The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon August 25th, 2009

The recent debate between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth over whether we actually can save the world seems mostly to have degenerated into sound and fury, which is rather a problem, since the larger question of whether climate change is stoppable, whether we can avoid having billions of people die, seems, well rather a good one.

The note that struck me most was Monbiot’s observation that he is “professionally optimistic” – that is, he knows he must continue, “…exhorting people to keep fighting, knowing that to say there is no hope is to make it so. I still have some faith in our ability to make rational decisions based on evidence. But it is waning.”  I too spend some considerable time being professionally optimistic, and I admit, I winced in sympathy at this particular construction, because I think there’s nothing harder.

As always, Monbiot puts his finger on the reality of our collective dilemma – the moment you conceed inevitability you close off a set of options.  This is possible in some ways in peak oil – you can say that some of the choices are no longer available to you, and begin to imagine a way to go on.  Depending, however, on how the climate change projections come out, the reality of climate change is very different – there is a very good chance that we will see mass starvation in a radically different climate.  I spent an awful lot of time with the data when writing _A Nation of Farmers_ and the net conclusions of runaway climate change are all bad. When you consider that we are presently facing an intertwined and deeply inextricable food and energy crisis with less than 7 billion people and the remnents of a stable climate, the problem of a wildly varying future climate becomes much more acute.

I find myself then, in greater sympathy with Monbiot than with Kingsnorth – most of the time.  Kingsnorth observes that he detects in Monbiot deep fear – my feeling is that anyone who isn’t scared of our ecological situation doesn’t adequately understand it, or its potential consequences.  Kingsnorth speaks of Greer, who talks of a gradual, steady decline and accuses Monbiot of apocalypticism.  I don’t think that’s the case at all.  While I think that Greer wisely and useful historicizes the process of collapse, and reveals it as something that takes time, there’s a danger to taking a sweeping historical view, one that I call the “poor are always with us” fallacy (note, I am not claiming that John Michael Greer subscribes to this, but quite a number of people who use his analysis do). 

It is not an accident that Greer’s preferred historians (and I like many of them myself) tend to be old school historians of the “big picture” – rather than modern historians who tend to take a narrower perspective or view things through some particular lens.  Both models have their limitations – whether we are talking about how the Irish supposedly created all of human civilization or how Rome Declined, Fell and Turned into a Tourist Trap.  All of this depends, as almost everything does, on how you look at it.  Seen, for example, through a sufficiently sweeping and progessive lens, the decline and fall of Rome was merely a short term bump – after all, the populations were back up again a mere 1700 years later .

Kingsnorth seems to have taken wholeheartedly to Greer’s vision of a gradual decline, and there’s almost certainly a good bit of truth about this vision.  Monbiot, on the other hand, keeps emphasizing the billions dead – and there’s a good bit of truth in that one too.  The problem is the lens through which they are looking.  Because of course, the Greerian story where a young woman born in 1960 begins the journey of collapse while her great-granddaughter finally leaves the broken cities for the countryside is a compelling, and probably accurate one for a certain subset of the population.  But it isn’t all the story – every story has its early victims.  How would we view Greer’s narrative if the story began (and admittedly, this makes it far less interesting an illustration of his larger point ) with a young woman, born in 1960, who begins to see the energy and ecological crisis from her vantage point, and who happens to be living in south Florida when the nearly-inevitable massive hurricane, causing massive loss of life, snuffs out hers and her son’s, thus ending all future discussion of what her grandchildren will see?

For every person who in a multi-generational novel-style narrative got to see the full decline and fall of any collapse, there was at least one who saw collapse occur completely and totally, who thought, during one of the early barbarian sorties that made it to the suburbs, “Oh, crap, things have really gone to…Gaaaaaaahhhh!”  I don’t mean to make mock of other people’s deaths, even when I have invented them for the purpose of killing them off , but I do think it is important to realize that even if the great sweep of history goes the way Greer describes, sweeping history famously fails to fully articulate the general experience of the people who get to be the early victims.  They are generally categorized as the poor, the unfortunate, etc…. and unless there’s some reason to lionize them, their deaths are recorded, 500 years later, with a complete lack of interest except as factual observation.

 Thus, the fact that a million people a year (approximately) are now dying from climate change already gets subsumed into discussions - millions of people die every year from all sorts of things, as noted above, the poor are always with us.  Thus, when a few (or a few tens of thousands or even a million or so) extra of them die, seen through the proper lens (and again, let me articulate, I do not imply that this is Greer’s point, but rather the way that Kingsnorth uses Greer) , it is easy to subsume that into the sweep of history, easy to say “wait, that isn’t collapse, we have a long time before that happens, because, after all, the guy in Cleveland is still arguing about whether climate change exists.”

As I see it, the distinction between Kingsnorth and Monbiot comes down to this – how do we view history?  How do we view those people, mostly poor, mostly ordinary, many of whom didn’t have a very bright future anyway, because they were poor, who are the early victims?  And how many early victims do we permit before we admit that something substantial is going on?  We can say, for example, that Haiti was always, at least in our modern memory, a terrible and corrupt and impoverished place, so that it does not much matter that climate change seems to be upping the infant mortality rates.  A comparatively small number of deaths in New Orleans get our attention, but it is easy to sweep the ordinary people of Bangladesh, losing more and more lives to annual flooding, into the sweep of historic scope.  How many dead before we can say it is a collapse?  Or does it only count when it comes here?

