"When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." Twain / "I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of these contradictions out for myself." Montaigne / "I write because I have found no other means of getting rid of my thoughts." Nietzsche / "Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding." Arendt / "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." Asimov.
"One of capitalism's greatest successes is to shut down our imaginations. With the help of its favoured tools - neoliberalism and fascism - it persuades us that 'there is no alternative'. Our first task is to re-ignite our moral imaginations and name our alternatives. I cannot count the number of times I've been told, 'if you're against capitalism, you must be a communist,' or 'you must be a feudalist'. In fact, as in my case, you can be fiercely oopposed to capitalism, to communism, and to feudalism. It helps if you undertstand what capitalism is. This means recognizing that it's true nature is endlessly disguised. It's a distinct economic system which arose around 600 years ago. In The Invisible Doctrine, we give this definition:
Capitalism is not the same as commerce. The Dutch VOC and the British East India Company were not trading with the people whose land, labour and resources they seized. Nor were the slavers in the Caribbean and the Americas. Nor is investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) commerce: nations are forced to surrender resources to corporations or pay compensations. Nor is conversion of rainforests to cattle ranches or extraction of deep-sea minerals. No one's freely trading or being properly remunerated in such cases. Yes, colonial looters might then trade the wealth they steal: capitalism can intersect with commerce, and can overrun commerce, but it is not the same.
There are tons of explanations for it. Here's a roundup of a few perspectives that helped me wrap my head around it all.
Last January, British journalist George Monbiot predicted this possibility as a result of the American culture:
"People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world. People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likey to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration , dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.
George Monbiot has a compelling theory to explain what makes people believe conspiracies.
"Those who believe unevidenced stories about hidden cabals and secret machinations tend to display no interest in well-documented stories about hidden cabals and secret machinations. Why might this be? Why, when there are so many real conspiracies to worry about, do people feel the need to invent and believe fake ones? These questions become especially pressing in our age of extreme political dysfunction. This dysfunction results, I believe, in large part from a kind of meta-deception, called neoliberalism. The spread and development of this ideology was quietly funded by some of the richest people on Earth. Their campaign of persuasion was so successful that this ideology now dominates political life. It has delivered the privatisation of public services; the degradation of public health and education; rising inequality; rampant child poverty; offshoring and the erosion of the tax base; the 2008 financial crash; the rise of modern-day demagogues; our ecological and environmental emergencies.
But every time we start to grasp what is happening and why, somehow this understanding is derailed. One of the causes of the derailment is the diversion of public concern and anger towards groundless conspiracy fictions, distracting us and confusing us about the reasons for our dysfunctions. It’s intensely frustrating."
He spoke to one conspiracy theorist, Jason Liosatos, who called Covid a fraud and "called doctors promoting Covid vaccines 'Mengele medics'." Yet Monbiot aligned with him in some ways:
Thorn explains how subtle sexism led to free labour in the home. Even today, women get the lion's share of household chores, even if they're working the same or more hours outside the home, through "Social Reproduction" - the reproduction of beliefs that enables the continuation of existing power structures, which go so far as to make up "facts" about a group of people in order to further their exploitation, for instance, by propagating the notion that women are better suited for this type of work. I once dated a guy who, when I suggested he do dishes more often, insisted, "But you're better at doing dishes." This is a version of learned helplessness that serves to reinforce the status quo and keep some men firmly on the couch with their feet up.
But Thorn further explains a bump in the road that happens when society accepts people who are trans:
"If Mrs. Mansley can become Mr. Mansley, then the idea of an essential female nature starts to look a little bit shakey. If Burt can become Berta and be happier for it, then the idea that women are inferior also starts to look shaky. If they can both become Mx. Mansley, nonbinary partners in loving communions, then who the fuck is gonna work at the Chrysler dealership?"
I thought a discussion of Locke might come out of all this because he exposed this essentialist specialization of roles bullshit with respect to the questionable inborn ability of the royal class at the time of King Charles II and Oliver Cromwell. His epistemology, that we're all a blank slate from birth, affected his politics: there's nothing inherently special about royalty, and we should vote on the best leaders! He wrote anonymously knowing what a ruckus that would cause!! Now we're in the same situation but instead of the monarchy exploiting the peasant's labour, we're looking at a shift in men's exploitation of women's labour.
