In recent weeks and months, climate activists have called my climate work “an alternative climate story”. I feel that the term “alternative story” is now mostly utilized for “othering” uncomfortable opinions – demarcating an opinion from “my climate truth”. This blog clarifies how I relate my work to the climate crisis and the climate movement.
I don’t disagree with this science of global warming – in the contrary, I fear that the Earth’s climate has already overstepped irreversible tipping points (see Rockstroem & Attenborough). However, I do warn activists who take a position that “Fighting climate change is the most important thing in our time”. The reasons for my warning are complex: this position simplifies our world, it elevates one crisis above many other crisis that equally warrant our attention, it uses a war analogy that narrows our minds on carbon as a “pollutant”, and it triggers public reactions that are not useful or even dangerous. We cannot succeed in fighting the climate crisis – but we can actively embrace a different way of living, different forms of relating to one another and the living world, we can make decisions holistically. Fighting the drivers of the climate crisis means fighting ourselves and each other – a waste of life.
The four drivers of climate
Before going into detail, a quick definition of climate change. Climate variations fall into four categories:
- Recurring patterns of the weather, driven by random variability and semi-regular behaviour of the oceans. An example is the La Nina oscillation, which for many thousand years has lead to dry conditions in much of North America, roughly every seven years.
- Solar forcing describes the relationship between the Earth’s axis and its orbit around the sun. Regular wobbles of this orbit have triggered the ice ages since 2.4 million years. Chances are that, in 30 to 80 thousand years, the Earth’s axis and trajectory around the sun will favour another ice age.
- The biosphere’s climate regulation –vegetation’s impacts on reflectance of solar energy and the water cycle – can dramatically alter the climate on the ground. This is more pronounced during hot summer days – compare a parking lot to a forested park, a greenbelt with an urban centre, or a desert with a rainforest. Human land use decisions can heavily influence the biosphere’s climate regulation.
- Global warming – changes of the global climate that stem from greenhouse gas emissions into our atmosphere. Greenhouse gases are those molecules that trap heat at the Earth’s surface, and change the energy balance that way. The IPCC materials explain global warming at length and certainly better than I can.
Fallacies in our response to the climate crisis
In several ways, an absolutist position toward climate change has lead to “not useful” responses to the climate crisis:
- False solutions –If responses make us feel as if we address the problem but actually don’t;
- Solutions with collaterals – If responses create global warming benefits at the expense of other damages to the Earth system;
- Irresolvable discord – If despite years of negotiations and research, collective decisions fail to create impactful outcomes;
- Climate dominance (for lack of a better term) – If our “battle against climate change” subordinates all other struggles and takes our attention away from important life functions,
- Inequality drivers – If only wealthy individuals can comply with policies without addressing overall outcomes, but furthering social tension.
- Illusions of technological progress – If technological efficiencies trigger increases in consumption such that overall damage increases.
To explain these, let me give one example for each of these fallacies.
Plastic recycling is a false solution for our waste problem. For 30-40 years, countries around the world have addressed excessive waste production by promoting recycling of metals, paper, glass, and plastics. I grew up being taught to put more attention toward recycling in the 80s, and we continue to teach our children the same strategy to overcome waste. Unfortunately, it starts to tickle into the mainstream that plastic recycling is not feasible at scale. Worse, we have not paid attention to reducing the production of non-recyclable garbage. Consumer goods are still wrapped in plastic, designed for planned obsolescence and shorter lifetimes than ever, we use more disposable batteries than in the 80s, wrap candies in increased worry about hygiene and terrorism. Despite 4 decades of education in waste reduction, each one of us creates more garbage than 40 years ago. The focus on recycling was an inadequate approach to address waste, and plastic recycling was a false solution.
First-generation biofuels are a solution with unacceptable collateral damages to the biosphere and fail to reduce fossil fuel use. Today, we know that the most important biofuels – the conversion of corn into ethanol and palm oil into diesel –both create more harm than good. The hunger for biofuels has triggered an expansion of industrial agriculture, deforestation, degradation of soil health, loss of biodiversity, the drying of entire regions, and hunger. Furthermore, industrial agriculture comes along with land accumulation in many countries, especially in South America and Africa, exasperates inequality and social tension. Still, governments hang on to subsidizing biofuel s – a confluence of a short-sighted climate action narrative while serving agro-chemical industry interests.
The lengthiest struggle around an irresolvable discord is the overfishing of our oceans. Today, the oceans are so depleted in fish stock that fishing costs are rising steeply. Industry is developing technologies to chase down the last fish stocks in the less accessible part of the sea. By managing fishing for maximum reproduction, fish stocks could recover within only few years and create more harvest at cheaper fishing costs. Since WWII, global fishing negotiations were unable to achieve agreement on how to avoid overfishing. We understand how unregulated access to an open resource leads to collapse of the resource – a “prisoner’s dilemma”. But only a very strong coercive regime can convince fishers to stop fishing from the shared pool of fish. And the oceans lack this coercive regime. Political negotiations around greenhouse gas reductions have a similar structure: politicians continue to project the dream of retaining global warming at 1.5 C. But all of their economic and practical decisions taken in their home country – for their voters and financial supporters – contradict this goal. And the world lacks a coercive power that could change that[1].