I’ve been rough on Kingsnorth here, because I think he misses two important points.  The first is that even if Global Climate change can’t cause a single overarching thing called the apocalypse, no such thing has ever existed – but that doesn’t mean that it can’t cause a thousand things that look an awful lot like apocali (ok, that’s probably not a word, but it should be )  to the people migrating painfully across continents to find food, or drowning, dying of new diseases and otherwise falling gradually into hell. 

Second, I think he fails to grasp that anthropogenic global warming really may well be a different kettle of fish than the drawdown of our other ecological resources – one of the things worth observing, for example, is the history of abrupt climate change.  We know, for example, that at least a few times in the Earth’s history massive releases of greenhouse gasses have brought about fairly rapid climate change – the shift to the Younger Dryas may have taken as little as a generation.  The Younger Dryas freeze of course lasted 1,300 years, a long, long period of history, but when it flipped over again to a warm period, ice core evidence suggests it could, at most, have lasted a decade, but there is some evidence to suggest that much of the temperature change happened in a year, or even in a season.  With northern temperatures dropping as much as 28 degrees overall, it is hard to imagine a story like the one Greer tells, of a gradual crisis, with a few centuries to do the work of adaptation.

Even if this isn’t the case, climate change lends itself to abrupt events that many people will experience as immediate, catastrophic, and depending on how far down the curve we are, probably an irreparable plunge from one state to another, rather than a gradual decline.  Those folks who lived in Eastern Coastal Scotland 8,000 years ago, when a massive tsunami caused by the melting of methane clathrates in the undersea Storegga, and those in the affected coastal areas of Europe, for example, found that their situation was radically altered – chunks of their land were gone, and the Shetland Islands were pretty much wiped clean of human habitation.  In a society capable of sending the kind of relief that was sent to Asia after the massive tsunami there, such disasters are smaller things, tragic as they are.  Without the helicopters and massive ocean carriers, they are very different events.

But for all that my sympathies are largely with Monbiot on the subject of climate change’s impact, and for all that my fears are personally the same, I do think that Kingsnorth is right about his larger point – there is no hope for Monbiot’s claim that;

“Strange as it seems, a de-fanged, steady-state version of the current settlement might offer the best prospect humankind has ever had of avoiding collapse. For the first time in our history we are well-informed about the extent and causes of our ecological crises, know what should be done to avert them, and have the global means – if only the political will were present – of preventing them. Faced with your alternative – sit back and watch billions die – Liberal Democracy 2.0 looks like a pretty good option.”

This indeed might be a good option, although with its limits, if it were viable.  But it isn’t.  This is not a railing against the injustices of modernity, or an assertion that agrarianism has merits, or anything else – I do some of those things too, but ultimately, my observation is simply this – there is no hope of a de-fanged, steady-state version of our current settlement, and I have to imagine George Monbiot knows this.  We are now banging hard against economic, political and ecological restraints on our ability to create anything like what we have had – we already see the decline of renewable energy investment (barring short term government investments that simply won’t be able to continue on the tax base the UK and the US have to work with) – because the capital isn’t there.  Each resource constraint plays out economically, ecologically, and politically – what we can do is getting smaller every day.

I enormously respect Monbiot’s effort in _Heat_ to come up with a way to continue our basic way of life.  But running the numbers, I don’t think he did – even with 450 ppm as our target, he left out agriculture and other figures, and I don’t think that’s an accident.  The numbers were extremely marginal than – and that was before we knew what we know now.  Even Monbiot has admitted, on this blog, that the very process of a renewable build-out may push us past our tipping point. 

It was particularly difficult last year, when I finally began forcing myself to say and write the words that the science has been leading me to – that there is an excellent chance that it is already too late to remediate our climate crisis, at least in some measure.  I generally prefer to keep my personal reactions mostly private, and the last thing I ever want is to break down in front of an audience who came to hear me do the professional optimism thing, but the first couple of times I stood up in front of a room full of people and talked about our climate change situation as I see it – about the increasing evidence that climate sensitivity is greater than we expected – I cried.  I forced myself to admit to my audience that there is a real chance that we cannot prevent our crossing the critical tipping points.  With practice, I can do this without choking up now, but I still have to force myself to say the words “it may already be too late.”

Why am I saying this here?  And why on earth do I do this to my audience and myself, when hope is so terribly important?  I agree with George Monbiot entirely that we have to live our lives as though it is possible to remediate climate change.  By the time that we know for sure where we stand, it probably will be too late – the only choice is to act as though we can do this, because the price, not just to the people so many are implicitly prepared to write off, but to all of us, is potentially so great. 

But I don’t think the only path to action comes from selling the idea that we can have something like our present, or by not telling people it might be too late.   The problem is that too many people already grasp how close to the cusp we are.  This is dangerous politically – the same people who wanted us to believe for a long time that climate change was really no problem would rather immediately leap to the idea that it is now irremediable, since either way, the economy goes on much as it has been.  But it is even more dangerous to sell ideas that almost certainly are not true – it is true that the idea that we are very close to a climate tipping point is a dangerous thought.  But we have to trust our audiences to grasp the subtle distinction of “may be” because if we are wrong, they will see us as having lied to them, and that has far worse outcomes than telling the truth.

I think it is possible to say “we do not know where we stand, it may well be too late, but we have no choice but to try.”  If nothing else, this language has a history we can invoke – this is precisely the state Britain stood in when the Nazis seemed certain to overrun the country.  And yet, the idea compelled people to act – because the alternatives were worse.  It was not necessary to offer optimism, merely necessity, a sense of urgency and shared crisis. 