But she doesn't go that far down that particular road.
She brings up Malm's book to relate the fight against climate change to the fight against patriarchy. For both, we've been told for decades to spread the word and raise awareness, but WE ALL KNOW already!! We know that people are exploited and that the climate is being destroyed. As long as people can benefit from pretending they don't know this and that more education is all that's necessary, then there will always be people pushing the stories that tell us it's all okay. But we know it's not, and we need to make some noise. Of course, the same could be said for the Covid situation. Denial is a hell of a drug!
George Monbiot talked with journalist Rachel Donald of Planet Critical.
In a nutshell, Monbiot has many views in common with Chomsky: People with the money have become the people with the power, and the masses are voting based on "presumed consent," which means we cast a vote before it's clear what they really stand for. Times of equity in the west, were often times of brutality internationally as capitalism is a looting machine. But nation states are a recent introduction that we struggle to see past and assume it has to be like this. Things can change. It's useful to know the people at the top who are commanding or allowing the pilfering to continue, but also be aware that this current structure is the problem. We have made huge sweeping changes in the past, and it can happen again when just a quarter of us recognize that we're in a huge systems crisis. We can all live with sufficiency individually with luxuries once we recognize the benefit of our luxuries being public (everything from healthcare and education to community swimming pools). We're generally good people, but we're a society of altruists governed by psychopaths. Something will change.
Here's the video and a slightly abridged transcript below it.
George Monbiot's article today is the perfect rant for our times. It's pretty much what I've been screaming into the void for the past while, but, thankfully, he has a large audience.
Monboit shames us with this,
"When we forget the virus, we forget clinically vulnerable people trapped by our insouciance. Some can scarcely leave their homes as the danger to them of infection is so great. . . . Many who suffer [Long Covid] reported a lower quality of life than people with stage 4 lung cancer."
Yet my university will not grant accommodations if a student (like me) won't physically attend a class--that's always recorded and posted online--because the class is full of people who will not heed a gentle request to mask, and which requires daily group work, unevaluated, in which three or four people, a foot away, speak directly at their face. The CO2 in the room is regularly over 1200 ppm. Some people are perfectly capable of doing all the work of the program to a high standard, but just not in that room in that way. Sucks to be them (us).
And we don't give a shit about harming healthcare workers despite desperately needing them right now. Monbiot continues,
"Symptoms of long Covid 'had an impact on health as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury.' Some doctors are unable to work, to care for their children, cook, perform basic arithmetic, even brush their hair. Some are now facing the loss of their homes, bankruptcy and destitution. Though most caught the virus in the line of duty, they've been bright-sided, sacrificed to the officially sanctioned delusion that it's over, and we should all get on with our lives. They must wish they could."
"For some people, going to hospital may now be more dangerous than staying at home untreated."
This morning I listened to a Naomi Klein interview from this week about her very different type of book, while reading a prescient Geroge Monbiot article that he reposted from last March. There's a striking amount of overlap.
Both are about the new right-wing alliances being formed, and the furthest right political parties we've seen in some time creeping up worldwide.
George Monbiot:
Monbiot blames the influencers who are feeding the young conspiratorial messages, including Russell Brand (hence the recent repost).
"He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand. . . . He wastes his talent on tired and discredited tales. . . . Such claims are not just wrong. They are wearyingly, boringly wrong. But, to judge by the figures (he has more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube), the audience loves them. . . .
Check out the people on the left, some of whom continue to eat and drink as if this is all dinner theatre. Nothing will wake us up to what's happening around the world. We're in the top end of the boat, just thankful it's not impacting us right this second, and somehow convinced it never will.
We live in the "Goldilocks Zone" and have for many thousands of years, but that's changing very quickly. When agriculture started as an option, it wasn't just that people figured out to plant seeds, but quite possibly that the climate began to be able to support having crops grown repeatedly in the same place. Now we appear to be moving out of that zone.
Change is hard. Absolutely. But we can't properly alter our habits until we face up to what's happening.
