ECOLOGICAL VIRTUE
2012
Stephen Emmott is head of computational science at Microsoft Research in Cambridge and professor of computational science at Oxford. He is currently touring the country giving a lecture on the future of life on Earth. Over the course of 75 minutes, Emmott slowly but constantly delivers facts and figures which, taken together, in their interconnection, become incontrovertible and frightening in their implications.
Taken as discrete facts, much of what Emmott says is familiar. What is most disconcerting is the way that these facts mesh to promise a future that is terrifying. Emmott spells out the facts and figures before us with a clarity, force and vigour which is compelling. Emmott describes with inescapable logic the destructive cycle of ecological destruction which follows from the simplest of facts. In 1800, the global population stood at 1 billion and 4 billion in 1980. We are now at 7 billion and will have reached 10 billion by the end of the twenty first century. An increased population means an increased demand for food, double what it is now by 2050. Food production accounts for 30% of greenhouse gases, which is more than manufacturing or transport. More food requires more land, particularly if the food demanded is meat. More land in production means fewer forests, which in turn means even more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which means an even more unstable climate, which means a less reliable agriculture - hence the current crop failure in the US.
And that’s only for starters. Emmott grinds on, relentlessly accumulating facts and establishing their connections. He turns next to the inexorable demands being made upon water. The UK eats 10bn burgers a year, each burger requiring 3,000 litres of water to make. A world population of 10 billion will need 960 new dams of the size of the world's largest in China's Three Gorges. 15,000 nuclear power stations, wind farms…. The world needs everything and more, and it still won’t be enough. Runaway climate change will have been preceded and caused by runaway human demands. Something will have to give.
The efforts of governments, both taken together and singularly, have been feeble.
Intergovernmental action has sought common agreement designed to restrict the rise in average global temperature to 2C, but an increasing number of scientists are producing research which suggests that a warming by 4C, and even as high as 6C, is becoming unavoidable.
If 6C is reached, Emmott argues, the world will become "a complete hellhole" riven by conflict, famine, flood and drought. Emmott points to the significant fact that, alongside the usual attendees at a climate change conference, there is now usually a detachment of the forward-looking military concerned with strategic questions of resources and control. The military cannot afford to be in denial of hard evidence, facts and trends.
So we come to the age old question of ‘What's to be done?’, a question that has been asked many times before in politics, and just as often ignored at the level of political practice.
Emmott is not an optimist. He addresses the solutions currently being offered by "the rational optimists", those who retain a touching faith in human inventiveness and who thus seek an engineering solution. Desalination plants, a new green revolution, seeding the oceans with iron filings to absorb more CO2, all the kinds of geo-engineering proposed in books like Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline (2009) and Mark Lynas’ The God Species. The great flaw of all such books is that they propose engineering solutions to what are social and political problems, problems with human demands on the environment and the way we arrange our technics. Emmott is clear that all such engineering ‘solutions’ threaten to produce as many problems as they solve.
For Emmott, the only genuine solution is behavioural change. We need to have far fewer children and reduce our consumption. And Emmott means by much less, not a little bit. Not that Emmott is claiming that the human race is capable of meeting the challenge. He is less concerned with wishful thinking with respect to what we will do to curb our desires and reduce our demands than with arguing what we will have to do in order to survive. It’s up to us whether we have the strength of character to control our exorbitant desires. Emmott, a rational pessimist, doesn’t think sufficient numbers of people have what it takes to change. If scientists produced evidence to show that a large asteroid were on course to hit the Earth by a certain date, then every government would marshal its resources to find ways of altering the asteroid's path or mitigating its damage. Governments and peoples find it easier to mobilise against an identifiable, external threat. But the problem facing us is not external, it is internal. The problem is not an asteroid, the problem is us. It’s the old Woody Allen line, I have seen the enemy, it is us.
The human race has to find within itself a solution to a problem that itself comes from within the species.
Despairing of a solution, Emmott asked one of his academic colleagues what he thought could be done. "Teach my son how to use a gun," came the response. Hence the increasing presence of the military at climate conferences.
"We're f****d," he says. And on that note the performance ends.
It’s time to live lightly on the land, reclaim the global commons and take no more than is required for the fulfilment of needs.
The Gleaning Field c1833 Samuel Palmer
Many whose interest is purely in the science of climate change probably miss the parallels here with Rudolf Bahro who, back in the early 1980’s, split with the Green Party for its reliance on little reformist measures within the ecologically destructive system, rather than concentrating upon what was really required, a fundamental transformation in the way of life. In ruling out an engineering solution and demanding a change in human behaviour, Emmott the scientist more or less repeats Bahro’s demands.
