Edward Struzik’s Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future (2017) speaks alarmingly of a future dominated by ‘megafires’, as global temperatures rise, forests become drier and lightning strikes become more common. Warmer temperatures mean longer fire seasons, which in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere, increasing temperatures further. As an example, Struzik discusses the Horse River Fire, which tore through 1.5 million acres of inhabited land in Alberta, Canada, in 2016. Known by locals as ‘the Beast’, it turned 2,500 homes and 12,000 vehicles to ash, and forced 90,000 residents to evacuate. ‘The firestorm was of such ferocity,’ says Struzik, ‘it created its own weather patterns, including lightning strikes that set off smaller fires to herald its approach.’ More recently, bush fires in Australia began burning in September 2019 and grew more and more severe. By March 2020, when the authorities finally got the situation under control, a staggering 46 million acres had burnt, destroying 6,000 buildings, killing dozens of humans and an astonishing 1 billion animals. Somewhere, John of Patmos is nodding his head sagely.
The problem started some time ago. Since the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, humans have been increasingly polluting the planet as the consumption of fossil fuels took off in earnest. At the time, few people noticed or concerned themselves with the effect on the environment, focusing their apocalyptic anxieties on a different fear: overpopulation. The increase in food production had led to a rapid growth in population that some felt was unsustainable. Of particular influence were the ideas of Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth-century British writer who calculated that population growth would always outpace food supply, resulting in starvation on a mass scale for the poorest in society. His controversial theories encouraged some to think the suffering of the poor inevitable, even divinely sanctioned.*
It is a mistake to insist that the global problem is ‘overpopulation’ – indeed, China’s one-child policy made an important dent in that vast country’s burgeoning population without reducing the country’s carbon pollution. Some might even point instead to the global dropping birth rates, combined with the pressures of an ageing society, as being more likely to threaten our societies. Still, concerns regarding overpopulation and the future of our species don’t necessarily track the science. It’s a fear that often informs popular culture.
Take Soylent Green (1973), the cult film directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Charlton Heston, based on Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966). The movie is markedly different to the novel.* Harrison’s overpopulation fable concentrates on the degradation of urban life. It is set in 1999, in a run-down New York so overcrowded that people have to share their apartments with strangers. For everyone except the super-rich, food is no longer delicious and varied; most people subsist upon a product made of soya beans and lentils called ‘soylent’. The plot of the novel is more or less inconsequential, but Harrison’s proposed solution to the problem of global overpopulation is the dissemination of contraception. In the last scene in the novel, the year 2000 begins and a big screen in Times Square announces, ‘Census says United States had biggest year ever, end-of-the-century, 344 million citizens!’† It’s almost an anticlimax.
Adapting this novel into a movie, the screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg made a number of changes (including excising all mention of contraception to avoid alienating Roman Catholic cinemagoers), and added a new twist ending that has become the most famous part of the whole story. In the movie, Charlton Heston’s character comes to a grisly realisation: far from being made from soya and lentils, ‘Soylent Green’ is in fact made from processed human corpses. The film ends with the dramatic climax of a horrified Heston staggering through the city streets, warning his fellow New Yorkers: ‘Soylent Green is people!’
It’s certainly a dramatically effective ending, but it’s not a concept that survives a few seconds of rational thought. Soya and lentils are easy to grow and to convert into nutritious food; human beings are neither of those things, never mind the added expense required in keeping it a secret from the general population. But, of course, we should not judge Soylent Green in terms of its logical plausibility any more than we should The Day After Tomorrow. Its celebrated ending is, on the contrary, a symbolic articulation of a great truth: that we are hungrily consuming our world, devouring our means of subsistence and poisoning our reservoir of resources. The unsustainability is the point. Soylent Green is a metaphorical articulation of environmental disaster. We are Monty Python’s Black Knight, gaily lopping off our own limbs while loudly boasting about our invincibility.
While we’re unlikely to be tricked into eating each other, the question of how we’re going to feed our growing population while climate change challenges our existing practices of production and consumption is a valid one. But the problem isn’t simply that there are more people alive than ever before; the real issue is that those people are no longer content to live primitive, subsistence-level lives. They want the trappings of modernity: central heating (or air conditioning), internet access, cars, air travel, out-of-season fruit. As climate scientists remind us, around each person exists a circle of influence much larger than the individual – I’m talking, of course, about our ‘carbon footprint’. It is the amount of carbon that we’ve pumped into the atmosphere, through the burning of fossil fuels to power our lifestyle that is the biggest culprit, although there are certainly other problematic industries and practices, from fast fashion to cattle farming.
If we carry on in this way, the consequences will likely be dire. The work of thousands of scientists feeds into the reports issued, periodically, by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); most recently the 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C. It outlines the warning that unless we cut our carbon emissions significantly over the next two decades to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100, we will likely start to see heatwaves of magnitudes never experienced by humans, with deaths in the tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands. It might mean the extinction of nearly half of all plant and animal species; agricultural yields would collapse and many millions would starve;* sea levels could rise by more than two metres, submerging entire cities.
