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| Dan Wylie: "Your back yard: 2170" |
As I write, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) is issuing yet another warning that if humans don’t get their
communitarian act together, and cut fossil-fuel burning to a point which will
prevent average global temperatures rising by another 1.5 degrees C, we will
suffer horrendous and incalculable climate effects. Essentially, they recommend
cutting CO2 production in half by 2030 – that’s in 12 years’ time.
Such warnings have been current from the broad scientific
community for several decades now, and despite sundry conferences, international
agreements, and many innovative technical solutions proposed and in places
implemented, the overall trend on the part of governments, big business, and
swathes of the general populace has been to ignore them, fail to fulfil
promises, or even actively deny there’s a problem at all.
Why? Is it that fossil-fuel commercial interests are just
too massive to budge? Is it that the changes are so relatively slow to
accumulate that they can be brushed aside as insignificant? Or that the high
variability in climate effects at the local level (weather, that is) casts too
much doubt on the concept? That scientists are bad at conveying their findings
in a publicly persuasive way? All of the above? I recently came upon an article
in which a British Minister was quoted as admitting, “The recent rise in
temperatures is caused by climate change”. Hooray, the writer crowed, at last
someone in a position of authority is actually seeing the light! But it seemed
to me that this formulation was wrong: it’s a bit like saying “These floods are
caused by an increased volume of water upstream”. The flood is the increased volume; rises in
temperature are climate change. It’s
not that ‘climate change’ is somehow ‘out there’, a devilish sui generis entity or machinery which can
be tackled independently of our daily lives. Perhaps the very phrase is
tempting people to shelve the now pervasive advertising to cut your
electricity, fuel and water consumption, and so on. 'Climate change' encompasses so vast a
global system that we feel helpless in the face of ‘it’. How can I begin
to change my lifestyle in a way that can have an impact, or even know what’s really
best?
It’s not my aim here to engage in all the debates about causes
and effects of global warming. I’m interested rather in another very fundamental
question: How is it that I have come to believe that dangerous climate change is
indeed under way? After all, I can’t say that I’ve detected any major changes
in my own life: another drought, the jasmine blooming early this year, an
apparent dip in the number of migrating swallows, more trash? The answer, of
course, being of the Bookish Tribe, is that I’ve read stuff, ranging from books to science magazines to blog posts
and newspaper articles. But why should I credit any of it? “Do you believe in climate change?” I am
sometimes asked, as if it were some religious credo one either subscribes to or
not, holus bolus. A more useful question is: “Which view or theory of climate
change do you find most persuasive (or not), and why?” This acknowledges that there is a multiplicity
of arguments, and that one’s job is to level one against another and ultimately try to justify one's response.
Where does one even begin? The literature on the subject is
now vast and continuously ballooning, and my own reading is inevitably extremely
spotty and probably unconsciously selective. So rather than try to present an
argument, alarmist or otherwise, about something I'm a million miles from
being an expert in, I’m simply going to jot down some thoughts about the readings I’ve done
over the years. You might be tempted to try one or two.
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| Dan Wylie: "Fate of the Animals" |
1. Science in the
world
How can I personally “know” that CO2 production is actually climbing, or that
70% of Germany’s winged insects are gone, or anything else I can’t directly
observe? Well, someone said so! In
our modern techno-world, it’s very likely to be said that the most credible
someone will be scientific. “The science says...” is the common phrase – again
as if science is some Platonic ideal
entity independent of those who practice it. It’s so much more complex than
that: scientists of sundry persuasions and specialisations, all drawing on more
or less limited data sets, are frequently at odds with one another. Opponents
of anthropogenic climate change have used this to full advantage, since they
can say, “Oh, but there are studies that show the opposite...” and happily
trash something unpalatable as “bad science” though they might have no more
qualifications than I have to make any such evaluation. But this misunderstands how the core scientific
community works (excluding those paid by power-lobbies to say what they're told). Because so many scientists from so many fields are involved,
weak theories are usually rapidly challenged and superseded.
