Australia has its own permutations of this, but sometimes it can help to see just how ugly greed can be in a context a little distant from ours in order to help us to see our own context with fresh eyes.
The day after they've given thanks for all they have, people are trampling and even killing each other to grab more (largely unnecessary) stuff. I have thought for some time that the main antidote to the idolatry of consumerist greed is thankfulness, but reflecting on this juxtaposition in the US cultural calendar makes me question that assumption. While I have been thinking and teaching for many years that thankfulness is the path to contentment, perhaps I should be concentrating more on the cultivation of trust in God's future goodness as a more important source of satisfaction. Giving thanks may briefly shift my gaze from the next purchase to what is already in my hand, but if this is to be more than a momentary distraction from the insatiable hunger for more, we need a healing of the heart: a cleaning, filling and binding of the gaping wound that our purchases briefly and ineffectually seek to soothe. Indeed, sometimes what looks like thankfulness can merely be "entitlement in thankfulness clothing",* as our thanksgiving can serve to baptise our current level of affluence, neutralising any critical reflection on the purposes and consequences of that affluence. Perhaps this particular demon requires not just prayers of thanksgiving, but also fasting. *A phrase from my friend Claire Johnston, who helped me rethink my understanding in a recent Facebook discussion of this video.
At a practical level, minimising exposure to advertising is critically important, since though we all deny being influenced by silly ads, corporations know that we're fooling ourselves and so willingly spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on an industry designed to erode our contentment and corrupt our desires. But it is not just avoiding the negative messages; we need to soak in the message of divine truth, grace and delight. The healing of desire is a slow process and there are no shortcuts.
One final unrelated thought: there are omnipresent riot police for every peaceful demonstration, but where are the shields and paddy wagons for these mobs? Just to be clear: I am staunchly opposed to heavy-handed policing and think that the criminalisation of dissent is a grievous injury to any claim to democratic society. I'm simply noting an irony that the surveillance and security state manages to coordinate a massive police presence at any event that might threaten the culture of endless corporate profits, but seem largely absent at these far more violent spectacles dedicated to the pursuit of that end.
So begins the critically-acclaimed and blockbusting new film Gravity - the most humble, human and hopeful sci-fi film I've ever seen.
How can a sci-fi flick be humble? This was no "to infinity and beyond" celebration of hubristic human intergalactic imperialism. This was an extended study in our inability to survive a mere few hundred kilometres above the surface of the only habitable piece of rock in the known universe, a precarious existence in orbit (i.e. perpetually falling back to earth and missing, which is what orbit is) threatened not by aliens, not by an absent God, not by international tensions and conflicts, but simply and depressingly by the unforeseen consequences of our shortcuts and fundamentally by the inability to deal with our own junk.
Even amidst death and destruction, the Earth itself was the star of the show, the jewel in space, the pale blue dot on which all human hopes depended. The sheer beauty of the planet was the backdrop against which the crises and tragedies of the tiny cast played out. Indeed, the last line from the one human who felt somewhat at home in space was an appreciation of the beauty of the earth, praising the wonder of sunlight reflected on the Ganges.
When it all comes crashing back to earth, we are thrown again onto the ground, finding in the mud between our fingers the basis of our only hope. The sense of being "home" at the end was overwhelming. We are creatures of the dirt. It is no coincidence that the only survivor is named Stone.
The film was redolent with images of gestation and birth, symbolism that even became a little heavy handed at one point as Stone floated in the fetal position trailing a breathing tube. Numerous rapid dangerous movements through narrow spaces and a final desperate breaking into and out of water completed the natal symbolism. Stone, having found in space the ultimate womb in which to hide her maternal grief, the ultimate car ride to delay the full recognition of her loss, is reborn back into the world of pain and loss, the world of gravity, the word of dirt and mud. Her final embrace of the mud was a return to roots, an acceptance of her existence on a finite planet, a rediscovery of being fundamentally a pedestrian rather than celestial species.
We are humans from the humus, 'adam from 'adamah, and our destiny is tied intimately to the planet that is our only home, a home threatened by our inability to deal with our own junk.