Some would say it’s already too late. Climate change is already happening, and all of our efforts will only succeed in limiting or delaying the damage. Consequently, research is being conducted into how science and technology might provide more extreme methods of intervention in the form of climate engineering – finding ways of managing solar radiation, for example, or removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Such stories of science saving the day are reassuring – many of our visions of the apocalypse, as we have seen, push things to the brink of disaster, and even beyond, but reserve a ‘eucatastrophe’ or unexpected escape or happy ending – but it seems foolish to rely upon such a deus ex machina in real life.*
The idea of climate change engineering is also a controversial one, partly because it suggests that we don’t need to engage in a systematic overhaul of our lives to address the underlying problem. Another, possibly valid, concern is that we would rush headlong into a scheme intended to save us but that has terrible unforeseen consequences and side effects that only make it worse or create an entirely new problem. Such a scenario is the basis for Bong Joon Ho’s movie Snowpiercer (2013), a powerfully eloquent portrayal of human hubris in which an attempt to reverse global warming has instead brought on a new ice age, and the last human survivors live on a train that travels endlessly around a frozen world.
The film also focuses on the clash between the lower classes at the tail of the train and the first-class passengers at the front, and so highlights another very real issue in the climate apocalypse: the fear that the poor will be left to die or scrabble to survive while the wealthy are able to protect themselves from the worst of the effects. We can already see this to some extent: the richest 10 per cent of the population is responsible for more than half of the world’s carbon emission
s, but are able to protect themselves from the worst effects – they can simply jet off elsewhere when the weather gets a bit extreme. Meanwhile, billions of the poorest people around the world, who tend to have the smallest carbon footprint, are most likely to suffer from climate change – drought, floods and extreme storms. As the effects are felt more keenly, this gap between rich and poor may only widen.
The situation we find ourselves in is understandably scary to most people. Fears over climate change are rising, as is a belief that something must be done – recent Pew Research Center polling finds a 68 per cent global average of the population who consider climate change a serious challenge, rising to as high as 90 per cent in Greece.* But are we scared enough? Given how gloomy the scientific forecasts are – and that this is the one apocalypse scenario it would be quite sensible to be afraid of – perhaps the global figure should be higher, and action should already be well underway. Environmental concerns have been around for decades, after all.
There are reasons why we’ve been slow on the uptake. Certain groups with a vested interest in the continued use of fossil fuels have lobbied determinedly to obscure or undermine the science and prevent policy changes in regard to energy sources. It might also be more plausibly argued that scientists had difficulty mastering the channels of media communication – years in a lab do not ready a person for the bright lights of a TV studio. At the same time, there is a convention that media coverage must be ‘balanced’. With politics this makes sense; it wouldn’t be fair for a left-wing pundit to dominate the airwaves without giving a right-wing pundit the chance to reply and rebut, and vice versa. But climate change is about science first and politics only insofar as politicians need to act on what the science determines. We don’t look to balance a news story about a new Earth-orbiting satellite with a rebuttal by a flat-earther, or a report about the particle accelerator at CERN with a vox pop by a man who thinks electricity is little demons running up and down copper wire. But for years climate change deniers were given equal footing, even though scientists have been largely in agreement for quite some time. So if the scientists failed initially to communicate the urgency of the situation to the masses, perhaps it’s not entirely their fault.
Now, climate change often dominates the headlines. There are still deniers but the global climate strikes, protests and movements demonstrate that people are increasingly getting the message. Even with this raised awareness, however, scientists agree that not nearly enough is being done to avert the crisis. According to the IPCC report mentioned above, to avoid the worst-case scenarios we need to limit the global rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees by 2100. On our current trajectory, we could be looking at a rise of between 2 and 4 degrees in that time.
At the heart of our stories, real and fictional, is a warning of what is to come if we do not confront the problem head-on. Because while we might very sensibly fear climate change itself, what we should really be afraid of is our own apathy and inaction. Climate change is not just a story on our screens, nor are we unfortunate victims of an unavoidable fate. This is not a fictional invasion of the undead, a rogue crazed general pressing the red button, or the Sun engulfing us in a billion years. We are the ones driving it; we are doing this to ourselves. And only we can change that.
There certainly are actions we can still take to reduce our impact on our environment and avoid the most catastrophic effects of global warming – from transforming our methods of food production and diets to ceasing large-scale clearances of forests and investing heavily in renewable energy while keeping fossil fuels in the ground – requiring the combined efforts of individuals, governments and corporations across the world. So why are we still finding it so difficult to get to grips with this?
Perhaps we are simply overwhelmed by the scale and severity of the problem combined with the complexity of coordinating global efforts in overhauling our way of life. The fear of how daunting the task is has paralysed us into inaction. Some people are already throwing their hands up in defeat, claiming there is nothing we can do. Yet this eco trauma seems to be having an influence on the environmental dialogue; stories are emerging that focus less on panic and catastrophe and more on providing solutions. The Australian documentary film 2040 (directed by Damon Gameau, 2019), for example, envisions a future in which climate change has been solved using the technology available to us today. Its optimistic message is intended to provide hope and inspiration, a call to action.
