Gentle Decline 1/34: Hope & Humanity
Hello. As I start writing this issue, it's seven in the morning and I've been awake for an hour. I'm recovering from a (fairly minor) operation, and the painkillers aren't quite covering right now, so I'm a little less even-tempered than usual. And who among us can claim to be even-tempered at the moment? This issue is more a stream of consciousness than anything coherent, because I'm feeling a need to get some words out into the world, and hopefully they'll make some sense. But if it has a theme, it's about hope and the need for hope.
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Someone asked recently if I didn't get tired of staring climate crisis and its outcomes straight in the face all the time. I absolutely do, but that doesn't mean I can stop; doesn't mean that anyone can stop. But the thing about it is that I am hopeful. I have certain things I am resigned to; temperatures will rise, sea level will follow, and conservatives will continue to deny anything even remotely inconvenient outside of their own immediate personal horizon, while being around half the world's population. Within those constraints, though, I see humans doing good things, and being generous to one another, and getting on with making what preparations they can.
The US West Coast fires are terrifying. Those orange skies. I know more people in the affected areas than I did for the Australian bushfires with which we started 2020, and the landscapes are more familiar, so they hit that bit harder. And most other effects of climate crisis you can walk away from; you need to run from the fires, and sometimes run pretty fast. It's hard to be generous when you're running, and the fire isn't even like a bear that will be happy to catch the slowest runner. And at the same time, there are people out there offering lifts and transport to those who don't have it, going back into the dangerous areas to get out more people, and so on.
Other situations are less viscerally terrifying, but still need to be squarely looked at. The US is run by someone who, if you had to define the opposite of generous, you'd be hard put to beat. And he has already indicated that, in line with his usual regard for rules, that if he isn't re-elected in the autumn, he might not give up the throne anyway. Or he might declare that this reign didn't count, and his limit of two starts with the next one. The idea that the people of the US might put him back in power is head-wrecking; the idea that a significant proportion of them want to do so is horrifying. There have been a few articles recently from relatively straight-laced academics pointing out that the US is on the verge of civil breakdown, insurgency, or even civil war, and from outside, that doesn't look unrealistic. A number of people I know moved to the US in the last decade or so; I told them they were mad then, and I think they're completely insane not to get out of there now. But the experiences they're having, as white people with Irish and Australian accents whose income is from big tech companies, don't reflect the broader reality of American experience. I really hope it doesn't catch up with them; I rather fear it will.
Closer to home, and less... insane, for what it's worth, the UK government are also ignoring rules to go their own way on Brexit, which is surfacing from the murk of 2020 like a budget shark in the cesspool. I'm not surprised by their breaking the law - or proposing to do so - because the UK, or specifically Britain, has held since time immemorial that the rules don't apply to them unless they feel like it. The sun, for quite some time, never set on that attitude. The Tories are, of course, the epitome of this approach, and Johnson is very much a Tory through and through, which is to say he's a selfish asshole. There was a group, or page, or something on Facebook for quite some time called "Nobody Likes A Tory", and, y'know...
Brexit is, whatever way it actually happens, going to be a disaster. I've talked about stockpiling food and other supplies for it before, and while my gradualist understanding of history prevents me from saying outright that it's going to be a second-world country within a decade, that's not implausible. That's going to have knock-on effects here in Ireland, because we can't really avoid the sucking whirlpool across the sea, and indeed, some bits of it are right there with a land border. I'm also pretty fatalistic about environmental concerns post-Brexit; I suspect that some segments of industry - the ones that haven't vacated in the face of the chaos - will not be regulated nearly as much as they are now, and will respond as capitalism dictates. Which is to say they'll pollute and emit and generally make a mess.
Basically, the UK is going to bring an artificial pre-cursor of the future down on itself, and the conditions there - possible food shortages, uncertainty about the future, difficulty in travelling far, multi-nationals pulling out, industries shutting down - will be a preview of the rest of the world in a few more decades.
But I see hope in this too. The UK has a long history of making things work. I'm not talking about Blitz spirit here; that's mostly a post-war invention, and if you look at the contemporary writing of the time, you'll see plenty of whining and grousing and looting and meanness. I'm talking about the hundreds and hundreds of allotments you can see from train windows all over the country, but particularly in the North; the fried chicken shops that take the place of local pubs for those who don't drink in South London; the brewing co-ops in ex-industrial spots; the squat bookshops in Glasgow, and punk as a whole concept, to pick out a few bits and pieces. I think the UK is going to be very strange over the next decade, and while I think it's going to be painful for many people, I also think there are going to be good things coming out of it; new resilience that the rest of the world can learn from.
Speaking of, I'm not the only one deploying fiction in aid of understanding. You can now read about Leeside, a US climate haven in the year 2057. I find it interesting that Amanda Shendruk's creation here also sits around the 40-years-out area; it seems to be a sort of threshold in thinking where we reckon it's enough time to make a difference, and not enough time to become completely unpredictable. Give the capability of someone in 1980 to predict the world now, I think that's an illusion in real terms. But I also think it's really important to have this kind of fiction, so that there is some sort of path visible.
This is one of the reasons for which I favour the approach of coming up with an idea, any idea, with which to deal with a situation; when there is no plan, people just despair. Once there is a plan, they can call it stupid and say what's better, but until there's something, they can't see anything. Fiction gives something to push back against. Hopeful fiction - not utopian, just not dystopian - also gets to set a tone.
Venkatesh Rao, who is one of my very favourite writers in the world, has a piece here about the fires on the US West Coast and some of the effects of climate crisis he's thinking about. In particular, here's a fine paragraph which parallels my thinking:
It increasingly doesn’t matter whether climate action failure is driven by incompetence or malice. It increasingly doesn’t matter whether climate change believers or skeptics are in charge. It increasingly doesn’t matter whether you blame corrupt elites or apathetic masses. The window of opportunity for larger-scale state action is closing faster than people realize, and the market is reacting more slowly than free marketers thought it would. Skeptic-believer debates are increasingly moot. All must respond to whatever they experience, wherever they live. Whether you believe your personal troubles are due to climate change, or something else, is increasingly irrelevant.
And also:
What other weird, science-fictional elements might become part of life in the climate-altered future? Will people be hoarding scuba gear in preparation for having to dive for submerged goodies in low-lying areas? Or buying kayaks to navigate annual street flooding? Or buying generators to ride out increasingly frequent blackouts?
It's possibly a sign of my depth in this thinking that these don't seem like science fiction to me, just common sense. But I'm seeing more and more people coming round to this way of thinking, and that cheers me immensely. Let's deal with this stuff.
Alright. That's probably enough for now. I'm going to get my Three Things put on some mugs and tshirts: Move Inland; Plant Food; Be Generous. (I've updated "grow potatoes" to "plant food", because while it was catchy, some audiences thought it was funny but not real). If you'd like that on something less obvious than mugs, tshirts and stickers, give me a shout.
This issue brought to you by a medicated haze, a new D&D game, cider-making, and autumn sunshine, which is so much nicer than the summer kind. I'm giving up on trying to say what the next issue will be in advance, but I'm taking requests - hit reply to make yours.
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