Tag: climate denial

The Severed Hand

(excerpted from the Dark Mountain Manifesto)

The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that greatness is cost-free. Each is intimately bound up with the other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is [5] evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilization. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained.

Outside the citadels of self-congratulation, lone voices have cried out against this infantile version of the human story for centuries, but it is only in the last few decades that its inaccuracy has become laughably apparent. We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that our attempt to separate ourselves from ‘nature’ has been a grim failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris. The attempt to sever the hand from the body has endangered the ‘progress’ we hold so dear, and it has endangered much of ‘nature’ too. The resulting upheaval underlies the crisis we now face.

We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace – a figure predicted to rise to 80% by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us.

And over it all looms runaway climate change. Climate change, which threatens to render all human projects irrelevant; which presents us with detailed evidence of our lack of understanding of the world we inhabit while, at the same time, demonstrating that we are still entirely reliant upon it. Climate change, which highlights in painful color the head-on crash between civilization and ‘nature’; which makes plain, more effectively than any carefully constructed argument or optimistically defiant protest, how the machine’s need for permanent growth will require us to destroy ourselves in its name. Climate change, which brings home at last our ultimate powerlessness.

These are the facts, or some of them. Yet facts never tell the whole story. (‘Facts’, Conrad wrote, in Lord Jim, ‘as if facts could prove anything.’) The facts of environmental crisis we hear so much about often conceal as much as they expose. We hear daily about the impacts of our activities on ‘the environment’ (like ‘nature’, this is an expression which distances us from the reality of our situation). Daily we hear, too, of the many ‘solutions’ to these problems: solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. Things may be changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here, folks. We perhaps need to move faster, more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development. We accept that we must become more ‘sustainable’. But everything will be fine. There will still be growth, there will still be progress: these things will continue, because they have to continue, so they cannot do anything but continue. There is nothing to see here. Everything will be fine.

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We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be. Of all humanity’s delusions of difference, of its separation from and superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing down. For a very long time, we imagined that ‘nature’ was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now. And in the worst case scenario, there would always be some kind of Plan B. Perhaps we would make for the moon, where we could survive in lunar colonies under giant bubbles as we planned our expansion across the galaxy.

But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have labored for so long. The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilization.

Consider the structures on which that bubble has been built. Its foundations are geological: coal, oil, gas – millions upon millions of years of ancient sunlight, dragged from the depths of the planet and burned with abandon. On this base, the structure stands. Move upwards, and you pass through a jumble of supporting horrors: battery chicken sheds; industrial abattoirs; burning forests; beam-trawled ocean floors; dynamited reefs; hollowed-out mountains; wasted soil. Finally, on top of all these unseen layers, you reach the well-tended surface where you and I stand: unaware, or uninterested, in what goes on beneath us; demanding that the authorities keep us in the manner to which we have been accustomed; occasionally feeling twinges of guilt that lead us to buy organic chickens or locally-produced lettuces; yet for the most part glutted, but not sated, on the fruits of the horrors on which our lifestyles depend.

We are the first generations born into a new and unprecedented age – the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to presume the outcome, but simply to describe a process which is underway. The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our existence – all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a bottomless tip, endlessly able to dilute and disperse the tailings of our extraction, production, consumption. The sheer scale of the sky or the weight of a swollen river makes it hard to imagine that creatures as flimsy as you and I could do that much damage. Philip Larkin gave voice to this attitude, and the creeping, worrying end of it.

Nearly forty years on from Larkin’s words, doubt is what all of us seem to feel, all of the time. Too much filth has been chucked in the sea and into the soil and into the atmosphere to make any other feeling sensible. The doubt, and the facts, have paved the way for a worldwide movement of environmental politics, which aimed, at least in its early, raw form, to challenge the myths of development and progress head-on. But time has not been kind to the greens. Today’s environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences hymning the virtues of ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethical consumption’ than doing anything as naive as questioning the intrinsic values of civilization. Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for shopping.

‘Denial’ is a hot word, heavy with connotations. When it is used to brand the remaining rump of climate change skeptics, they object noisily to the association with those who would rewrite the history of the Holocaust. Yet the focus on this dwindling group may serve as a distraction from a far larger form of denial, in its psychoanalytic sense. Freud wrote of the inability of people to hear things which did not fit with the way they saw themselves and the world. We put ourselves through all kinds of inner contortions, rather than look plainly at those things which challenge our fundamental understanding of the world.

Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become – and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch. Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of history in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that ‘must’. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative.

And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm.

Our question is: what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us?

We believe it is time to look down.

Climate Grief

Since 2007, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief has been applied to climate change by both those who accept the science and by those who do not. Looking at climate change through the Kubler-Ross lens isn’t quite as straightforward as if you were the one receiving the terminal diagnosis or if your spouse had just passed away. She later regretted creating the impression that grief progresses in a linear way through a defined set of stages. It does not, and no more so in the case of climate grief. The stages are signposts on a circuitous journey back to wholeness, through the gradual emergence of climate data and the shifting terrain of social responses to that data.

Facing one’s own mortality or the loss of a loved one occurs against a backdrop of relative stability. It’s socially sanctioned. There are many social structures acknowledging, empathizing with and supporting a passage through such grief. All the other aspects of one’s life may remain relatively certain as one addresses and metabolizes a radically disruptive transition. But generally speaking, the infrastructure of one’s life is not threatened.

Climate change, on the other hand, threatens the foundations of civilization, the biosphere, the underpinnings of everything we know, what we in the ‘developed’ world might call modernity. There’s no such universal social support for this type of grief because, unlike guaranteed mortality, climate grief is not universally shared. It also represents an unprecedented disruptive condition, one that doesn’t arrive all at once, but one that unfolds in multiple unpredictable ways over a long period of time.

