Gentle Decline 2/9: Letters & Links
In which the writer attempts to clear down the open tabs.
Hello. This issue, as befits this point in the year, is a somewhat chaotic assembly of bits and pieces; a veritable smorgasbord of links and opinions thereon, and a few stray opinions not attached to anything else. There’s probably something in here for everyone. Grab a coffee, or whatever you’re having, and prepare for some reading.
[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. You can support the newsletter via Patreon, Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise. The spotlighted product for this issue is the GD Light-Colour T-shirt, which is for those of us who don’t dress in black all the time. I mean, I try to wear colours. Some colours. A few colours. Green, ok, I wear green and black.]
[Illustrative of both summer and climate crisis, Watch The World Burn is a photograph by Niall Murphy of Edge Cases Photography. You can buy prints and other good stuff at https://www.edge-cases.photos/]
Alright. In further work on attacking capitalism, we have the following statement: “Green Investment is definitely not going to work”. This is a Guardian article, an interview with a fellow with the spectacular name of Tariq Fancy. Fancy used to work for BlackRock (an “investment institute”) and reckoned then that investment - as in, buying stocks, shares, etc. - in companies that were environmentally responsible was a way in which one could make money and do good for the environment. However, now:
Investors have a fiduciary duty to maximise returns to their clients and as long as there is money to be made in activities that contribute to global warming, no amount of rhetoric about the need for sustainable investing will change that, he believes.
In summary, if the company doesn’t make money, the investors go elsewhere, so the top priority is always going to be money. In that line, see Danone’s chief executive and chairman, Emmanuel Faber, being fired (effectively, like) for being too environmentally sensible and not seeking money in a blood-thirsty enough manner. This is really not surprising; investment and the expectation of a return on investment is what drives the need for growth at all levels of enterprise, and that’s one of the two fundamental aspects of capitalism that does damage (the other one is allowing people to play with the money and turn it into “more” money). It’s useful to see someone like Fancy saying this doesn’t work, but I suspect that a lot of companies and corporate entities are just going to greenwash harder.
In a bit of positive stuff (although I’m going to attempt to talk it down in a minute), I present Reasons for Hope, a newsletter about… what it says on the can, really. It’s a lovely idea. However, looking at a sample issue, I’m mostly seeing a lot of hope and not a lot of realism, mostly focused on taking anything that claims to be environmentally useful at face value. This includes the Vertical Field growing-stuff-in-shipping-containers thing which I was sceptical about before, and a miniature garden disguised as a coffee table, which cannot on any planet be an economically or environmentally viable object. But there may be some interesting material in there, and it’s definitively not doom and gloom.
An interview/review by Ingrid Burrington of Medium Design, a new book by Keller Easterling, contained a line that stood out to me.
“To be fair, a lot of books about capitalism do this; there’s plenty of cultural currency in being the most right about how bad things are.”
I dislike the attitude of “don’t bring me a problem unless you’re also bringing me a solution”, beloved of middle-managers across the world of business. But at the same time, standing back and shouting about problems without doing some thinking about solutions isn’t useful. At the very least, someone has to think about the solutions. The book is about messy, imperfect solutions to complex problems, and I am entirely down with that.
Apparently there’s a new field of academia called “supply studies”, which deals with the complexities and difficulties of supply chains. In some ways, this is like catnip for me; I’m fascinated by supply chains in any case, and when we’re seeing a global shipping crisis, that pretty much confirms the fragility I’ve been talking about for a while. Irritatingly, I can’t find anywhere in my own writing where I’ve explicitly said “supply chains are fragile and this is bad”, but there it is now.
I’m having some experience of that at one remove; one of my current clients has dealt with stock made in China for some years. This worked well for them because the stuff they were getting was of equal quality, and even allowing for shipping, cost about half to two-thirds as much as having it made in Europe. Now, they’re having serious issues getting the stuff from China to Europe at all. Even when the container ships are through the port congestion at the Chinese end, there are not-entirely-joking concerns about pirates, storms, and mutiny, and there’s equal or worse congestion at the European end of the journey. They’ve been looking at the possibilities of getting their shipping containers moved right across Eurasia by train, and are coming around to the idea that the European supplier, even with the ferocious costs, is a better idea than it used to be. A lot of my work at the moment is getting around the supply issues to let them sell the material they do have, while we wait on the rest to arrive. See also Bloomberg, “The World Economy Is Suddenly Running Low on Everything”.
