Since we tend to judge the person who's telling us something before we're prepared to listen to what they're saying, it soon became clear that the message was unlikely to get through if delivered by stereotypical sandal wearing beardies. So, for those of us who began to believe that the challenge was as much one of public relations as it was of sound science, we began to adopt three major tactics.
The first of these was, to put it simply, to try to appear a little less weird. Our ideas might have been off to one side of the cultural spectrum but that didn't mean that we couldn't occasionally put aside our beards and sandals and put on a suit or at least a clean T shirt.
The second was to make change seem possible by talking down the scale of what would be necessary. This might be summarised in the slogan "Every little helps". We ended up presenting the challenge as one of simply making a few relatively modest life style changes. We knew that these wouldn't be enough but at least we wouldn't get thrown out of the room for trying and they might just give us time to get more realistic, i.e. likely to be effective, changes onto the menu. A good example of this would be the progress of the Kyoto Protocol and the UNFCCC. The initial aims were modest, nothing like enough to get the job done, but at least there were international talks about global issues. Since then, I think it would be fair to say that the only solid outcome of all the grand conferences has been "at least we're still talking".
The third was to translate things into the currency that every nation and business understands and that's money. Don't talk about carbon emissions that will only make them feel guilty, tell them how much money they'll save instead.
I think it's now clear that these strategies haven't really worked; though I'm no closer to working out what would. The first perpetuates the least helpful aspects of social identity theory (see an early post Dispositional or situational ). A rapidly changing world needs less conventional thinking and we need to celebrate the cultural outliers rather than oblige them to conform. The second fails to challenge consumer capitalism and its emphasis on growth and consumption. The third simply confirms what business men and most politicians think they know already which is that money trumps everything else.
The end result is that we've failed to challenge the patterns of consumption in the developed world that have brought us to this position. To quote Stephen Emmott from his recent book Ten Billion
The only solution left to us is to change our behaviour, radically and globally, on every level. In short, we urgently need to consume less. A lot less. Radically less. And we need to conserve more. A lot more.
So, it seems likely that in 500 years time just as our history books look back on Henry VIII they'll be looking back on us. They'll live in a world where there are far fewer native species, where much of the world is barely habitable and where extreme weather is taken for granted. Assuming that there are still some functioning societies, the history books of the future will probably regard us with despair. "They knew that if they set fire to all those fossil fuels it would bring about chaos and destruction but they couldn't manage to do anything about it". It'll be a tale of short sighted greed in a grab what you can world that didn't appear to give a damn about the future, about them.
Apart from the entirely predictable stuff about mass extinctions and climate change there's one other prediction that I'm prepared to make. That's that one the images in the history books of the future will be a visual representation of pointless self destruction. Traffic and smog masks.
Andy,
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Although I agree with what you say, I'm not convinced people will look back and blame us for "opportunities missed", any more than we blame our current situation on the religious wars of the 17th century. If I'm honest, I'm also not sure how much I really care what people lucky enough to be alive in 500 years will think of me and my choices.
I'm afraid I'm a bit of an optimist, where humanity is concerned. On the evidence so far, life in 500 years is going to be bloody brilliant, and I envy them. We're surely just a few major technological breakthroughs away from a better, cleaner planet. You must know those dire predictions of unmanageable quantities of horse dung in our streets, made in the 19th century? Based on the best evidence, and extrapolating current trends, that made perfect sense. True, car exhaust is worse than horse dung, but I'd bet that our predictions of doom are wrong, too.
Humans are morally bankrupt creatures, collectively and individually, but we have an incredible talent for innovation (and, crucially, intolerance) when it comes to our creature comforts. I do not believe that any society will live with smog and poisoned water for any longer than it has to. I'm told Manchester is quite liveable, these days...
I also think that you're wrong about the failure of the green message. The seed has been planted where it matters -- that's why those technological breakthroughs will happen.
[gets off soapbox]
Mike
Mike
ReplyDeleteAnd I agree with what you say too. I actually edited out a phrase in the final paragraph which referred to "this part of our story" and, on re-reading, the bit about despair is over the top.
I'm only pessimistic about our ability to stop the mass extinction, maintain agricultural production in the face of drought and soil erosion and cope with large numbers of climate refugees. About everything else, call me an optimist.
One of Iain M Banks' eras in the Culture series was an age of waste. I don't doubt our resilience nor our ability to make a dreadful mess along the way.
There are about 30,000 premature deaths a year in the UK from particulate pollution, mainly from Diesel engines. Despite appearances the centre of Manchester is still swimming in crap.
Hi, I always enjoy reading your blogs. I assume Mike is an economist. Economic theory assumes that just enough money needs to be invested to solve a problem. As a physicist I think a limited planet cannot bear an unlimited consumption. In history the problems could be solved by exporting the problem to other countries and other continents. Our pollution has been exported to China where the heavy steel production happens now. If we would consider the exported pollution we could not praise ourself of reducing carbon emissions in Europe. We exported famines to Latin America and Africa where the soy beans for our meat production comes from. But contrary to earlier centuries we do not have another continent anymore to export problems to. We reached a global scale. And the promises of decoupling growth never came true. the truth is economic theory does not have a blueprint for a shrinking economy. And I know why: we need economic growth to allow rich people getting richer and maintain the poverty of the masses. Shrinking economy leads inevitably to more poverty and for alleviating this the rich need to share. Obviously nobody wants to share. We will only find a solution for our environmental problems if we develop an economic theory for a shrinking economy where the rich voluntarily share (or it will end up in socialism like we had before and don t want to have again). I cannot see an economic theory that fulfills these conditions and so, I am afraid, I have to be pessimistic, just due to pure logic.
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