The widespread denial of climate change losses prevents our emotional pain from being socially acknowledged and validated. Those touched by this grief may be viewed as overly sensitive, as exaggerating the issue, or even as emotionally unbalanced. These responses can encourage individuals to isolate, remain silent, and become disenfranchised from their own grief process, rather than move through it with support.                                               Leslie Davenport, 2017

The diagnosis has not been terminal from the very beginning. When James Hansen testified before the US Congress in 1988 and warned of global warming, no one took that warning to be a terminal diagnosis for humanity. Its nature has unfolded slowly to the point at which it’s only now becoming clear to the majority of those paying attention: An uninhabitable earth. An entire planet not accommodating to any image of human culture as we’ve known or imagined it. Instability. Profound uncertainty and extremely daunting logistical and environmental obstacles to continued viability of civilization.

Overlaying the common 5-stage model (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) on these conditions is not so simple, but it does provide a way of understanding and naming key dynamics of the responses to the ever-advancing conditions we face. What a personal terminal diagnosis and climate change share in common is that resilience is possible. Even if the diagnosis is terminal, it’s still possible to recover and maintain wholeness.

The words ecology, ecocide and economics derive from the same root, the Greek word for home: oikos. This common root implies equilibrium in the biosphere and in all our relations with each other, not only through mere commerce. What we see today is a common radical disturbance of increasing severity in ecology and in economics. We have strayed far from home in both domains. We are killing ourselves and now live under a common threat of death. Whether it is understood in these terms or not, this is the root of our grief, an existential estrangement from home. To restore that equilibrium requires that we turn our efforts toward the biosphere, toward others and toward our selves to heal the economy of the whole.

The womb of grief is the seat of love, of caring. To turn away from eco-grief is to turn away from home. The feelings related to grief can be very difficult to bear. But if we remember to think of grief as a natural expression of caring, even love, we can begin to see grief as a form of compassion and strength. We can even begin to see our grief as a tool for action.                                                             Leslie Davenport

Those of us who accept the diagnosis, anthropogenic global warming, are all too familiar with the forms of denial practiced by those who do not accept it–or play with words to appear to be agnostic about it. Some deny there’s a problem altogether. They deny humans are causing the problem; they deny the magnitude of the problem; they claim mitigation measures will be too costly now and that they will be cheaper later when the impacts are more obvious. They deny the scientific consensus, attack the reliability of the data and finally, they attack the messengers, the scientists themselves, as greedy liars. And besides, what hubris it is for humans to claim God’s Plan may be flawed. The audacity!

Less obvious are the forms of denial practiced by climate advocates: We have to push harder for emission reduction. Admitting failure will only lead us to hopelessness. We can still change course (after 30 years of insufficient action). Technology will save us. We have to shield ‘others’ from hearing the truth. We practice functional denial, being well aware of our compromises, inadequacies and limited agency, but still trudge through our days as if species are not disappearing all around us. Truly, sometimes we have to give ourselves a break from the onslaught of bad news. Otherwise, we fear, we could not function. Every day is a conversation with urgency against the backdrop of our grief and periodic despair. Who could resist denying all of it from time to time?

The few, the gifted, the fearless, the ones who fully experience the deep well, the womb of grief as the seat of care are the ones who demonstrate what in our deepest heart we know is true. Those who can fully dismantle their own denial are the ones who demonstrate—even without words—the fundamental and natural connection within all of us to the full magnitude of the issue and the horror of all that is being destroyed around us. And not only by Others, but by we ourselves. Our complicity is much easier to deny than to fully accept.

The anger we feel about the denial all around us, the cynical disregard for the advancing consequences of climate displayed by politicians, the disinterest, the half-measures, the delay, the obfuscation, the lies, the aggressive ignorance, the outright hostility to the truth (as we see it) is like an unwelcome intruder, draining us of energy and focus. Anger may rise at any time, triggered by a casual remark, a headline, a social media post. It’s usually directed elsewhere, but not always. We can surely be as angry with ourselves as with someone else. But either way, it does undermine our capacity for action.

We also have our own versions of bargaining and will quickly adopt internal measures appealing to our inner panel of judges, justifying our exhaustion, assuaging guilt, promising improvement. This is the terrain of personal and collective lobbying. Pushing for someone else to do something. Ultimately, bargaining is too often an attempt to squeeze wine from a raisin. We are not getting where we need to go and finally realize we are only delaying the inevitable. This is the moment Deep Adaptation dawns upon us. We finally know we are alone and what is required. That space, a no man’s land where our agency is hopelessly lost between knowledge and action, is the crossroads of depression and acceptance.

Accompanying depression is what Kubler-Ross might have called extreme helplessness, a near-fatal despair. There is nothing to do but stare into the darkness, searching for any sign of form, of possibility, of faith. As long as any denial remains, despair will not abate. We have to acknowledge that there are others not ready to hear the truth. Perhaps we ourselves are not ready to hear the truth that we are (on our way to) losing our home, our family, our life as we knew it.

But despair is a state, not a station. It’s a passing condition. That it will change may be the only thing we can be sure of. It is telling us to change our strategies, to change the parameters of our activities, the definition of our community, the issues we tend to. It is telling us to discard what has not been working, to accept our mortality, that wholeness is not only possible for ourselves, but a gift we can offer to others.

Acceptance opens space, restoring agency and creative possibility. It opens the floodgates of feeling, connection and resilience, putting us back in the middle, holding the ambiguity of life and death, of journeying but never fully arriving. Acceptance restores meaning. This is the ethos of Deep Adaptation, remembering home from the ground up, embodying a new economy, taking care of what is within our reach and accepting limits on our capacities.