Climate Dominance may be the most subliminal and dangerous path, because it distracts us from the broader functions that maintain a healthy society. On one hand, there are many concrete warnings that elevate Global Warming into a central concern in our decision making: The Greenland ice shield has likely already hit an irreversible Tipping Point, glaciers started to melt in a self-accelerating manner that will lead to the complete greening of this arctic island. This dooms the Inuit way of life. Meanwhile in the oceans, where most of the excess heat was absorbed, coral reefs are now overheating. These titans of biological productivity are dying and depriving the world of one of the most biodiverse and beautiful ecosystems, and also removing important spawning ground for many commercial fish species. So a sense of urgency is certainly warranted to address global warming. But urgency cannot mean “total warfare against global warming”, if this comes at the expense of maintaining basic life functions of our planet and society. The Club of Rome’s “Limit of growth” predict societal collapse even without global warming, because humankind’s resource use exceeds the Earth’s capacity along five dimensions. Global warming “merely” adds a sixth dimension that interacts with the others, so we have to find ways to address all dimensions simultaneously. Solutions that protect the climate while dimensions exceed boundaries are false solutions.
Inequality drivers are policies that can be attained by some, but not by others. For example, regulating individuals to invest into solar roofs, heat pumps, or electric vehicles requires significant capital expenses. Only those who own financial assets can afford these. Many policies are being discussed that favour technological purchases by the affluent classes. The outcomes are perverse: it creates realities where richer people live in extensive mansions with solar roofs and heat pumps and drive electric luxury vehicles, but still have larger climate footprints than their low-income neighbour in poorly insulated, electrically heated tiny homes with old pickup trucks. The affluent classes remain the major contributors to global warming, while the bureaucratic apparatus targets poorer citizens. Such situation will inevitably drive societies apart, undermine democracy, and enable populists and worse.
Computer were once introduced to reduce human labour time. In the West, few people work less now than 50 years ago. Similar illusions of technological efficiency are everywhere: our transport vehicles have better mileage, but we still burn more fuel per person because we commute longer, travel farther, drive more. In our homes, the energy use per square foot decreased – but our homes exploded in size. Highly technified application of chemical fertilizer reduce wastage per plant, but the use of animal manure on our crop fields is diminishing – we still produce more fertilizer than ever, while manure turned from a resource into a waste. Even if our per-person ecological footprint is reduced, population growth increases the overall impact. So technological innovation by itself is not helpful – it must be embedded in a use framework that actually reduces damages. Like we all experienced with computers, most technological efficiencies bring about new levels of consumerism.
Death by thousand Small Hammers
We have many examples how civilizations collapsed – The breakdown of food production causes starvation, disrupts trade routes, cut a society off the supply of vital goods, natural disasters add extra pressure, inequality triggers violence and disrupts food chains, plagues break out. In fact, most civilizations collapsed if multiple stressors simultaneously undermined a society’s “sense of normal”, driving societies into short-sighted governance (revolts, populism, centralist dictatorships). During times of instability, scarce resources were directed to maintaining power and fighting internal and external dissidents. These resources were no longer available to steward living systems or core infrastructure –societies in pre-collapse power struggles would neglect the education of youth, the tending to ecosystems and soils, health and hygiene, the caring for each other. The fight against a destabilizing issue thus becomes the direct cause of collapse, with far worse consequences than the issue in itself. I call this death by many little hammers, or a collapse of our resiliency.
If you are in a hurry, make a detour
So what am I proposing, in these interesting times that we live in? First of all, I am arguing against a rush into quick fixes to the climate crisis, because these simply don’t work or even create more damage than good. A Zen Buddhist saying is that “if you are in a hurry, it’s best to make a detour”, or “if you are late then walk slowly”.
- Our world certainly doesn’t have time for more false solutions (often technologies), nor can we afford to sacrifice the health of our soils, waterways, biodiversity, societal peace. The Russian-Ukraine war exposes how the “mentality of fighting” rationalizes otherwise irrational actions – since WWII, humanity has not wasted that many resources. Only slowly, climate advocates begin to see the ubiquity of false climate solutions (Rights of Nature, Global Justice) – electric vehicles, Geo-engineering, palm plantations for biodiesel, corn ethanol, increasing energy efficiency per area without addressing the increasing scale of luxury mansions, are all not reducing emissions. The list continues – unless we dramatically reduce the entire lifestyle of our world’s top earners, climate policies will fail their objective.
- Climate negotiations are unlikely to bring real political commitment globally – the climate problem arises because the atmosphere is an open access resource for carbon dioxide, just like the ocean is an open access resource for fishing and waste disposal. Humanity’s political systems have never achieved to protect global open access resources – so how can we expect that the first success is with our climate dilemma, which requires a total redesign of our societal fabric?