What is powerful
about the latest Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) report is not just its technical density (which
is already way beyond my little brain), but that it correlates the assiduous
work of hundreds if not thousands of scientists’ findings, evaluating what
measure of agreement or certainty does exist. Agreement is never total,
especially when dealing with climate, which is intrinsically a vast, volatile,
multidimensional system yielding inevitably imperfect data and therefore the likelihood
of varying interpretations. This is even more so when trying to project into
the future, where unpredictable effects, especially at local levels, are
inevitable. So the IPCC (like most scientists) is extremely careful to accord every
assertion a level of probability, ranging from virtually certain to unlikely,
and careful gradations in between. As for the future, they make no simple predictions,
but present alongside each other at least four different computer-generated
model scenarios. Each model comes from a different source, with somewhat
different data inputs, depending on what was available and what that team deemed
important; therefore each produces somewhat different results or ‘predictions’.
The IPCC does not oblige you accept any one of these; they are deeply, impressively
cautious. For the record, even the most
pessimistic projections in the previous four 5-yearly IPCC reports have fallen
short of what has actually occurred. Even the most optimistic models show that
we are in profound global trouble, and unequivocally that human activity is
primarily responsible. In the end, I reckon if 90% of the world’s scientists
are 90% certain about something, that’s as good as it gets; you would be wise
to follow their advice, rather than pinning your hopes on the 10% of dissent
(which is what climate-change denialists routinely do). Of course, you have to have a certain basic
faith in the processes of science, flawed, incremental and provisional as they
are. Large numbers of people, through ignorance, cultural foundations, or
religious belief, accord science no credence at all, even attack it: National Geographic recently ran a cover
story entitled “The War on Science”. In
sum, I think the IPCC report, even just its Introduction, is worth looking
through, not for any easy answers – there are none – but to get a sense of how they have gone about their work. As
a recent Dutch court ruling indicates, that work seems finally to be gaining
greater traction on at least some governments’ policies.
2. Histories of the
World
If an inadequate understanding of how science functions
emasculates much public debate, so too does inadequate historical knowledge. One
set of anti-climate change arguments postulates non-human drivers of change
(sunspots, or wobbles in the Earth’s axis, or volcanoes). What history shows,
however, is not that such variables do not exist, but that human societies have
historically contributed to and responded to them in different ways. All
societies have been subject to climatic and environmental factors, and I’ve
lumbered through a number of such “environmental histories”, starting with Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s Civilizations: Culture, ambition and the
transformation of nature (2001). More recently, Jared Diamond wowed the world with Collapse (2006), in which he explores why four past
civilisations chose (his word) to come to a sorry end. He foregrounds the ways
in which societies overextended their use of natural resources, while not excluding
other factors. Though wildly popular, Diamond has been trenchantly critiqued
for, among other things, ignoring social institutions, economic networks, and
examples of human resilience; for blundering into disciplines in which he is
inexpert; for drawing big conclusions from thin evidence; and above all for
trying to apply those past cases to our present – that is, to hint that we,
too, are at the point of collapse.
In fact Collapse was
long pre-empted by the more solid, less selective work of Clive Ponting, A Green History of
the World (1991, revised
2007). Covering similar territory is Evan
Eisenberg’s more conceptual, lyrical, even visionary take on human-nature
history, The Ecology of Eden (2004).
A little more tightly focussed and persuasively researched, Stephen Solomon’s Water (2015) covers similar ground but shows how deeply societies
are shaped by their various regimes of water management – centrally important
for our future, obviously. Whatever the arguments within and around these interpretations
of past human interactions with natural resources, they all show one thing: our
complete dependence upon, and interfusion with, the natural environment. ‘Climate’
and ‘environment’ are not ‘over there’: they are inside our very lungs and
hearts, our customs and our institutions. Perhaps most readable of all is
Australian Tim Flannery’s The Weather-Makers (2005), who
incorporates historical perspectives but organises his material around
different biomes. (Flannery has also written terrific environmental histories
of North America and, just released, Europe.)
