An Inconvenient Apocalypse
Bookbuster Review of the above title by Wes Jackson & Robert Jensenby. Published by Notre Dame Press, rrp £20.99, available to order from Bookbuster, £20 each. Review by Tim Barton.
“…and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction” – Wendell Berry (Leavings, 2010).
That line is from a poem quoted in the concluding chapter of An Inconvenient Apocalypse. It is quite clear, throughout the book, that both current reality and prediction together make hope very hard. The book addresses what can and can’t be done, and in so far as ‘hope’ is concerned it is very clear that ‘prediction’ offers little to none. The authors seek to redefine what hope can be, as the day-to-day expectations of most of us are off the table.
As I write this, yet another green-washing corporate/globalist COP is taking place, and all the signs are that it will be as useless as the last 26 of them. In Hastings, the Labour council has been strong-armed by a tin-eared Party HQ to drop the Green councillors from the cabinet. Whilst this local farrago may seem very small beans from the perspective of international leaders, the two issues together illustrate nicely how little is being done to address environmental concerns, and how much those most responsible for the ecocidal collapse we are facing are in control (or, rather, ignoring and sabotaging any chance…) of ‘solutions’. Meanwhile, every day I have conversations with ‘denialists’, who view media and political attempts to address ecological issues as a ‘corporate lie’, despite the fact that those same corporations not only spent decades covering up data and trying to shut down criticism from greens in order to pursue short-term profit, and that they, today, whilst admitting problems in public, spend millions funding social media denialists, buying off politicians, and sabotaging agreements to seek new ways of approaching climate, biosphere and population.
In light of the present daily news, where in addition to the above, biologists, meteorologists, and other scientists in relevant areas are clearly of the view that we are hitting irreversible tipping points, this book’s ‘pessimistic’ outlook is clearly somewhat more realistic than almost any other out there. Apart from global and national failures to act preventatively, issues covered include ‘the decline of key resources’; ‘collapse of ecosystems’; population growth, and demand, pressuring ‘the Earth’s carrying capacity’; climate change; chemical pollution; ‘rising food insecurity and failing nutritional value’; WMDs; and disease.
‘Business-as-usual’ and ‘growth-growth-growth’ rule the day. The idea that consumerist habits and planet-raping industries be questioned and, god forbid, rolled back is barely on the table. Jensen and Jackson make it quite clear that this is a fundamental issue going forward. ‘Strategies for a sustainable human presence must involve holding the wealthy and powerful accountable for damage done and moving toward a more equitable distribution of wealth and power’, goals they see as ‘desirable independent of ecological realities’. On point analysis of the difference between needs and wants are given, too. One example stands out to me, in our current cultural moment: ‘we think electric vehicles are a diversion’, they make clear, even whilst acknowledging that other allies ‘see them as a solution’.
They offer clear analysis of how culpable our own culture and, therefore, if to differing degrees, we ourselves are in this; and how much addressing of the problems must be done with justice for those least responsible (and often most at risk). They also question our culture’s Hobbesian assumptions around ‘human nature’, clearly regarding ‘egalitarian, cooperative human societies [as] possible’. But, too, they ask the hard questions: what size human population is sustainable; what is an appropriate scale for a human community; what competence have we to achieve these; and how fast must we act ‘to avoid catastrophic consequences’? None of the answers will be welcome, or an easy sell, despite their urgency. Yet answer them they do, and what they conclude is of great importance for us all. The book is compulsory reading in this regard, and shows the influence of Joseph Tainter’s excellent 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies.
The authors make it quite clear that ‘the Overton window’ (the range of views the public are ready to accept) can’t be respected if we are to act even vaguely in time. More: if we are to act too late, but not really, really apocalyptically too late. In good news ‘increasingly, scientists are speaking of the connection between ecological crises and an unsustainable economic system’, though, counter to that, many, many of us in political activist circles have been doing that for decades, even before 1972’s Limits to Growth was published.
One clear conclusion is that we must seek communities that are resilient. The tsunami is coming and, frankly, cannot be stopped. One chapter is entitled ‘A Saving Remnant’. Yes, the authors’ ‘hopes’ lie with a minority that may survive – may survive, that is – if we act now. We are left in no doubt that mitigation is what we have left now, rather than any realistic hope of averting the crisis (or, rather, crises). Hope, such as it is, is to be found in the fact that ‘the ecosphere has given us the gift of life with no strings attached, no expectations of us’, but that we are ‘not special’ that we should ‘take care not to undermine other species’ capacity to thrive’ and ‘it turns out that is self-preservation as well’. In no scenario do 8 billion humans on this planet not crash the system, although our civilisational choices are at least as corrupting here as the sheer number of us. I expected us to hit 8 billion by Christmas, in fact, as I write, on the 20th November 2022, we are already 1 million over and counting…
It is ‘good news’, not bad, that ‘empires not only rise but fall’, as it is all too clear that a saving remnant is a fiction should our patriarchal planet-trashing system not fall, and soon. The culprit is more than two centuries of carbon gluttony, it is ‘ten thousand years of drawing down the ecological capital of Earth beyond replacement levels’, a drawdown that has massively accelerated in all spheres in the last century. Like it or not, no rational predictions can offer ‘hope’.
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