The climate book, p.39
The Climate Book, page 39
But it is also about us and the improvement of our lives. It’s about people coming together to find ways to live and work within healthy, flourishing ecosystems. Local communities need to be at the heart of any decisions about land- and marine-use change. Nothing should be done without the involvement and consent of Indigenous peoples and other local people. By using a localized people-led approach we can help to create economies that are regenerative and restorative by design, which support human prosperity within nature’s flourishing web of life.
To do so, we must start working with nature instead of against it. We would like to see governments, public bodies, businesses, farmers, foresters, fishers and local communities coming together to develop collaborative place-based visions for the ecological restoration of our land and seas, which catalyse the economic restoration of communities. We believe that a new and thriving ecosystem of employment can be built around the healing and rewilding of nature. For example, recent analysis by Rewilding Britain reveals that, across England, rewilding projects have resulted in a 54 per cent increase in full-time-equivalent jobs. Not only has the number of jobs increased, so has their diversity. Rewilding can enrich lives and help us to reconnect with wild nature while providing a sustainable future for local communities.
Rewilding enables us to begin to heal some of the great damage we have inflicted on the living world and, with it, the wounds we have inflicted on ourselves. And this could be our best defence against despair. We can replace our silent spring with a raucous summer. /
We can replace our silent spring with a raucous summer.
One of the oldest living organisms on Earth: a meadow of Neptune seagrass (Posidonia oceanica) in the Mediterranean Sea near Ibiza.
5.8
We now have to do the seemingly impossible
Greta Thunberg
The fact that our societies are in many ways governed by social norms is a great source of hope, because social norms can be changed. Real change creates real hope, and real hope creates real change. It is a positive feedback loop. But it does not appear out of nowhere. Societal changes are the results of our collective efforts and actions. So instead of asking others if there is still hope, ask yourself, are you prepared to change? Are you prepared to step outside your comfort zone and become part of a movement that will bring about the necessary systemic transformations? Sure, it might feel a bit uncomfortable at first. But then again, the future of our entire civilization is on the line, so it just might be worth it. Instead of looking for hope, we have to go out and create that hope ourselves.
When I sat down outside the Swedish Parliament in August 2018 I was suffering from selective mutism and I could not eat in the company of strangers. It was difficult in the beginning to do around ten interviews a day, five days a week. Sometimes, when young people came up to me, I had to hide and cry because I was so scared of other children. I had been so mistreated that I just naturally assumed that all children were mean. But it was more than worth the effort. I saw that people were listening, despite the fact that all I had to offer them were facts and moral imperatives – or guilt, if you like. I did not have any knowledge about communication tactics. Later, the Norwegian psychologist Per Espen Stoknes told me that, according to psychological research and behavioural studies, I – and the Fridays For Future movement – did everything wrong. But one year later, in the week around the UN climate summit in New York, over 7.5 million people in more than 180 countries flooded the streets of the world, demanding climate justice. ‘It wasn’t supposed to work,’ Stoknes said to me with a smile, ‘but it worked.’
The school strike movement is based on climate justice. We seek to shine a light on the intergenerational impacts of climate change and the need for equity for the most affected people in the most affected areas. There is nothing new about this. It is one of the main pillars of the Paris Agreement. All the words that we say have been spoken by others. All our speeches, books and articles follow in the footsteps of those who pioneered the climate and environmental movement. It would be easy to assume that all those before us have failed and that we now are failing too. After all, our emissions are still rising and the necessary action and commitment are still nowhere in sight. But that is not true. We are creating change. Massive change. We are winning. We are just not winning fast enough. We are not a political organization, we are a grassroots movement dedicated to spreading awareness and information. We are not interested in compromises or deals. We have nothing to offer. We tell it like it is.
For this, we are receiving unimaginable amounts of hate and threats. We are being mocked, bullied and ridiculed. And for pointing out that our political leaders have spent thirty years debating this while our emission levels have done nothing but keep on rising, there are elected officials that have called us a threat to democracy. Perhaps this level of political desperation should not come as a surprise, since over one third of our anthropogenic CO2 emissions have occurred since 2005. There are leaders who have been in charge of some of our major emitting nations for large periods of that time. Imagine how their historic responsibilities will be viewed in the future.
Many people say that the actions required for us to stay below 1.5°C or even 2°C of warming are politically impossible today, and I agree. But, as Erica Chenoweth writes, changing what is considered politically possible can most definitely be done. As a matter of fact, it happens all the time. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic we saw it everywhere, often daily. Who created this shift in thinking? The media did. And they did it simply by objectively telling the reality as it was. It turns out they did not have to offer any inspiration for people to change their behaviour – contrary to what all the communication experts have been saying for years and years. Nor was it hopeful stories about ninety-five-year-olds who miraculously survived the disease that got us moving. The media just told us the facts, and we reacted to them. We did not become paralysed. We did not give in to apathy. We simply reacted to the information and changed our norms and our behaviour – as you do in a crisis. And we did not do it because we saw financial opportunities. We did not do it to create new jobs in the health sector or to benefit the face-mask-manufacturing industry. We changed because others did. We changed because we got scared, because we became afraid of losing our loved ones, our friends and our livelihoods.
