Let’s acknowledge our mistakes, what we don’t know, and what we can’t do. Let's get as many of us as possible working together on ideas and actions that really address our predicament.
The solidification of these issues into binary debates is an oversimplification of reality. It’s a waste of time we no longer have. There are only two sides to an argument, and neither is listening. But there are a myriad of other ways we might discuss what is happening to us. This blog thread was an attempt at one of them.
Maybe I should move on now. Partly because none of us can allow ourselves to get locked in our own, partial viewpoints and realities. Especially someone like me. We need too much help from everyone else to risk doing that.
We need to break down the barrier that “environmentalism” has become. Until we do, environmental communicators like me will keep making grand statements about sectors and industries we no little about. We’ll keep claiming ‘solutions’ that deep down we know won’t work.
In the process we’ll keep alienating the real experts. Some would be allies if we stopped yelling at them long enough to really listen.
We should enter into this real discussion with every sector and industry. We should do our best to discard our preconceptions. We can't steamroll reality with an ideology, despite how satisfying it can feel to try.
Neither should we ‘shoot from the hip’ or make brash appeals to raw, transient populism. We shouldn't become eco-shock jocks, despite the thrill in finally getting to scare the shit out of people who’ve been ignoring us for decades.
Honesty and passion do not negate the need for balanced evidence and research. It strengthens and deepens these requirements.
We won’t break out of the dominant narratives without taking in a much wider scope of information. This includes sometimes inconvenient evidence from sources on the other side of the artificial, ideological divides we've been battling over. This is particularly important now. Those divides seem to be hardening in response to the very problems we desperately need to talk about, with everybody.
We’re going to be communicating very uncomfortable information. So we have to get our facts so straight that they are tough to argue with. Interestingly, nobody has argued with a single statement I have made in this blog thread so far. I find that deeply alarming.
There’s significant personal risk involved in being honest. It requires vulnerability, and really knowing what we're on about. Evidence and research is the tin hat we don when we stick our heads above that parapet.
Perhaps the most dangerous thing is that the environmental movement might come to believe it is finally winning the argument. Because it is often only forcing the opposition into a position where it becomes taboo to express their true feelings. As we know from sex, drugs and rock and roll, making things taboo does not make them go away.
There’s a very real risk of leaving behind unspoken, hidden, hardened pockets of resistance. Witness the myriad of hard-won environmental agreements broken before their ink is dry. If we are not more careful this may rapidly overturn sensible choices when the shit really starts hitting the fan.
The lack of transparency and honesty is what is leaving the gap for people like Donald Trump to shamble into. We can’t win arguments against that kind of heavily armed irrationality.
I know the road I am pointing down does not look inviting. It will not be the easiest one on which to find our way. It has taken me at least three years to come to terms with thinking about things in this way, maybe much longer. In the process I have come perilously close to professional and personal burnout. To be honest the only reason most of this got written was because my personal life was in such disarray that I had nothing better to do. That’s probably not a coincidental experience for those taking on these concerns. It’s probably also the kind of personal disruption each of us is going to have to go through to snap ourselves closer to reality. And probably more than once. Reality is not always presented as a wellness programme.
That said, at this point my overriding feeling is one of deep relief. I feel somewhat relieved of the enormous stress of trying to bend the world and other people around my moral judgements. I’ve stopped wishing the world were so very different from what it is. I feel more open to working with and gaining help from others. I am keen on conversations with people I once considered my enemies. I feel a bit calmer, and like I am more likely to be useful.
If this alone is the only payback for taking this approach, then that alone should recommend it.
So, what shall we talk about next? Maybe the potential for a managed withdrawal from the inherently unsustainable industrialised civilization? I think this is actually what people are really talking about, or should be, when they talk about climate change or sustainability. It is the only logical conclusion to these endeavours. But even now most are either not following these things through to their logical conclusion, or not admitting it.
The coming breakdown of industrial civilisation is not a political program. It's not a philosophy, an ideology, campaign, programme, preference or choice. It’s not even an idea. It’s simply an observation. It is what the widely accepted, scientific and evidence-based observation that industrial civilisation is unsustainable actually means.
So one of the things to talk about is how we define ‘breakdown’, when that is likely to happen and where.
How might a managed withdrawal be achieved, which doesn’t do as much damage as just crashing? I don’t see any signs that the world’s political leaders have even begun to think in these terms, let alone discuss them. I see very little evidence that the environmental movement has thought seriously about this either.
My own answer is that I don’t know, yet. It’s likely I never will. I don’t know if it is, was or would ever be possible to manage or even safely navigate the breakdown of a civilisation on this scale. I suspect that if it was possible, it’s unlikely to be so now. Industrialised civilization is now so wildly overblown and hurtling over its tipping points. We need crisis talks, not another programme or agenda. They need to include a lot of people much smarter than me.
Whatever we do will most likely just be another thread an increasingly unravelling world. Some threads may turn out to be sane and progressive attempts to continue the human project, whatever we decide that is. Some will be desperate and varyingly successful attempts to cling on to outmoded ways of life. More still will be brutal, savage and barbaric outbursts of ignorance and violence. All of these, of course, are already happening.
It's up to us to choose which threads we put our energies into. It will not be easy. Human thinkers, groups and movements have a depressing habit of getting it wrong. It’s fearsomely difficult to tell which threads will survive, and which will be extinguished or replaced, possibly with threads of culture and thinking we cannot yet even conceive of.
I’ll probably try exploring some of them in future posts on this blog. Because it’s still my belief that some could lead to much better places than where we are currently headed.
I hope to see you there.
Sustainabile has been - and is - an outstanding contribution to a discussion that just isn't happening, but that desperately needs to.
You have laid yourself bare in the public domain with humility, insight, honesty and courage. Taken a risk, crossed a threshold, accepted the adventure and its unknowable outcomes.
I have been largely silent as your posts have emerged, for exactly the reasons you have described. I am part - at least in part - of the very fabric of self-serving environmentalism myself. Bills to pay, etc. Complicit.
So I have lived through you vicariously in this public endeavour . This is my confession to cowardice, which is the very least I can do to honour your work.
I think this cowardice might also be why so many people have not commented or engaged with the blog publicly, as it has unfolded? That, in itself, is a profound thing. It calls people like me out into the open, creates dissonance, movement. I'm still feeling my way in the new darkness of that. But you have definitely challenged me to step into the light, however glaring and uncomfortable. To being more honest about how I really feel and what, after nearly 30 years of professional environmentalism, I know to be true.
Now I just need to find the same courage that you have shown here ... if I don't first explode into a billion bits from the repression of my own cynicism.
Thanks, Andy.
You’ve got it just right Andy. Everything, is ending. Civilisation is already breaking down in places. The supply chain is already collapsing and health services are struggling. Look at tech stocks this last month. Inflation. Wild fires. Floods. Wars. This is how it will be now. A managed withdrawal is personal so do what you’ve been thinking you’d do and do it now.
I just expected it to happen more rapidly. How can your readers argue with you when we are in agreement.
Be brave though. Take back control of your life and stay well.