How do we allocate our personal energy when the world is in such a state?
I've been thinking about that goal-setting exercise they had us do in high school: Divide a piece of paper in three and write 20, 5, and Bang at the top of each column. In the first section, write out where you'd like to be in 20 years to brainstorm potential long term goals. I think I mainly designed the house I'd live in. The second column is what you hope to be doing in five years to get some medium term goals and see if they can line up with long term goals and see if they're remotely attainable. Mine lined up perfectly. My 5-year goal was to have enough money for my own place -- something my kids have given up on as a remotely attainable. I worked a few well-paying jobs, took all the overtime they'd give me, lived in happy squalor in an old broken down house full of people, and amassed a 40% downpayment in three years. I bought my first house at 23 for just over $100,000, then filled it with friends to help with the mortgage (enticed by cheaper rent in nicer digs), and paid it off by the time I was 35.
That's completely impossible in a low-ranking paper-pushing job right now, no matter how much overtime you're willing to work or how many people you're willing to cram into your home!
Then, "Bang." Imagine you've just been shot. What do you wish you had done with the last few weeks of your life. This is the version of the exercise I remember, but it's likely far less gruesome now. We don't like to think about death in polite company; it might traumatize the kids. But it was an effective tool for provoking thought: The idea of making sure I actually enjoyed my life didn't at all coincide with my medium and long-term goals. I consciously put enjoyment aside for my money-focused years working for a soul-sucking insurance company that paid well and had subsidized meals to keep us in the building all day. I spent $10/week on food and $50/month on rent on that broken down house. It was actually fun, when I wasn't working, because we were all poor, and we lived like it, unashamed, with stolen milk crates a significant part of our furnishings. It had the feel of Rent a decade early, without AIDS playing a role. But, while everyone else got take-out, I was the only one eating baloney sandwiches with thousand of dollars in the bank.
It was so worth it!
Now, at this stage in my life and in the life of our species, I'm not sure I want to spend another minute doing something that will pay off later but is immediately unnecessary and unenjoyable. I'm not convinced there will be a later. I used to write about environmental issues a lot, and now I can barely think about it. Seeing yet another picture of tipping points or the heat graphs in Europe leads me to believe there won't be much hope for a 5-year plan, much less 20 years.
The pivotal question now is what we do now?
I have choices of the privileged afforded to me, mainly, by the economic system of my youth now replaced with neoliberal deregulation. Do I spend my time and money finishing this degree? Or do I spend it helping my kids? Do I sell my house to build a place up north where it's a bit colder and surrounded by fresh water lakes, and breathtaking beauty, or do I hunker down in K-W, which I've grown to hate, shoring up my tiny home with a wood burning stove for when the electricity stops working or the gas shuts off while paying $450/month in property taxes to listen to leaf blowers and car vacuums and so many barking dogs ignored in their yards all day, very aware it's closer to grocery stores and open hospitals (so far) and far less likely to be destroyed in a flood or forest fire? Is there even time to build something??
Nobody knows what this will look like. But we do know it's all happening much faster than even some of the bleakest projections expected.
Energy analyst, Dave Jones, peer reviewed the IEA Net Zero report and says we can keep it under 1.5 by building lots of solar panels and charging points everywhere, installing them on our roofs (check) and shifting to heat pumps (requires supplemental source here - no check).
"Once we've moved our heating away from gas, our cars away from oil, we are done. We will never look back. . . . Reduce (not eliminate) flying, don't superheat your home in winter or supercool in summer, don't drive super fast, ditch the tumble dryer for a clothesline, and buy smart."
He adds, it means saying "Yes" to nuclear IF it's safe and he doesn't mention agriculture at all or even consider promoting public transit instead of EVs. I'm dubious.
