Climate collapse: we can’t outsmart nature
We can’t outrun the natural laws that will bring climate collapse. Here’s how we respond in the Global South, argues South African science writer Leonie Joubert.
The ‘overview effect’: something only a handful of humans have experienced. It’s that sense of wonder that many astronauts feel when they leave Earth’s atmosphere and look back at this blue-and-white swirled marble spinning through the darkness of space and realise: this is home. This is it. There’s nowhere else to go.
That’s what NASA astronaut William Anders described when he took the famous Earth Rising photograph in 1968. He returned not just with a profound feeling of connection with the Earth, but an urgent sense of the need for better custodianship of our only home.
This could be one of the most important records in the history of humanity’s attempt to document our species’ time on this planet. The image sledge-hammers home the truth that we are but one species in a complex web of life. This has never been more poignant at a time when, to quote the novelist Richard Powers in The Overstory, we have turned half the planet into a factory farm to support just one species. And it looks increasingly like we’re going to bring about our very extinction as a result of this idea that the planet is little more than a pool of resources to extract, or a giant landfill in which to dump our waste.
We need a collective experience of the overview effect. This isn’t just a call for a bunny-hugging value system change. It’s a reminder that we need to shift our entire political economy to reflect the immutable scientific truth that our survival is embedded in the laws of nature. We don’t have to believe in gravity; the apple is still going to hit us on the head.
Breathing forests, filtering water seeps, pollinating insects, heat- and storm-buffering green belts, predictable cold-front weather systems, diverse gene pools, and vibrant soils: these aren’t just nice things to have, our very survival depends on them.
It really is time to panic, as Swedish schoolgirl activist Greta Thunberg’s placards have been saying, because the house is on fire. The planet is burning, and this fire has got the momentum of three centuries of extractive industrial Capitalism behind it. We’re not going to slow it down quickly. It may even be too late.
A decade ago is the blink of an eye in humankind’s story arc. But if US journalist David Wallace-Wells had released his book Uninhabitable Earth 10 years ago, he would have sounded like a sandwich-board wearing doomsday prophet. In it, he outlines just how much we’ve underestimated the extent to which our economic extraction over the past 300 years has altered the planetary heat-exchange between atmosphere and ocean, and how that’s spinning the climate into a state that’s outside that in which human ‘civilisation’ evolved.
But the shrillness of his message is becoming more and more mainstream. Some at the coalface of climate change research estimate that we need to reduce global emissions to zero in just 12 years, if we want to avoid societal collapse. You could argue that we’re already witnessing it now. These views aren’t getting traction because they’ve wooed the biggest crowds with juicy hyperbole or convincing rhetoric, but because the scientific consensus is self-correcting to be more reflective of what the data is saying.
Every seven years, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases a bulky but comprehensive overview of the scale of climate-altering carbon emissions. It summarises the extent of the resulting fallout for our environment, society, economies, and health. It tries to estimate how much this will ratchet up if our economies continue business-as-usual, and by how much we need to cut carbon emissions, if we want to avoid slipping over into unstoppable climate collapse.
The peer-review process behind this work is arguably the most rigours in the history of science. But increasingly, some scientists in the community are pointing out how the reports’ conclusions have been toned down to avoid political discomfort or societal alarm.
Wallace-Wells’s Uninhabitable Earth got the endorsement of a global publisher, and his message went mainstream. And although he’s been criticised in some circles for being hyperbolic, many like him argue that we’re much closer to climate breakdown than the IPCC has been willing to report.
Prof Jem Bendell from the University of Cumbria’s Institute for Leadership and Sustainability is one of them, although his message got a more chilly response at first.
Time to break the rules?
In 2018, Bendell submitted a 34-page research paper to the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal where he outlined why he believes that the data shows that near-term ‘climate-induced collapse is inevitable’. The journal’s peer reviewers turned the piece away, worried about its potential ‘emotional impact’.
Bendell’s response was the academic equivalent of what Thunberg did when she refused to go back to school until someone took her climate message seriously. He broke publishing protocol and released his paper online, without the endorsement of peer review.
The paper, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating ClimateTragedy, literally went viral, birthing in the process the ‘Deep Adaptation’ movement. This is a ‘conceptual map’ for how society should respond if we accept that things are far worse than we’d believed. Rather than focus on cutting emission, ‘deep adaptation’ is about working with communities at a local level to see how we can absorb the economic, political, social, or environmental shocks that are going to start hammering us more and more. Indeed, many would argue, these already are.
If climate change does bring societal collapse with our lifetime, it won’t be like a plague sweeping the planet in one outbreak, suddenly leaving every city or rural dwelling silent and littered with the bodies of slain humans like some post-Apocalyptic movie scene. It will look like Cape Town’s taps running dry, as they almost did last summer, which will shut down our sewage operations, bring disease outbreaks, turf-wars around standpipes, and temporary economic shut-down.
It will look like Knysna, where homes were turned to ash by wildfire, or 90 per cent of Beira ripped apart by cyclone-driven flood waters. It’ll be in the scraggly flotillas of North African refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean in thimble-sized boats, and the reactive European Nationalist politics that met those lucky enough to survive the crossing. It’ll be in the civil war in Syria that started with drought and political tensions, well before Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia triggered the Arab Spring.
The story arc of climate change is longer than the next five-year political voting cycle. It’s longer than the three decades in which South Africa has tried to recover from generations of colonial and apartheid extraction at the expense of the majority for the profit of the few. It’s longer than the life of any individual in this story.
The Club of Rome’s famous quote — that we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet — made it into our language in 1972, the year I was born. Nearly half a century later, our political economy still hasn’t internalised this fundamental truth. Gravity doesn’t stop pulling, just because we ignore that it’s there.
Bendell, Wallace-Wells, Thunberg, and writers like Powers are right. We do need to start panicking, because our life depends on it.
We can’t outrun the natural laws that will bring climate collapse. It’s time that our public conversations, activism, and voting choices demand of our politicians and big corporations — who are some of our biggest environmental offenders, and who leverage their economic clout to uphold the status quo of the current profit-driven political economy — that they respond with the necessary urgency.
This article first appeared in the South African Afrikaans newspaper Vrye Weekblad on 19 April 2019.
