THE END OF NATURE WITHOUT AS THE END OF NATURE WITHIN
When human empathy ends, civilisation declines and falls. The warm, affective ties that bind individuals to each other start to thin and then finally snap. Individuals withdraw into immediate, private concerns, the public realm is emptied of meaning and content. There is a breakdown in social affinity. Individuals lose their concern for others, all go to the wall, captives of external, amoral forces much bigger than themselves. ‘There is no such thing as society’, claimed Margaret Thatcher. That statement of individualist liberalism was also a prediction that powerful forces sought to fulfil. What liberalism sees as individual freedom is realised as a universal antagonism and apathy in which individuals see each other as competitors rather than cooperators, rivals for scarce resources, enemies. It’s the old Hobbesian vision of the war of all against all, each against all, and each against himself or herself. Except that Hobbes used this miserable, mean psychology to justify rule by the strong state. Make no mistake, this liberal atomism is based upon not just the assumption of material scarcity, but of psychological scarcity. Human beings, as Aristotle argued, are social animals. We need each other in order to be ourselves. Separated from each other, the individual retreats into his or her own ego, the ego becomes a prison, where the individual withers and dies. Thatcher’s statement ‘there is no such thing as society’ projected a dystopian future which is implicit in liberalism as such. Civilisation will collapse through the subversion of the social units which bond individuals together. If socialists no longer have sufficient nous, nerve and numbers for the fight, it will be left to genuine conservatives to see off the abomination of individualism, putting an end to the repressing, incarcerating licence of egoism.
Too strong a statement? The anarchy of individualism is covering the corporate violation of the planet, stripping the world of its biosphere. Moral codes and social practices, cultural resources that have taken centuries to evolve, weaken and collapse, to be replaced with organised barbarism – lifeboat ethics – which decides who shall live and who shall die, followed by the final descent into chaotic, random murder. Whilst scientists have long sounded the alarm concerning ecosystems and species under threat, we have been repeatedly told that human beings are so much more important than …. birds, bees, coral reefs and trees. Taken to its logical conclusion, there will be nothing left but human beings. There will be no nature left, nothing left to exploit, nothing useable. So human beings will have no option but to shark on each other.
Whilst this is an unrealistic scenario, it works well as a thought experiment, insofar as it encourages to identify the inherent ecological stupidity of the concept of human uniqueness. That concept has driven us to create a technosphere beyond the biosphere. A remarkable achievement, no doubt, but it has also fostered a technological hubris that blinds us to our dependence on natural life support system. We are over-impressed by our achievements, failing to realise that civilisation has been erected on the thinnest biospheric material. Instead of respecting planetary boundaries – biodiversity, climate system, nitrogen, land and pedosphere, freshwater and oceans, ozone layer – we act as if they didn’t exist. The attack on nature without is linked to the attack on nature within.
The Love Embrace of the Universe 1949 Frida Kahlo
Worlds within worlds, the human being as a microcosm within the macrocosm. There is a direct connection between the nature we experience without and our nature within. Any damage to the one, is damage to the other. After millennia of separation, we need to re-integrate nature within and nature without.
Landscape with Two Figures 1908 Picasso
There was a film from the early 1970’s, Soylent Green. It starred Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson and depicted the future world as an ecological wasteland. In the film, Heston discovers the awful truth that the food source upon which the population depends, the ‘soylent green’ of the title, is people.
This is the concept of human uniqueness taken to extremes – that’s what happens when the only useable natural resource left is people.
It in light of this question that I read a UN report on the state of the planet, singling out production for close scrutiny. The improvement of crop production over the past 20 years (from 1.8 tonnes per hectare in the 1980s to 2.5 tonnes today) has not kept up with population. It is estimated that by 2050 the global population will stand at 9 billion. To succeed in the task of feeding this population whilst realising the millennium development goal of halving the proportion of hungry people demands a doubling of world food production. Yet the UN report states that "World cereal production per person peaked in the 1980s, and has since slowly decreased".
Without reductions in waste, overeating and meat consumption, total demand for cereal crops is likely to rise to three times the current level.
The evidence contained in the UN report is not auspicious. A major limiting factor is water. "Meeting the millennium development goal on hunger will require doubling of water use by crops by 2050." As though the resource of water is in abundance. Anything but. Water is scarce and getting scarcer. "Water scarcity is already acute in many regions, and farming already takes the lion's share of water withdrawn from streams and groundwater." Some ten per cent of the world's major rivers no longer reach the sea all year round. "If present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two-thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress."
