That smell is your hair burning

Working in professional sustainability is increasingly like asking Marie Antoinette what way she’d like her hair parted on the way to the guillotine.

I sit on Zoom calls all day scoffing gingernuts, getting told by a parade of marketers that for people to do what’s required to save humanity we have to “stress the positive” and “make it easy”.

I’m sure all heroes’ tales start this way: “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, to save the entire world, will involve minor changes to your shopping preferences…”

What’s missing in that framing, along with the consumerist hijacking of all possible approaches to behaviour change, is that THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. It’s not the same as trying to get people to go to the gym.

Contrary to what the majority of mainstream environmental organisations seem to think, and are structured to do, it shouldn’t be like selling something to get money. And it shouldn’t be about keeping everyone in their pleasantly air-conditioned offices, or working from home, complete with pot plants, luxury retreats and largely pointless work trips.

No.

Our home is burning. It’s quite likely to turn our kids into bubbling lumps of human lasagne in the very near future. I know it’s hard to imagine this in direct, concrete terms. Most of us have only ever even seen the odd dead body (I’ve seen two).

For us, for you, now, it probably doesn’t feel like an emergency. If you’re like me - white, middle class, affluent - then it kind of feels a bit like heaven. This is especially true if you happen to live in ‘Godzone country’ tucked away in Aotearoa New Zealand. We’re rightly encouraged to lean into that, to be grateful and enjoy our lives. Have another gingernut.

And the more stressful the news gets the more we tuck into our treats. Have another beer/holiday/car. You’ve earned it. That’s what we’ve ‘learned’ from being bombarded with thousands of hours of carefully crafted, billion dollar behaviour-changing propaganda. The stuff we in the ‘free’ world call paid advertising.

Meanwhile, cars are surfing down the main street of your holiday destination in a maelstrom of shitty looking stormwater. Have you noticed?

In such circumstances, you’ll rightly be defined as mentally ill if you sit there going: “Well, I would do something about this, but I just don’t know enough or feel good enough about my options yet, and it looks a bit difficult to climb out of the window. And I was just about to make another sandwich…”

And that’s because we are, as industrialised people, mentally ill. That’s what that barrage does to us.

As Josh Schrei has pointed out: “For 98% of human history, 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate. Imbued with lifeforce. Inhabited by and permeated with forces, with which we exist in ongoing relation. This animate vision was the water in which we swam, it was consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world and our place in it. It wasn’t a theory, a philosophy, or an idea. It wasn’t, actually, an -ism. It was felt experience. It was, simply, how things were. Which is why it has been commonly understood across the entire world for all of time.”

Check that against what you're experiencing.

Personally, I’m very close to the point where, as something like a barely trained first responder, I’m just going to say “fuck it, let ‘em burn”. I might just concentrate on people still alive enough not to need to be marketed the idea of saving their own lives and those of their families.

Let’s call it triage.

I don’t want to be the idiot left standing on the railway line, patiently trying to tempt the lunatics off it with a range of easy lifestyle options when the 12.55 Express from Chipping Norton smashes us into warm strawberry yoghurt among the stinging nettles.

Nor am I content to keep my family in a similar position for very much longer.

I hear the train coming.

Of course, stating this simple, provable reality in any professional context still feels like farting loudly in the library. At this point everyone understands the processes that lead to farting, even if they’re not scientists. They know every one of us farts too. We have a shared responsibility for the overall whiff. But meat eaters and rich people, of course, fart more. They just don’t feel like it’s polite to do or even to talk about. Instead, we’re all supposed to shit our pants in private while we pretend everything is fine.

Meanwhile, writing jokes on here about the future feels a bit like playing the Prodigy’s Firestarter on Kazoo at your grandchildren’s funeral.

When I was growing up I always wanted to be a writer. I envisaged lugging a suitcase sized ‘laptop’ around the world. I never dreamed I’d be enabled to insult the most powerful people in the world, and have them completely ignore me amidst an avalanche of conspiracy crap written by wingdings. There’s something in there about the vaporous power dynamics of suicidal capitalism. Everything’s allowed but nothing matters. I think James Howard Kunstler used to say that, before someone slipped too much bigotry into his cocoa.

While all this is happening, it must be increasingly difficult for the sustainability folks who’ve been made redundant because, apparently, they’re not needed. I imagine them going for a new job to effectively work for that propaganda barrage. They’re asked: “Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?” They try not to say: “Kicking your burning skull around the ruins of this building…”

And the looting is accelerating…If, like me, you read the word “looting” and picture someone from a lower class or ethnic minority hefting a telly out of a high street window, then yet another check of your source code is required. The real looters are carting your health systems and public transport out of a government ministry to lodge all the money in a tax haven. As Frankie Boyle points out, superyachts are always, always, getaway vehicles.

They say keep crime off the streets. But it isn’t really on the streets. It’s down the side streets, in the boardrooms of non-descript offices with brass plaques by the door. They’re called things like: “Watson, Watson and Fuck You Lower Class Socialist Scum, Limited” or “The Taxes Are for Losers Trust.”

The police can’t do anything about any of that. They’re too busy charging into Quaker meeting rooms to arrest teenagers planning a peaceful protest. This is the sort of thing students have been doing since Isaac Newton led Trinity College’s Antifa collective while dabbling in alchemy. It won’t be long before Kum-Ba-Yah will only appear on the news if voiced unconvincingly by an Irish actor. You heard it here first.

On May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. When he met his Cabinet on May 13 he told them that “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

This is our May 10 1940. We’re offering people easy, positive options, otherwise they’ll just switch back over to the porn, online games and videos of roller skating cats.

Overall, everything should be fine.