Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Trump’s decompensation on the campaign trail.
“Climate change covers everything. It can rain, it can be dry, it can be hot, it can be cold….”
That’s exactly right, and that’s a huge part of the goddamn problem. It’s not just a “change” like flipping a switch on or off; it’s the disruption and destabilization of established, reliable patterns upon which human civilization (and the biosphere in general) depends. It is the removal of “pattern” itself, which makes human planning much more difficult, in this instance, the rescheduling, or the end of the concept of a hurricane “season” itself.
Looking more closely, it’s not just a “climate change” problem, but a nightmare weave of disasters arising from the collective appropriation by eight billion humans of ever more of the Earth’s species and materials for their own exclusive use. Even if we weren’t destabilizing the climate, we’d still be in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, a water crisis, a food production crisis, a pollution crisis, and a resource scarcity crisis. Our numbers alone impose an irreducible footprint and load upon the normal, healthy cycling of the planet and the health and wellbeing of all of its other inhabitants. Multiply anything each of us does by eight billion. We take up a lot of biogeochemical space simply by existing. Our cumulative impact starts at the molecular level and goes up from there, with our fingerprints on change and influence at every scale over the entire planet. We are a growing herd of bulls in a china shop that is still as small as it ever was, but there are now fewer things left to break. Taking everything for ourselves is a self-defeating strategy. Looking at the trend lines we’re following, it looks like our goal is a human monoculture. More humans mean less of everything else, and that “everything else” gives us the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. There are no substitutes. There are no alternative brands we can switch to, no other store we can go to that will stock these items if they disappear from the shelves.
The Earth system is not going to restabilize until we stop dumping massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into it (among other things). If and when that happens, it is likely to have shifted to a new regime unprecidented in human experience, which is not a phrase one wants to hear in conjunction with the very conditions upon which human society depends. The Earth is still recovering from the last such major perterbations we’ve induced; the widespread extirpation of Ice Age megafaunal communities, and the European conquest of the Americas, both of which are still unfolding, and both of which have involved massive disruptions and reorganizations of biomes on a continental scale, the first over a timescale of millenia, the second over centuries. It’s harder to dance if the beat keeps changing. Our current crises (which are developments of and elaborations upon these two previous convulsions) are operating at a decadal level, with things getting worse faster than our models had predicted. We’re not dancing anymore. Now we have to run just to keep up. This is not good news for a global, Just-On-Time civilization, because at some point it means we’re not going to be sure where our next meal is coming from. Multiply that by eight billion.
Humans are a pattern-seeking species. It has been one of our vital survival skills, allowing us to see fleeting parts of a whole and infer the signal “predator” lurking in the undergrowth. The occasional “noise” of a false positive where it’s a false alarm is a small price to pay compared to the lethal and overconfident false negative that resulted in a non-forebear becoming dinner. Pattern-seeking is the basis of all science. But we are pattern-creators too, with the false-positive noise of mistaken inference being elevated to the level of meaningful “signal” Our pattern-seeking instincts can be hijacked and redirected by our cultural expectations and turned into elaborate, whole-cloth delusional structures, like astrology. Or, they can be incorporated into an existing cultural construction where there is a resemblance to expected imagery. Pareidolia can be quite culturally specific. From this we get the veneration of a random pattern on a leaky oil storage tank because it happens to look vaguely like some peoples’ idea of the appearance of the Virgin Mary, and that this is actually a vital message, a call for repentance and renewed faith. That’s a lot of baggage to load onto a stain. Non-Catholics and non-Christians are much less likely to see any such resemblance, and even less likely to ascribe any meaning or urgency to any such “apparition,” and yet still succumb to triggering by a resemblance to something culturally salient to themselves. Catholics and other Christians will in turn see nothing of interest or import in someone else’s “significant” patterns of burnt toast, or stained walls. Message not received. (This cultural naivety/gullibility can be used by the unscrupulous, with “images” created for power and profit, the “Shroud” of Turin being the most well known among all the relics of the Saints, and splinters of the True Cross.)
There’s money to be made in the other direction as well. What we’re dealing with now is a denial of pattern, a claim that there is no connection, no signal in the supposed pattern of phenomena ascribed to “climate change.” That this denial happens to align perfectly with the economic and financial interests of those promoting it is supposed to be disregarded (in effect, the denial of another pattern) and ignored, their hand poorly hidden behind made-to-order astroturf organizations whose sole purpose is to sow doubt. Denial of the tobacco-cancer link was just the audition. In a nice bit of judo, this conflict of interest is projected upon the researchers studying climate change, with the charge that they are grifters making a buck out of the climate change “industry,” and that their calls for “more research” are just grabs for more money. This accusation, coming as it does from the oil industry’s side of this grotesque power imbalance, would be laughable if it weren’t leading us on into disaster. But it’s part of the fine human tradition of hiding from ourselves the true costs of our behaviours. It’s as old as calling cows, pigs, and chickens “beef”, “pork” and “poultry,” and of a piece with hiding sweatshops overseas, and euphemistically naming suburban property “developments” for the natural features plowed under and bulldozed away to make room for them. We’re encouraged to look the other way, to not concern ourselves with how others have to pay for what we have and how we got it. If we lose our appetite for what’s on our plate, we no longer buy their product, but we still have to find something to eat.
Part of this pattern denial is hiding alternatives to the way things are now. Products labeled “fair trade” offer a hint of this. What does that say about products that aren’t labelled as such? What of the treatment of people at the other end of the supply chain? Isn’t it possible to run a profitable business that doesn’t rely on oppression and expoitation in service to the bottom line? These are choices that have been made, not things that just happen. Somebody signs those paycheques and decides how many zeros follow the number on the line. It shouldn’t be remarkable or noteworthy to treat people working for you with dignity and respect, and to take less in profit in order to pay them a living wage. The end price that consumers pay should reflect these considerations, rather than be used as an inflexible position to use as leverage against workers’ conditions in a race to the bottom. One would hope that a knowledgible, educated, compassionate society would be aware of this and realize that our economic relationships should be more like a partnership or collaboration, and less like a dictatorship or theft. We’re all in this together, and we shouldn’t let sociopaths set the agenda or write the rules. At this point in time, a “winner take all” mentality ends up with everyone losing.
Making choices depends upon knowing their are choices to be made, that choice is even possible. Hiding this fact, and acting as if our current conditions are somehow “natural”, “inevitable” and not themselves the products of past and current choices prevents us from making informed decisions. Ultimately we are constrained by the physical limits of material reality (limits which are making themselves felt more keenly as time ticks away). But the most important limits might be both imaginary and imaginative, dependent upon our ability to discern the importance of patterns that are actually present, our ability to overcome cultural and economic blindness to those patterns, and our willingness to change what we’re doing. Not all changes are improvements, so having a clear understanding of where we are, how we got here, where we want to go, and how we might get there, are crucial to choosing our actions. The human impact on the Earth can be found everywhere, at all scales. This knowledge is sobering, but it means that opportunities for action to heal those injuries is possible at all scales, everywhere. Wherever we are, there are things we can do. We’re capable of so much. We have produced more than our fair share of cruelty and barbarity, destruction and thoughtlessness. But we also have an amazing aptitude for creativity and genius, curiousity and determination, understanding and compassion, physical and mental courage, stamina and perseverence; for imagining things that one would scarcely believe possible, both individually and collectively, and doing them. Multiply that by eight billion.
Roll up your sleeves: there’s work to do.