In the end, I think Kingsnorth and Monbiot’s final pissing contest distracts from the much more interesting question that they raise – are there any choices between “Death of Billions” and “Let’s just keep on keeping on, even though it almost certainly won’t work?”  I suspect there are, and that will be the subject of my next piece. 

Sharon

• climate , future , monbiot
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Sharon May 14th, 2009

At the end of last year, I predicted that by the end of this year, the US would have experienced an economic collapse into a deep Depression.  Despite the rhetoric about bottoms and “green shoots” my own take is that we’re on target for that outcome – the realities of losing millions of jobs through the auto company bankruptcies (now inevitable, at least in the case of Chrysler and GM), the hundreds of thousands of teachers and state employees on the chopping block, and the expected losses, which even the IMF’s conservative estimates mark as stunning, combined with the deep economic crisis of the states and declining tax revenues and massively increasing deficits means that it is very unlikely that we’ve seen anything like a bottom.

Indeed, my 2009 predictions suggested that the rally brought about by a new president and completely irrational exuberance would probably last until mid-summer – if anything, I may have been too optimistic (not something I get accused of a lot ).  I still may well be wrong about this – others will tell us that we’ll see a recovery.  But I find it very hard to believe we are not facing a major crisis, if not when I expected, not far after.  The recent evidence linking the economic crisis to the oil price spike points out that when/if growth gets going again, we’re likely to see the same boom and bust cycle, only shorter.

Add to that the fact that I don’t see consumer confidence recovering soon – the reason being that price volatility and economic instability are not going away – whether oil crashes further (perfectly possible) or we see a short term recovery, price spike and collapse again, food prices are likely to remain volatile in a tight market, and people will never know for sure whether their heating bills, gas costs and grocery budgets will be small or large.  That kind of economic instability undermines the desire to purchase – even if things seem to be getting better, as they seemed in April, consumers aren’t buying because they are afraid (correctly) of the next wave of instability.

The news that Medicare will be bankrupt in 8 years (and that figure is based on a sustained recovery – we can expect to see it shortened next year, I suspect) means that older consumers, who disproportionately hold the nation’s wealth, have even fewer reasons to spend – they now know they may be struggling on their fixed incomes with heating, gas and food costs, but also with more health care costs not covered by Medicare.  Most baby boomers did not prepare for a future in which more or all of their health care costs have to be paid by them or through private insurance – they are already concerned about drug costs, for example, but Medicare’s economic instability means that they must expect to bear more of the health care costs themselves.

But this post is primarily not about what might bring about a major crisis (and right now I think we are in a minor crisis, although, of course, many people experience it as dire), but about the impulse to put it off just a little longer.

I do not speak here of an abstract impulse that I recognize in other people, but of my own desire to see events, if they are inevitable, delayed as long as possible.  You might think I was immune to this, or that I even gloried in the idea of “ripping the bandaid off.”  I’m not – I think like everyone else, I’m very fond of my comfortable life, and have no desire to face the unknown – and it is unknown, even given the amount of time I spend speculating about it.  And what is not unknown, I do not anticipate mostly enjoying – while I have never lived through a Depression or economic collapse, none of my reading on the subject has left me with the impression that I will be delighted by the experience, even if eventually, in some measure we end up better off for our endurance.  That which does not kill us may make it stronger, but evidence suggests that some of us do get killed, and I’m fairly content as a weakling, thank you very much.

All of which is just a long way of saying that when I see signs on the horizon that our constant running faster just to keep in place is starting to lose momentum, my immediate impulse is bargaining “just one more year!”  I doubt that I’m the only one.

I find I want more time mostly for my children’s sake, although this implies a great deal of unselfishness, and right behind them are plenty of selfish motivations.  I find I want my kids to grow older before they are faced with hardship – I don’t know if that is selfish or unselfish – I hope that perhaps while they are little, they will remain insulated from the worst in ways older children can’t.  And yet, I want them to have as much of the good of modernity as they can before it goes away.  Even if the easy life isn’t always good for them, I want it for them as a gift, and to fill them with good memories of good times. 

I want my oldest son to get the enormous investments that our schools make in disabled children as long as he can – while if we have to, we will do what we need to for him, I have no doubt that we will fail miserably to replace his speech therapists and special education teachers.  We will do what we can – but every year he can have those resources is one that gets him further.

I want these things selfishly for myself – I want the trips to visit family and the internet to roam (I don’t necessarily think all these things will disappear, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to afford them).  I wan the pleasure of being a writer a little longer – it is still a new profession for me, and I do enjoy it.  I want enough money to continue accumulating books and plants.  Yes, I know I’ll be able to make do with what I’ve got.  And that I don’t especially want to.

I want more security, more time of comparative affluence to put up the hoop houses and build a greenhouse, to get the herb business up and running and master more skills. And I want time for everyone else who needs those things – I want more time simply because I don’t want people I care about to be hurt.  I think about all the people moving slowly, gradually, in their comfort zones, the ones who only just now see trouble on the horizon, and I want them to have time.

I want more time for all of us, sometimes badly enough to consider seriously – should I personally use my tiny influence on strategies that mostly just buy time, even at a price, so as to make this easier.  Should I fix on strategies that allow us to adapt more smoothly, to move more by baby steps?  I realize that I will not make policy, that for most people the choice is out of our hands, and yet, I still wonder what I should do, if it mattered?

