At a Loss For Words

It's becoming increasingly hard to write almost anything about climate change. There are no longer any stark words of warning that seem to connect in any meaningful way with most of the public.

It's hard to write about it. It's hard to read about it.  Which is why I was initially less than enthusiastic to read Jeff Sparrow's piece in The Guardian entitled, "Climate change is a disaster foretold, just like the first world war."

Sparrow recounted an interesting observation of the late American historian Paul Fussell that really struck home.

"The cultural historian Paul Fussell once identified the catastrophe of the first world war with the distinctive sensibility of modernity, noting how 20th century history had 'domesticate[d] the fantastic and normalize[d] the unspeakable.'"

Fussell was right. We have domesticated the fantastic. We have normalized the unspeakable. This is how we function.

In my dad's time it took just over seven years and an enormous amount of resources and personnel to slaughter barely sixty million people. Today we can easily wipe out billions in under an hour. Isn't that fantastic? And yet we have, for decades, gone about our mundane, daily lives underneath this sword of Damocles hardly uttering a word of complaint, rarely even giving it a second thought. Isn't that normalizing the unspeakable?

If you take the course of human civilization at 12,000 years, then the last century is just 0.0083 of the history of civilization. Go back to the early part of the Industrial Revolution and it's barely 0.016. That's also the era of fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas, about 0.016. And in that brief little window we've also added nuclear power. Our tiny slice of time has been nothing but fantastic.

This fantastic process of normalization has left us dull, numb and enormously vulnerable to almost everything going on around us. We have lulled ourselves into a state closely resembling the fatalism of Andean mountain tribes who accept sudden death from natural calamity such as mudslides as just part of life.

Sparrow writes:

The extraordinary – almost absurd – contrast between what we should be doing and what’s actually taking place fosters low-level climate denialism. Coral experts might publicise, again and again and again, the dire state of the Great Barrier Reef but the ongoing political inaction inevitably blunts their message.

It can’t be so bad, we think: if a natural wonder were truly under threat, our politicians wouldn’t simply stand aside and watch.

The first world war killed 20 million people and maimed 21 million others. It shattered the economy of Europe, displaced entire populations, and set in train events that culminated, scarcely two decades later, with another, even more apocalyptic slaughter

And it, too, was a disaster foretold, a widely-anticipated cataclysm that proceeded more-on-less schedule despite regular warnings about what was to come.

Have we, as Sparrow argues, already normalized climate change?

As concentrated CO2 intensifies extreme events, a new and diabolical weather will, we’re told, become the norm for a generation already accustomising itself to such everyday atrocities as about eight million tons of plastics are washed into the ocean each year.

"It may seem impossible to imagine, that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we’re now in the process of doing.”

This passage from the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert concluded a piece on global warming, which was published way back in 2005. Over the 13 years since, the warnings from scientists have grown both more specific and desperate – and yet the march to destruction has only redoubled its pace.

The extraordinary – almost absurd – contrast between what we should be doing and what’s actually taking place fosters low-level climate denialism. Coral experts might publicise, again and again and again, the dire state of the Great Barrier Reef but the ongoing political inaction inevitably blunts their message.

It can’t be so bad, we think: if a natural wonder were truly under threat, our politicians wouldn’t simply stand aside and watch.

Disaster porn? Absolutely.  Only, this time, we're the writer, producer, director, actors and the audience.