It took me 75 years to discover Planet Critical and it's become an integral part of my world now - thanks. The discourses on climate survival, mitigation and resilience are all very illuminating, BUT it seems to be going on in another plane to the world we are living in right now, the talk of carbon reduction, plastic elimination, leaving fossil fuels in the ground are all highly endorsable themes, but none of this will be achievable with the world at war with itself.
We will never solve the climate crisis while nations are at war with nations whether in actual conflict or through proxy wars. The UK could lead the world by declaring itself militarily neutral, we can't afford a sustainable armed force on land sea or air, while we have so many poverty related issues at home, but by declaring humanitarian neutrality and converting our armed services into peacekeeping forces we could convince many other progressive nations to join together in bringing peace to our world. And through this we could begin to unite the people of the world to coalesce in the name of human survival and global peace.
Global survival depends on epoch making, fundamental, sustainable belief in the positivity of humanity over riding the manaical neo con belief in growth, subjugation of humanity, and capitalism.
My own somewhat odd reading practice of recent years has been to avoid any news stories headlined as about individuals (whether celebrities, politicians, sports people or otherwise). Hard to maintain sometimes, but it avoids a lot of the fluff and focuses one on events, processes, institutions and bigger picture things.
As to future history, it’s hard to imagine how future generations will view us, as it is largely dependent on how bad things get during the polycrisis and an unfolding era of disaster nationalisms and resource wars. If we muddle or luck through somehow, and avoid a nuclear conflict, I suspect the period will be judged as another abject lesson in civilizational collapse, missed opportunities, human fallibility, regression to barbarism, history repeating itself etc. (a Great Derangement, to cite Gosh, or a new age of endarkenment). Worst case scenario, though, I think human cultural memory will be so fragmentary in a denuded, impoverished and flooded world that there will be thousands of new myths, ideologies and stories to make sense of this earlier age (stories of when people walked on the moon or when the sky burned; plenty of examples from sci fi probably capture this pretty well).
RE: "the real life version of each scene of Don’t Look Up." That movie comes to my mind on a regular basis. For a very brief while, it was (as I seem to recall) one of the most watched movies in the world. And then "vanished" from popular awareness. We are arguably watching the real life version unfold around us right now. Unlike "Groundhog Day," we're not going to have a chance to repeat and repeat until we get it right.
That, I am convinced, is why we never really learn, but just keep on running on our hamster wheel of *almost* reaching humanistic progress and then crashing back down into idiocy and anarchy. Only to rise again, think we are making progress, and then… whoosh! Down we go.
I hope there are historians left to parse the history of this misbegotten age. I hope they learn lessons that future humans can apply. But I have my doubts on both counts.
That said - thanks! Well written post, and thought provoking.
This is why any substantial change must be written in our narrative source code.
We need to tell each other different stories than the ones we tell each other now.
Unfortunately this might require the loss of the justice/revenge, triumph/dominance, stories that we gather around now. These have poisoned us, they enabled the wars that clear indigenous people from their land, they enable political structures with powerful figureheads, they enable the carceral state and slavery, they enable a system that puts personal success at its center and sweeps the unsuccessful to the edges.
We need heroes and villains working together to solve predicaments. We need narratives of forgiveness and repair of social fabric. We need to valorise stability, sustainability, networks of support so that everyone has a chance to give what they can to the culture.
While today’s crises may be unprecedented in scope, scale, and entanglement, history offers a number of relevant parallels. I grant that the global ecological crises are especially unique; however, other aspects—geopolitical instability, economic upheavals, populist movements, technological disruption, and mass migrations—do have precedents, even if the magnitudes, complexity, and cultural contexts are distinct. We have an abundance of history to draw from, and I would suggest we emphasize and integrate the lessons we can learn from.
Climate is but one symptom of human overshoot. There are many weak links, and as Liebig 's Law of the Minimum applied to agriculture, it similarly applies to our complex, living system. Ronald Wright's Massey Lectures were combined into his _A Short History of Progress_. There is no known teleology leading toward some Nirvana, or even a stasis. We're just another species with too much power/leverage. https://www.amazon.com/Too-Smart-our-Own-Good/dp/052175769X
Nice to see Dilworth's work getting referenced. The Vicious Circle Principle is hard to refute and far more developed than Wright's more well known 'progress traps'. We are indeed too smart for our own good (and the biosphere's good too). An interesting experiment by Nature that has spun out of control into ecological overshoot.
Our species has at least one major weakness: we haven’t understood the effects of our “progress”. The industrial culture is based on the steady destruction of the Earth, an organism, and our host. That weakness or basic character will end most if not all of us. Perhaps a tiny minority will live close and off of the Earth.