I know that I will never have time enough.  And the part of me that approaches this subject rationally (not that much, actually)  recognizes that there is a compelling case for *not* wanting more time. Not because I want my predictions to be right, not because I want suffering, but because if we were to put the crisis off another ten years, we risk facing it further ecologically degraded, further down the energy curve, in a warmer, more dangerous, hungrier world, with fewer choices and resources for mitigation.

In the 1970s, when I was running around in pigtails, oblivious to the discussion, there was a great national discourse about the state of our ecology and resources.  Nearly everything we know now, we knew then – that is, we knew in the 1970s that the oil would eventually run out, and indeed, many of the scenarios offered then have turned out to be surprisingly accurate.  We knew by the late 1970s that Global Warming would be one of the great challenges of the 21st century.  We knew that we were rapidly degrading our ecology.  We knew it, and many courageous people tried very hard to push us to living our lives then as though these crises were immanent.

That we did not listen, that we chose to believe it was morning in America will turn out to be one of the great human tragedies of all time.  In the 1970s, there was still time to shift our resources to renewables, time to build a sustainable economy, time to mitigate the worst of our climate shift.  When I was a child and had no power to change things, when my parents stood in the place I am in now, holding the future for the next generation,  the adults around me faced a real choice – and chose to put the issue off.  I understand why they did so – it is hard to look to the future.  I understand that many of them tried so very hard, and still grieve their failures.  I understand.  But I don’t want to be them.

I don’t know if it is possible to put off our crisis – I suspect in some ways it may be, in others, maybe not.  But I cannot doubt that the choice to delay facing the crisis was a mistake, and a terrible, terrible mistake.  So as badly as in some ways I want more time, I do not think it it right to allow that desire not to have to face the hard stuff to take root. In the end, the buck has to stop somewhere, someone has to take responsibility, not just for the problem, but for facing the crisis, and enduring it.  I think we all will always wish someone else had done it for us.  But that doesn’t give us the right to ask that of anyone else.

To the extent I can separate out what I wish for and what I believe will happen, I think in some measure, we are facing a crisis, and very soon.  Whether it will be the beginning of something deeper, or just the first step down on a long flight isn’t clear to me.  What is clear to me is that in the absence of a collective national movement to mitigation, that my wish that we have more time may be perfectly reasonable, but it isn’t an impulse I should give in to much.  If we get it, we get it, and I won’t complain.  But I am better off thinking “how will I go forward in a positive way from this moment” than in wishing.

 Sharon

• Uncategorized , future
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Sharon April 12th, 2009

One of the best things about life is the strange bedfellows you find in it.  It makes for one heck of a slumber party.

I was thinking about this recently, because I happened to follow out the links that people have been putting in to my posts one afternoon when I had time to kill, just out of curiosity.  I do this periodically, but I’d never done so systematically, or sat down to really sort through them.  And the juxtaposition, say of the black women survivalists with the urban Catholic distributist nuns,  the anarchist social critics and the right wing ones, the Belizian Mennonites, the Mormon food storage people,  the Pagan Fiber artists,  the Baptist farmers, the socialist Baptist farmers,  and the guy who occasionally sticks my pieces in with his essays on South African poetry made for a truly engaging collage.  And it got me asking – what do all of us have in common? 

We certainly don’t share a primary political bond, or religious faith – or at least most of us don’t.   After my post recently on the role of religious communities in the future, I got emails from members of 27 distinct religious groups, not to mention plenty of athiests and agnostics.  My readers cross the political spectrum.

National bonds, cultural ones, racial and ethnic ones – all of these are too variable to provide primary common ground.  Even common belief about climate change, peak oil or the financial situation isn’t sufficient – I have quite a few readers who are climate change dissenters, but who share my perspective on other grounds, and plenty who think peak oil is a hoax, but have agrarian priorities.  And while I disagree with them, I’m truly glad they are part of my readership, since being agreed with all the time is bad for my intellect, not to mention dull.

In the end, there is a common ground, however, and it is simply this – most of my readers come to this blog with a pervasive sense that what industrial society seems to promise them either has not arrived, or is not coming.  They see no future for themselves in the path we’ve been on.

And they are not wrong.  The whole premise of modernity as we practice it now is that future generations won’t mind the fact that we are using resources they will require, polluting and destroying the future capacity of the earth.  The whole and most fundamental premise of modernity is this – that because progress always goes forward, there is no need to consider the future.  And thus we create a culture that reverses the ordinary human desire to pass down to one’s posterity more than one already had – now we arrange life so that the future serves the present – children as yet unconceived will pay our debts and clean our messes.  The future is always and inevitably enslaved to the present, and since we do not wish to acknowledge this, we do not enjoy looking at the moral consequences of this, there is no reason to think much about the future at all.  Thus, modernity at one blow disposes of any future that doesn’t look like a science fiction movie.

I think it is important to realize that we cannot separate out the failures of industrial society in the present from the failures in the future.  That is, peak oil and climate change (and the food crisis, overpopulation and the financial crisis and any other problems you want to pile on to the list up to and including waxy yellow buildup) are fundamentally, symptoms of a larger societal problem – industrial modernization.  I don’t think that the root cause is energy depletion or the side effects (ie climate change and pollution) of energy use – that too is a symptom of a larger mindset that says that all we have to do is pour more and more resources into technologies and “development” and we can create paradise.