Back in 1982, Bahro rejected ‘realism’ as a series of compromises with the very political and economic system that is destroying the life support systems of the planet. For Bahro, the Green Realos are the dupes of a system, sustaining the illusion that the ecologically destructive impacts of the system are being addressed, whilst preserving the fundamentals of that destructive system intact. Bahro describes this environmental reformism as the "euthanasia as Green politics", as symbolized in the anti-pollution filters of the "eco-industrialists" and their "catalytic converters for the next boom in the car industry". Much more eco-engineering for a turbo-charged capitalism has followed since.
Bahro’s words could have been tagged on to Emmott’s lecture: "It is the time, not of reformists, but of a reformation, which has now commenced."
This demand entails a commitment to the building of a new civilisation. Bahro writes of "a change so deep that one must speak of a break with basic European patterns of behaviour", and "the building of a new psychology". Bahro argues that the fall of the Roman Empire is "the only event which can be compared in dimension with the present-day crisis of civilization". Bahro takes as his model and inspiration the communal monastic orders which emerged after the fall of Rome to found civilisation anew.
Before one dismisses Bahro’s ‘eco-monasticsm’ as hopelessly reactionary, it is worth emphasising its striking resemblance to the conclusions formed by the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre at the end of After Virtue. MacIntyre demands the ‘construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness… This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different —St. Benedict.’ (MacIntyre After Virtue 1983).
Now, MacIntyre has also been criticised as a nostalgic philosopher unable to identify alternative and progressive lines of development within modernity. If it is a reformation we need, and no mere reformism, then it will be achieved not through the resurrection of those residues of a lost past which continue to exist in the modern world but in the formation of new solidarities out of those aspects of modernity which point towards an alternative future. That was Marx’s solution, and it’s been a long time coming. It remains the most intellectually coherent and cogent theory of emancipation beyond modernity and its problems.
Failing that, I suspect Emmott is right.
And, continuing with the theme of reformation, I cannot help but think of the closing pages of Max Weber’s classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The concluding chapter is entitled ‘Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism’.
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.
Weber 1985:181
The asceticism of religious morality was replaced by the determinism of machine production, with material things acquiring an inexorable, existential power over the lives of their human creators. Weber never lived to see the day that asceticism came to be replaced with hedonism, itself a treadmill of endless production and consumption, determining human life until the earth has yielded its last piece of ‘free’ energy.
If capitalism was born out of the Protestant work ethic, it seems that Emmott is demanding that we recover that old asceticism as a condition of our survival, if not our salvation. Whether Emmott realises it or not, his argument for changed behaviour amounts to a demand for the abolition of capitalism, with all its material determinism.
Over one hundred years ago, Max Weber stated our current predicament very clearly:
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved." (Weber 1985:182).
A phoney world of phoney people is certainly a possibility. The world of capitalist technoscience is now talking of engineering the future. It will be a world fed by GM crops and powered by nuclear energy, power stations built on every field and coastline, a workforce of drones with neither the wit nor the inclination to get off the hedonistic treadmill. A life of the senses, with no heart and no soul and no spirit. An existence, certainly, but not a life. In the Politics, Aristotle argued that the point of human life is not to live but to live well. (Bk 3). ‘It is clear then that all men aim at happiness and the good life’ (Bk 7 To eu zen, 'to live well'. A few lines below, 'good life' = to zen kalos, 'to live finely'.) That’s a world of the flourishing of natural essences, not a world of engineering.
Emmott’s rather abrupt ending, after a relentless barrage of facts and figures, leaves us with the feeling that we must mend our ways to avoid eternal damnation, without quite knowing how we can go about, individually and collectively, effective the levels of material renunciation required for salvation.
We need a politics, and a collective politics at that, to have any hope. Individual lifestyle changes won’t do it, and behavioural changes on the scale required by Emmott imply that together we break out of the ‘iron cage’ of industrial capitalism and all its deterministic relations and imperatives.
It is the speed at which the seemingly distant future is arriving that is the truly terrifying thing. We are so used to hearing phrases like ‘window of opportunity’ that we are inclined to think that there is always time enough left to finally see the light. That time is disappearing fast. And once that nightmare future is in sight, the odds on human beings behaving rationally will become very long indeed.
Few people realised back in the 1960s how much the atmosphere's carbon content had been increasing since the industrial revolution, which you might argue following Weber was a byproduct of the Protestant Reformation and its calculating spirit. We need a new Reformation, one that values spirit and heart and ideals – what we used to call the soul – above material goods and things. Emmott is one in a long line of scientists who have given a petrified human race a wake-up call. There is a book out which argues that as the world has become more complex, so intelligence has increased. Maybe, to conclude on an optimistic note, the younger generation will see the possibilities of the new technics that other generations, seduced by false promises of material plenty, were simply unable to see. But it is as well to consider that here, in Stephen Emmott, is another scientist whose best work will fall on deaf ears, a well-researched soliloquy as the full price for our Faustian bargains comes to be demanded.
Must the owl of Minerva always fly too late to make a difference for the better in the world in which we live? We have the technics to secure the future for the generations to come. Have we the moral intelligence to use our technology wisely so as to preserve and enhance life?