“Deep Adaptation” thought says climate crisis will destroy human society. Does it also generate disabling despair? It’s a mighty fight, but we still need hope
Photo by Soheil Arbabi on Unsplash
We are profoundly committed to a radical response to climate crisis on this site. Our work with Extinction Rebellion, developing the Future Democracy Hub and other democratic innovations, is compelled by the urgency that comes from the most recent IPCC report on our alarming warming statistics.
But we have always fallen on the side that wants people to be inspired to act to transform their world into a viable eco-civilisation - and not so interested in the story that asks us to mourn, grieve and prepare for the inevitable destruction we have wreaked. What kind of motivation to action can be stoked, in the face of inevitable, unmitigable disaster?
We respect those for whom climate grief is a necessary part of their activism. But we were interested to read this long and detailed Open Democracy piece, which sets itself up as a scientific takedown (from within climate radicalism) of the Deep Adaptation paper by Jem Bendell. This has been downloaded by hundreds and thousands, and a core text in the belief that climate breakdown will inevitably lead to societal breakdown (BBC backgrounder here).
We’re happy to point you to the piece and read it at your leisure. Essentially, they accuse Bendell of overstating the case for the complete melting of arctic ice, and the massive release of methane into the atmosphere from permafrost and seabeds. The former is certainly happening—though over the next century than in the next few decades. The latter is also happening, but not at the massive scale indicated by the scientists Bendell cites (scientists which, they claim, take extreme or eccentric positions in relation to the scientific consensus).
The OD writers, themselves in XR, do not deny for a moment the pressing challenge (and potential disaster) of climate breakdown - but they believe Bendell’s overstatement of the case both subverts his credibility, and allows for a kind of psychological security blanket to be grabbed by those who accept this “doomist” narrative.
“[The climate movement] should publicly disavow the message that near-term collapse is inevitable, or that climate-induced total human extinction is plausible”, say the OD authors:
if societal collapse were truly inevitable, it would make no sense to practice mass civil disobedience against governments that would shortly fall apart. Instead, we in the climate movement should view societal collapse as a distinct possibility among a number of long-term outcomes — and work as hard as possible to prevent it by transforming our societies.
…The belief that near-term societal collapse is inevitable takes a serious toll on the mental health of many people. That’s bad in itself, and it’s also the wrong way to bring people into our movement. In fact, a recent study surveying 50,000 people found that “individuals who believe that climate change is unstoppable were less likely to engage in behaviours or support policies to address climate change.”
Telling the full truth about the climate emergency is at this point a radical and extremely powerful act; telling the fatalist tale of Deep Adaptation is not. Deep Adaptation encourages a kind of paralysis when it claims that “there is no ‘effective’ response” to the crisis.
Again, that’s just wrong: we know that there are many effective responses, and in order to make them happen (and happen fairly) we need democratic political power which can overcome the people and corporations opposed to action on climate change. Building that power is the main goal of the climate movement.
More here. Again, it has to be stressed that this is a critique coming from committed activists in and supporters of Extinction Rebellion - so it should in no way be taken as any plea to relax on climate militancy. We already see on the OD site that there is substantial response to the article - which we also invite here.
But it would be wrong to say that climate disruption shouldn’t be squarely addressed in its massively destructive dimensions, even if we want to keep the bias towards hopeful action.
We found this piece from eco-economist Julia Steinberger which ends with this stirring combination of gloomy intellect, and chirpy willpower:
1: An avoidable disaster
The first is that the current trajectory we are on is both utterly devastating, and utterly avoidable. The loss of life, human and non-human, will be horrific. There is no way that ecosystems and species can adapt to millions of years worth of climate change in the span of decades.
We are already in the midst of the 6th mass extinction and have destroyed biodiversity equivalent to millions of years of evolution of our own branches of the tree of life. This is not looking good.