As I am finishing the final edits to this book, Russia has commenced an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. This horrific violation of all international law has brought about a growing demand for the EU to completely stop all imports of oil and gas from Russia, despite the fact that this action would most likely initiate an unparalleled European energy crisis. This act would severely defund Putin’s fascist war machine, yet it was completely unthinkable even a few days ago.
We know what it means to treat something like a crisis, and we know – way beyond any doubt – that the climate crisis has never even once in any way been treated as such. This is the heart of the problem, and it is not the fault of the oil companies. It’s not the fault of the logging industries, the airlines, the car manufacturers, the manufacturers of fast fashion or the meat and dairy producers either. They are very much guilty, but their purpose is unfortunately to make money, not to inform citizens about the state of the biosphere or to safeguard democracy.
Our inability to stop the climate and ecological crisis is a result of an ongoing failure in the media, as George Monbiot points out. A crisis of information not getting through – because that information has not been told, packaged or delivered as it should be. And way more importantly, it has been drowned out by other stories. During the week of COP26 in Glasgow, the environmental media coverage was at its peak. But it still struggled to compete with the airtime dedicated to Britney Spears as she regained control over her life. This is one of countless examples of how we are constantly being indirectly told that we are fine. After all, if a newspaper dedicates most of its space to sport, celebrities, diets and crime, then surely all that talk of an existential crisis must be blown way out of proportion? And the credibility of all those scientists might not be considered very great if they say all those things about extinction and a code red for humanity and still get bumped from the front page by Kim Kardashian or Manchester United.
Melting glaciers, wildfires, droughts, deadly heatwaves, floods, hurricanes, loss of biodiversity – these are all starting to make headlines on the front pages and in the evening news. But this is still not reporting about the climate crisis. This is reporting on the symptoms of a much larger problem. These stories alone will not explain the challenges we face. To communicate the crisis, you first of all need to convey the fact that the clock is ticking. The climate crisis is about time. If you leave out the aspect of time, then it is just one topic among other topics. If you take away the countdown, then a collapsing glacier, a forest fire or a record heatwave is nothing more than three independent news events – a series of isolated natural disasters. If you fail to include the aspect of time, the climate crisis is not a crisis. Then it is just another story that can be dealt with down the road – in 2030 or 2050; who really cares? Remove the countdown and you lose sight of all the most important details, for example that it might not really matter if we develop technological solutions in the decades to come if we fail to take the necessary action here and now. And that we do not primarily need climate targets for 2030 or 2050. We need them now, for 2022, and for every month and year that follows.
If the media is going to tell the truth about our situation, it must also start to focus on climate justice. The people who are on the front lines of the climate emergency belong on the front pages, as Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate has said. But that is yet to happen. The most affected people in the most affected areas have been erased from the mainstream western media. Yet they are the ones suffering the consequences of our affluence – a way of life that was built with stolen natural resources and forced labour from low-income nations, as Olúfẹ́ mi O. Táíwò writes.
Justice means morality – and morality includes guilt and shame. But guilt and shame have been officially banished from the western climate discourse by the media, by the communication experts and by the entire greenwashing community – conveniently closing the door on our historic responsibilities and the losses and damages caused. This is the social and cultural equivalent to what Saleemul Huq described in Part Three, where he explained that low-income nations are not allowed to talk about loss and damage and that words such as ‘liability’ and ‘compensation’ have become taboo in high-level climate talks.
How can we possibly address a crisis that is fundamentally created by injustice and inequalities if we are not allowed to talk about morality, justice, responsibility, shame and guilt? We cannot. Ninety per cent of this cumulative crisis has already been created; it is already up there in the atmosphere, and that has to be accounted for. Therefore we have to fundamentally change our social norms. We have to make it not only politically possible but also socially acceptable to address these issues without most people automatically shutting down and sheltering off into a defensive position. And of course that can be done. Guilt, shame, morality and justice are based on social norms, and social norms can easily be changed.
The Finnish philosopher Elisa Aaltola from the University of Turku has argued that shame can be a highly effective moral and psychological method of persuasion. Guilt is not, in fact, a bad thing in itself. On the contrary, it is a necessary part of a functioning society. We pay our bills and we obey the laws to avoid being guilty of a crime. In a way, our entire society is upheld by our desire to avoid guilt. Guilt may not be a pleasant thing to experience, but once we have recognized our mistake, we have the opportunity to apologize and move on, often with a great sense of relief.
