The Great Disruption (14 page)

CHAPTER 8

Are We Finished?

By now, there is a reasonable chance you've been having some fairly dark thoughts. You may be wondering if my view, that we will make it through this, is correct. You might be thinking those who argue we will just slowly slide into collapse may have a point.

Even if you haven't gone there, you may be having moments where you wonder: “What if this all goes horribly wrong?” Maybe moments of despair at the suffering to come, frustration that we've left it this late in the process, anger that it got to this stage, and confusion as to why. You may have considered what it all means for you personally—your family, your security, and the young people you know.

If none of these reactions apply to you, feel free to skip to the next chapter and get straight into what happens next. But I imagine most of you have had these moments. I certainly have. In that case, read on.

I have spent many years considering these questions. Whether this is a crisis we'll pass through or if we'll just face collapse. Whether a rational look at the science and politics warrants a response of despair or hope. I've also discussed these issues with corporate executives, activists, policy makers, and leading scientists over many years and considered their responses and approaches.

My conclusion is that over the next few years, the attitude we adopt—for simplicity let's call it hope versus despair—is perhaps the
most
profound issue we will face. I think it will be more influential on our future than technology, politics, or markets. This is a big claim, so it warrants some serious discussion.

The challenge we face with the Great Disruption is, in severity and scale, unprecedented in all of human history. The situation we will find ourselves in and the consequences that will unfold will be very severe. However, I have no doubt that we can survive and move through virtually any scenario imaginable if, and only if, we stay focused and determined and act together as a species. This conclusion is based on some important assumptions that are different from how many others see the world, so it's worth sharing them.

First, we have to accept that things are going to get ugly and prepare ourselves for this—physically, economically, and psychologically. This is not going to be inconvenient or unpleasant, this is going to be what James Kunstler described in
The Long Emergency
—a generations-long crisis that will need to be managed with focus and determination.

Second, we must drop the dominant assumption that has been held for decades, of how change will occur—steady, market focused, and by global consensus. We must rapidly get our heads around how it will actually occur—discontinuous, chaotic, and transformational change, driven by a war-footing type of response.

Third, we must now understand that the type of change we need will require a major evolution in human values, politics, and personal expectations. This is not a single technical problem like fixing climate change; this is a system design problem. We will therefore need profound shifts in how we behave personally and collectively.

Fourth and perhaps most important, we have to accept that this issue is now a human one. For decades people like me have advocated protecting the environment or preventing significant global changes to the ecosystem. We have to accept that it's too late for that. It is now inevitable that the whole planetary system will be profoundly changed by our actions, with implications for thousands and possibly millions of years.

This means we need to forget about “saving the planet.” The planet will be just fine, it will recover very nicely, and it's not in a hurry. If it takes a million or a hundred million years to recover from our impact and get back on a new evolutionary path, this is no intrinsic problem from the planet's point of view. No, our issue is now
our
issue—do we want to “save” civilization and allow it to keep evolving and developing from the base we have built over the past ten thousand years? Or do we want to go back to a few hundred million people or fewer and start again? That is our choice, and it is the only choice we now need to make. It is a choice we
can
make, and getting through this is an outcome we can achieve, but only if we
decide
to do so. This is a future we get to make.

That's how I see it. You can make up your own mind as we explore these questions and our potential responses over the remainder of this book.

First, though, and within that context, I want to focus on the vexed issue of hope and despair. This is not an issue just of intellectual interest, though it certainly is very interesting. This is a determining issue. If we get this wrong and slip into collective despair and fear, we risk creating a self-fulfilling attitude. This is important at the collective level of broad society, but more urgently it is an issue for people actively engaged in these issues now. We cannot afford to have the most informed and engaged people withdraw, lose focus, or act even subconsciously in a halfhearted way. We have to believe we can succeed, and we have to believe it every day. As I said earlier, we can do this, but only with focus and determination.

I used to think despair about our potential in this area was a personality-driven response. That optimists were full of hope and pessimists went to despair. I think I was wrong. My view now is that despair is a completely rational and logical response to what we have learned about our situation. Confused? Read on.

This is not an intellectual question for me. It is deeply personal, and I have dived down into the depths of it. Let me tell you that part of my story. When I first started writing and presenting on “Scream Crash Boom” in 2005, I noticed I was much more engaged and passionate about the Crash than I was about the Boom, and partly as a result, so were my audiences. At first I thought this was just because I understood it better, with my background as an environmental campaigner and the amount of time I had spent examining the science of sustainability and climate change. It also had the drama of a crisis, making it an easier communications task.

To correct this, I spent more time exploring the extraordinary range of exciting activities around the world being undertaken by people preparing for the transition to a new economy. There are so many amazing stories, some of which we'll cover later, it is easy to get excited about what's possible. Despite learning a great deal and being inspired by the stories and people I came across, I found that my approach didn't fundamentally change. It was the Crash that got the attention and energy of both my audiences and me.

Then, when I was presenting to a Cambridge BSP seminar in New York in 2007, to a largely business audience, I was going through the Crash and was suddenly overwhelmed by a great sense of sadness, and I actually started to cry—not a good look for a big Aussie bloke!

Afterward I gave this a great deal of thought. Given that my purpose in doing this work is to motivate people to be inspired and active, projecting despair was not likely to be effective.