Two contributory factors to water shortage are wastage and deforestation. There is a need to curtail deforestation and engage in schemes for reforestation, a familiar message that bears repetition. However, the biggest cause of the droughts to come is climate change. The places which need water the most will suffer the greatest declines in rainfall. Without significant reductions in carbon emissions, there is going to be a major crisis in food supply. It is easy to see social conflict and collapse as a result. Without the necessary changes in the way we conduct our interchange with the planet, it is hard to see how the siren voices of those proposing GM food can be resisted. Food production will remain under the control of the very commercial forces driving ecological destruction, controlling the people. It’s the vision of Soylent Green. Better to make the changes necessary to avoid such a society. GM food is a dodge, keeping in place the very forces that need to be removed. GM food changes nothing, just buys a little more space before the inevitable. It is estimated that half of the world's species could be eliminated as a result of climate change. These problems are interlinked and cannot be solved in piecemeal fashion. To solve the problem of feeding the world by a technological dodge does nothing to alter the loss of biodiversity, a loss which, sooner or later, will damage human health and well-being. Some 25 primate species are on the brink of extinction. Jared Diamond has written a book about the human species entitled The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (Jared Diamond 2002 Vintage). Human beings may well be the last ape standing, but they will not stand for long. The concept of human uniqueness is a delusion, an unwarranted self-importance assumed by the naked ape. Human beings are a part of nature, not above nature, and the species will fall with nature. Already, there is evidence that carbon is being released from its biological repositories, well ahead of schedule.
That’s the problem with predictions. Too far in the distance, people postpone necessary changes in behaviour; too close on the horizon, too late to do anything. And when the planet is on the move, there is nothing we can do but react. What remains of civilisation will be nothing more than a rescue squad living from day to day. At present, there is paralysis, as each watches and waits for others to make a move. So no-one budges. There is an unconscious assumption that if things really were so bad, then surely someone somewhere would being doing something. No-one is doing anything, so things can’t be so bad, so everyone carries on doing nothing. The reasoning is symmetrical. Everyone thinks and acts the same way, everyone waits for someone else to take the initiative, nothing moves except the planet. And the planet is most certainly moving fast now.
In a telephone call to Stewart Brand, James Lovelock gave this pessimistic analysis. "The year 2040 is when the IPCC is estimating that Europe, America, and China become uninhabitable for the growth of food. They're grossly underestimating the rate of temperature rise, so that 2040 may be 2025. People don't realize how little time we've got. The planet really is on the move."
Lovelock continued: "I don't think there's much doubt at all now amongst those few of us that have worked on the problem, that the system is in the course of moving to its stable hot state, which is about 5 degrees Celsius globally higher than now.”
Lovelock cites evidence from 55 million years ago. “The Arctic ocean temperature was about 23° Celsius [73.4° F]—crocodiles swam around in it. The whole damn planet was tropical, probably. And will be again, if it goes on the way it's going. The equatorial regions were a hell of a lot drier than they are now. You see that already happening."
When asked what the human carrying capacity in that hotter, stable Earth would be, Lovelock responded. "Oh, I think it's less than a billion," he said. "It will be too hot for things to grow." And it seems that, for Lovelock, little can be done: "The earth will continue to move to its hot state almost regardless of what we do. Peter Cox at the Hadley Centre in our country has done some very careful analysis on how little CO2 is needed to start the automatic jump from the cool to the hot state, and it's an astonishingly and worryingly small quantity. He probably doesn't want to be quoted. It turns out to be about a quarter of a gigaton of carbon per year. Now that compares with the eight gigatons that we're actually emitting to the atmosphere. So you'd have to cut back below that level to keep it stable, and you wouldn't succeed if it's already on course up towards its hot state. You're not going to turn it back." (Lovelock quoted in Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline 2009:11).
That’s how a civilisation ends. There is a loss of confidence, a loss of hope, a loss of vision – there is no sense of any future as anything other than the present, certainly no sense of the future as anything better than the present. At least Lovelock’s perspective exposes the ‘progress’ we have been brainwashed and trained and cajoled into pursuing as the plainest of delusions. But his view is bleak, pessimistic and paralysing. Greens argue for the transition to a liveable habitat for all on Earth. For Lovelock this is also a delusion. We can rearrange the deckchairs as much as we like, but the ship is still going down.
One almost feels like cheering Matt Ridley and The Economist for reminding us that long-term trends are actually good and that we can have hope for the future. Almost, but not quite. Ridley is in complete denial of the ecological constraints. And that completely undermines his long term vision. The problem is that the neo-liberal economics espoused by the likes of Ridley are certain to ensure the misuse our technological capacity and deprive us of that future. Nevertheless, that capacity exists and gives us alternatives.
Governments may be an easy target, but there is a reason for that – instead of leadership on the issue, they wheedle their way round problems with half-hearted measures that go off half-cock, making problems twice as bad at twice the cost. There is a need for government to create the energy infrastructure that shifts us to a low carbon future. Instead, the Labour government promoted policies in the key energy sectors - aviation, transport, power generation, house building, coal mining, oil exploration – that could only increase carbon emissions.