I suspect that future humans will look upon our ruins, poking out of the seas or collapsed in the new deserts, and suspect they were made by alien visitors. There will be broken bits of our technologies on 'cargo cult' altars, and crazy 'once upon a time' stories about people who flew too close to the sun and crashed to earth.
I am, of course, an optimist for thinking there will actually be humans still around. By no means a given, and it isn't like we deserve to be given another go.
I would be most interested if you could somehow supply this clip you mentioned, perhaps by simply posting the text of it, or some way of finding it on the Internet:
“a cutting of an editorial written in the late 1930s by Germany’s top Jewish publication in which the opinion of the magazine was the threats of Hitler’s rising star were empty; there was no precedent for him to act on them. Therefore, the editors argued, there was nothing to fear.”
Another great and important post Rachel! How the present era will be seen depends on who gets to write that history. I see four broad possibilities: a) an "end as apocalypse", total annihilation of our civilisation following cometary impact or nuclear war, in which case those piecing it together will be post-human or possibly even alien. The Silurian Hypothesis comes to mind. The films Don't Look Up and Planet of the Apes explore this sort of territory, b) an "end as repetition" in which following the collapse of our civilisation, the cycle repeats itself in which case our past will be pieced together in fragmentary, mythic archetypes and much of what actually happened will be lost in translation. The film Mother! is in this ballpark, c) an "endless end" where we are trapped in the continuation of wherever now goes next in which case our history will likely be revised by those in power to suit their needs. 1984 covers this territory, d) an "end as start" where we shift into a new, wiser relationship with earth, restore the planet and create Utopia in which case this era will viewed as a destructive, self-absorbed and unserious age in which we lost our way. Strange how I can't think of anything that reminds me of in art besides religious imagery.
Rachel. You are an incredible journalist and truth-slayer. Never stop. I wrote my application essay to the Annenberg school at UPenn on media literacy and my intent to create a program/k-12 curricula that every student would take as a citizen of this planet. That was 1987. I veered off from the cultural indicators project to environmental communications and have been Cassandra ever since. I still dream of this media literacy curricula as the narcotyzing dysfunction of our species reaches epic proportions. Stay your course!
An Uncanny End indeed, such as awaits the the parasite when resources dwindle. And parasites have policy, such as the Parasite Policy of Purchasing Power Parity, or PPPPP. The have lobbyists 4:1 in policy areas that harness regulatory capture, state capture oozing Greed Guaranteed. Enough to twist Overton a new order to Policy = Unthinkable + manufacture consent = Psuedo-sensible = Acceptable. Media capture. Evil. There's an angel there too, called earth. We are approaching a time where food and shelter outside main centers will be adoption for survival. Earth will always come back, said the stoa to the Stoics. Worry not, about that which you cannot control. I hear they have good migration incentives on Antikythera. Planet Critical Eco-village.
So you described examples of the crisis but your tagline suggests you also talk about why. What are your thoughts on why the world is careening back to how it was in the dark ages?
Excellent post, Rachel. I am struggling with how people can respond so differently to the same information. To you, me, and probably most of your readers, it is evident that we are witnessing the collapse of human civilization in real time. "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." (Lord Grey, 1914) However, most people respond with denial and choose to continue their lives in blissful ignorance. They seem to have given up already and typically get very upset when told there is still hope.
And yet, it is important not to surrender! As Upton Sinclair put it: "To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat—and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going."
Hi Henrik, you say most people are in denial- so they don't know that they're defeated, let alone can they 'surrender' and acknowledge their defeat. Yet the world keeps going and therefore has nothing to do with the difference between human 'defeat' and human acceptance of 'defeat'. And surely those in denial that there's a problem aren't the same as those who hate being told there's a solution to it?
What do you mean by defeat? The end of this human civilisation and species? Refusing to accept that all things change and all things die is living in blissful ignorance. We can fight this truth all we like, it won't get us anywhere.
We are witnessing the collapse of 'civilisation' in real time- yet there's hope? Hope of what? That we can stop it, or change the laws of physics or convince Mother Earth we'll do better with one last chance to treat other animals like equals and stop being so ruthless.
Acceptance of who we are, how we got here and that it's fine if the human species dies out (indeed most animals would greatly prefer it) and that we're all going to die, is not defeat. It's the first step to liberation and happiness.
It took me 75 years to discover Planet Critical and it's become an integral part of my world now - thanks. The discourses on climate survival, mitigation and resilience are all very illuminating, BUT it seems to be going on in another plane to the world we are living in right now, the talk of carbon reduction, plastic elimination, leaving fossil fuels in the ground are all highly endorsable themes, but none of this will be achievable with the world at war with itself.