Katharine Hayhoe - mother, evangelical Christian, pastor's wife and highly regarded professor in atmospheric physics - makes an excellent point. Climate change threatens more than ecosystems, economies and the stability of societies; it also threatens certain identities, and we often hold those even closer than our children's future.
This is a twenty-three minute talking head video that you can basically put on as an audio since there is practically nothing to see. But the grasp of our situation by this investigative journalist - who has spent fifteen years grappling with climate science, politics, journalism and ethics and published two major books on these matters - is superior to that of many other commentators I've come across. It is now a couple of years old, but still extremely relevant.
This little animation (complete with Australian accent) is a great summary of one narrative gaining steam in certain circles. It outlines an analysis of economy, energy and environment that draws a picture of three converging crises as shaping the coming decades in quite dramatic ways that are likely to take the form of a global sustained Greater Depression, complete with economic deflation, energy supply constraints and political instability. As a positive response it suggests re-localisation, social resilience, trust building, and power-down innovation (such a permaculture). This is what the Transition Movement is all about and this animation is in many ways one accessible and cogent expression of that movement.
I am very attracted to certain elements of this account. I accept that there are grave threats in these systems (though I would characterise some of them differently) and that they could interact in complex ways. I also agree that rebuilding local communities of trust is a critical part of a health response to our present predicament. Where I'm perhaps most hesitant about an account like this is that I feel it is somewhat naïve about the likelihood of larger political events overwhelming merely local efforts. That is, very often such localism involves an explicit ignoring of national and international entities as doomed to fail anyway. I think that while such entities gain their legitimacy through acts of collective imagination (and so a widespread adoption of re-localist principles would indeed see them hollowed of clout), the path from here to there is never going to be smooth. Government and corporate powers hold sufficient cards to make life very difficult for localist movements if and when they are perceived as growing to a point where they might begin undermining their legitimacy. And even beyond such deliberate opposition, the capacity of a globalised economy and wounded ecological order to deliver sudden and catastrophic blows to a local community is easily underestimated.
So let's get serious about nurturing local communities of trust, about adjusting our expectations away from high energy consumption, about building resilience into our economic and social systems. But let's not take our eye off the ball of the macro-scale political and economic order or abandon the field to the plutocrats, deniers and techno-optimists.
It is refreshing to find a journalist who has done a little bit of homework prior to an interview and is ready to question spin, half-truths, strategic inexactitudes and "misstatements" from political leaders.
Rather than contribute another dissection of this particular interview, instead I thought I'd gather a few thoughts on the Australian carbon price and its place in contemporary Australian politics.
As Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott is so fond of reminding us (especially when facing an interviewer turning the screws on his own truthfulness), Australian PM Julia Gillard did indeed say during the 2010 election campaign, "there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead". Yet one of the signature pieces of legislation from this minority government has been the introduction a price on carbon coupled with income tax reform.
A straightforward broken promise? Yes and no.
It is axiomatic that a minority government will need to compromise its electoral platform in order to get the support of other parties or independents required to govern. If a party could gain the support of enough MPs without altering its policies, then the extra MPs would just join the party. It is abundantly clear in this case that the price on carbon was the top item on the Greens agenda (and also on the radar of the independents) and so compromise was necessary. Once the election results were known, that such legislation would be the price of Greens support (needed by either party to govern) was entirely predictable.
As far as I can see, there were really only four other alternatives: (a) for the Greens to have dropped this demand, which was considerably more core for them than a promise made once on the campaign trail (did Gillard make this claim more than once? If so, I am not aware of it), (b) for the Greens to have negotiated an agreement with the Coalition, which would have faced the same sticking point (along with likely even more disagreements on other policies), (c) for the two parties who were against a carbon price (Labor and the Coalition) to have made this the sine qua non of their respective positions and so come to a power-sharing agreement between them in order to prevent the Greens from introducing such an idea, or (d) for no agreements to be reached and a new election called.
As I've said before, too much is usually made of campaign promises. Governments exist to execute wise political authority, not merely to implement the majority will.