It’s a dodge. It has all of the Labour Party’s hallmark cowardice written over it. It would seem that Labour is seeking to reconcile that energy policy with its commitment to cut emissions by 60% by carbon trading. It’s all in the small print, the natural habit of the small minded and chicken hearted. Lacking the wit to achieve a 60% cut in the UK, the Labour government plans to pay other countries to do it on our behalf. Leaving aside the moral hypocrisy and political cowardice of the approach – using money to get others to do what we lack the courage to do – the figures just don’t and won’t add up. The kind of cuts in emissions that are required to halt global heating are substantial. The idea of carbon trading implies that the problem is a small one. The evidence is that if we are to have any chance of preventing runaway climate change, the greater part of the world's carbon emissions must be cut. The world’s richest economies are also the biggest emitters – they cannot trade their emissions with the world’s smaller emitters. Further, all nations are obligated to reduce their emissions, the scope for carbon trading is small and narrowing as every day passes. The idea of buying credits is not just immoral, it’s financial lunacy. Ultimately, we will have to buy credits from the moon. The solution is clear – the reduction of carbon emissions in each and every country is the only way to prevent runaway climate change. Everything else is a dodge.
Which brings us back to the atomisation of society into wanting, desiring, rapacious little egos. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists tell us that the principal cause of the enlarged human brain capacity was social proximity. The brain is wired for connectivity and responds to communication and interaction. Empathy is part of this. The collapse of human empathy and sociability will bring about the collapse of civilisation. Rather than make an intelligent, courageous stand and do the right thing, we see government and business proposing little more than dodges. This political and moral evasion is also grounded in an economic system that panders to individual wants, desires and impulses. The word politics derives from the ancient Greek polites, meaning those interested in public affairs. The antonym is idiotes, which means those interested only in private affairs. We do not have a democracy, in which individuals join together for a common purpose, but an idiocracy in which individuals pursue their wants as they see fit. We can blame government and business, but they will claim that they are serving the voters and the consumers – the idiotes. Brendan O'Neill of Spiked, one of those toadstools that have sprung up out of the putrefying corpse of Living Marxism, thinks environmentalists are just prudes attempting to stop individuals enjoying themselves. 'Stupid, feckless, greedy: that's you, that is', he wrote (Spiked, 16 March 2009). No, that’s all of us. It is hardly a revelation to say that human nature comprises both high and low roads, Jekyll and Hyde characters. Plato’s tripartite theory of the soul comprised reason, appetite and desire. Freud wrote of the Superego, Ego and Id. The idea that human beings can be chained to natural necessity by desire forms for bedrock of the Kantian moral system. Human beings most certainly have the capacity to be stupid, feckless and greedy, and the history books prove that they are more than willing to exercise that capacity to the full. The greatest minds have argued for the development of a long range thinking capacity for the common good. The idea can be found in Bronowski, John von Neumann, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, in the contemporary works of James Lovelock and EO Wilson.
The crude libertarianism of the contemporary political and economic system is leading us not to freedom but to destruction, a case of the blind leading the blind, something seen many times before. We can call it for what it is – idiotic.
The modern economy must keep growing and must keep selling, so individuals are addressed as consumers who are encouraged to buy more and buy more often, travel further and more often, drive faster and more often, build bigger and higher and wider. We have a political and economic system that panders to the self-seeking proclivities of pampered individuals. That system is irredeemably biased towards the individual as an ego without social ties and affinities, as against the holistic conceptions of human sociability and biospheric well-being.
A study from Loughborough University entitled Propensity to Fly indicates that Britons have little appetite for reducing their carbon footprint by reducing the number of flights they took each year. The research shows that the overwhelming majority of people would sooner cut energy at home than go without flying for a year. While 88% of participants were willing or very willing to "reduce how much energy I use in my home throughout the year", a mere 26% gave the same response when asked if they would "not fly in the next 12 months".
Such individuals care little for others on the planet, even in their own society; they care nothing for future generations. They are small people, so it is futile to demand anything substantial from them. The production of too many useful things produces too many useless people, Karl Marx wrote in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. John Stuart Mill feared that the growth of the state would diminish human independence and freedom. At then end of On Liberty, Mill writes:
The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.
The great irony is that it’s not the state that has been the principal agency in the diminution of the individual but the capital economy and the constant, relentless appeal to individual wants and desires in the world of politics and advertisement. Consumer capitalism has issued in what Benjamin Barber describes as infantilism. (Consumed Benjamin Barber 2007 WW Norton). There’s only one thing to say to those who identify this licence as liberty – grow up.
An atomistic society of free individuals is nothing more than a universal antagonism generating a universal apathy. Well, society is going, and with it the commons and notions of the common good. The sense of a shared moral fabric will go, along with age old norms and codes. The biosphere will be the next to go. Nothing will remain but narrow little egos. Max Weber predicted an era of convulsive self-importance, an age of nullity. It’s already here, visible in the hardening of hearts, in the militant assertion of wants and desires, in the winnowing away of sociability and empathy, in the closing down of social concern, in the militarization of urban surfaces. This is apparent in the societies of the wealthiest economies.
The world is suffering not merely from an economic recession but from a psychic recession. I have long argued that before the eco-catastrophe as a result of climate change hits, societies will have already fallen as a result of moral implosion. If this is true, then we will not have to wait for the heatwaves, the droughts, the rains and the floods, the deforestation – the retreat of nature without will be a consequence of the withering and the dying of the nature within. Each will feed upon and reinforce the other.