This Civilization is Finished

I've just finished reading This Civilization is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond by Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander, which is framed as a dialogue between the authors about how doomed we are.

Read opens with the three possibilities he sees, in order of likelihood:
1. This civilisation could collapse utterly and terminally,
2. it will manage to seed a future successor-civilisation, or
3. it will somehow manage to transform itself.

From there, the interlocutors expand on what this all really means, and how likely each is.  Both believe 3 is highly unlikely. They're clearly gunning for 2, and discuss how we might get there, what place technology might (or probably won't) have, and where that change can come from.

It's a short book which, although I don't agree with everything in its pages, nevertheless resonates with me a lot.

Consumerism and economic globalisation are going to end ... Consumer culture seems to be spreading a sort of spiritual malaise, an apathetic sadness of the soul, as more and more people discover that material things cannot satisfy the human craving for meaning ... If it is the case that human beings just don’t find mindless consumerism all that fulfilling, that seems to open up space for consuming less.

 More clearly, more relentlessly, much less pleasingly than the climate fiction I've been compulsively consuming, this book articulates all my worst doubts and fears about the world that will confront my daughters, and how I can prepare them for it.

We lie to our children every time we pretend that they can expect an ordinary career of their choice in an endlessly growing economy. We lie to them every time we present them with an image of a ‘typical’ farm full of happy outdoor pigs, cows, and hens. We lie to them every time we tell them we love them while giving them a new piece of plastic crap before turning our attention swiftly back to our mobile phones.

It accepts as given, almost without comment, the massive suffering that is to come. I'm not sure whether it's comforting or alarming to discover that I'm not alone in entertaining very dark thoughts about how many of us will still be around in a century or less, what our lives will be like, and what will have happened to the rest of us. And not only that I'm not alone, but that there's a whole literature backing up those dark thoughts, one that goes back decades.

Frankly, reading This Civilisation is Finished ruined my weekend. An otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon in our local park watching my daughters biking gleefully was transformed into something dreadfully reminiscent of Sarah Connor's nightmare in Terminator 2: An oblivious playground that she watches silent and helpless, unable to warn anyone of the impending apocalypse.

Perhaps the takeaway of this book is the same as Sarah's nightmare: "there is no fate"; what we do can shape the future.  It's not alarmist, but rather it's raising the alarm; a call to action.

Hopefully this message will sink in soon, so I can move beyond the dread and grief.

On the other hand, straws

As a counterpoint to my cheering of the Buenos Aires Straw Ban:

I was declined a straw at a restaurant this morning. The waitress had one in her apron. As she poured the water I said “excuse me miss can I have a straw?” She said “we can’t just give them out” and walked away.

— moe (@EhlersDanlosgrl) June 13, 2019

TLDR: moe was forced make a huge fuss in a public place, and to out herself as disabled, in order to get a straw. (Read the thread for the details, and the comments by environmental Twits to appreciate the full horror of their lack of humanity)

Yes, Plastic Straws Are Evil, because they're a single-use plastic contaminant and hundreds of millions are just handed out (and thus thrown out) every day.

But maybe a blanket ban would ignore the small but vulnerable percentage of people for whom a plastic drinking straw is a necessity or even just an invaluable factor in making life suck less.

Making them available on request, on a no-questions-asked basis, might be a more nuanced approach. That way, society will hemorrhage less plastic, but those with good reason to want one can just ask.

Graphs that freak me out

Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, prepared an animated spiral graph of global temperatures up to 2016 which leaves very little doubt about the tendency.  If only the ominous rings at 1.5º and 2º were asymptotes.

 

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Not only did Exxon know in the 80's that Global Warming would be a thing, their modelled predictions of it have been uncannily accurate so far. The scary part is the right half, with no orange dots yet.

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According to the Guardian, CO₂ levels grow inexorably, despite everything we're supposedly doing:

Striking a balance

I'm a bit hand-wring-y about my daughters' future, have you guessed?! And anxious to prepare them as best as I can for the world they'll be living in.

Although they've had some stuff at school about waste and the environment (watching the first half of Wall-E in the AV lab, etc.), neither, I suspect, knows what 'global warming' is, much less what it means for their lives.

I figure I'd be failing as a parent if they grew up ignorant of something as important and ubiquitous as this.  But I thought they need a gentle start; Ms 5 is a bit little to have to confront such things directly, and even Ms 8 has some unexpected sensitivities sometimes.

So I figured Sir David Attenborough would be a pretty good start on the road to appreciating the natural world, while giving a gentle introduction to it being in danger from humans.  So we've been watching an episode of Our Planet on Netflix each Saturday afternoon.

It's rated 7+, so should be ok for Ms. 8.  For Ms. 5's sake, I skim-watch each episode first, checking for rivers of lion-prey blood or anything else icky. We did, for example, skip the infamous falling-walrus episode.

Poor old overcrowded walruses!

This has been going pretty well, but I've been wondering whether it's too gentle an introduction.  Climate change and habitat loss is, of course, talked about, but not emphasised enough for them to really notice, I think.  And Attenborough's voice is too trustworthy and soothing to invoke a sense of Peril.

But then I saw this tweet:

As he's falling asleep last night 10 sighs and asks me, "Why did I have to be alive now, just when everything is dying?"

The emotional costs of climate change are going to be ASTRONOMICAL.

— Stephen Ross (@GhostProf) May 30, 2019

...and now I'm sure they've got plenty of time to hear of it, be vaguely aware of it, learn about it in secondary school, hear their parents mention it in passing over the years, etc.

It is an train-wreck, but a slow-moving one, which won't be prevented by traumatising young children.