While it is a minor point, it's worth noting that the carbon price is not a tax. The current system is based on carbon credits that are sold to the five hundred or so largest polluting companies in a market mechanism that spends the first few years with a fixed price and unlimited credits in order to give business certainty and then shifts to a fixed number of credits (declining each year) and a moving price (with a floor and ceiling imposed). It may well have been better as a direct tax at the point of extraction with proceeds distributed equally to all Australian citizens (tax and dividend), but that is not the system that was chosen. Now it is quite arguable that most Australians do not understand the difference, but that is because there has been such an effective effort by the Opposition to muddy the waters and no effort on the part of the government to explain it. Public ignorance is assumed and reinforced by both sides.
More importantly, the current legislation is way too unambitious, with tiny targets that put Australia towards the back of industrial counties in its level of ambition and which, if adopted by all advanced economies, would most likely see us sail past two, three and four degrees. Furthermore, current legislation does not including our massive coal exports, which are already the largest in the world and are planned to double in the next decade (blowing any domestic reductions out of the water), nor the embodied carbon in imported goods, nor international aviation or shipping. It provides extremely generous free credits to many industries to soften the initial burden. And it includes international offsets, so that we can continue to emit locally while paying someone else to make changes elsewhere that Treasury does not actually expect domestic emissions to decline very much, if at all.
Yet perhaps the greatest failure by the government regarding this legislation has been the failure to make use of its introduction to keep raising climate literacy, explaining the basics of climate science (which are still widely misunderstood), why serious action of carbon emissions are morally justified (getting beyond short-term cost-benefit analyses) and necessary at every level (personal, local, national, international), why Australia must do its bit (which is considerably more than most other nations, not less) and why this battle is worth fighting, even if it looks like we're currently losing.
So be assured that I am no particular fan of the present legislation or government, but repeating Gillard's broken promise - while it may be a satisfying way of expressing anger at a government that has had its fair share of controversies while being surprisingly effective at getting more than an average amount of legislative work done - is doubly misguided.
Hurray for the EPA
The US Environmental Protection Agency is one of the most successful government programmes in the history of the US government. It has saved millions of lives and avoided tens of trillions of dollars of unnecessary health spending (for a tiny fraction of that price), as well as helping preserve and restore scores of endangered species and habitats. It was set up under arch-environmentalist Richard Nixon forty-two years ago (with a 99-1 vote in the Senate), but has come under greater attack in the last couple of years (basically, since Citizens United) than at any prior point in its history.
The Democrats are only marginally better, in many ways differing from the Republicans more in tone than substance, so I'm not trying to push any partisan agenda here (NB there are more than two parties in any case), simply noting that this organisation provides a generally excellent model of how governments can seek to wield their authority for the common good, preventing or at least reducing the abuse of the weak by the powerful (which is basically the structure of most pollution in and by rich nations: powerful corporations offloading the true costs of their polluting activities onto poorer communities). Long may it endure.
There is some debate whether small symbolic actions are a useful "easy" first step to get people taking a little bit more responsibility for the ecological consequences of their consumption, or a distraction that serves to draw attention away from the true scale of changes called for and inoculate people against genuine repentance.
Now perhaps sometimes we need to take the steps that are currently available, while working towards those that are ultimately desirable. Perhaps for some people, learning to recycle is the start of a journey in which they awaken to the fact that there is no "away" to which we can throw things, and that all our actions take place within a finite planet on which the actions of seven billion (one billion of whom live better than ancient royalty) have serious cumulative effects.
Where there is a tension between the short term tactical victories and long term strategic goals, then it can sometimes be difficult to determine whether immediately obtainable harm minimisation ought to prevail or long term hopes. For instance, should we decriminalise the use (not production) of hard drugs and treat addiction as a medical illness in order to reduce the criminalisation of end users, or would this undermine the message that ultimately we hope for a society in which no one is addicted to dangerous substances? Alternatively, would attempting a too stringent ban on smoking tobacco lead to a long term backlash against such regulation and so undermine the short term gains in smoking it may achieve?