I don’t, thus, want to speak, as some people do, of energy as the master resource in this.  Energy is extremely valuable – but the roots of our fossil fuel dependence go deep into our colonial past, and our dependence on the energy of human labor in slavery and colonialism. 

And ultimately, it is this that my readership has in common – anti-modernism, a fundamental skepticism that economic growth, more energy, more technology, more shiny things, minor economic social change and other incremental variations on the same basic themes can resolve the deeper problems.  Fundamentally, most people have either made a leap to the belief that some new model is required, or they are on the cusp of such a leap, struggling to balance the fact that our society views the price of modernity, even the costs to (and of) the future as a reasonable one, a mere side effect of a progress that is simultaneously inevitable and necessary to keep us all from an endless misery and suffering. 

It would be easy to reject the idea of anti-modernity – after all, one could make the case that many positive and noble ideas and advances from longer lifespans and the germ theory of disease to voting rights for women are a product of modernity – reject modernity, the reasoning goes, and we’re back to wallowing in our own filth.  Nor is it particularly politically realistic to imagine a wholly agrarian society, in a world of nearly 7 billion people.  And this is a reasonable point, to a point.  This is one of the reasons I don’t call this agrarianism.

And this would be a fair critique were anti-modernity purely retrospective, the nostalgic longing for a golden past – in that case it would be easy and right to correct it with the reminder that the past was not golden.  That’s the cartoon version of anti-modernism, in which it is simply a longing to go backwards.  But backwards is a direction not available to us, even if we wanted it.  Anti-modernism begins from modernism, from an industrialized society with the germ theory of disease and depleted farm land, civil rights laws and toilet paper.  The idea is to go forward towards a future, not to find another futureless image, in which nostalgia is all.  There are legitimate debates about what of the good of modernism can be carried with us into the future without compromising our future, but as I point out in _Depletion and Abundance_ there are much less modernized cultures that have lifespans as long as ours, literacy rates that are similar and political power for women. 

The progressive industrial worldview, combined with the habit of a false dualism (ie, that there is nothing between apocalyptic misery and the technological perfection of the future, what I often call the “Klingons vs. Cylons” fallacy), and between “techno future” and “regression” is very hard to shake off.  Thus it is quite remarkable that as many people have done so as have.  In fact, there are encouraging signs, I think, that the society as a whole is beginning to do so – consider the recent poll data that suggested that just about half of all Americans think socialism either might be better than capitalism or don’t know if it might be.  While I suspect most Americans don’t really know what socialism (or capitalism) are, this is all the more astounding because Americans are taught to believe in capitalism, not as a fully comprehended thought, but as the “home team” that you root for win or lose.  The idea that most Americans are ready to abandon their home team is pretty astonishing.  The poll represents not a reconsideration of socialism, I suspect, but a longing for another choice outside the one that has failed them.  As usual, the only choice presented are a false dualism – other economic possibilities aren’t even mentioned.   But this is no accident – industrial modernity, capitalist or socialist (and both are fundamentally industrial and modernist) is a totalizing worldview, which doesn’t merely affirm one choice, but strives to eliminate alternatives.

And this, perhaps, is what makes me affirm my identity as an anti-modernist, and to think that this might be the right way to think about the common ground that I have with people who I would not ordinarily know or meet, and in many cases, with whom I would ordinarily be discouraged from working.  That is, it is all very well for me to wax rhapsodic about the “diversity” of my readership, but our society, which uses enlightenment political categories as weapons, is very clear in its message that I shouldn’t actually try and work with people (and get them to work with each other) who commit the deep sin of standing on the other side of those political and national barriers from one another.

And there are real reasons to wonder whether people who, say, believe that population is the root problem of modernity and should be constrained at all costs and people who believe that reproduction is a blessing and a gift to be welcomed can work with one another on creating a sustainable future.  There are real reasons to wonder why those who believe that abortion should be illegal and those who believe it should be a private matter for women and their doctors can ally even tenuously on other matters, and how strong those alliances might be.  There are reasons to wonder whether climate change activists and dissenters can work well together on agrarian issues, or how the Global South and North views of ecology might come together.  It is not my claim that anti-modernist ties are sufficient to obviate all other political categories.  But I would claim that they are sufficient to build something upon.

Of course, this has been done before – the agrarian movement is an entertaining mix of aging Hippies and conservative Christians already, the anti-globalization movement has Pat Buchanan and George Monbiot, and any world climate conference will present fascinating alliances between nations that before had little in common.  I’m hardly suggesting anything new. 

But ultimately, what I would suggest is that, without overly eliding essential differences, it is possible to imagine that anti-modernism, that is,  a commitment to and belief in the future both in the abstract and the real bodies of our real posterity, is sufficient to carry the weight of a movement.  If that is not sufficient to bear political fruit, what else is, after all?

I would expect the many and varied debates that are already going on between disparate views of what society should look like to be both engaging and contentious.  I think that if such an anti-modernist identity could collectively arise, and a political rubric be created for at least some alliance, we would have to decide what future vision we all collectively stand in favor of, rather than simply opposing the totalizing vision of modernity.  I suspect hybrids and factions will arise in fascinating and troubling ways.  I don’t know that I will always like what such alliances achieve.