One of the reasons Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek franchise has endured so well, with multiple TV serials, movies, tie-in novelisations, video games, reboots and spin-offs from its inception in 1966 right up to the present day, is the way it offers fans a positive vision of future possibilities. According to the fictional ‘timeline’ that lies behind the show’s twenty-third-century spacefaring and utopian Federation, the middle decades of the twenty-first century saw a general collapse on earth due to war and environmental degradation. Only when humankind had sunk so low was it possible to come together and rebuild a harmonious and rejuvenated world.*
Nevertheless, many of our climate apocalypse stories still tend to play more on our fears. There are those that handle it more thoughtfully and accurately, as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s scrupulously researched and carefully worked-through ‘Science in the Capital’ trilogy,* a near-future extrapolation of today’s climate change trajectories into a plausibly written near future that highlights the urgency of the situation – many of the characters are scientists, and they are not shy about explaining to other characters the various implications of climate science. But many more prefer to throw science to the wind in a melodramatic fashion. Writers and filmmakers need to inject excitement and narrative thrills into what is not, in its purely environmental-science sense, a very exciting story. A vitally important story, don’t get me wrong, but a slow, aggregative and encroaching story, rather than a sharply delineated good-guys/bad-guys rollercoaster of the kind Hollywood prefers.
Contemporary culture mimics contemporary society: caffeinated and sugar-high, often pepped up with drugs, our society has been so bombarded by stimulants we have developed a tolerance that can only be overcome by ever-higher stimulation. Our culture, today, is a hyperstimulant. Climate change is poorly served by such an agitated and agitating popular discourse, but it can be hard to grab people’s attention any other way.
People understand immediate threats – the image of ice sprinting across the floor after the protagonists in The Day After Tomorrow is a very clear and present danger. The reality of climate change is that it is gradual and therefore people don’t necessarily grasp the urgency, even if they understand the importance. Although the effects are already on display, they are being felt unequally around the globe. We can all gasp at the images of Australia on fire, but it is not the same as it happening to you. Most people are not yet seriously suffering the consequences. And so a warning of ten years seems deferrable, and a warning of a hundred years might as well be a million. What doesn’t filter through is that solving the problem is also a slow process, that we need to take measures now as they will only have an effect over time. As the writer William Gibson astutely remarked on Twitter, ‘We’ve never had a cultural model for an apocalypse that lasts for a century or two. We don’t even know how to make a movie or a pop song about such a slow catastrophe.’*
The environmental campaigner George Marshall conceptualises climate change ‘as the ultimate challenge to our ability to make sense of the world around us. More than any other issue it exposes the deepest workings of our minds, and shows our extraordinary and innate talent for seeing only what we want to see and disregarding what we would prefer not to know.’† According to Marshall, our failure to act is a result not of a lack of knowledge or of political will, but of our inability to grasp what is going on. We are presently not acting in a way equal to the reality because that would mean acknowledging that it is actually happening. The problem, in other words, is that the crisis is environmental. Our environment i
s what surrounds us, we are immersed in it, and that’s what makes it so hard to see. We can allow ourselves to ignore the problem and let it fade into the background and into the future.
So, although we are afraid of climate change in theory, in our minds it is an issue that doesn’t yet directly affect many of us in the Western world and therefore is not prioritised over issues that are pressing right now. Fear of change and disruption, having to give up the luxuries we have come to rely on and enjoy, outweighs the fear of a threat that is down the line. One of the arguments against transforming the way we live, for example, is the economic hardships many people would suffer. In fact, many reports suggest that there would be plenty of economic benefits – job creation and improvement for our physical and mental health, for example. But even if the closure of certain industries, such as coal, isn’t balanced by the creation of new green technologies, we should not take the short-sighted approach; we have to factor in the harm suffered by future generations. This is called ‘stewardship’ and it is one of the human responsibilities that undergird and validate our human rights (for there are no rights without responsibilities). Stewardship, though, is hard, and requires us to think of others as well as ourselves. It is easier to pretend that it’s not going to happen, or that science will swoop in and save us at the last moment. Eighteenth-century Irish politician Boyd Roche is reputed to have asked during parliamentary debate, ‘Why we should put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?’ People laughed at Boyd Roche, and rightly so. We don’t want to be like Boyd Roche. But it is an attitude that is still discernible in certain parts of the climate discourse.
Certainly in the past we’ve never been that good at looking after the world around us. We’ve taken our planet for granted, and in doing so, in focusing on our immediate needs and self-interest, we allowed some of our worst traits to run rampant. We are used to exploiting our planet and its resources. It has become second nature to put ourselves first without thinking of the longer-term consequences, stretching back to the days when our ancestors hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction. But it is a modern invention that best encapsulates this attitude: videogames. Fictional worlds where there are no consequences, where nothing matters, and everything exists to serve the player.
It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) Page 11