"Extreme heat situations are becoming more democratic. . . . All living things share one simple fate. If the temperature they're used to rises too far, too fast, they die. . . . Earth is getting hotter due to the burning of fossil fuels. The more oil, gas and coal we burn, the hotter it will get."
The almost universal desire to return to normal in a pandemic, despite normal being bad for most people, is one of the best examples of the hegemonic collusion of class interest as you will ever see. Brexit was another. Late stage capitalism is the most dangerous stage because at this stage class consciousness has been largely dissolved (as a deliberate strategy to fuel capital accumulation), leaving society open for opposing class interests to fuse in the search for safety as conditions deteriorate. But this fusing can only spur further deterioration of conditions. And this action-reaction dance between capital owners and workers becomes a spiral that, in the 20th century, ended in fascism and war.
The institutions and economic settlements born from 20th century horror have both been broken, leaving us ripe for a new cycle. Right now, it looks like this new cycle will have one major element in common with the 20th century cycle: the acceptance of mass death as necessary for the maintenance of the security and safety of an imagined normal. Whether virus death or climate death, we are being primed to accept mass death as the cost of doing business, the only business, the business that, in the end, is best for everyone, regardless of the cost. We're running head first into ruling class fascism.
George Monbiot wrote an article that he's calling his best bit of writing. It's largely more of the same argument that people can't seem to hear or respond to. We're ignoring the changes in the world at our peril.
In the back of our minds, there’s a voice whispering, “If it were really so serious, someone would stop us.” If we attend to these issues at all, we do so in ways that are petty, tokenistic, comically ill-matched to the scale of our predicament. . . . In normal conditions, the system regulates itself, maintaining a state of equilibrium. It can absorb stress up to a certain point. But then it suddenly flips. It passes a tipping point, then falls into a new state of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse. . . . If one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse. . . . vast tracts of the Cerrado have been cleared to plant crops – mostly soya to feed the world’s chickens and pigs. As the trees are felled, the air becomes drier. This means smaller plants die, ensuring that even less water is circulated. In combination with global heating, some scientists warn, this vicious cycle could – soon and suddenly – flip the entire system into desert.
The mainstream media treats it as an afterthought. Chomsky has been on about this for decades: we keep getting distracted by sports and entertainment when the world needs our attention. Even in political news, we focus on the wrong things.
Of course calendars are a construct and don't mean anything, but the end of the year and, even more so, the end of the decade are useful times to take stock.
In pop culture, we have the Ecco Homo moment as a cultural foreboding - the chutzpah to insist on a fix that pretends to be completely oblivious to the destruction of former beauty. We've done that with our whole planet. But more than that is the fame it brought to the amateur restoration worker, driving up tourism dramatically. We are positioned to celebrate destruction of beauty more than creation. This could be bookended with the acknowledgment and then immediate justification of "billionaires in wine caves" having more power than the rest of the populous; that a politician will be attacked for refusing to be bribed is a sign of our times.
The New York Times got a random smattering of people to answer: What Will the World Look Like in 2030?, twelve years after we were told we have twelve years to fix everything. It's a terrifying read. I've smushed some pertinent bits together here:
September is always a busy month for me, and typically I don't get the luxury of reading the news significantly, but this time was different. It's been a car crash that I just can't stop looking at. When the Charter was first developed in Canada, largely a spin off of the UN's Declaration of Human Rights, it seemed like we turned a corner with respect to human rights. It seemed like we were on a linear progression that would, bit by bit, get better and better. For sure there would be times it would slip back and have to be propped up again, keeping the quest for free speech at the expense of individual rights at bay, but I didn't expect it to be dismissed. And then, next door, we came to the harsh conclusion that they believed a woman's depiction of sexual assault, but they Just. Don't. Care.
Brutal.
Conservatives are winning elections everywhere, but not the normal types of fiscal conservatives that just want to lower taxes so we can benefit from a bit more cash in our pockets, but hateful, discriminatory radical right wingnuts who hang out with white nationalists or want to ban religious symbols for public servants or so much worse, like Brazil's Bolsonaro whose solution to poverty is to allow police to indiscriminately murder suspected criminals.
