Fuck your apocalypse
Between denial and despair, a better climate change story
There’s an article doing the rounds this week called The Uninhabitable Earth which has been described, not without basis, as apocalypse porn. It pissed a lot of people off on my social feeds and elicited responses from climate scientist Michael Mann to the socialist magazine Jacobin. The traditional liberal “climate change communictors” responded in chorus with a question:
It pissed me off too, but for some different reasons. Here’s why.
Yes, the situation we find ourselves in is far worse than we think and maybe worse than we can imagine even in fiction. Homo sapiens have never lived in a world with this much carbon in the atmosphere. And we’re just getting started. It will deteriorate far faster than predicted.
And yes, most of the populations in the global North are in a state of near total denial about this. If you’re reading this chances are everyone you know is in denial about this. I’m in denial about this.
And yes, the actions offered by our governments amount to “too little too late” no matter how they are dressed up. The pledges to the Paris Agreement, if actually fulfilled, will still result in upwards of 3 °C warming. Never mind that the finance needed to do even this is in the region of tens of trillions of dollars while the finance actually on offer is in the tens of millions.
And yes, the promise of technological salvation delivered via mystical “market forces” is complete nonsense. If ever there were a problem capitalism is ill-equipped to deal with, it’s the question of justice at the heart of climate change
Yes, that may all be true. And that should make you want to put your head in the oven. But what is the point of saying that — and nothing more?
Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades. Communities facing the impacts of drought, flood, fire, and storm have been sounding the alarm. Some have even experienced the apocalypse before.
And yet the world has not accepted defeat.
For the past year, I’ve been part of a small team writing about the reality of climate change as experienced by people today — not 2050 or 2100. We are trying to burst the bubble of denial that engulfs many including in the climate movement itself. We believe in the need to tell the truth about the crisis, even if nobody wants to read it. And that truth is not just unpalatable, it is digusting.
But more importantly we have been trying to burst the bubble of doom.
Our bulletins have tried to do this by showing the reality of resistance around the world. In doing so I have learnt that communities on the frontlines — those who live in what Naomi Klein termed “sacrifice zones” — have not thrown in the towel or thrown their hands up in a climatic “hah! We are fucked!”
Instead, they have at every stage of this apocalypse we are living in decided that their lives are worth fighting for. That their forests, rivers, and special places are worth protecting. That even though closing one pipeline or coal mine won’t avert climate chaos they have to be fought nonetheless
I think that’s instructive.
The majority of the back and forth doom/not doom articles ignore that. And that’s what pissed me off.
Because what good is our analysis, what is the point of our writing, if we can’t offer anything else? If we can’t contribute to transforming the world? It speaks to a poverty of the imagination if we cannot even see past our nihilism to ideas about how we might possibly fight and win.
“Ordinary” people are fighting for life all around the world. They always have and they always will. Some have sacrificed everything for this struggle, their deaths like their agency going unnoticed in the annals of any New York publication.
Deniers, you can keep your opinions to yourselves. Doomsayers, you can keep your apocalypse. I’ll keep my belief that another world is possible and worth fighting for.