It’s looking particularly bad for those least to blame. I’ve been using the word “we”, as though “we” humans, young, old, poor, rich, were all equally to blame for our current trajectory.
We are not. Some of us, specifically the affluent, have a disproportionate share of the blame, and are in fact driving the systems of global production and consumption, extraction, pollution and exploitation, that are causing our disastrous planetary roller coaster ride into a climate unknown to our species.
Some of us, the majority world, the young, the poor, the Black and Indigenous and migrants and generally people of color, will suffer the most.
To give one simple example, on our current high emissions trajectory, the tropics will become uninhabitable within this century due to heat & humidity — see the map below.
The map of countries with high historical responsibility for emissions is almost the reverse of this one, a clear demonstration of the injustice built in to climate harms.
Figure of deadly heat & humidity days per year by 2100 from Moira et al in Nature Climate Change.
But this immense harm is mostly avoidable, still. There is nothing predetermined about it. If we change our energy, consumption and production systems, to focus on sufficiency and decent living standards, we can both reduce our demand for energy while decarbonising our supply.
If we change our diets to become plant-based, we can stop deforestation and remove a major source of methane and nitrous oxides, two potent greenhouse gases, as well as providing healthy and nutritious food to all.
There is no historical evidence that we need fossil fuels to thrive, and looking into the future, we need to eliminate them to survive.
2: A struggle for survival
The second point I want to make is that we have a huge, immense struggle on our hands to achieve this livable, better (and entirely technically achievable) future. We are in a struggle for survival, and the odds are very much against us.
The main obstacles to our maintaining a planet on which the human species can thrive have names.
Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, in their short and excellent sciency science-fiction book “The Collapse of Western Civilization: a View from the Future” named two culprits in the world of ideas: scientific positivism (the overcautious nature of current scientific communication) and market fundamentalism (the belief in markets-above-all enshrined in neoclassical economics and neoliberal policy).
In my research, I’ve circled around this problem, and come to name capitalism as the intertwined economic, physical and social system as the root cause of our current trajectory. Capitalism manifests itself in concrete ways, in the state capture by industrial interests which are antithetical to a different trajectory (as we showed in the case of car dependency) and in the existence of ever growing inequalities, with the affluent most wedded to damaging patterns of consumption and production.
The solutions put forward to comfort and maintain these existing power structures and inequalities, such as green growth, have been repeatedly shown to have no basis in reality.
This means that to avoid disaster, we must confront capitalism. That’s hard, certainly…But I did want to say a few words.
It can be done.
The history of learning how it can be done has been erased from our education. We don’t learn how to be activists, advocates, muckraking journalists or revolutionaries at school. But we can and need to learn this now.
It takes the determination to become as revolutionary as we can.
Comfort and security are the past, if you ever had them. Many people never did. The Holocene is behind us. What lies in front is still undetermined, and can still be changed. But it will take the fight of our lives, for all of our lives, to change this.
This will not be fun, or fulfilling, or a worthy adventure of self-discovery, or a cute feel-good movie, or a task of personal validation. I mean, maybe from time to time there will be those things, who knows. Who cares. This is a fight for life itself.
We get to be depressed, despondent, little creatures against the crushing change of geological epochs and mighty economic systems. But we need to be little creatures who are learning to fight very very very fast and very very very well together against the brutal forces of domination which steer our current course.
What does it mean to be loving a vanishing world a this time? As Mary Annaïse Heglar has written: “I don’t need a guarantee of success before I risk everything to save the things, the people, the places that I love. … This planet is the only home we’ll ever have. There’s no place like it. Home is always, always, always worth it.”
So. Read Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, George Monbiot, Frantz Fanon, Rosa Luxemburg. Learn to become a revolutionary, get some courage and guts and analysis. Join Extinction Rebellion already (caveat: only the groups that put social & racial justice front & centre, obviously), and/or the Sunrise Movement, and/or Fridays for Future, and/or all of them. Let’s do this. GO.