A B.C. teacher was called to the carpet to justify a civics survey (likely abridged from The Political Compass, which I also use) because the survey associated the right wing end of the spectrum with racism. The school board has assured the parent that the worksheet won't be used again because, of course, racism comes in all kind of boxes. But that's true of everything that we look at to deduce where we are on the political spectrum. Is it just a stereotype that the far right have a prejudicial agenda, or is that a legitimate claim? At least one set of studies suggests there's a correlation between conservative values and discriminating attitudes. Isn't it becoming clear from recent events that voting conservative is more likely to result in more overtly discriminatory policies on the books, or did I just imagine that? And, are we not allowed to make this connection in a classroom? Of course not all conservatives are prejudiced, but if MPs and MPPs continue to follow the party line, and their leader is racist, then that reflects on the entire party.
BUT none of that seems to matter nearly as much as climate change. Well, actually, it all really, really matters because, as I've said over and over here, we have to commit to a path of profound and intentional compassion if we're going to make it through the next few decades without slaughtering each other. It also matters because that same side of the political spectrum also generally wants to ignore climate change. Again, that's not to say everyone on the right thinks we should keep burning coal instead of investing in solar, wind, and tidal power, but, in general, that's the attitude of the parties in question. Ontario ministries are banned from using the term 'climate change,' Québec is looking at fewer environmental oversights, and Bolsonaro plans to withdraw from the Paris accord. And, according to one reporter, Trump has entered "stage 5 climate denial" - the "it's too late" stage.
Another IPCC report is out that suggests we really ought to do something about all this. We've got 12 years to cut our emissions by half if we want to have any hope of slowing this down. Here's the report, and here's an explanation on the scope and process of the report. The next one comes out in 2021. And here's a history of climate change science since 1824.
ETA: Naomi Klein expressed the gist of this long-winded post in a brief tweet:
"paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has 'no documented historic precedent.' . . . The report . . . describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by [2℃] . . . The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the [1.5℃] mark. . . . the report says that heavy taxes or prices on carbon dioxide emissions . . . would be required. But such a move would be almost politically impossible in the United States, the world's largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China. . . . President Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused climate change, has vowed to increase the burning of coal and said he intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement."
"The report makes it clear: There is no way to mitigate climate change without getting rid of coal." But the World Coal Association plan to "continue to see a role for coal in the foreseeable future."
This raises the question about the ethics and feasibility of corporations self-regulating themselves out of business - specifically including these 100 companies. We're not at a place in our embracing of ethics to actually stop harmful actions that come with huge personal rewards. Which airline or factory farm is going to willingly close their doors? Trump's statement say, specifically: "We reiterate that the United States intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement at the earliest opportunity absent the identification of terms that are better for the American people." But what's better for the American people is what's better for us all: the ability to continue to survive into the future. Preventing warming will also help reduce migration into the states. His focus is too short term. Obviously.
"Scientists might want to write in capital letters, 'ACT NOW, IDIOTS,' but they need to say that with facts and numbers . . . And they have. . . . The report says there must be rapid and significant changes in four big global systems: energy, land use, cities, industry. But it adds that the world cannot meet its target without changes by individuals, urging people to: buy less meat, milk, cheese and butter and more locally sourced seasonal food - and throw less of it away . . . use videoconferencing instead of business travel . . . insulate homes, demand low carbon in every consumer product. . . . You might say you don't have control over land use, but you do have control over what you eat and that determines land use. . . . the report's 'pathways' for keeping a lid on temperatures all mean that hard decisions cannot be delayed. . . . Ultimately, politicians will face a difficult choice: persuade their voters that the revolutionary change outlined in the report is urgently needed or ignore it and say the scientists have got it wrong. . . . If the nations of the world don't act soon, they will have to rely even more on unproven technologies to take carbon out of the air - an expensive and uncertain road."
"Limiting global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels would be a herculean task, involving rapid, dramatic changes in the way that government, industries and societies function. . . . The world would have to curb its carbon emissions by at least 49% of 2017 levels by 2030 and then achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. . . . Scientists have 'high confidence' that 1.5℃ of warming would result in more severe heat waves on land. . . . Temperatures on extreme hot days in mid-latitudes could increase by 3℃ [5.4℉]. . . . Two degrees of warming could destroy around 13% of the world's land ecosystems, increasing the risk of extinction for many insects, plants and animals. Holding warming to 1.5℃ would reduce that risk by half. . . . Without aggressive action, the world could become an almost impossible place to live for most people . . . As we go toward the end of the century, we have to get this right."
