Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
There is one major distinction between the coronavirus and climate change. The coronavirus may, in time, level off, after a record number of deaths and a body blow to our economy. But the effects of climate change are not reversible.
We should have listened to Lynn Margulis more. For one, she did offer a solution to the “what is life?” dilemma: life is not a thing, it’s a process. Indeed, what does an organism do? It grows. What for? To grow more.
The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up.
We make decisions, not on known outcomes but on imagined projections standing on theories of how things work. These projections have an ethical range called the ‘planning horizon.’ The better we understand the world the broader the reach of our anticipations. Conscience serves to measure how well we encompass social effects.
So I have decided to do something counterintuitive, and write a blog that I really hope you won’t read, because its intention is that that you might instead use the time you would have spent reading it to close your laptop screen and go and do something else instead.
Now that we’ve patted ourselves down to check for wounds to our wallets or cupboards or health, I challenge us to plant the question in our hearts – who isn’t safe, needs support, needs allies – and see what grows.
Who will you be on the other side of this?
Slowing growth in population and in consumption of materials and energy will not eliminate the problem. But it would reduce the pressure to increase efficiency and leave more possibility for increasing resilience.
COVID-19 and climate breakdown are interconnected crises. They are the unintended consequences of a 500-year history of territorial expansion, conquest, resource extraction and industrial growth as a by-word for progress that has seen carbon pumped into the earth’s atmosphere at a rate that carbon sinks, compromised by industrial-scale deforestation, can’t contain.
Thus, although Transition Towns thinking came about primarily through considerations about peak oil, all essential efforts toward re-localisation and community resilience may provide the strongest available single buffer against the many storms that are likely to prevail upon us.
It’s in the interests of the 1 percent that we not use the Nordic model as a way to talk about vision. They’ve watched with alarm the growing public appeal of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, which are partial versions of the Nordic model. Especially now, they don’t want us to expand, to talk in an appealing way about system-change.
A longstanding anti-human, anti-science, anti-democratic, individualistic, racist and xenophobic narrative is clashing with the reality of a pandemic that can only be overcome by humanity, science, equity, collective effort, and trust in the democratic institutions that are coordinating and delivering health services and economic relief.
Navigating the end of growth will require courage, new thinking, flexibility, and a willingness to make mistakes. It’s understandable why, during “normal” times, people want to stick with what’s familiar. But we’re no longer in normal times.
