A Climate Interregnum
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Antonio Gramsci
The world, your world, my world is changing.
Some say that it has always changed and they’d be right.
They’d also be wrong.
The human species has witnessed change on this planet since we first stood upright on the East African plains.
We’ve experienced cyclical climatic change with each of the alternating cold and warm glacial and interglacial periods of the Pleistocene, but never has such a large number of living human beings been subject to such rapidity of change as we are experiencing right now.
Environmentally, technologically, medically, socially.
We have harnessed the products of ancient photosynthesis laid down more than 300 million years ago as a concentrated energy injection into our development as a species both in number and through our technological prowess.
But this was no free ride.
That energy injection had consequences that have only become apparent in the last 30 years. Recently, with increasing urgency since certainty in its effects on our climate has increased.
From the benign Holocene climate of the last ten thousand years that spawned the development of civilisation, to the Anthropocene — our current time of undeniable human imprint over the Earth system and its inhabitants — we have shaken things up and moulded the Earth’s surface like no animal in history.
This enormous capacity to shape our world has largely been the consequence of an unwitting exercise in furthering our species both in number and in its standard of living.
This capacity to change our planet has not been matched with action to avert the climatic conclusion of our unchecked behaviours.
An uncertain future
We still do not know where we will be as a species. So deeply embedded in an Earth system of our own making that in the space of two generations our climate could be in any one of a range of states.
We exist in a climate interregnum that precedes the establishment of a new normal state. To shape that unknown future into one that is assuredly benign is a task that is completely dependent on human foresight, ingenuity and political will so that the new can be born.
This climate interregnum has yielded a great variety of morbid symptoms upon our species.
In tandem with our spectacular success, we are adjusting to the likely coming demise of the dominant social and economic paradigm of western liberal capitalist democracy.
An economic model that has presided over and enabled the worst excesses of exploitation of the natural world that it has imperilled our very existence.
Where economies once progressed unchecked thanks to the extraction of materials and energy from the Earth system and trade in human necessities, their new nourishment is the data extracted from a newly commodified populace. The Matrix made true.
I believe that in this headlong rush to progress we’re in danger of losing something that is fundamental to our species; our humanity, and that in turn, we set ourselves up to fail in the battle against climate change.
I also believe that in this very problem lies a potential solution. That in seeking to regain our humanity and regain contact with the core needs of our species, we begin to approach the solution to our ills.
Over the coming months, I’ll be exploring this theme in greater detail as part of a series of posts with Laurence McCahill, co-founder of The Happy Startup School.
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This is a series of posts in collaboration with an old school friend, Laurence McCahill, co-founder of The Happy Startup School
Credits: Icons from Noun Project