Where I'm currently at is that while on many topics the precise balance between tactical, currently possible steps and strategic currently impossible goals may be difficult to navigate, there are elements of the situation with regards to our ecological predicament that seem somewhat obvious (at least to me). As long as we are mainly talking about plastic bags, recycling and more efficient light bulbs, we've already lost.
The goal is not a society free of plastic bags, or one that recycles assiduously and ensures lightbulbs meet the latest standard. That is far, far too small. The goal is a society that is no longer destroying the conditions of possibility for its own existence (and the existence of the biosphere as we know it and all future human societies). Plastic bags are one relatively tiny piece of that puzzle. And so while it is right to wonder whether premature regulation of, say, plastic bags causes a backlash that is counterproductive, there are bigger fish to fry. To return to the smoking analogy, it's a little as though the entire discussion is whether it would be a good idea to raise the legal age of smoking to 18 years and one month (or some other very marginal action that might slightly alter smoking stats). Whether or not this would provoke a backlash may be a relevant consideration, but given the scale of the problem, the fact that so much energy is spent discussing what is ultimately a relatively tiny piece of the puzzle actually serves to leave the status quo intact.
Cultural change does often come in small steps under sustained and creative social pressure, but the long term goals need to be clear from the outset. We don't want to be pissing in the wind.
Here's a documentary I'd really like to see. A home-grown Chinese environmental movement is one of those important developments the world needs right now. Even better would be for it to make good connexions with the Christian church in China, which has all kinds of excellent reasons for being concerned about how we treat God's good creation
As a socially-awkward young lad, I grew up reading more than a little sci-fi. For many years, stories of the real life exploits of astronauts just didn't cut it in comparison to the realm of the imagination. Yet as I've come to appreciate a little more of just how complex, demanding and risky working in space actually is, so my respect for rocket science has grown. It is indeed rocket science, after all.
At the same time, I've become increasingly suspicious of pinning any of our hopes on the (for many) cherished dream of one day colonising other planets. Indeed, the two developments reinforce each other. Learning more of the challenges raises both admiration regarding what has been achieved and the barriers to the Star Trek interstellar techno-utopian dream. Not only are interstellar distances staggeringly large, but the technical challenges at every stage are enormous. This video gives a sense of the many difficulties involved in just one step in an operation to get an unmanned rover to our second-nearest planet, a project we've been working on for forty-odd years (with many failures and some stunning success).
I don't begrudge the space programmes their funding. I think Curiosity is a great name for this project; curiosity and wonder are at the heart of knowledge's raison d'être and learning about the cosmos needs no further justification. Furthermore, even from a purely instrumental perspective, NASA's work with satellites looking back at our own planet has been one of the vital ingredients helping us raise our sights from local to global impacts as we've sought to grasp the scale and pace of changes wrought by human activities. So I will be holding my breath in the early hours of 5th August waiting for news of a successful landing (ok, maybe I'll be asleep, but holding my breath in spirit). I too am curious.
But as we seek to understand more about the worlds beyond our world, let's not get carried away by unlikely dreams. Those other wonders of astronomical investigation, telescopes, may have been revealing a growing list of earth-like planets throughout our galaxy over the last few years. Yet the nearest of these, Gliese 581g is still something like 192 trillion km away. At that distance, the fastest space craft we have yet built would take a mere 87,000 years or so to reach it.
For some, the idea of interstellar travel is an inspiring long term goal. In principle, I have no particular problem with this. Yet I get the impression that as the magnitude and proximity of our various ecological threats becomes increasingly apparent to more people, so the dream of escaping from here to start a new life elsewhere has grown. In this form, as potential salvation from our self-inflicted termination, the idea of colonising exo-planets is an illusory psychological defence mechanism, a dangerous distraction from the task of caring for our neighbours and preserving what we can of a habitable world. Yes, perhaps with some currently unimaginable silver-bullet technical breakthrough perhaps we'll be jetting off at significant fractions of the speed of light at some stage. But let us acknowledge that as a way of keeping (a tiny fragment of) the human race alive in a cosmic insurance policy, it is, quite literally, the longest of long shots.
We look to the stars, but our feet remain on the only planet we can realistically inhabit in the timeframes relevant to our self-destructive trajectory.
H/T Gareth.
