as evolutionary success, although a more sophisticated reading of Darwinian theory would note the danger in the absence of competition. And then, there’s Gaia.
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A brief diversion into history: Around 1900 an Austrian geologist named Eduard Suess introduced the idea of the biosphere, “the place on Earth’s surface where life dwells”, as he put it. The term was later defined to mean the global ecological system that includes not only all living things, but also the ground, air and water amid which they live. About the same time a Swedish physicist, Svante Arrhenius, demonstrated that rising carbon dioxide levels could change surface temperatures on Earth, and forty years later Guy Callendar produced weather observations to show human-produced carbon dioxide was already causing our planet to heat up.
In the late 1950s, armed with new data-gathering technologies, scientists took a fresh look at “greenhouse theory”. Within four eventful years, 1956 to 1959 – who said the 1950s were a boring decade? – came the breakthrough which thrust greenhouse theory into prominence among earth systems scientists. It took longer to break out into the wider scientific community, and much longer, as we know, into the public consciousness.
In these four years Gilbert Plass, Roger Revelle, Hans Suess (grandson of the biosphere man, Eduard Suess) and Charles Keeling produced powerful evidence, if not absolute proof, of the “Callendar Effect” – that human activity was causing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to rise, that oceans could not tale up all of this excess, and that as a result the planet was warming. Plass warned that early in the 21st century warming may be approaching dangerous levels.
The next ten years or so were eventful years for the development of environmental consciousness. While David Brower, in defence of natural systems, was leading the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth into battle against big money and big technology, his friend Paul Ehrlich was opening up debate on the limited ability of Earth to sustain life and the need to curb population.
And James Lovelock, then doing extra-terrestrial research for NASA, was developing a concept of our planet as a kind of organism, a complex system of living and non-living parts sustained by a regulating biosphere. This “mother of all” needed a name, and as is often the way, Lovelock turned to the ancients. To the Greek earth-goddess… Gaia.
The science behind Lovelock’s Gaia theory is not without some eminent critics, including a favourite of mine, Richard Dawkins.
But I’m not so much interested in the science as in the notion Gaia encompasses, that all life is inseparable from its home, this rocky, watery, airy planet. In these times of trying to make sense of our present existence on Spaceship Earth, Gaia is a very powerful idea indeed.
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Gaia is powerful, above all, because it represents an effective counter to the biggest myth we humans have ever created (and we’ve created some corkers down the ages). That is, the myth that we can continue to live out our lives in our own artificial world without reference to anything outside it, independent of, and dominant over, the rest of creation. The eternal domination myth has been the mindset of the rich and powerful all through history, but it became “democratised” over the course of the Industrial Revolution, as power to change our environment spread to the masses. It’s a myopic, self-centred and ultimately suicidal myth, but we’ve continued with it because nothing appeared to challenge it. It’s been a comfortable mindset.
But not so comfortable any more. In the past couple of years the braying about the “doomsayers” – such as the attacks on Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome over their “false” warnings about over-population and food supply – have become steadily more muted. Slowly – too slowly – but steadily, people everywhere are coming to realise that our persistence in doing what we damn well like will eventually come back to bite us.
The problem is, it’s all been so easy. Steadily, through the decades of the 20th century, with a few hitches like depression and war, it became easier to obtain food, insulate our homes from conditions outside, buy a car and equip it with all mod cons, shop till we drop, travel abroad – and, if we want, have more children.
In the wider scheme of things this is a false economy, because it takes no account of the real cost – the damage to the biosphere that sustains us. But we’ve managed to extend the illusion of comfort and prosperity for much longer than was good for us. We’ve been too clever by half.
I’m referring only to what we’ve glibly and quite inaccurately called the “developed world”. The other, “undeveloped”, part of humanity, is living in much the same way as it’s always lived, from hand to mouth – except that most of these people are now less independent than they were, because they’ve been driven by war, the global economy and the policies of nations and international bodies to leave their once-productive rural lands, the lands that sustained them, and live in urban slums. That’s one of the inevitable fruits of “development”.
But let’s not get too stuck on the morality of the privileged few (us) and the exploited others (them). The reality is that given the opportunity, anyone in the world would do what we’ve done. Look at what’s happening in India and China, where uptake of cars and electricity is at levels we’ve never seen before, anywhere. No matter when and where we live, when we have the means our first impulse is to consume as if our lives depend on it, ignoring the reality that the opposite is true.
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We and our “developed” mindsets are now at a crossroads. The challenges we face today offer a rare opportunity for change. The instability of our climate due to human greenhouse gas emissions is now a global emergency – a fact that increasing numbers of people in Australia and countries like it are becoming aware of.
Something is developing in the Australian social psyche akin to what existed in 1942 with the fall of Singapore. Perhaps it’s not quite as stark, but that gap is narrowing, and today’s food shortages and our drying earth bring it much closer to home than the Japanese army in Singapore.
