Looking forward to a brighter future

Recently I met with a friend in Melbourne, Derbyshire. It is a beautiful market town and we met by the church and walked past Melbourne Hall and The Pool then followed the footpath signs across fields and through woods on a lovely walk, ending up back in Melbourne a few hours later.

 

The Pool Melbourne

We had a fabulous time, chatting all the way. It was 7^th July 2020 and the coronavirus lockdown was starting to lift, but everyone was still being cautious. It was such a joy to be out with a friend again enjoying the English summer at its peak. Did I mention it was raining?

Melbourne Hall

By the time we had returned to Melbourne we were soaked and hungry, but the pubs and cafes were still closed. We bought some sandwiches and tea from a bakery and sheltered from the rain under the marketplace pavilion. ‘Pavilion’ is maybe not the best description but I am at a loss. There were 4 benches facing outwards from the stone centre, the marketcross built in 1889, and a roof over us held up by wooden posts on each corner. We enjoyed sitting in the dry and watching the cars passing by, with a hot drink and some deep discussions, oblivious to the constant downpour.

 

The market cross

My friend told me about Professor Jem Bendell and ‘Deep Adaptation’. Bendell promotes the idea that we are already too far along the climate change route to prevent societal collapse, and that we should focus on enjoying the important things in life for the remaining years.

It doesn’t resonate with me. Rapid globalisation has created some big issues for the planet and I think most people recognise that in the core of their being without spending too much time on the over-whelming evidence supporting it, when they could be focusing on the solutions. I just don’t accept the ‘we are doomed’ conclusion, which isn’t new and has been pushed for the last 30 years or more. Plus define 'doomed', because it could be anywhere on a scale from a financial recession to extinction, and the most probable outcomes are somewhere between the two. 

There is plenty of evidence that indicates doom isn't upon us which I will touch on. I also feel that nothing positive will emerge from that kind of despair. People need hope and there is genuinely a lot to be hopeful for, though I may struggle to get it all in one post, so maybe this is the start of a new series of posts.

I read a few of Bendell’s blog posts and watched a couple of youtube videos. I was surprised that one of the proposals was that people concerned about climate change go through a stage of despair followed by a stage of prepping for collapse. I have been through those stages, but I always felt this was a complete anomaly in the UK. Even my friend sitting with me in the rain, who has supported the climate change movement for at least the last 15 years that I have known her, has not experienced that and we know no one else who has. If you have then please do get in touch either in response to this post or by private message to me. For me the stage after prepping is a deep understanding and knowing that there is a lot of hope and optimism for the future.

There is no disputing that there are some climate facts behind Bendell’s work, however I feel there are also some simplifications and a denial of progress and human nature, which skew his conclusion of collapse. There is a big difference between fact and theory or projections. Even with regard to facts they can look different dependent on what side of them you come from (your natural bias) and of course they can change with time. For instance the World population is a fact, but the figure changes daily. What I am saying is that nothing is fact and everything is in flux and in particular anything predicated on human behaviours and reactions. Experts struggle to predict next week’s weather, so looking further in the future is unreliable. Anything can happen today that could change everything tomorrow… and it frequently does.

What I didn’t like about this Deep Adaptation video on youtube is the comment below it that states:

As Dr. Bendell notes, there will be a tendency to want to reject his conclusions in Deep Adaptation since to accept them is so life changing in its repercussions.

You may also want to dismiss Deep Adaptation because you simply disagree with their conclusions, but with this sentence Bendell has dismissed every argument against his theory as coming from someone ‘in denial’. In addition he talks about the middle classes in his posts, and maybe he means that middle class society is collapsing and if it is hurray, because I am all for a classless society. However it does seem to overlook that it is the working class who are the collective power behind change (as well as being the least burden on the climate) and that there is a lot missing from this research if large parts of the population are overlooked.