3. The devils of
human nature
Why does society seem so resistant to changing in ways that
will secure the species’ long-term future? I happen to be reading Wade Davis’s
magnificent book about ethnobotanical explorations in the Amazon, One River (first published in 1996). At
one point in his absorbing narrative, he encounters an Amazonian native who is
using dynamite to kill fish in his river. In response to a question about
yields, he says: “’When we started using it, we got lots of fish. Now not so
much.’ What about your children, I asked. Without the slightest sign of remorse
he calmly said, ‘Oh, they won’t have any fish, but we will.’ Depressingly, maybe
that’s just the way we generally are: myopically, haplessly self-serving. We
live our lives as we will, or can, or feel we must, and leave the storms of the
future for our grandchildren to sort out. That thought provides the title for James Hansen’s Storms of my Grandchildren (2009). It’s rather histrionically
subtitled The truth about the coming
climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity, but if anyone is
a true global expert in climate change, it is Hansen, a self-effacing scientist
thrust into public debates and writing because he felt he had to. Since the
1980s he has testified more than once before the US Congress, to little obvious
effect: he discovers that governance is a “perverse” world in which “altruistic
actions become meaningless”. Storms
is a heartfelt autobiographical account of his efforts to persuade government agencies
to take the issue seriously. He worries about his grandchildren. And he
concludes bluntly: “The picture has become clear. Our planet, with its remarkable array
of life, is in imminent danger of crashing. Yet our politicians are not dashing
forward. ... Therefore it is up to you.”
The problem
of resistance is bigger than just one or two deluded or corrupted governments,
or the natural inertia of established lifestyles: it has become core to the
entire neoliberal system of globalised capitalism, which is founded on
technologies themselves dependent on continuous extraction of non-renewable
resources (fossil fuels and minerals), at minimal cost for maximum profit. Globalised
capitalism, while it has brought humans innumerable benefits, also
intrinsically constitutes a “war on nature” – and ‘development’ has often been
couched in terms of warfare. Naomi Klein’s
This
Changes Everything: Capital and the climate (2014), brilliantly unpacks
the involuted cultural, ideological and economic struggles underpinning
governmental and societal resistance to change, and particularly demonstrates the mind-blowingly cynical lengths
to which the petrochemical industry will go in order to deny that they have
anything to do with global warming or pollution-related ills. Bottom line: free-market global capitalism is
fundamentally incompatible with planetary health. Something’s got to give – and
we might still have some room to choose what that change might be.
Despite the
daunting odds, Klein refuses to bow to pessimism, and something of this
determined optimism suffuses an earlier take, George Monbiot’s Heat (2006).
Monbiot was initially vilified for his views, but he has been proven right more
often than not, and now amongst other things writes an energetic column for the
Guardian. Heat
is unabashedly argumentative, laying out the parameters of climate change in
ways that are numbingly familiar and now scientifically irrefutable. He is an
excellent and fearless researcher, is winningly able to admit his own past
errors of judgement, and has a gift for putting things into provocative new
perspectives:
The problem is compounded by the
fact that the connection between cause and effect seems so improbable. By
turning on the lights, filling the kettle, taking the children to school,
driving to the shops, we are condemning other people to death. We never chose
to do this. We do not see ourselves as killers. We perform these actions
without passion or intent.
Many
of those things we have understood to be good – even morally necessary – must also
now be seen as bad. Perhaps the most intractable cause of global warming is ‘love
miles’: the distance you must travel to visit friends and partners and
relatives on the other side of the planet. The world could be destroyed by
love.