We will never solve the climate crisis while nations are at war with nations whether in actual conflict or through proxy wars. The UK could lead the world by declaring itself militarily neutral, we can't afford a sustainable armed force on land sea or air, while we have so many poverty related issues at home, but by declaring humanitarian neutrality and converting our armed services into peacekeeping forces we could convince many other progressive nations to join together in bringing peace to our world. And through this we could begin to unite the people of the world to coalesce in the name of human survival and global peace.
Global survival depends on epoch making, fundamental, sustainable belief in the positivity of humanity over riding the manaical neo con belief in growth, subjugation of humanity, and capitalism.
My own somewhat odd reading practice of recent years has been to avoid any news stories headlined as about individuals (whether celebrities, politicians, sports people or otherwise). Hard to maintain sometimes, but it avoids a lot of the fluff and focuses one on events, processes, institutions and bigger picture things.
As to future history, it’s hard to imagine how future generations will view us, as it is largely dependent on how bad things get during the polycrisis and an unfolding era of disaster nationalisms and resource wars. If we muddle or luck through somehow, and avoid a nuclear conflict, I suspect the period will be judged as another abject lesson in civilizational collapse, missed opportunities, human fallibility, regression to barbarism, history repeating itself etc. (a Great Derangement, to cite Gosh, or a new age of endarkenment). Worst case scenario, though, I think human cultural memory will be so fragmentary in a denuded, impoverished and flooded world that there will be thousands of new myths, ideologies and stories to make sense of this earlier age (stories of when people walked on the moon or when the sky burned; plenty of examples from sci fi probably capture this pretty well).
RE: "the real life version of each scene of Don’t Look Up." That movie comes to my mind on a regular basis. For a very brief while, it was (as I seem to recall) one of the most watched movies in the world. And then "vanished" from popular awareness. We are arguably watching the real life version unfold around us right now. Unlike "Groundhog Day," we're not going to have a chance to repeat and repeat until we get it right.
Every hundred years, all new people.
That, I am convinced, is why we never really learn, but just keep on running on our hamster wheel of *almost* reaching humanistic progress and then crashing back down into idiocy and anarchy. Only to rise again, think we are making progress, and then… whoosh! Down we go.
I hope there are historians left to parse the history of this misbegotten age. I hope they learn lessons that future humans can apply. But I have my doubts on both counts.
That said - thanks! Well written post, and thought provoking.
Humans come and go but stories persist.
This is why any substantial change must be written in our narrative source code.
We need to tell each other different stories than the ones we tell each other now.
Unfortunately this might require the loss of the justice/revenge, triumph/dominance, stories that we gather around now. These have poisoned us, they enabled the wars that clear indigenous people from their land, they enable political structures with powerful figureheads, they enable the carceral state and slavery, they enable a system that puts personal success at its center and sweeps the unsuccessful to the edges.
We need heroes and villains working together to solve predicaments. We need narratives of forgiveness and repair of social fabric. We need to valorise stability, sustainability, networks of support so that everyone has a chance to give what they can to the culture.
Absolutely YESSSS to this. Perfectly said. Thank you.
While today’s crises may be unprecedented in scope, scale, and entanglement, history offers a number of relevant parallels. I grant that the global ecological crises are especially unique; however, other aspects—geopolitical instability, economic upheavals, populist movements, technological disruption, and mass migrations—do have precedents, even if the magnitudes, complexity, and cultural contexts are distinct. We have an abundance of history to draw from, and I would suggest we emphasize and integrate the lessons we can learn from.
Climate is but one symptom of human overshoot. There are many weak links, and as Liebig 's Law of the Minimum applied to agriculture, it similarly applies to our complex, living system. Ronald Wright's Massey Lectures were combined into his _A Short History of Progress_. There is no known teleology leading toward some Nirvana, or even a stasis. We're just another species with too much power/leverage. https://www.amazon.com/Too-Smart-our-Own-Good/dp/052175769X
Nice to see Dilworth's work getting referenced. The Vicious Circle Principle is hard to refute and far more developed than Wright's more well known 'progress traps'. We are indeed too smart for our own good (and the biosphere's good too). An interesting experiment by Nature that has spun out of control into ecological overshoot.
Our species has at least one major weakness: we haven’t understood the effects of our “progress”. The industrial culture is based on the steady destruction of the Earth, an organism, and our host. That weakness or basic character will end most if not all of us. Perhaps a tiny minority will live close and off of the Earth.
I suspect that future humans will look upon our ruins, poking out of the seas or collapsed in the new deserts, and suspect they were made by alien visitors. There will be broken bits of our technologies on 'cargo cult' altars, and crazy 'once upon a time' stories about people who flew too close to the sun and crashed to earth.