At the current rate, if we don't make any changes, we could expect to reach the 1.5℃ mark in about a dozen years at the earliest, which is actually a few years longer than originally estimated, so there's that silver lining.
"Many scientists have argued that meeting even the 2℃ goal is virtually impossible. But the IPCC report sidestepped questions of feasibility and focused instead of determining what government, businesses and individuals would need to do to meet the 1.5℃ goal. These include ramping up installation of low-carbon energy systems such as wind and solar . . . and expanding forests to increase their capacity to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. . . . Other proposed options involve changing lifestyles: eating less meat, riding bicycles, and flying less."
"The world is on fire. In order to avoid more of these tragic fires, severe storms and loss of life, the world must halve global emissions in the next decade. This is a huge challenge, but is is doable and the costs of not following the right path are a matter of life and death to millions around the world, particularly the vulnerable. . . . What matters now is that we decide to try and that we make it our absolute priority. . . . Those who say it's unrealistic are actually telling us to give up on people, to give up on species . . . We do not give up on human ingenuity, courage or hope against political apathy and corporate greed. We will never give up on us."
In the New York Times, "Why Half a Degree of Global Warming is a Big Deal" graphs some of the differences between a 1.5 and 2℃ change, like ten times the chance of no sea ice in the Arctic, over a third of the world's population affected by extreme heat, and coral reefs mostly disappearing.
The Guardiantries to take a more positive spin, that we can limit warming to 1.5 C with political will. Figueres says, "Most striking to me, therefore, is the fact that the determinants of whether we head for 2C or for 1.5C are mainly political; they are not technical or economic." We've been saying this for a long time now, "We have the technology, we just have to put it in place," and it's still true, but it just feels so incredibly unlikely given the current sway in voting. I'm not sure it matters that "the price of large-scale solar and wind energy has fallen" when the elites have put all their money in oil. However, perhaps my pessimism is a result of location, since, "China, India and the EU appear to be ahead of their Paris targets."
Except, George Monbiot, on the other side of the pond, is also not entirely convinced of a rosy future.
"We can now leave fossil fuels in the ground and thwart climate breakdown. . . . So how come oil production, for the first time in history, is about to hit 100m barrels a day? . . . How is it that in Germany, whose energy transition was supposed to be a model for the world, protesters are being beaten up by police as they try to defend the 12,000-year-old Hambacher forest from an opencast min extracting lignite - the dirtiest form of coal? Why have investments in Canadian tar sands - the dirtiest source of oil - doubled in a year? The answer is, growth. . . . It doesn't matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things. Given that economic growth, in nations that are already rich enough to meet the needs of all, requires an increase in pointless consumption, it is hard so see how it can ever be decoupled from the assault on the living planet. . . . Clean growth is as much of an oxymoron as clean coal. But making this obvious statement in public life is treated as political suicide."
He concedes that New Zealand is starting to make the change away from a growth model, and warns that we all play a part in this,
"No politician can act without support. If we want political parties to address these issues, we too must start addressing them. We cannot rely on the media to do it for us. . . . A crucial factor in the remarkable shift in attitudes towards LGBT people was the determination of activists to break the silence. They overcame social embarrassment to broach issues that other people found uncomfortable. We need . . . to do the same for climate breakdown. . . . Let's create the political space in which well-intentioned parties can act. Let us talk a better world into being."
The book cover says the book "provides the hope and clarity required to change the world." Well, he certainly tries. He's got a plan of action that's possible, but I didn't get the requisite hope necessary to be spurred to action. It's a bit of an overview of many ideas from different places, many of which are already in action somewhere in the world, and it left me with a solid book list to peruse, but it also left me with a sinking feeling that this will never work. We're never going to get our shit together enough to do any of this. But I've been wrong before.
The first part is a mix of Charles Taylor's notion of social imaginaries, Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, Robert Reich's Inequality for All, and Noam Chomsky's talks on solidarity. Then he gets into specifics about our ideas around our communities, environment, economics, and democracy.
