Don't Even Think About It (32 page)

Rosemary Randall, a psychotherapist who has worked extensively with climate scientists, says that she frequently encounters their “bewilderment, depression, and despair at public attacks or indifference.” Their solution, she suggests, has been “to move further into the world of reason—more graphs, tighter arguments, greater precision.”

Another psychologist, who works alongside climate scientists in one of the largest British research councils (and so preferred to talk to me off the record) is perpetually disturbed that her colleagues fly constantly and never talk about their anxiety or the implications of their work. She is convinced that, as a result, generating ever more knowledge has becomes the end in itself. They have, she told me, created “a huge information machine run by experts, reinforced by other experts, and all they do is sit around in expert committees, and make their expert presentations to each other.”

This rationalist expert culture protects scientists from the emotional content of their work. When Lertzman interviewed scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency in 1998, she expected them to share stories about their emotional struggle at the frontline. She tells me she was really surprised to hear them say, “‘I am a scientist and I don’t engage on that level.’”

In the fascinating article “When Swordfish Conservation Biologists Eat Swordfish,” the marine biologist Giovanni Bearzi complains that biologists who spend their professional lives researching unsustainable fishing can nonetheless sit down at a restaurant and order swordfish or tuna from those declining stocks. It is, he says, “as if monks advocating poverty were to wear jewelry and expensive silk robes.”

Yet, if Lertzman and Randall are right, we could see this in a quite different light. When people gratuitously perform the thing they warn against, it suggests a ritual of public disavowal. They are managing their own emotional anxiety by policing a strict cognitive divide between work and play, information and responsibility, the rational brain and the emotional brain. Activists often quote the motto “be the change you wish to see,” which they ascribe to Mahatma Gandhi (although, of course, he never actually said this). In a way, these experts are also acting out the world they wish to see—a world in which they do their job, governments do their job, resources are managed sustainably, and then they can fly to Italy on holiday and have that well-earned swordfish steak—goddamnit!

Professor Chris Rapley, former director of the Science Museum in London and one of Britain’s most senior climate scientists, has become an unlikely advocate for the psychoanalytic arguments, which he gladly defends against the positivist prejudice within the science community that “psychotherapy is not rigorous and quantitative.”

Rapley speaks with remarkable honesty and clarity about the internal stress he endures from what he knows. “It is,” he tells me, “
so
difficult to be optimistic, however much you argue yourself into an optimistic position. I know I have tended to deal with my own anxiety by placing what I know into watertight compartments. The fact that we climate scientists can sleep comfortably at night tells you that we have unconsciously worked very hard at this.”

Lertzman and her fellow psychotherapists argue that we are all irrational, unconscious, confused human beings and we are
all
struggling to make sense of this issue. This is why she finds the cognitive explanations for our avoidance of climate change to be “incredibly limited.” They put the blame on the “ignorant, self-centered, shortsighted people, in contrast to the enlightened and evolved people.” The focus on political affiliation is also superficial because it does not explore what leads people to become so strongly identified with those affiliations. Hatred, she says, is always a clue that something else is going on.

For Lertzman, the argument that climate change is too hard for us to deal with is “ridiculous,” and if we turn it on its head, “there is plenty of evidence that we have enormous capacity for deep care and concern.” The question is then how to reframe the argument away from the gap and into the tangle of the tapestry. People need to be in the place where their anxieties are recognized, to be able to say, “Yes, this is scary; this is hard,” and only then, she says, can we be truly mature, creative, strategic, and innovative.

38

Intimations of Mortality

Why the Future Goes Dark

The Jacob K. Javits Convention
Center in New York City is heaving—115,000 fans crammed in for the second day of Comic-Con, the largest comics convention on the East Coast. I am here to ask a simple question: What do you think the future will be like?

My reasoning is this: These people are young, smart, and curious about technology and future worlds. Surely, as they stand around in lines waiting for autographs, they will have spare time to answer a few questions from a stray British social researcher—not in costume, although one woman eyes my scruffy trench coat and asks, “Out of curiosity, have you come as Inspector Gadget?”

So, I ask them, what
do
you think the future will be like?

The surprise is that they have little idea or, it would seem, desire to find out. One woman says, “I’ve never thought that far ahead—I like living in the present.” A man farther down the line is concerned that it might be “a one-color-jumpsuit kind of future.” “Like
Logan’s Run
,” he adds when I look perplexed.

Brian Ferrara is selling nine-hundred-dollar replica weapons from science fiction video games. “I’m not a doomsday prophecy kind of guy, but I am a realist,” he says. So, being realistic, he doesn’t see a bright future, but he is very vague about the details. Maybe, he speculates, we will be immobilized, strapped to a chair with a feeding tube.

One couple are more politically alert, having spent time with the Occupy movement. They anticipate some kind of corporate dystopia, But, they say, there are other issues too. Overbreeding. The constant battle over fertility rights. “Yes,” says the woman, warming to the theme. “Politicians! Get out of my uterus! Leave my lady parts
alone
!” In her one-piece latex Catwoman outfit, she looks reasonably safe for the moment.