And yet, I think it is necessary.  Agrarianism alone, peak oil awareness alone, eco-village culture alone,  traditionalism alone, anarcho-agrarianism alone,  crunchy conservativism alone, anti-globalization alone, climate activism alone,  survivalism alone, distributism alone, radical homemaking alone, or any of the complex personal identities we create for ourselves alone are insufficient to stand against to the totalizing message of modernity, the one that erases even the possibility of our existence.  All of these identities alone ultimately leave us…alone, too few to make an impact, without sufficient density of culture to draw others together under our rubric.  If we are not to be small outposts alone, dissenting from modernity as it devours our future, our only hope is a unified case to preserve it.

 Sharon 

• anti-modernism , future
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Sharon March 2nd, 2009

Today Is Dr. Seuss’s Birthday. Today is the day that anti-coal activists try to shut down the capitol coal plant.  Utility shut offs for those who can’t pay their bills have hit a new high.  Last week New Scientist magazine published its prediction that we would hit four degrees of climate change, and its apocalyptic vision of what that might mean. Friday we learned that economy had contracted nearly twice as much as predicted.  This Friday we can expect to find out that we’ve lost between 3/4 of a million and million jobs.  Somehow, all these things came together in my mind…

I once read an incredibly entertaining literary critical analysis of _The Cat in the Hat_ which began from the premise that all the action in TCITH is an attempt to fill up the overwhelming absence of the mother from the scene.  She has “gone out for the day” leaving her children untended, something she clearly is in the habit of doing, since there’s a sequel with the same issue embedded.  The glimpses we get of “mothers new gown” and her empty bedstead stand in implicit reference to what it might be that mother is out doing, while the The Cat tries desperately to distract the children from thinking about it.

Now whether or not you think this is an excessively close reading, you must admit, it adds a bit of engaging frisson to one’s 87th repetition of the book.  The fun thing about Dr. Seuss is that there’s so much there to play with, even for the grownups.  The books can generally be sung, recited from memory (and how many parents do know a full repetoir of the books perfectly?), sped up to get the kids to bed faster, have the words changed for pornographic or political discussions between exhausted parents desperate for a joke later… or for internet circulation.  My husband and I used to have Fox in Socks speed competitions to the delight and and amusement of my children, who got to declare the winner.  One normally praises Seuss for what he brings to children, but his work is a gift (and occasionally a curse) to adults as well.

I was thinking of Seuss this morning, because my children are anxious to celebrate his birthday (his 105th), but also because it strikes me that the world-turned-upside-down qualities of our present situation are in some ways Seussian.  And how surprising is that, when so many of us were formed by his writing?  I suspect, thinking about Seuss’s endings and stories, that maybe we owe him more than we think – some of our ability to process reality, rather than fantasy, may come precisely from the fantasy creator.

Seuss books almost inevitably follow the pattern of a small, precipitating event (the offer of a snack, rainy day boredom, a horse and wagon on Mulberry Street), and preceed through a frenzy of wild variations on the theme, bringing things to a crisis point.  The horse and wagon becomes a parade, the cat trashes the house, things deteriorate (or progess) into wild chaos.  In some cases, things as basic as language themselves begin to decompensate -  a few words “fox, socks, box, Knox” becomes “When a fox is in the bottle where the tweedle beetles battle with their paddles in a puddle on a poodle eating noodle, THIS is what they call…at tweetle beetle noodle poodle bottled paddled muddled duddled fuddled wuddled fox in socks, sir.”  And in _The Cat in the Hat Comes Back_ we actually see linguistically multiplying alphabet cats, and something beyond Z that annhilates language and imagination altogether.

Perhaps it is just me, but it does seem to me that (mostly without the funny bits) we’re moving towards a Seussian style crescendo of many different parts.  Whether we like it or not, the events we’re seeing are linked to one another.  The tanking of our economy was helped by oil’s meteoric rise – the destruction of our climate is presently being partly aided by the fact that we’re all distracted by the economy, our oil decline may well be set in stone by the economy because we are not investing in energy infrastructure that would keep our decline rates stable.  All the pieces are interconnected, and as each situation becomes more acute, responses become more scattered in many ways.

Dr. Suess books almost inevitably end in a full stop, another small thing that reshapes the crisis.  Sam I Am takes a bite.  The resentful turtle at the bottom burps.  Horton’s egg hatches.  And in the midst of all that wild language and its even wilder illustrations, things become quiet again – not necessarily because all the internal conflicts are resolved, but because the books reached the point at which there was nowhere else to go in the direction they were facing, and thus, another small precipitating event changes things.  As we see from _The Cat and the Hat Comes Back_ further chaos is likely – but the direction has changed.

I have no crystal ball, but I wonder how much radical shift in direction we’re likely to see in the coming year.  My own sense is that we may well see such a shift – and quite soon – away from our frenzied attempts to prevent the worst, and toward attempts to mitigate what we must now acknowledge as inevitable - the extended Depression, the rising temperatures, the lifelong project of adapting to Depletion.  I do not know for sure by any means, but it strikes me that we are nearing a point at which we will no longer be able to go on as we have been, and the projects we engage in will have to change fundamentally.  We may have to admit that the hope of growing the economy again or rescuing the banks is futile – and turn our efforts, hopefully, towards mitigating suffering.  We may have to conceed that the planet will pass the 2 degree tipping point (and I say this with great pain), and that the best we can hope for is to not add more damage.  We may have to conceed that our children will be dealing with a national infrastructure designed for cheap energy – and without much of the energy, and turn ourselves to the national and world project of adaptation.

My own favorite Seuss book is _I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew_ – in it, a young creature with a constant stream of unbearable troubles finds himself seduced by the promise of a trip to Solla Sollew, “…where they never have troubles, at least very few.”