My friend took from Bendell that collapse is inevitable, so stop worrying and spend the remaining years on things that have meaning for you. The perception being that Collapse means an end of life/ mass extinction event, rather than an end of a way of life such as a breakdown of current societal norms. Collapse represents fear, and just the word pulls the mind into a fear-driven frenzy where logic and reason jump ship and denial seems like a viable option. So let’s replace ‘Collapse’ with ‘Change’. There will be changes, there has to be changes in our society and history shows that there always have been changes.

Tobacco smoke is a killer, and in order to persuade people to quit smoking every packet has a disturbing image of the damage it has inflicted on some smokers. It looks pretty scary and if I were a smoker I would think that I was damned to die of some horrible lung disease or cancer before too long. The emphasis on the worst case scenario is aimed at scaring people into changing their smoking habit. For some people it makes the future look hopeless, so they may as well continue to enjoy smoking as they will be dead soon anyway. And yet we all know of someone who smoked until they were 80 with no sign of ill affect at all. How can that be? Maybe that future is not written in stone?

We are focusing on the worst case scenario for a smoker. That’s what we are doing with climate change too. This may scare us into changing our lifestyles or putting legislation in place and on the whole it has had that effect. However it can also cause people to become paralysed by fear or believe any efforts are futile. But there are other ways for positive change to come about and it is far better that we enjoy and embrace those changes because then they will be changes that are here to last.

I was given a book for Christmas “The Uninhabitable Earth – A story of the future” by David Wallace-Wells. It’s a shocking title but drew me in with the promise of an envisioned future. I only made it to page 44 and the weight of all the depressing, boring facts and figures that were being driven down to make you feel the full weight of hopelessness was enough. So I skipped to the back to see what the bright future might look like, but it was pretty much more of the same. Now if you have more stamina than me and have read this book in its entirety then please do enlighten me about the good parts that I have missed, or even shout up just to let me know you have not died of despair. I am a solutions person. I wanted to find someone who could envision the future for us and see the solutions - what is the use banging on about the same old stuff?

Wallace-Wells message is the equivalent of the stark image of lung cancer on a cigarette pack, I guess I have grown numb to it. Whereas the solutions such as banning smoking from public spaces worked just as well but without the fear factor. Providing solutions for people is a lot more empowering than just painting a bleak picture and leaving them paralysed. Obviously the fear factor is better for selling books…

Now I don’t deny that there is evidence that looks pretty bleak for the planet, but that evidence has been around for years. The Uninhabitable Earth has been compared to the Silent Spring by Rachel Carson published in 1962 and there has not been a silence regarding environmental damage in the years in between. I remember the mistake of bringing study material, Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update, with me on holiday in 2006 and I sure felt the despair that Bendell talks about then!

The 30 year update was written in 2004 and the data used was from the years preceding that, and, well, things change. I think we only have to look at the growing proportion of renewables in the electricity grid in the UK to see that things change. Or the consistent tightening of energy efficiency targets in Building Regulations. Or the energy efficiency labels for cars, homes and white goods, with the commitments to phase out petrol cars completely. Standards are consistently being raised and maybe progress has started slow, but momentum is growing. The growth in globalisation completely over-shadowed the gains made until recently, and now there are more and more positive reports emerging. It’s clear that our perceptions and understandings of where we are need to change constantly and be open to the improvements we see, not just the devastation being caused.

There is definitely a delayed response in the updated facts being interpreted, understood and then disseminated and grasped by the wider community. Population growth is a good example of that and I would urge anyone who hasn’t yet seen the fantastic explanation by the late Hans Rosling back in 2013 to watch it. Even though the facts and figures have moved on already and there was more good news about population growth slowing further in the news this week. The message is clear that population is still increasing, but it is no longer accelerating. The continuing growth is down to the increase in life expectancy of people already alive, and is no longer due to birth rate which has dropped considerably (see below).

World fertility rates (births per woman), The World Bank,  

Birth rate is a clear area where the actual changes have to be taken by individuals. Yes education and access to contraception are vital to enable that, but couples have chosen to move away from the large families of their parents and grandparents. Who would have thought it was possible to change that on a global scale?