This soundless little presentation from NOAA's Carbon Tracker shows atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations over time. The first half of the video shows on the left hand side the yearly rise and fall of CO2 concentrations around the world since 1979. The various dots along the line each represent a different location around the globe, arranged by latitude, with the blue dot on the far left being the south pole and the dots at far right representing measurements in the Arctic. The dots rise and fall in a regular pattern as time passes. This is because trees "breathe in" CO2 during the northern spring/summer as leaves photosynthesise and then "breathe out" in autumn/winter as leaves decay, meaning that atmospheric concentrations rise and fall a little each year in a natural cycle. The annual variations are far more pronounced in the north hemisphere (the right end of the line that bounces up and down) since there is a much greater mass of land (and so trees) up here than in the southern hemisphere. So the concentration is never exactly the same at every point in the world or on every day of the year. And yet, along with the annual cycle there is something else happening. The overall movement is unmistakeable: up, up, up. If we look at the right hand side of the display, which shows the famous "Keeling curve" of average CO2 concentrations going back to 1958 when precise records first began to be kept (by Prof C. D. Keeling at Moana Loa in Hawaii), we can see that the annual rise and fall of the natural carbon cycle is superimposed on and ultimately dwarfed by a relentless upwards rise, which represents the human contribution to the situation. Each year we dig up literally billions of tonnes of carbon that had been safely stored for millions of years underground and burn it to power our lightbulbs and laptops, our concrete and cars, our fridges and flights.
Once the period 1979-2011 has been shown (up to about 1:40 in the video), we begin to zoom out, seeing further back in time. Initially, we are introduced to the earlier progress of the Keeling curve as it wobbles up and down back to 1958 (the green part of the cuve, spanning roughly 1:40-2:00 in the video). Then we suddenly begin zooming out much more quickly, and the green curve becomes a series of yellow dots spanning back to the time of Christ (2:00-2:20). Since the apostles were not measuring CO2, these measurements are "proxies", reconstructions of historical concentrations from a wide range of sources that have preserved a natural record of atmospheric concentrations. From 2:20-3:00, the blue curve represents a record of pre-historic CO2 concentrations going back 800,000 years (ka = thousand years; BCE = Before Common Era = BC) preserved in the ancient sheets of Greenland and Antarctica (Antarctica has the deepest ice and so the oldest records). The line here jumps up and down over many thousands of years as the world went into and out of glaciations (commonly, though incorrectly, known as "ice ages"). When CO2 concentrations were low (below 200 ppm), huge sheets of ice covered vast areas of land in the northern hemisphere. We have very good reasons for believing that CO2 concentrations played a crucial (though not exclusive) role in previous natural changes in climate.
The units used to measure CO2 concentrations are parts per million (ppm), that is, the the y-axis (vertical axis) represents the number for CO2 molecules for every million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, so 300 ppm means 0.03% of the atmosphere was CO2. These seem like tiny amounts and it is true that CO2 is a trace gas, but the effects of even small changes in some trace elements can be very large. If we were adding arsenic to a cup of coffee, then a mere 300 ppm would be sufficient to kill you. So don't be fooled by those who point to the "small" numbers involved. Changing the CO2 concentration from 280 ppm (as it was prior to the Industrial Revolution) to today's level of approximately 395 ppm represents the addition of more than a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
So what does this all mean? This presentation very usefully shows the very large natural atmospheric changes in the earth's "recent" experience (recent by geological standards, since the earth itself is 4.5 billion years old). Notice that the difference between glaciers thousands of metres thick covering most of the UK and more temperate periods during which life can flourish on these isles was only about 100 parts per million.
Human agriculturally-based civilisation has only existed in the most recent 10,000 years (known as the "Holocene"), during which time CO2 concentrations (and so climate) have been fairly stable. Or had been.