Disputable, but thought-provoking. What’s hopeful is that
much of Heat is about solutions – in architecture,
in transport, in power generation. Monbiot is clear-eyed about the obstacles, sceptical
about the potential of renewable energy sources, and eminently pragmatic. Whether
or not you think his ideas are viable, at least he is thinking about what we
can actually do without all devolving into a version of quasi-mediaeval
poverty.
4. South Africa’s
climate change
A goodly number of writers have written books on our own region’s
environmental condition, notably sociologist Jacklyn Cock's The War Against Ourselves: Nature, power and justice (2007). Two books of even heftier and more scholarly nature are Patrick Bond’s Unsustainable South Africa (2002), and David Hallowes’ Toxic Futures: South Africa in the crises of
energy, the environment and capital (2011). Both these studies show in
uncompromising detail how the South African economy is intimately tied into
global capital and highly pollutive extractive industries, with great
short-term benefits for some, but with horrendous damage to environmental
health, and following the global tendency to concentrate wealth in ways that
increase inequality, not solve it. (And this well before the Gupta state
capture’ scandal.) Hallowes is drawing on two decades of reports by GroundWork,
an independent environmental research group, and reveals a literally toxic
relationship between corporations, pollution, power generation, governmental
dereliction of legal duties, and rampant profiteering. I suppose Bond and
Hallowes are both classifiable as ‘left’-leaning, but I’ve yet to see any
comparably detailed and persuasive defence of our industrial trajectory that
rises much above the mantra of ‘providing jobs’ and ‘making a profit’, or that adequately
addresses modernity’s trick of 'externalising’ its true costs on destruction of
both the environment and the livelihoods of the poor. This externalisation - characterised
as ‘progress’, ‘growth’ and ‘development’ - in fact employs a creepingly
incremental “slow violence”. South African, now US-based academic Rob Nixon’s multi-award winning book, Slow
Violence and the environmentalism of the poor (2013), is now a key text for almost anyone working in the field
of environmental justice and ecocriticism
– a work of scary brilliance.
By far the
most approachable South African book on climate change that I’ve read is Leonie Joubert’s Scorched: South Africa’s changing climate (2006). It’s a chatty
but informative work aimed at a general audience, enlivened with illustrations
and often amusing anecdotes about Joubert's own researches. She can be charmingly
self-deprecating (“It was not my finest moment...” she begins one chapter).
This style might annoy some purist scientists, but it’s part of Joubert’s
strategy for bringing global warming down out of the stratosphere of economic
theory, tables of figures, and the abstruse languages of policy, and into the
realm of the immediate and observable. She has a particular gift for revelling
in the existence of a particular frog, or the astonishing symbiosis between an
ant and a rare butterfly, the fynbos biome’s relationship to fire or the
distribution of the quiver tree – and then showing how their existence is being
affected by global warming. She travels from the lobsters of the West Coast to
the coral reefs of the east; though her focus is on non-human creatures, she
also has a chapter on “Food for the human animal” (dealt with more fully in
another book), as well as some closing thoughts on the IPCC projections of the
time. For the South African general reader, definitely the first port of call.
South African novelists are also starting to incorporate
climate change into futuristic narratives (including my own The Wisdom of Adders). I’d like to leave the final word to the protagonist of Patricia Schonstein’s novella The
Master’s Ruse, a passage concerning the fate – and retaliation – of our oceans, which we all share and depend
upon, but deplete and pollute.
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| Dan Wylie: "Cityscape, 2170" |
[A] messianic force ... to redeem
the earth from human dominion... used the oceans. It made use of that mass of
dead, black water and all the rubbish and filth that burdened it. Cataclysmic
shifting of tectonic plates created tsunamis, which slammed the shorelines,
tossing dolosse aside and pouring through coastal cities and town. They
engulfed skyscrapers and highways, drowning their human prey in the very oils
and solvents that had brought about oceanic demise.
I don’t know about a “messianic” force, but these events are
already happening. If we are not to fulfil this imagining, what are we to do?
*****