Further to my last post about the current values and the boundaries of the social imaginary that prevent us from making any significant and necessary changes in the world, George Monbiot has data to show that actual shift in pervasive attitudes:
A study published in the journal Cyberpsychology reveals that an extraordinary shift appears to have taken place between 1997 and 2007 in the US. In 1997, the dominant values (as judged by an adult audience) expressed by the shows most popular among nine- to 11 year-olds were community feeling, followed by benevolence. Fame came 15th out of the 16 values tested. By 2007, when shows such as Hannah Montana prevailed, fame came first, followed by achievement, image, popularity and financial success. Community feeling had fallen to 11th, benevolence to 12th.
He relates the link between corporate capital and celebrity. Adam Curtis explained how that was orchestrated by Edward Bernays in the Century of the Selfas I recapped in an earlier post:
There was a growing concern with industrial overproduction, so Bernays helped the US shift from a culture focused on satisfying needs to one obsessed with fulfilling desires. He promoted the idea of regular citizens buying shares in companies, and he got film stars to come to parties at the White House, forever after linking politics with celebrity right up to today when Americans are choosing between Meryl Streep and Scott Baio.
George Monbiot lists 13 crises, but warns you should only read the list if you're feeling very strong. It's an appropriate warning.
He's barely even talking about climate change here, so this list could be so much longer including the degradation of the oceans, poisoned waterways, messed up ecosystems... His list is more political in nature: Trump and his new team running a country with a powerful military and unbreakable corporate ties. On the other side of the pond, there's concerns with the effects of Brexit, the financial stability of Italy, and the French election.
If Le Pen wins, the permanent members of the UN security council will be represented by the following people: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Theresa May and Marine Le Pen. It would be a stretch to call that reassuring.
Everywhere, there will be fewer jobs as automation takes over, and with the Paris agreement likely trashed, the new landscape will create "a mass movement of people that dwarfs current migration" and an accelerated increase in the extinction rate of mammals. The scariest one in my books is that soil loss alone relegates us to only sixty years of harvests left.
So even if we can keep the politics working, without intervention we have six decades of food.
But we're so totally blind to all of this. I don't think there will ever again be a good time to have kids, yet my daughter's doctor still won't let her get her tubes tied because she might change her mind later. There are so many little things we do that reveal a profound disconnect with the way the world is headed. We're keeping this information in a different place in our heads and not letting it seep in, protecting our emotional core from knowing about it gnostically.
Monbiot says his goal is not to depress us, but to "concentrate our minds on the scale of the task," but without power to effect change, I'm not sure what he hopes focusing his readers will do. At Standing Rock they have a task, stopping the machines, and that task carries the symbolic weight of stopping the power of big business, exploitation, environmental destruction, and the pursuit of profits over people. It's a vitally important fight on the ground. Those who aren't near there don't have a task. We can donate to them, and then write our letters, but it feels impotent. We could drop everything and join them. In a movie, hundreds of reinforcements marching up over the hill would be the climactic point where the music swells, but there have already been problem with white people joining only to use it for their own means. Man, we suck!
I think one thing we really need to be proactive about, that unfortunately might be more possible than being proactive about climate change, is to generate an influx of books and articles and teachings and preachings and an entire marketing scheme / mythology on getting along during a crisis. If we're lucky, we'll only need it to learn to be kind and respectful shopping for bargains on Black Friday. Well...we can keep telling ourselves it's about luck.
At this rate, we're likely to go out fighting, like in so many extinctions and collapses of the past. I'm not sure that can be changed, such is our nature. But while we're continuing to work on convincing the powers that be to implement solutions already, we can continue to work to foster more connected and inclusive lives, vigilant with our own character when we might waver and our drive for survival tries to override our compassion. Can we do this with grace, kids?
I was really looking forward to seeing the latest Josh Fox film on fracking. I loved Gasland (for which Mark Ruffalo was just added to the US Terror Advisory List for promoting), and then Chris Hedges gave this film a nod, which means a lot to me. And then one reviewer wrote that the film will "restore your faith that we, as a people, have the power to save ourselves." Exactly what I need. So I bought it on iTunes and settled in for some enlightenment.