After an agonizing comic journey, he arrives to discover that Solla Sollew only has one trouble – but it is a trouble that means that no one can get it.  Offered a chance to embark on another journey to “Boola Boo Ball, on the banks of the beautiful river Woo Wall, where they never have troubles! No toubles at all!”  He considers it, and then chooses otherwise.

“I’d have no more troubles…that’s what the man said.  So I started to go. But I didn’t. Instead…I did some quick thinking inside of my head.  Then I started back home to the Valley of Vung.  I know I’ll have troubles.  I’ll maybe, get stung.  I’ll always have troubles.  I’ll maybe get bit, by that green-headed quail on the place that I sit.  But I’ve bought a big bat.  I’m all ready you see.  Now my troubles are going to have trouble with me!”

The acknowledgement that our troubles are not going away, no matter how deeply we care, how much we wish to prevent them, no matter how we try to stop them, seems like a starting point for what we really can hope for – a shift in which we give events we are not fully in control of as much “trouble with us” as possible.  That is, we face what is necessary, stop what harm we can, and set ourselves hard to the project of making sure that we get back some of our own by doing the work of mitigation.  The message is for children, but it is a fundamentally adult one.

In Suessian stories, there are happy endings, of course. These are children’s stories, after all.  Horton, who hatches the elephant bird, the Grinch whose heart grows three sizes just in time.  Because, as Seuss says of Horton’s elephant-bird, “And it should be, it should be, it SHOULD be like that!”

But in the happy endings are also “happy enough endings” that teach children that solutions aren’t always found at the end of the story.  The Onceler can pass on a seed of the last Truffala tree, but he can’t bring back the Lorax.  The Cat in the Hat may have cleaned up his mess, but the children are still faced with the question of whether to lie to their parents about him.  And the boy goes back to the Valley of Vung, this time better prepared, but still expecting to get stung.  Written into the text of Horton and his egg is the fact that the reason things happened the way they did, is because it is a story.  That is, the transformation that made all the problems go away is narrative, something that can happen in stories because “it SHOULD be like that.”  But, in the very transformation he draws, Giesel reminds us that it isn’t – those heavy, repeated “shoulds” force us to think of the ways in which it usually isn’t.

This is a hard lesson for children, but one that it is good to embed early – to clarify the distinction between fiction and reality.  It is one that is clearly hard for many adults to grasp – thus, the fact that we desperately *want* the economy to be restored makes us see signs of restoration where none are.  The fact that we want to address climate change without personal hardship makes us convinced that this is possible, that we want there to be fossil fuels without constraining our consumption means we choose to believe it.  But navigating the fact that happy endings of the “Happy 100 percent” sort are mostly fictive is perhaps the life project for both children and adults. 

And that may be his best gift to the world’s children and grownups – that even as he trained us to see that the stories can end in joy, he also reminds us that sometimes, the best we can hope for is a future in which we give our troubles all the trouble we can.  Let us do so in his memory.

- In Memorium Theodore Seuss Giesel-

 Sharon

• future
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Sharon February 4th, 2009

Oh you’ve been on a fast train

And its going off the rails.

And you can’t come back, can’t come back again.

And you start breaking down, in the pouring rain

Oh, you’ve been on a fast train. 

….Got to go on the land.

Stuck in no-man’s land.

Ain’t nobody on your way back.

Ain’t nobody going to lend you a helping hand.

And you start breaking down

And you falling to the sound

You are hearing a fast train. - Van Morrison, sung by the incomparable Solomon Burke 

Despite the fact that there are plenty of people out there who view me as wildly apocalyptic, I don’t actually consider myself a doomer. My own feeling is that while radical restructuring awaits us, our future probably won’t look much like _The Road_.  I have argued that what we face due to peak energy, climate change and our financial crisis can best be described as “ordinary human poverty” - and we can do much to mediate our experience, that we can experience either an ordinary, survivable poverty or one that becomes pathological, based on our own choices.

On the other hand, compared to the mainstream culture,  which tells us endlessly that things will stay the same or get better always, I am, of course, your friendly neighborhood Apocalyptic Dominatrix of Doom.  That’s me,  cracking the whip over my readers to get their gardens going, food storage in order, learn to darn socks and fix their own roofs, etc…  Carolyn Baker was kind enough to mention me as a notable Dystopian chick in her well deserved rebuke to the New Yorker.  So even though I often spend time observing “well, I don’t really think that we’re literally going to see TEOTWAWKI” I suppose I qualify as one of Cassandra’s descendents.

A while back, I wrote my doomiest post to date, when I sat down to compose a section of _A Nation of Farmers_ that described the changes in food and energy issues as of last April.  I was so shocked at what the aggregate shift in our reality looked like put down on paper that I posted it as “We regret to inform you…”and I argued that we are, in fact, in the midst of a fast crash of our society.  I wrote then,

“When climate change and peak oil thinkers run out of other things to worry about, there’s always the endless, inevitable debates about whether we are facing a “fast crash” or a “slow grind.”  And I admit, I’m worried about my fellow environmentalists – because I think they are about to lose their favorite distraction.  When no one was looking, we got an answer.  Fast crash wins.  And we’re in it now.

Wait a minute, you argue – that’s not right.  If we were in a fast crash we’d be well on our way to living in a Kunstler novel.  But we’ve still got cars, we’ve got food, things are slowing down, but at worst this looks like a slow grind – but the crazy lady at the blog is saying fast crash?!?!?

