Search for hope amid climate doom
The original version of this article was published in the Canberra Times and Sydney Morning Herald, October 5, 2017.
After another frigid Canberra winter, I've welcomed the warmer weather with joy. Yet it's increasingly too warm to leave a lasting smile. We used to look forward to summer, with its liturgy of play and relaxation but we might well dread them now as punishing.
In his book, Blueprints for a Post-Anthropocene Greenhouse Earth, the Australian National University's Dr Andrew Glikson says there's no turning back the greenhouse clock. He foresees mass extinctions and a breakdown of civilisation. In his book, Defiant Earth, Clive Hamilton of the Canberra-based Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics foresees something even worse: the possibility of our own extinction by an untameable Earth.
Hamilton writes it will probably be hundreds of thousands of years before most of the large reserves of carbon released during the human age can be rendered immobile again. People have rivalled the great forces of nature so much that we have changed the functions of the planet for an era. The Arctic is vanishing as is the Greenland ice-sheet. It won’t be reversed for tens of thousand of years.
While drifting into unparalleled catastrophe, I want to cling to hope, be slow to admit that all the facts are in, that all the doors have been tried and all is defeated. But how?
When I talk to people about climate change, there are common responses: “It’s all too hard”, “I can’t do anything about it” or worse, “I’ve just tuned out”. Some see hope in outer space. Glikson, like many scientists looking at this climate monster in the eye, says that’s ridiculous.
Hamilton does not lack faith in human inventiveness, but, like Pope Francis, he reminds us that inventiveness also harbours danger. Human ingenuity has produced the tools to source and unleash the energy, that we struggle to control.
The existential question is how to reconcile doom about the future with living a spirited and optimistic life today. While not every human is responsible for changing the climate, every human is destined to live with it. I oscillate between deep despair and small rays of hope (the take-up of renewables etc) but I am still disorientated. Bogged down by Australia’s painful, non-urgent and superficial political response to climate change, hope requires a real leap.
One person who has considered our conundrum is Canberra-based Neil Millar, a facilitator with the global Centre for Courage and Renewal. He says while we increasingly know of our connectedness to the planet it remains abstract for too many of us. To make it specific he suggests we adopt something of the Aboriginal practice known as a ‘Dadirri’. Dadirri involves deep listening with an inner and quiet still awareness, based on respect for the country and everything that’s in it. Without wanting to sound too much like a hippy, he suggests we walk our neighbourhoods appreciating that “we are in this together” and that trees breathe in what we breathe out.
Hamilton says our greatest tragedy is the absence of a sense of the tragedy. It’s a theme taken up by disillusioned British journalist Paul Kingsnorth, the co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project set up eight years ago. Artists and writers at The Project find a sanctuary in creating but above all, attend to the tragedy rather than run from it. Musing on his blog last month Kingsnorth notes a shift in the global discussion as topics that were once mainly talked about with the Project are now found in the glossy pages of the New Yorker.
“Eight more years of failed treaties, of rising emissions, of expanding human numbers, of plastic in the oceans, of species slipping away, have made the reality clearer to us all. In another eight years, it will be clearer again. None of the vaunted ‘solutions’ to this predicament, from nuclear fission to colonising Mars to top-down ‘new stories’ developed by worthy intellectuals, shows any sign of shifting the machine from its designated course,” he writes.
Kingsnorth like Millar, wants to take us to the top of mountains to see beauty and then back down into our neighbourhood to hug and hear trees. He doesn’t offer solutions beyond that, but is almost evangelical about our capacity to rise above the impacts of our stupidity. We have lived through an ice age and many ages of barbarism. He thinks we can probably live through this.
Perhaps I live with a paradoxical hope, a hopeless hope, a tepid gloom. Like a pop-singer I wobble between song titles, ‘I know it’s over’,‘ From little things big things grow’ and ‘There is a light that never goes out’. I waltz to Nietzche’s ‘arrows of longing for the other shore’ and a reframed John Lennon’s ‘Imagine there is a heaven’.