And when it comes to climate guilt, very few of us have anything to fear – unless you happen to be a fossil fuel corporation, an energy company or a leader of a major oil-producing nation. Climate injustice is in no way the fault of ordinary people. The vast majority of us are not even remotely aware of historical emissions or of the wrongdoings of the past. Or even of the very basics of global warming, for that matter . . . Because how could we be? We have never been told, at least not in any official sort of way. And it is hardly the responsibility of ordinary citizens to do the work of governments, international newspapers and major TV networks.
But when something that has previously been considered good and desirable – for example, an extremely high-emitting lifestyle – is suddenly revealed to have disastrous consequences for our common society, then we all have a responsibility to find quick ways of making that lifestyle socially unacceptable, just as social norms and laws prohibit theft and violence. And don’t get me wrong, it is not guilt that will save us – it is justice. But we cannot have one without the other.
In order to create all the necessary changes, the concepts of climate justice, historical emissions and the mindsets of dominance and inequality that have laid the foundation of the climate and ecological emergency must be explained in the media, over and over again. There are centuries of wrongdoing to acknowledge and make up for. This may seem like an enormous obstacle, but there is no way around it. We cannot continue to create global ‘solutions’ for just the richest 10 per cent or the wealthiest nations. It simply will not work. To solve global problems, we need a global perspective. And when it comes to climate justice, democracy knows no borders.
None of this will happen unless the people in power are held accountable. Today, our political leaders are allowed to say one thing and do the exact opposite. They can claim to be climate leaders while they rapidly expand their nations’ fossil fuel infrastructure. They can say that we are in a climate emergency as they open up new coal mines, new oil fields and new pipelines. It has not only become socially accepted for our leaders to lie, it is more or less what we expect them to do. It is hard to imagine that exemption being given to any other group in society. But this privilege has to end.
You can say that none of this, realistically, is going to happen, and you are most likely right. But I assure you, achieving all this is far more realistic than the notion that our civilization will be able to endure the stress it will face in a 3°C or even a 2°C warmer world. This late in the day, doing well is unacceptable. In fact, even doing our best is no longer good enough. We now have to do the seemingly impossible. The changes we need are enormous, and we need more time to bring people along, to adapt and develop. But we do not have any more time, so all our solutions from here on have to be holistic, sustainable and taken in full consciousness of the ticking clock. I believe that the main reason we have reached this point – the reason we are facing this catastrophe – is because the media has allowed the people in power to create a gigantic greenwashing machine designed to maintain business as usual for the benefit of short-term economic policies. They have failed to hold those responsible for the destruction of our biosphere accountable, effectively acting as gatekeepers of the status quo.
But – and here is the great news – that great failure can be undone. There is still a way out of this. Science has delivered the data. Grassroots movements and non-governmental organizations have brought those facts into our societies. But in order to turn all this into political action, we need to drastically scale up the process. Given the size of our mission and the time we have left to act, there is, frankly, no entity other than the media that has the opportunity to create the necessary transformation of our global society. In order for that to happen they must start treating the climate, ecological and sustainability crisis like the existential crisis it is. It has to dominate the news.
Our safety as a species is on a collision course with our current system. The longer you pretend this is not the case, and the longer you pretend that we can solve this catastrophe within a global societal structure which has no laws or restrictions whatsoever protecting us long term from the ongoing self-destructive greed that has brought us to the very edge of the precipice, the more time we will waste. Time that we no longer have.
So, dear media, you are among those in the driver’s seat. You have the ability to steer us out of danger. Whether you choose to turn that ability and responsibility into a mission is your decision – yours, and yours alone. /
Social norms can easily be changed.
5.9
Practical Utopias
Margaret Atwood
Way back in 2001, I began writing a novel called Oryx and Crake. I was with some bird biologists, and they had been discussing extinction – the probable future extinction of several of the bird species we’d just been looking at, including the red-necked crake – but also extinction of species in general. Our own species was included. How long had we got? If we were to go extinct, would our extinction be self-inflicted? How doomed were we?
Biologists had been having such conversations since at least the 1950s. My father was a forest entomologist, and he was very interested in our collective stupidities and also our collective prospects. At the dinner table, when I was a teenager, a sort of cheerful gloom prevailed. Yes, things would get worse. Yes, we would probably pollute ourselves to death, if we didn’t blow ourselves up with atomic bombs. No, people didn’t want to face facts. They never do until the facts are unavoidable. The Titanic was unsinkable, until suddenly it wasn’t. Pass the mashed potatoes.
And that was before the cod population crashed, before the sea level had measurably risen, before Insectageddon, before we had even begun tracking global warming in any serious way. It was when we still had a big chance to stave off the worst impacts of carbon emissions. Now we have only a little chance, because we missed the other chances. Will we miss this one too?