The coronavirus pandemic predictions were bleak in the UK. Maybe they needed to be to prod our slow and bumbling government into action. However the 250,000 – 510,000 deaths predicted for the UK on the 16th March by Neil Ferguson's Imperial College team were based on the worst case scenario. That worst case scenario may have been fairly accurate based on the information available at the time and the assumptions made. Those assumptions can make an enormous difference. That’s why there will be several scenarios run for different assumptions. The worst case is the do nothing scenario, the best case is that all infections are tracked and everything is under control, which was equally as unlikely in the UK as the worst case, however not totally impossible.

It is the same with the impacts of climate change, there is a range of ‘likely’ outcomes based on how much or little action is taken to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impact. My concern is that human nature seems to be misunderstood in modelling and some of the positive changes happening now are overlooked.

Most of the constructs which govern our society and dictate the actions of the majority are beliefs, traditions or habits. For instance families were large because they were for our ancestors and our neighbours, because there was and still is a belief perpetuated by religion that contraception is bad and because people weren’t educated on the choices they had or choices weren’t widely available. The barriers that needed to be broken weren’t physical (although it all came down to a physical barrier at the basic level J).

Back to coronavirus, the decision of when to lockdown and how far to go, was a human one that made a significant difference on the overall impact of the virus. If you were calculating this based on monetary costs alone then you would not expect a lockdown to be implemented, because the economic risk was enormous and the probability of stopping the virus spreading seemed slim. Those most at risk were the weak and frail members, not the productive worker members of society. Boris Johnson certainly preferred the do nothing approach to start with, talking about ‘herd immunity’.

However this was out of kilter with the rest of human nature, which is to protect and care for loved ones. Many companies had already started to voluntarily shut down offices and ask their staff to work from home a few weeks prior to the government instigated lockdown. The pressure for the government to act on behalf of society was immense and of course they had to go with it. So who would you say made the decision in the end? Was it the politicians or was it forced by public opinion? Where does the power really lie?

Whilst there are some people who did not stick to the lockdown rules, the vast majority did. The vast majority have tried to take care of themselves, their loved ones and their community by following government advice, however confusing and pointless some of it seemed at times. This human effect has made a difference. This community response has shifted the outcome away from the worst case prediction. The power of this human response and its influence on decision-makers was under-rated. Similarly Bendell and others mistakenly believe that the natural instinct for humans is to protect only themselves at all costs, but it never has been. We are social animals.

When I read The 5 Stages of Collapse by Dmitry Orlov he discussed a tribe that had lost this community instinct to protect others. It was most disturbing to read of parents with no regard for their off-spring and the extreme conditions that had brought this shift in culture about. It is an anomaly that is so alien to our current culture. I can understand that writing in the age of Brexit the feeling of division and disdain for others was at its peak. However the lockdown has brought a blossoming of communities, just as social interaction and national pride were buoyant during the 2012 Olympics and Queen’s Jubilee celebrations. We can choose whether we foster and promote feelings of despair, isolation and fear of others OR encourage community spirit and camaraderie. I know which I prefer.

Another very positive change for the future is the new generation. My climate change fear years were during a time when the Baby Boomers were the dominant decision makers, with their focus on growth. Now 20 years later it is my generation that are taking up the reigns and the focus has moved more to sustainability and there has been a shift in gear. In 20 years’ time the decisions will be made by a new generation who have lived through lockdown, protested for Black Lives Matter and get their news from social media, rather than mainstream media. Growth at all costs will no longer be on the agenda. I could argue that we are already there, as for most of the world growth has been demoted and saving lives has become far more important when faced with a pandemic. Money is bailing out people and businesses not financial intuitions – that’s an incredible shift away from austerity.

Most of the solutions we need to transition to a low carbon sustainable lifestyle are already available. Many are underway and building up momentum. Just like the shift seen in  population growth, individual change is not only possible but is in motion. Your choices have made it so. As shown with lockdown, the people have immense power to instigate the changes needed and are already surging ahead of government legislation. 

Over the next few posts I will write you that positive future that I know to be true, with examples of low carbon successes.