For some excellent-looking further writing on supply chains - Supply Studies: Writing on our Global Assemblies of Assembly.
Grist has a fine article on new, eco-friendly tech in shipping. These include rotor sails, solar panels, towing kites, suction wings, and flapping underwater foils. Some of them look and sound bizarre, but I’m actually more optimistic about these than I am about a lot of tech. Sailing ships were incredibly efficient technology in their time, being able to cross the Atlantic in two weeks in good conditions. A container ship now isn’t all that much faster - they can make the journey in ten days in absolutely optimal conditions, but might take as much as three weeks. So if new materials and battery tech can be applied to these already well-optimised machines, it should be possible to make the journeys in equal or even better time without the use of fossil fuels.
Cadence Roundtable is an organisation that holds conversations about climate catastrophe issues “[b]eyond mitigation: because impacts are coming that it is too late to mitigate; beyond adaptation: because much will be lost that cannot adapt; beyond resilience: because assumptions of continuity are now in question.” They’ve an upcoming event on June 15; I’ve booked myself in for it, and if it’s interesting or useful, you can expect to hear more about it.
A lot of the wool produced in Ireland is immediately disposed of, because it’s not suitable for textile use. This has always seemed like madness to me, particularly given the level of subsidies paid out to sheep farmers. There’s now an effort under way to find other things to do with wool, courtesy of Pippa Hackett, Minister of State for Land Use and Biodiversity. The wheels of government grind slow on these things, but it’s something useful. I’m firmly of the opinion that we have more sheep in this country than are of use, mind; they’re primarily responsible for our bare hill and mountain areas, which by all rights should be forested. See also the lobbying efforts of meat companies to block climate-friendly action, and an excellent piece on how the farm subsidy model is broken.
The excellent Tales from the Dork Web has an issue about Solarpunk. Listing all the good stuff in it would essentially mean copying and pasting it here, so go read it instead.
Similarly, Yes Magazine has a piece on What An Ecological Civilisation Would Look Like. There’s a lot of theoretical and in-principle stuff there, and not much practical, but it is a broad view. It lines up pretty well with my thinking.
Orion Magazine has a piece on “dark ecology”, which covers the use of scythes, criticism of the techno-industrial system and the writings in this vein of, uh, Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. There’s been a dark streak appearing in eco-writing and climate fiction of late, though, acknowledging that if the current systems of government and finance continue to do violence to the world, then the world have have to resort to doing violence to them. See Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, for example. I’m not sure what to think about this, to be honest - on the one hand, I don’t want to engage in violence toward people (having thought about it, I think violence toward property is frequently justified). And on the other, there are plenty of people who know they’re doing harm, and keep doing it, and I think there’s a point past which they’re no longer entitled to a peaceful response. More thinking necessary.
There’s an excellent collection of eco-fiction at dragonfly.eco, if you need more food for thought.
Grist also has a US-focused consideration of where you could move to avoid the effects of climate change. The overall conclusion is that there are some places you could go - but that there are going to be plenty of people thinking the same way, and those places will become less optimal if there are a lot of people there. This is one area in which those of us in Europe have a kind of grim starting advantage; we don’t have the concept of “empty places” that Americans still seem to have. Everywhere in Europe, pretty much, is already inhabited by a good few people, and moving to avoid some effects means dealing with the people and communities where we’re going. We also have to consider the infrastructure we’re leaving behind, and the infrastructure in the places we’re going.
And finally, the concept of degrowth may be pretty important in the next few decades.
Alright. That feels like enough for now, and I’ve cleared out a lot of tabs in my browser, though by no means all. Time to hit publish.
This issue brought to you by some very sunny days, enthusiastic raspberry canes, and the discovery of the existence of hornbeam trees in all kinds of places I never looked before. I'm taking requests and questions. If you hit reply, you can send stuff straight to me!
Gentle Decline is on Twitter as @gentledecline, or you can visit gentledecline.org.
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