Writing Sustainabile has already led, inevitably, to criticism and personal attacks. People have questioned my professionalism, my commitment to the ‘movement’ and my motivations.
I intended to provoke, and sometimes I have done that clumsily and insensitively. A lot of this is on anti-social media. I wasn’t expecting anything different. I wanted discussion and I’m not about to complain if it gets a bit robust, doesn’t go my way or I have to apologise.
It should be pretty clear that I didn’t write all this because I thought everyone agreed with me. I wasn’t planning to join the in-crowd. In some ways I’m desperately playing Death Metal at the choir, trying to wake up the snoozy ones and get them to make more space for the people outside. Mostly, I am just trying to wake myself up.
I’ve taken a deliberately contentious approach to get attention. I’m narcissistic enough to want that attention. That’s pretty much a pre-requisite for a writing career. But I also care about this stuff enough to stick my neck out. I’ve tried to say things others aren’t saying in a way that’s designed to get a discussion going.
Who, after all, remembers my seminal WWF/Traffic Wildlife Crime Report Summary 2012-2013? How many of you devoured the Icebreaker Transparency Report 2018, which I co-wrote? I’m not saying these weren’t useful documents, but this is different.
In the words of fellow aging Essex boy Billy Bragg, “If you ain’t picking up flak, you ain’t over the target.” In many instances an angry response might be confirmation of what I’m saying. We are in dark, stormy waters. Many of us are desperately clinging to poorly made conceptual life-rafts. It’s not surprising we get upset when someone starts prodding at them.
Anger is a perfectly reasonable response to the situation we’re in. In today’s distracted world any emotional reaction at all might be a good thing, even if it’s just anger.
But mutual abuse on the Internet is a dark temptation. We have car-crash psychology and the psychopathic algorithms of social media. They make posts go further the more they piss people off. But I’m not doing this just to piss people off. So I’m trying hard not to get carried away with that, despite the way this system rewards it. If I get less combative I’ll probably risk seeing my audience dwindle to the point where I might as well whisper out of my window.
If the environmental movement I have dedicated my adult life to were winning, I would be the first to say “yay!” and let it get on with whatever it is doing. But it’s not. We’re losing worse than the South African Giraffe-only Olympic synchronised swimming team.
A touch of critical review might be warranted at this point, which is distressingly close to the point of no return.
What I do find interesting is the way some of these exchanges play out. I think how we discuss ideas is critically important. On one hand people ignore nearly all of what they read when it comes to actually doing anything about it. On the other they criticise every sentence they don’t agree with as if the writer believes the words are the Approved Truth From God.
I take my time over writing. I believe in what I am saying and can back it up. But every article isn’t a comprehensive summary of my entire world view. They’re more like badly maintained trains of thought. I know full well how they rattle and screech along poorly laid tracks. They inevitably only travel in directions dictated by my upbringing, bias and psychological disposition. At best, I might lay few branches over bumpy new territory. But that comes with more uncertainty and risk.
I get understandable demands to tell people what they should do. Along with everything in Solution Delusion, I’d say that pointing out problems does not oblige me, you, or anyone, to offer solutions. That’s just become a popular way of muting important discussions. If someone shouts “fire!” we don’t turn round and say: “You can’t say that unless you know how to put it out.” We look for the fire.
This response also neatly overlooks some of the key points I’m trying to make.
Firstly, what many people really seem to be asking when asking for “solutions” to climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and all the rest is: “How can we ensure that our history of rampant exploitation and destruction has no consequences?” The only sensible answer is that I don’t think that’s possible.
It’s like a habitual sweet shop thief asking how he can avoid conviction, and repair his teeth and waistline, without giving back the lollies or stopping stealing them.
What about a time machine to a green Jetson’s future or back to the Garden of Eden? Every good sci-fi fan knows that if they could exist they already would.
If there even were an answer to such a question, what makes anyone imagine that I, or anyone like me, would know it? That expectation highlights our culture’s relentless propogandising about the genius of white people in general and white men in particular.
I’m about as likely to be the person holding the key to our better future as the Queen is of holding an all night all you can eat buffalo wings and bondage orgy. And I’m not sure why I have spent the last 30 odd years pretending any different.
Sustainabile is not the way I think everyone should see the world. It’s only one mode of even my own thinking, some of the time. It’s not for everyone. It’s not necessarily even for me all the time. I still do a tonne of other stuff. I think in other ways. I might have changed my mind the moment I pressed publish. I reserve the right to do so. There’s been material I have regretted, removed and apologised for. I think that’s an important part of the process. One of the things I’m trying to escape from is having a fixed set of ideas and defending them as if they’re my Mum.
Our culture, especially media culture, perceives that as hypocrisy (as indeed at times, do I). But it’s really just the way people work. Everyone pretending they agree is how fascism works. It’s a really crap way of trying to brainstorm saving billions of people from imminent starvation.
It’s telling how often the most ‘positive’ people tend to be the most bombastically negative about ideas contrary to their beliefs. Is our positivity so fragile it can’t withstand a few challenging sentences? If so, is it maybe time to release our feverish grip on it? We might then be able to get on with dealing with whatever lies beneath that apparently wafer thin defensive layer. I’ve found it a lot more liberating than the motivational quotes of Arundhati Roy or Margaret Mead.
This is how we can explore ideas together. They aren’t necessarily finished or complete. They might still be interesting enough to talk about, or even, dare we, laugh about. One of the scariest things about our society today is our increasing unwillingness to do this calmly.
The concepts and frameworks that support our worldview and culture are now so hopelessly jerry-rigged we daren’t let anyone even cough near them for fear of their collapse.
It’s much healthier to have a multifarious selection of views. It’s not obligatory or even sane to blindly subscribe to a single set. We cling to that conceit in fear of the inevitable inconsistencies shared by everyone. Everyone, that is, except the maniacally single minded fuckers who often become the most dangerous people on Earth.
In other words, we can all chill out. Feel free to throw around the ideas rather than insults. They’re just little shapes on a screen. We don’t have to like them, or their author. We don’t need to try and berate them into oblivion either.
We don’t have to like everything somebody writes to get something out of their work. I don’t like everything written by punk folk troubadour Frank Turner. But when I disagree with the sentiment of one of his tracks I don’t race to social media to denounce him as a paid stooge for the system. I don’t even bother doing that to people I actually think are paid stooges for the system, like Chris Martin. Life’s too short.