Michael Mann's newest book, Our Fragile Moment, lays out how we can avoid catastrophes if we restrain greenhouse gas emissions starting right NOW. But the IPCC said that very same thing two years ago and nothing changed. Tra-la-la. One reviewer called Mann's book, "a plea for humanity to continue thriving on this planet, in spite of its own excesses." Mann leans in hard to the idea that we know so much now, we have so much science and technology at our disposal, how could we possibly fail to save ourselves? You'd think, right?? But then the reviewer goes on to say that Soylent Green was "remarkably prescient." Spoiler alert: the story's solution to agricultural collapse is cannibalism.
Our Prime Minister, who is absolutely the very best option at the moment (from pretty slim pickin's), promised to keep the oil in the ground eight years ago, then promptly reneged on that with the infamous line, "No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there."
We are so screwed.
Mann would call me a doomer and say I'm part of the reason for collapse despite not flying or ever using a clothes dryer. In the Guardian, he says "climate history was weaponised by doomers. . . . If we can keep warming below 1.5°C then we can preserve this fragile moment." Yet he also recognizes that the problem is political, with no solution for that, only further concern:
"We know that the obstacles to keeping warming below catastrophic levels are not yet physical and they're not technological--they're political. . . . Victory for Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election is stark, calling it 'a move away from democracy towards fascism.'"
The reviewer of that piece, Damian Carrington, added, "Today's climate policies and action would lead to about 2.75°C, while delivering all the pledges and targets set to date would mean 2°C." Last month Carrington wrote, "Earth's life support systems have been so damaged that the planet is 'well outside the safe operating space for humanity.'"
I've been environmentally aware and active my entire live, but I have zero effect on political will. So my question is what to do with myself while things get worse (while continuing to bike everywhere and hang my clothes on a line). The CO2 we put in the atmosphere today affects us for the next twenty years, so even if it all stopped on a dime, things will get worse before they start to get better. It means shorts on the patio in October, but also floods and fires, undrinkable water and unbreathable air.
How am I supposed to focus on school work during a pandemic with the collapse of civilization on the horizon? How are the kids managing this?? How do people with little ones not tear their hair out in agony for their futures? How do I tap into all the denial that's keeping everyone else so blissful? (But have you noticed how on edge people are these days?? Denial has some nasty side-effects.)
Staying in my program when I'm not enjoying every moment of it but just sticking with it for the future gains means I believe we'll all be here, in a reasonably stable civilization, at least ten years from now. I'm really not sure how to muster that much hope. It's worse with a weak prof who makes me long to be the teacher again, or at least let me be the admin assistant that organizes the courses!
At what point do we start to hunker down with some rice and beans stocked in the pantry, and just spend some time with loved ones before it all goes to shit?
A weekend workshop on trauma, unaffiliated with my school, was excellent and sparked my interest just enough to consider going back to class, but then, on the other hand, it really doesn't help that my university, Laurier, is so adverse to mask mandates that they're unwilling to be proactive enough to implement them before we're all sick or disabled or dead. In the UK, which is 3-4 weeks ahead of us with the newest variants, at least one College closed "due to a 'rapid spike' in Covid cases . . . as it spread across our teaching staff. . . . It kind of snuck up really, really quickly out of nowhere this week. The staff have been dropping like flies."
In Ontario, hospital bed occupancy tripled in the past month. There's been a surge of hospitalizations in my city, and one Laurier prof, Steve Wilcox, who previously wrote this article in Canadian Dimension about Laurier's removal of mask mandates last February, directly pleaded with the Senior Executive Officer of Laurier to bring back masks last week. The response:
"It was made clear that required masking isn't an option they are open to considering. The rationale for this had nothing to do with minimizing harm. They are motivated almost exclusively by public perception of masks."
I responded,
"Thanks for your efforts! Populist decision-making will drag us into an unending spiral downwards. Until leaders start to lead, we'll see increasing illness, disability, and death. It's so demoralizing when heads of universities care more about approval than integrity."
Typically, historically, universities run counter to corrupt political figures. And then, historically, when the dictators want to establish full control, university staff is executed first. It's hard to establish corrupt dictatorial rule with an educated populace! Maybe Laurier's administrators have also read their history!
I just want to stay healthy enough to watch the collapse of our civilization, dammit!! Is that so much to ask?!?
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