Maybe my expectations were a smidge too high.
It fell into the same problems that made Rob Stewart's films less than stellar. In Sharkwater, Stewart had long dramatic interludes focusing on himself and the problems he experienced being unwittingly thrust into activism. And then in Revolution, he spoke at length about beginning to learn about the environment. At least Stewart, near the end, seemed to recognize the part he himself was playing in exacerbating climate change with all the air travel the film required. Did it really require it, is the question. Stewart starts asking himself some really hard questions, which I respect. Fox doesn't go there.
Like Stewart, Fox is just learning - or, at least, he presents the appearance of just learning about climate change. He's been in this a while, so I can't imagine he doesn't get the big picture yet, and I'm really not a fan of the technique of feigning ignorance to get people on board. It feels like he hadn't done any research before the shoot so we could watch him discover what it is to "eat from the tree of knowledge, and now there's no going back." I want a documentary to tell me something I don't know, and tell me with confidence. I want a climate change doc, especially, to tell the world everything they need to know to get with the program. There were too many shots of Fox walking through forests in awe of nature - look at that spider! and that tree! and that bird! Even worse, most of those shots weren't of the forest, but of Fox looking at the forest. We were to be enthralled by his wonder at nature, not by nature itself. If he were my son, this would be my favourite movie ever. But he's not.
That gets to the bigger problem here: that this film is way too focused on Fox to be compelling to anyone who isn't related to him or doesn't have a crush on him. It starts with a painfully awkward dance to show how happy he is that a river nearby won't be polluted with oil. It was a hard-won victory, and I get the celebratory tone, but there are other ways to show joyfulness without forcing us to watch a guy dance in his living room for the entire opening credits. He finds it helpful to cope with tragedy by playing the banjo. That's really nice for him, but it's doesn't necessarily translate to helping us cope by listening to him play.
Like Stewart, Fox does it all, and sometimes it's better to spread the jobs around a more talented pool. His narration is stilted, with long dramatic pauses mid-sentence throughout. There aren't rises and lulls in the intensity of his tone; it's all drama all the way through: "Just a few months later. New York City. Was about to get. A wake-up call." Couple that with a really quiet voice juxtaposed with sudden bursts of loud extended musical interludes meant my finger hovered on the volume the whole time. He had some great footage from a camera strapped to a drone, and he had the cash to film in twelve different countries, but he didn't spring for a steadicam, so much of the tromping through the forest had a Blair Witch effect.
He collected the usual litany of talking heads: Bill McKibben, Michael Mann, Elizabeth Kolbert... but only for a few minutes each. If I had the chance to chat with Elizabeth Kolbert, I'd have so many more questions to ask. She's got a wealth of knowledge that was largely ignored. And the McKibben interview was in a food court, and they decided to include their argument with mall security about filming in the mall. I struggle to see the purpose of that clip - why they'd choose a food court to film in, and why they'd choose to highlight the conflict. Is it to mirror the pipeline protests? A corporation vs citizen struggle? He was just a security guard doing his job. Weird.
He threw in some stats about increasing weather events, rising sea levels, endangered animals, factory farms, ocean acidity, threatened protesters, that the window to slow the expected 2° rise by 2036 closes within a year from now (NASA thinks we may have already hit 2°), and that all our 40-year-old pipelines are going to break. He referred to the Amazon rainforest as the lungs of the world even though the oceans create significantly more oxygen. Standard stuff. But a few of his poignant pieces of information were learned by most of us in grade three: "People. And animals. Exhale carbon dioxide. Trees. Take in. Carbon dioxide."
What I learned? To make a good documentary, you really have to get over yourself and your personal learning experience and make the subject matter the star of the show. Read some Monbiotbefore you start shooting so you don't sound like you've never heard of any of this before, and so you can temper your amazement at what's being shared. A lot of it is old news to anyone remotely familiar with the issues, like that Republicans don't think climate change is caused by human activity. Even better, read the IPCC reports that came out in 2014.