When I returned home, I was telling my wife, Michelle, the story of my tearful speech and we both started crying! We both felt the pain and the sadness but still didn't fully understand it. We were sitting in a café at the time, and I wondered what others would think if I said, “Oh, we're crying because the world is on the verge of a systemwide crash that will see massive global suffering and chaos for decades.” If I did, they would look around at the lovely autumn day and probably call the mental health authorities to have us taken away.

Over the coming year, I noted my moods as I was presenting around the world and found I often went into a depression for several days after a big presentation, with the sense that the work I was doing was probably hopeless. I wondered if I was kidding myself that we had any hope of turning the situation around. An aspect of this was purely in the realm of personal psychology, and I put a lot of effort into looking at that. I wanted to know how much of this was about my response to the data rather than the data itself. However, this personal work, and the fact that there were plenty of data points around me, convinced me there was more to it than just personal psychology.

A new development in the issue had unfolded over the period 2004–2008. Some of the best-informed people in this area started to come over to the view, usually expressed in private, that we were just buying time and we wouldn't actually succeed. This development was not of the kind that is often dismissed as the “end of the world, survivalist” phenomena we have seen at other points in history. These were highly educated and experienced global experts who were analyzing the data and drawing the conclusion that it was simply, physically too late.

One of the more public and prominent of these experts is James Lovelock, a giant of a thinker in this area over many decades, who effectively founded the whole area of earth system sciences, the study of the earth as an integrated system. He was the founder of the Gaia theory—that the earth can be understood as a self-regulating organism. With a number of broad accomplishments under his belt, this is a serious scientist.

Now over ninety years old and still brilliant, Lovelock recently wrote what may be his final book,
The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
, in which he argued that the collapse of civilization was now inevitable. His primary reason for this conclusion is that as humans, we are just not smart enough to respond to a complex problem like climate change adequately. Like Collee's medical comparison earlier, it will overwhelm our response and bring us down. He believes we may end up with as little as a few hundred million people left on the planet, concentrated in the few areas still suitable for growing food.

He is far from alone in this view. Australian Clive Hamilton's most recent book,
Requiem for a Species
, takes a similar view, as evidenced by the title.

So feeling despair and a sense of futility is not just an emotional response driven by personality type. According to some seriously wise and highly informed people, it is a rational conclusion, drawing on human history and the scientific evidence. While I have absolutely been in that space, I have now come out of it, and I think they are wrong.

We will spend quite a bit of time on why they're wrong in a technical sense in the coming chapters, where we'll detail just how we can turn this around and why I think we will do so. Bear in mind that recent studies show that if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, temperatures would stop rising almost immediately.
1
We're not locked into climate disaster any more than we choose to be. Of course, stopping all emissions overnight would be politically impossible and inflict huge suffering. But avoiding any further warming is scientifically and technically possible, as we'll show. The principle challenge is finding the motivation to cut emissions with sufficient speed. For the moment, though, I want to focus on the attitude of despair and why we should be optimistic and believe that avoiding collapse is politically and humanly possible.

From my observations and discussions with others, I think despair is a stage we have to go through. It is in fact a positive sign and an indication of coming to the end of denial. On sustainability, most people start with denial—there is no serious problem. Then comes what we'll call “denial breaking down”—a more or less intellectual acknowledgment of the science up to a point, but without fully accepting the factual implications and emotional reactions that full acknowledgment would bring. Then comes full despair, sometimes with fear and anger on the way through.

My conclusion is that feeling despair at some point means you've genuinely and fully acknowledged the facts. This can perhaps be seen as a stage of grieving where, as in cases of personal loss, you recognize that your loved one is gone and isn't coming back. The reality has finally sunk in. So as a stage, it's actually healthy. Look at the facts we've been discussing and the full scale of their implications and then ask yourself, Wouldn't it be kind of weird not to feel despair and sadness in response? Anyone who doesn't feel this at some point is probably in denial—either denial of how bad it will be or denial that it's too late to prevent it, hoping some combination of political and technological sleight of hand will prevent it.

So ironically, if you're feeling despair, then feel good, you're almost there!

But while despair is a stage I think we all need to arrive at, individually and collectively, it's also one that we can and
must
move through. We face the same challenge when we deal with serious personal loss. We go from denial to despair. Then at some point we need to move on from despair—it's not a place in which people want to stay, even though it can be a difficult place to leave. This doesn't require us to forget the loss, or deny the sadness, but it does mean we have to re-find hope and empower ourselves through it. Otherwise we spiral into decay.

The easiest way to do that is to go forward. We act. We start doing things. This shouldn't be surprising—in other processes of dealing with grief and despair, we act as a way of reasserting control and direction over our lives. Of course, individual grieving isn't characterized by clear, distinct stages and progression. You might jump back as well as forward and feel conflicting emotions at various times. But generally, we accept the loss more fully as time goes on.

While all of the above can be considered at the personal level, it also needs to be considered at the collective, global society level. Without question, society is still in denial. Generally we are in the stage of “denial breaking down,” in that we sort of accept the science but are in denial about its implications—the speed and scale of the threat. I'm not talking about climate deniers or antiscience skeptics. They can be ignored for two reasons. First, we can't help them, because as with an alcoholic in denial, no amount of data will change their minds—they simply don't want to face reality. Second, they don't matter. The physical science will overwhelm them in the end.