Before you argue with me (and you are both welcome and encouraged to), I’d like to post something a bit out of my usual style – it is simply a description of what has happened with food and energy in the last year – that’s all it is.  Then tell me what you think – because it wasn’t until I began to write this introduction to the present food situation that I suddenly was struck by the fact that even a fast crash doesn’t always look fast when you live it – new normals arise and it turns out we assimilate faster than we panic.

So here we are – the “We regret to inform you that what you have imagined to be “civilization” is now falling apart” post.  See if it strikes you the way it struck me.”  

Although the major issues have changed somewhat - the collapse in energy prices has meant that now people can’t pay for heat because they don’t have a job, rather than because of the high price of energy, and the economic crisis has mostly numbed us to the growth of hunger in the poor world - I don’t see anything to suggest that we are not still in a rapidly accellerating crisis.  The only thing is that even at my most apocalyptic, I would never have guessed how fast – and I think that that’s probably true of most “doomers.” 

But I’m starting to feel like I ought to give back the quirt, the cat o’nine tails and that funky leather corset personally bestowed upon me by Richard Heinberg and Pat Murphy when I was inducted into the Ancient Order of Apocalyptic Prophets (you should have seen what they were wearing – I’m sworn to secrecy, but it was very fetching!)  You see, I’m starting to feel I can’t compete with reality – any actual attention to events as they unfold points up the fact that my own doomiest imaginings are being wildly exceeded.

Let’s see – California is broke, functionally insolvent, and has stopped paying for just about everything, including its state police.  Remember how often they trumpted that they were the 6th largest economy in the world – well, that’s kinda like saying the UK is insolvent…oh, and that actually might be not so far from the truth too, since they just had to nationalize their banking system.  We’ve lost at least 300,000 jobs in two weeks.  The New York Times may be out of business by spring.  While neither rain nor sleet nor hail will keep the postal service from its appointed rounds, money probably will, and they are talking about cutting out Saturday deliveries.  Homelessness and hunger are rapidly on the rise, as are suicide and murder suicide.

There’s rioting in Russia, China, Greece, and massive worker demonstrations in France and Britain.  Australia is seeing record high temperatures, while many of the rest of us struggle with record lows.  California’s drought may be the worst in a century.  And the already hungry are among the deepest sufferers of the food crisis.  The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, Bloomberg – they are all starting to use words like “Biblical proportions” “Deep Depression” “Apocalypse.”  It is getting hard to compete with the mainstream doomers.

We’ve been “fixing” the problem – which is a big part of the problem – think of the word “fix” here as in “the fix is in.”  We’ve just spent 8 trillion dollars bailing out the banks – more than all the wars in US history, the Louisiana purchase and the space program combined.  And what did we get for it?  Bank of America and Citi are still teetering, the jobs are still being flushed daily.  The estimate is half a million a month – every month.

And people aren’t really very angry yet.  They should be – think about what 8 trilliion dollars could actually have bought us, had anyone cared as much about the people as they do about the banks, and about the wealth of the fortunate.  At some point people will realize that it isn’t going to work – and their anger will be frightening – and just.  The New Hampshire state legislature is currently debating legislation that would assert that if the US implements martial law or abrogates the Constitution, it will effectively dissolve the Union.  While one wonders where they were the last eight years, this is being taken quite seriously, and it would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Eight trillion could have paid for free health care for every American, cradle to grave for a century.  Eight trillion was sufficient to cover the cost of almost all the mortgage debt - every American could have been given their house and the “foreclosure crisis” ended instantly.  Eight trillion was enough to build renewable energy infrastructure that could have softened the crisis, to reinsulate our houses, to provide basic food and health care to the world’s poor.  The same eight trillion we were told we didn’t have when it was needed by those who wanted educations, basic medical care, decent shelter, a home, hope, a decent life, we had a plenty for the banks and the wealthiest people in the world.

A number of energy and environmental advocates don’t seem to grasp that the 8 trillion figure – and the monies spent by other nations – aren’t proof that we can build a renewable infrastructure or address peak oil if we really want to – instead, they are what we are doing *instead.*  Yes, nations can print money, but in order to inflate our currency, we’d have to disentangle ourselves quite violently from the other nations with which we are economically intertwined, and that would have its price too.  That is, our ability to keep bailing is limited – and the 8 trillion now buried in bank vaults and flushed down the toilet is money we don’t have for future adaptations.  Think about it – we’re debating 3/4 of a trillion dollars for all the American people combined (and some of that will also make its ways into the coffers of the bank) – while we’ve already spent almost 9 times that much on the banks.  300 million Americans get 1/8 or less what the banks get.  What does that say about us?  And what does it say about the ability and willingness to mobilize funds for things that actually protect human lives?

So what’s a doomer chick to do but throw in the towel and her spiked mitts and admit she’s beat?  I can’t out-doom the Wall Street Journal – Wall Street invented our doom, and who better to describe it.  The old button ”I eat stranger things than this with my breakfast cereal” is increasingly true – me and my gardens and my ordinary human poverty are just plain dull. 

Don’t worry, I’m not going to stop writing.  But like Dmitry Orlov (who did threaten to stop writing, which would have been a tragedy), I’m getting out of the apocalyptic prophetess of doom job.  Like Orlov, I’m now an observer – hardly impartial, but there’s no point predicting the future when we’re living it, and when the song of the apocalypse becomes the universal chorus.

 Sharon

• economy , future
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