And climate change? In over twenty interviews, not one person mentions climate change until I prompt them to do so. Then they have lots of views. No one doubts that it is happening or is going to be a disaster. “It will escalate into catastrophe.” “If we can’t cope with that, we’ll all die like the dinosaurs.” But asked to identify when these impacts might hit, they reckon it’s still a long way off. “Maybe my great-grandchildren will have to deal with it,” Catwoman says.

Whatever happened to the future? Even when I was growing up, a final straggler in the baby boom party, there was no doubt about what the future would look like. Shiny glass buildings, food pills, mining the oceans, monorails. Images of the future were everywhere. Now, research shows, people are unwilling to even think about it.

Bruce Tonn at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has spent the past decade asking people what they think will happen in the future. According to his research, most people interpret “the future” as being no more than fifteen years away and, beyond twenty years, people’s ability to imagine the future “goes dark.” It’s an intriguing term, and I ask Tonn to explain it. He says that people are “just not able to imagine
any
type of future. They cannot visualize their lives, cannot visualize society, cannot visualize the impacts of various policies or lack of them.” Tonn’s research revealed a deep, underlying pessimism. Almost half of his respondents would not wish to have been born in the future and anticipate that humanity will go extinct, most likely from environmental collapse.

A survey of five hundred American preteens found that more than half felt the world was in decline and a third believed it would not exist when they grew up. In Australia a quarter of the children believe that the world will come to an end before they reach adulthood.

Extinction is an emerging narrative around climate change—not just extinction generally, but our own extinction specifically.
A World Without Us
, Alan Weisman’s book on the environmental recovery of a world emptied of humans, became a bestseller. In books such as Fred Guterl’s
The Fate of the Species
and Clive Hamilton’s
Requiem for a Species
, climate change writers argue that our extinction is the ultimate danger.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s book
Field Notes from a Catastrophe
ends with the line, “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

Recent years have also seen the emergence of a new field of extinction studies. The Future of Humanity Institute, nested within the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University, specializes in the study of catastrophic risks that threaten the future of humanity. The rival Cambridge University has founded the Center for the Study of Existential Risk with the support of Jaan Tallinn, multimillionaire cofounder of Skype. This is, one realizes, cool stuff.

The Future of Humanity Institute conducted a poll of academic experts on global risks. They gave an estimate of 19 percent probability that the human species will go extinct before the end of this century.
The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change
factored a 9.5 percent risk of extinction within the next century into its calculations.

Extinction fits neatly into an altogether more flippant and fatalistic narrative that it is too late to do anything. As the late comedian George Carlin put it:

Save the planet! What!? Are these fucking people kidding me!? The planet isn’t going anywhere.
We
are! We are going away, so pack your shit, folks. We wouldn’t leave much of a trace either. Just another failed mutation, just another closed end biological mistake. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.

Or, in a calmer version of what is essentially the same narrative, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh tells us that “the collective anger and violence” of global warming will lead to our destruction within a hundred years, but we can accept this because “Mother Earth knows she has the power to heal herself.”

These narratives do not belong exclusively to any single identifiable worldview. They are experimental, building momentum as people try them out and pass them around. They are already widespread. Carlin’s nihilistic monologue has been viewed more than five million times on YouTube.

If this is a defense mechanism, it is one that bypasses the entire issue of our moral responsibility. It is as though we have moved from a bedside vigil to bereavement counseling without actually experiencing the death itself.

And when it is said that we are the ones who will go extinct, this is the most slippery of all
we
’s. As I discussed earlier, people are consistently far more optimistic about their own chances than they are about those of humanity as a whole. No one using this language seems to seriously consider that they or their own associates are under direct threat—these frames prepare them to accept the suffering of others as unavoidable and required.

Climate change imagery draws heavily on the iconography of death. Starvation, cracked earth, skulls, dead trees. Reports of extreme weather events give prominent mention to the numbers of deaths, highlighted in headlines about “killer heat.” Metaphors of terminal illness, cancer, and murder appear regularly in environmental articles. An article in the
Sydney Morning Herald
framed climate change as a terminal illness under the headline “Prognosis for a Planet: Death.”

The veteran environmental scientist James Lovelock has explored these metaphors in depth. A climate scientist, he says, is like “a young policewoman” who has “to tell a family whose child had strayed that he had been found dead, murdered in a nearby wood.” Science study centers are “the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital” and are reporting that Earth “is soon to pass into a morbid fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma.”

Beyond such attention-grabbing associations between climate change and death lies a more interesting question: Does climate change
in its essence
trigger our fears of our own death and is our response shaped by those fears?

The anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that a fear of death lies at the center of all human belief. The denial of death, he argued, is a “vital lie” that leads us to invest our efforts into our cultures and social groups to obtain a sense of permanence and survival beyond our death. Thus, he argued, when we receive reminders of our death—what he calls death salience—we respond by defending those values and cultures.

Becker’s theory, called terror management theory, has been supported by more than three hundred experiments and predicts that when people are made directly aware of their death, they immediately rationalize the threat, often by denying the personal risk or the proximity, just as smokers will say, “It’s still a long way off, so I may as well live a little.”

Janis Dickinson, a professor of neuroscience at Cornell University, places climate change within the thinking of Becker. She suggests that many of the standard responses to climate change, of extreme rationalization, denial, or placing climate change impacts far in the future, are all consistent with our responses to our fear of death.