I am, of course, an optimist for thinking there will actually be humans still around. By no means a given, and it isn't like we deserve to be given another go.
I would be most interested if you could somehow supply this clip you mentioned, perhaps by simply posting the text of it, or some way of finding it on the Internet:
“a cutting of an editorial written in the late 1930s by Germany’s top Jewish publication in which the opinion of the magazine was the threats of Hitler’s rising star were empty; there was no precedent for him to act on them. Therefore, the editors argued, there was nothing to fear.”
Another great and important post Rachel! How the present era will be seen depends on who gets to write that history. I see four broad possibilities: a) an "end as apocalypse", total annihilation of our civilisation following cometary impact or nuclear war, in which case those piecing it together will be post-human or possibly even alien. The Silurian Hypothesis comes to mind. The films Don't Look Up and Planet of the Apes explore this sort of territory, b) an "end as repetition" in which following the collapse of our civilisation, the cycle repeats itself in which case our past will be pieced together in fragmentary, mythic archetypes and much of what actually happened will be lost in translation. The film Mother! is in this ballpark, c) an "endless end" where we are trapped in the continuation of wherever now goes next in which case our history will likely be revised by those in power to suit their needs. 1984 covers this territory, d) an "end as start" where we shift into a new, wiser relationship with earth, restore the planet and create Utopia in which case this era will viewed as a destructive, self-absorbed and unserious age in which we lost our way. Strange how I can't think of anything that reminds me of in art besides religious imagery.
Rachel. You are an incredible journalist and truth-slayer. Never stop. I wrote my application essay to the Annenberg school at UPenn on media literacy and my intent to create a program/k-12 curricula that every student would take as a citizen of this planet. That was 1987. I veered off from the cultural indicators project to environmental communications and have been Cassandra ever since. I still dream of this media literacy curricula as the narcotyzing dysfunction of our species reaches epic proportions. Stay your course!
An Uncanny End indeed, such as awaits the the parasite when resources dwindle. And parasites have policy, such as the Parasite Policy of Purchasing Power Parity, or PPPPP. The have lobbyists 4:1 in policy areas that harness regulatory capture, state capture oozing Greed Guaranteed. Enough to twist Overton a new order to Policy = Unthinkable + manufacture consent = Psuedo-sensible = Acceptable. Media capture. Evil. There's an angel there too, called earth. We are approaching a time where food and shelter outside main centers will be adoption for survival. Earth will always come back, said the stoa to the Stoics. Worry not, about that which you cannot control. I hear they have good migration incentives on Antikythera. Planet Critical Eco-village.
i tried to write from the perspective after the cliff. it's not a good idea.
So you described examples of the crisis but your tagline suggests you also talk about why. What are your thoughts on why the world is careening back to how it was in the dark ages?
Excellent post, Rachel. I am struggling with how people can respond so differently to the same information. To you, me, and probably most of your readers, it is evident that we are witnessing the collapse of human civilization in real time. "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." (Lord Grey, 1914) However, most people respond with denial and choose to continue their lives in blissful ignorance. They seem to have given up already and typically get very upset when told there is still hope.
And yet, it is important not to surrender! As Upton Sinclair put it: "To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat—and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going."
Hi Henrik, you say most people are in denial- so they don't know that they're defeated, let alone can they 'surrender' and acknowledge their defeat. Yet the world keeps going and therefore has nothing to do with the difference between human 'defeat' and human acceptance of 'defeat'. And surely those in denial that there's a problem aren't the same as those who hate being told there's a solution to it?
What do you mean by defeat? The end of this human civilisation and species? Refusing to accept that all things change and all things die is living in blissful ignorance. We can fight this truth all we like, it won't get us anywhere.
We are witnessing the collapse of 'civilisation' in real time- yet there's hope? Hope of what? That we can stop it, or change the laws of physics or convince Mother Earth we'll do better with one last chance to treat other animals like equals and stop being so ruthless.
Acceptance of who we are, how we got here and that it's fine if the human species dies out (indeed most animals would greatly prefer it) and that we're all going to die, is not defeat. It's the first step to liberation and happiness.
And yet, it seems stupid to give up without even trying to avert disaster. I will continue to promote the idea of Global Climate Compensation (www.global-climate-compensation.org). The next lecture (close to Zurich) will be on February 25 https://www.eventbrite.ch/e/klimakrise-stehen-wir-am-abgrund-oder-sind-wir-schon-einen-schritt-weiter-tickets-1089743424919)
And yet the future will make exactly the same mistakes. The more things change, the more they stay the same.