A We Don’t Have Time Exclusive: Read the first chapter of this thought-provoking new book on climate change
In his brand new book The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, dr Paul Behrens outlines two versions of our future. One is promising. The other utterly dark.
”Any which way, it’s the end of the world as we know it”, he says.
Read the first chapter exclusively here on We Don’t Have Time.
Paul Behrens, assistant professor in energy and environmental change at Leiden University in The Netherlands, recently sent us a copy of his brand new book The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science. We found it so interesting that we invited him to write about it on our blog.
This is Paul Behrens, in his own words:
Working as an environmental scientist I’m often asked a daunting question: ‘Do you think we are going to be okay?’ What people really want to know — I think — is whether my research gives me hope or despair for the future.
Whether I see climate change, biodiversity loss, microplastics and other environmental crises causing such damage that they make modern civilization untenable … or if I see promising signs that we will be able to mitigate the damage and adapt to the degraded environment. I have to disappoint people by refraining from any summarized, definitive answer.
Click here to the read the first chapter.
I know this can be frustrating, but, as someone who studies the interaction of humans with the environment, the only fact about the future I can declare with certainty is that the world as we know it is coming to an end — as it has already for many people caught in California’s wildfires, Bangladesh’s floods, or west African droughts. I have to be ‘that person’ in the room that says that things will continue to get worse year-on-year, that there will be no relief but that we can ease the suffering and make a better world for many by taking action.
In short, either we will remake society in unrecognisable ways to avoid overwhelming environmental damages, or the environment will continue to become more unliveable, changing the way humans live for millennia. More likely, humanity will end up on a scale somewhere between, both remaking society while adapting to an increasingly hostile environment. At any point on this scale, any which way, it’s the end of the world as we know it.
This may lead some people to despair, but as George Elliot remarked, what we call our despair is often only ‘the painful eagerness of unfed hope’. Pessimism can describe the world as it is and what will happen if today’s rate of change remains constant. It can highlight the baseline from which so much action has to be taken. Hope describes a vision for the future based on committing to unprecedented action. These actions involve addressing many of the things on societies’ to-do lists: alleviating poverty, reducing income inequality, improving women’s autonomy, cleaning the air, oceans and water, conserving soils, and much more.
I wrote The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science to explore the futures we are facing. The book has paired chapters of pessimism and hope, on subjects like energy, food, climate, and economics. Ethics, politics, and power are woven in throughout as they are at the core of the problems in our human and environmental systems.
I don’t hold back in the pessimistic chapters — these chapters are truly terrifying because they represent a future in which little effort has been made to address our environmental crises — the same modus operandi of today’s destruction but with increasingly desperate impacts on society. From global food shortages to large-scale conflict and war, I survey what science tells us about how the future looks like if we carry on like today.
The hopeful chapters describe the huge benefits from taking deep and sustained emergency action. Drawing on the latest research I show how the energy, food, and sustainable transitions we need to make also result in cleaner air to healthier cities, clearer water to more equality, and, ultimately, higher levels of human welfare, fulfilment and happiness.
The book’s structure aims to clarify how much work is involved in feeding Elliot’s hope. As our research shows, despair can lead to action and that action engenders hope. This is a hope that also lies in seeing other people act. A hope for a cleaner, healthier, more equitable and fulfilling world. A hope that will need all our action and all our will.
PAUL BEHRENS
Author of The Best of Times, The Worst of Times
FACT BOX
Paul Behrens is an author and academic at Leiden University. His research on food, energy and climate change has appeared in leading scientific journals, Scientific American, the BBC, and the New York Times. He was awarded 2018 Leiden University Discoverer of the Year.
Paul’s book The Best of Times, The Worst of Times is published by Indigo press on 17th September (£12.99). It is available at independent bookshops and online at Waterstones.