An emergency focuses the mind like nothing else, and opens up the prospect for radical change as never before. People may not necessarily be pursuing change – many may be frightened into withdrawing into silence – but this is where leadership is so important. Those people who can grasp the moment, who can understand the challenge of these times and have the voice to articulate the mindset shifts we need, must step up, speak out, and lead by the example of personal action.
We have seen some significant shifts in public policy addressing climate change, but the fact is that at this advanced stage of the climate emergency no Australian government at any level has made serious inroads into the radical changes – the actual physical changes – that are patently necessary to deal with the climate challenge. We’ve talked a lot, as I’m doing now, but we haven’t yet taken the substantive action that’s necessary. And all the while the clock ticks, and ticks.
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For all its imperfections, the Lennon government was democratically elected, and the next election is two years away – two years longer than the time we have to take action. The climate emergency demands that the wheels of government continue to turn to good effect. Until we next go to the polls, we have an obligation to help and work with our elected government, in whatever way we can, to meet the unprecedented challenge of climate change.
Last October, Paul Lennon said he wanted his government to lead Australia in tackling climate change. In February he said he’d asked Professor Ross Garnaut to provide “transparent, independent advice” on the role of the forestry sector in addressing climate change. Early in March he announced that the public service, starting immediately, would act with all necessary speed to reduce its carbon footprint, and that the government would make laws to mandate a 2050 emissions reduction target to cut emissions by 60 percent below 2000 levels.
(The target has been criticised as too modest. The science emphatically supports that, and I think it will eventually have to be raised. But in present circumstances of rising dependence on Victorian coal-power and questions about the impact of land-use activities, including forestry, 60 percent is looking increasingly ambitious.)
In the context of past inaction, these were very welcome developments. I for one applauded the Premier for bringing some much-needed authority and decision to the Tasmanian climate debate.
It still remains to see action on these directives, and for the wider Tasmanian community to be brought into the picture. To advance the latter, the Climate Change Office is to release a Tasmanian strategy in stages over coming months. This will, I hope, bring home to the Tasmanian community that government and citizens alike have a responsibility to work together on the urgent task of overcoming intertia in our systems and communities and starting real, physical action.
And dealing with people we once might have avoided. Because this effort will demand that we be open to ideas, and as we all know, good ideas often come from unlikely sources. One of the new, essential paradigm shifts will involve how we as individuals relate to other people, and to our respective communities.
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It’s interesting how our societies in the developed world have evolved over the period of the Industrial Revolution. In keeping with a physical environment that’s getting ever more artificial, our social links have left behind communities in their old sense, with their extended families, neighbourhoods, local networks and so on. In today’s society, people can have more contact with others living great distances away than with the person over their side fence, and parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews can be so estranged as not to know each other.
The artificiality of our modern social lives is why people need pets like dogs, whose natural inclination is to be social, dependent, loyal, and focused on and engaged with the people and other animals close to them in their lives. Such attributes seem almost quaint and old fashioned in today’s cool, detached social environment. You and I accept all this as normal, but if we hadn’t grown up in such a world – if we’d come from a past age or a less “developed” community in another place, and thought only in terms of the old ways of relating to others – I think we’d conclude that this was weird. And we’d be right.
It’s also unnatural and unhealthy, and threatens our future well-being. To again become a viable species on this planet we must try to rebuild relationships with the humans who live near us, while becoming more aware of our dependence on other species – the scary “other” that we call nature. Rebuilding communities and increasing environmental awareness go hand in hand.
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Environmentalists are potential, if not current, leaders in the climate debate. People who have made the decision to join such organisations are already well down the road to new mindsets – although it has to be said that we all rely to some extent on fossil-fuel-dependent systems and technologies.
Environmental activists are equipped as few other people are to start the paradigm shifts and actions needed to change our communities. It is essential that those holding public and corporate purse-strings recognise this and support such people in their work.
For their part, environmentalists must continue to work with scientists, economists, administrators, business people and others to refine their messages on protecting our environment and living sustainably, and to engage with politicians and teachers and coming generations to carry this message as widely and as powerfully as they can.
In doing so, they can’t afford to ignore anyone – politicians, business moguls, timber workers – anyone. We have to cross borders here. Leaving such initiatives to the “enemy” is weak, and people who stay within boundaries are not leaders. Leaders are people who break out of boxes, and who are big enough to admit that old antagonisms are futile, suffocating – and in emergencies, dangerous.
The climate emergency requires us all to open ourselves up, forge new, hitherto unlikely alliances, and look after our own health of mind. The eloquent counsel of Max Ehrmann in his “Desiderata”, written in 1927, seems more pertinent than ever:
“As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and ignorant; they too have their story…. And whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”
Peter Boyer is a Hobart-based science writer and presenter for The Climate Project (Australia). This essay is adapted from a talk to members of Tasmanian environmental organisations in Hobart on 3 May, organised by Environment Tasmania.