So what we see (or is at least hinted at) in this video is (a) the ability of relatively "small" changes in a trace gas like CO2 to produce huge, world-changing effects on climate, (b) the relative stability (CO2 and climate-wise) of the period during which human civilisation has developed and (c) the dramatic and very sudden jump in CO2 concentrations during the last 150 years or so, accelerating rapidly over the last six decades. Compared to all previous changes, the rate of change we're seeing is off the charts. In comparison to even the steepest rises and falls during glaciations and de-glaciations, the last century or so has been basically a vertical rise, almost the equivalent of a de-glaciation in the blink of an eye. And we're already in uncharted waters, at concentrations not seen for at least 800,000 years (indeed other proxies that go back even further - albeit with lower levels of confidence - suggest that CO2 concentrations have not been this high for at least 20 million years). And if you look at the numbers on the y-axis, keep in mind that our current trajectory, in the absence of either global economic collapse or a massive energy and/or cultural revolution, will take us above 800, 900 or even 1,000 ppm during my daughter's expected lifetime. We ain't seen nothing yet.
And carbon, once removed from the stability and safety of underground storage, sticks around in the oceans, atmosphere and soils (the "active carbon cycle") for a very long time. We'll see elevated levels of carbon for hundreds and even thousands of years after we reduce human emissions to zero. It's important to keep clear in your mind the difference between emissions and concentrations. Emissions are like income going into your bank account, concentrations are like your account balance. So if we get to a concentration of, say, 700 ppm and decide to go on a crash diet of zero emissions, things won't return to "normal" for tens of thousands of years.
One recent study pointed out that CO2 released by pre-industrial deforestation continues to affect climate today, albeit on nothing like the scale of industrial activities.
Why is this a problem? Many serious and senior researchers believe that life as we know it is incompatible with CO2 concentrations above 450 ppm. In the long run, many think that anything over 350 ppm is too high since 450 ppm could well trigger the extinction of literally millions of species, perhaps a third of all those currently on the planet. Remember, we're currently at about 395 ppm and rising by more than 2 ppm each year.
Yet the insidious thing is that the effects of elevated CO2 concentrations are not immediately apparent. It can take decades for global temperatures to respond to shifts in atmospheric composition, centuries before the full effects are visible and millennia before sea levels will stabilise. So that means the crazy shifts we're already seeing are merely the result of where CO2 concentrations had reached back in about 1980 or so. Even with the best efforts, things are going to get worse for some time after we start taking this problem seriously. Thus any generation that chooses to forgo the seductive and wondrous benefits of fossil fuels will not immediately reap the rewards. We can always kick the can down the road for a few more years, but in doing so, we condemn our children (and their children and as many generation as we can imagine) to an increasingly hellish existence.
Another brief, simple (simplistic? Perhaps, but you've got to start somewhere) animation from the people who brought you The Story of Stuff. This six minute video tackles the question of how social change is effected by groups of committed citizens taking action around an idea.
I entirely agree with the cynicism towards ethical consumerism as a change-making force. Sustainable consumerism is an oxymoron. Yes, buy stuff responsibly, and yes for some people it is a door into thinking more seriously about the world, but don't expect that ethical consumerism (a.k.a. light green thinking) will change the world. I have an upcoming post outlining five problems with ethical consumerism. More on that later.
The Romans, the Maya, the Anasazi, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Norse Greenland and many more: dozens of previous civilisations have reached a point where they have undergone more or less rapid and irreversible transition from high to low social complexity, usually known as societal collapse. I've blogged before about two of the best-known theorists of societal collapse, Joseph Tainter and Jared Diamond and have just come across a recent documentary called 2210: The Collapse? in which the ideas of Prof Tainter and Prof Diamond are quite usefully summarised into a 93 minute presentation. Some of the documentary's framing, with 23rd century archeologists trying to piece together the causes of the collapse of our present global industrial society (à la Age of Stupid), gets a little repetitive and gimmicky, but the ideas are important and the presentation lucid. We are not exempt from the brutal logic that placed temporal limits of previous civilisations. But we are in a unique situation: with a global economy, any future collapse will likely be global and with seven billion or more now alive, that's a lot of eggs in one basket. Put it on your "to view" list.
Byron is a husband, and father of two small children. He keeps worms, bees and a compost pile, with a small garden to justify them.
In his spare time, he is an ecological ethicist, author, activist, speaker, assistant minister and postgraduate student.
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