As far as learning basic information about climate change, there are better films to watch to understand all the meetings leading up to Paris. Like this one at only 4 minutes:
And then Grist also explained what happened in Paris, but in much more positive terms than Fox:
So his big question, the big draw to the film, is the focus on what won't be destroyed by climate change. His thesis is that we'll still have courage and creativity and resilience and all sorts of other wonderful human attributes that should be celebrated. But, I think we won't have any of those if we don't have any humans left. This is where some knowledge of Naomi Klein's and Gordon Laxer's plans for change would have helped add some substance to his song and dance. He's struggling with how to cope with all the knowledge, but he hasn't gotten far enough in depth in his own journey to have us walk with him. He seems to want to escape rather than actually cope with the reality of it all - to actually feel that reality.
By comparison, a much better film on the complexity of coping with the environmental destruction in our own backyard is Fractured Land with Caleb Behn. Both Behn and Stewart were willing to question their own motives and involvement in a way that Fox skirts around, refusing to acknowledge, which leaves his film feeling superficial at best. And of the three filmmakers, Behn's film offers the most complex understanding of the situation and leaves you with the most hopeful spirit. We can't have real hope if we distract ourselves with music in the face of significant loss. We have to have a clear path to walk to help make it okay.
Convalescing from a wicked cold that's beating the crap out of me, I watched a trio of movies about amazing musicians: Joe Strummer, Ginger Baker, and Sixto Rodriguez. In the films, other musical geniuses were highlighted along the way. What a delight! But as Ginger, Jack and Eric talked about people with the gift of perfect time, my first reflexive response was, "How many kids are told they can be a great musician if they just put their mind to it?".
In class this week, yet another student insisted that intelligence has minimal genetic basis compared to effort. Anybody can do anything if they try hard enough. I suggested there are people her age still struggling with the alphabet and lamented the ivory tower effect of streamed academic courses. I don't think it was very convincing. I'm battling a life-time of programming. In high-school, I struggled with grade 13 physics. Both my parents were math and physics profs at U of W, yet with their unwavering help, and the help of my teacher, I still couldn't get my head around that whole inclined plane issue.* It's just not how my brain works.
In a post a while back I advocate the best of our worst options for saving our species: a government that forces us be less wasteful. It's an idea that James Lovelock proposed, and some called it fascist. But there's a world of difference between enforcing legislation that actually protects the citizens in the long term and a police state.
John Oliver did a series of clips about how Australia managed to change their laws to ban semi-automatic weapons and seriously restrict other guns. The trilogy is well worth a watch at only 18 minutes in total. But the part that interests me is the idea that politicians had to commit political suicide in order to pass the legislation through, AND they were willing to do this for the good of the country. People protested the new restrictions and voted the politicians who supported it out of office. But it had already passed. This was in 1996, and since then, the citizens have gotten used to the restrictions on their freedom and appreciate that mass shootings have gone from almost one/year down to zero.
I took the kids to the beach on Sunday, and there's new signage everywhere about the problems with using the sand as an ashtray. In hopes for a "butt-free beach," they included information on wildlife concerns, toxins, costs to taxpayers, and the level of pollution: cigarette butts are the most common type of litter found on beaches. But the signs didn't seem to affect anybody's behaviour because they didn't come with people actually patrolling the beach to offer friendly reminders much less tickets or anything more punitive. Nor did they offer other options - like empty cups from the garbage half-full of sand for people use as ashtrays, then throw back in the garbage. Nothing.
Whenever I talk about atrocities around the world in class - slavery, oil spills, and the like, and I get the class to talk about what bothers them most or what most influences them to change, or get them to do a project on it, a good 70% of the class will focus on animals. That could be in part to distance themselves from the effect all this has on people, but I think it's more likely that it because we actually care more about animals than people. Animals are innocent, and people often suck.
In one class I showed real film footage of a 12-year-old girl being saved from almost being manipulated into prostitution slavery in the Ivory Coast, and footage of young girls working 16-hour days in factories in China. How do we help kids like this? Do boycotts work? Does letter-writing work? And the student response in that particular class was, more or less, "It's their own fault for being taken in by scams. We shouldn't do anything to help them." The class wasn't malicious, just so immersed in information about scams they can't imagine otherwise, and they're self-protecting by victim blaming.