- Social movement needs success. In no other crisis are actions and impacts further apart than in global warming. It requires tremendous faith into the actions of others, trust into the goodwill of our governance regimes, skill and social cohesion, to mobilize the global community for a climate transition. Yet, our society’s consensus is currently falling apart – political parties congregate behind fake realities, each group behind their own dream world. Even progressive, pro-climate action groups have lost their grasp on reality and embrace dream solutions – net zero through non-existent technologies, carbon offsets for today’s emissions with future emission reductions. Realistically, our world is not in a condition to successfully coordinate the mitigation of fossil fuel emissions. By focusing all of our attention on fossil fuel emissions, we inevitably create a global sense of failure, doom, and lack of agency, while further pushing wedges into our societal cohesion. Social change needs to start with successes, build trust and agency.
- We cannot afford to give up other success stories. As Climate Change has become the dominant concern of all environmental movements, we are neglecting to maintain past successes. Pesticide use, nutrient runoff, the drying of entire landscapes, deforestation, economic inequality, human rights abuses, and even accomplishments around gender equality are simultaneously falling backwards. Corporate dominance of our food system is unprecedented, the organic movement is near collapse because eaters no longer recognize its merits. Local food hubs are going bankrupt, and our push for recycling cannot reduce waste fast enough compared to the rise in packaging of candies, vegetables, and other short-lived consumer goods. Biodiversity loss is at record high. While this is certainly not fault of the Climate movement, global warming diminishes all other efforts. It demoralizes, depresses, and diminishes the youth that we all depend on to carry the torch forward.
- Spirituality is at the root of the planetary crisis. Human spirituality can be described along three dimensions: relationships, values, and life purpose. Spirituality frames the meaning of our lives – our longing, our desires, our fears and our hopes. Much of Western societies either embraces a oversimplified, narcissistic understanding of a superior Christian truth, or dismisses the Christian narrative entirely. Yet, even our non-religious Western communities continue to structure their emotions around the Christian worldview: our shame, guilt, perceived need to change others, our compromised relationship with nature, our need to prove our worthiness and demonstrate success, our sense of scarcity and competition, the break between mind and body, our gender norms, the very idea of the nuclear family, our fear of death – are all remnants of our forefather’s Christianity that continue to structure how we think, feel, and relate to one another. Yet, in the face of the overpowering danger from climate change and the larger planetary crisis, only a strong spiritual footing can give us the strength to stand straight and, when the media predicts tomorrow’s apocalypse, gives us the faith to plant an orchard. Yet, nothing gives more hope than building such a long-term solution.
- Healthy spirituality needs practice and community. Learning how to parent a child is something we hold dear in human cultures. Every culture agrees that one person cannot raise 300 babies all at once – because we could not give them the care they need. The same is true with the living world, the planet. Somehow, our economic system makes it “rational” to farm thousands of acres – far more than we can truly care for. On our own farm, it took us 10 years to develop our perception to regenerate this land, learn the managerial and practical skills, and acquire the tools and infrastructure. Yes, some Prairie First Nations or aboriginal Australians cared for tens thousands of acres – by cautiously manipulating the landscape, by burning grassland so that the bison herds would follow them as the grasses re-emerge. These cultures had cautiously ingrained “care” into their entire culture though, through story telling, religious practices, community ceremony, and cultural norms. Are we practicing these skills at school?
True climate solutions
In short, every true climate solution also moves us forward along the other aspects of the planetary crisis – biodiversity loss, desertification, rising inequality, violence, and governance. Education and empowerment of women is one example of a true climate solution. The restoration of vibrant landscapes that produce food and host biodiversity simultaneously, and spiritual personal growth, are other examples. So are shifts in our cultural mindset that require less luxury signalling, less consumerism, and bring forth more mutual care, more respect toward each other and the living world. a A hammer can build a shelter or, if used for a different purpose, destroy that shelter. So let’s rebuild smart governance systems that direct our technological innovations toward decreasing the overall footprint. Let’s build local success stories that create a sense of agency in our community – YES WE CAN – and empowers us as an incoherent diverse bunch. For example, a local food distribution co-operative is currently struggling. Yet, farmers that don’t look eye to eye and disagree on COVID responses and almost anything politics, farmers who would not speak with each other in a bar, suddenly cooperate and problem-solve together, overcoming ideological trenches. This ability to problem-solve collaboratively is a true climate solution. Initiatives that enable regenerative livelihoods, celebrate low-impact lifestyles, and open zero-emission paths to happiness are true climate solutions.
Imagine that all of us would drop their competitive tendencies, their fears from perceiving scarcity. Instead, we’d seek happiness in practices of personal mastery that give us the feeling of flow – playing a violin or flute, juggling five balls, gardening for abundance and beauty, dancing tango like it’s the last day in our lives, cooking as if we catered our own wedding, using our hands to reunite our minds with our bodies – our need for consumerist assurances would wane. We could build sacred economies for us humans, and overcome our resource overuse effortlessly. We would rediscover the divinity in creation, in all forms of live including our own. We’d find satisfaction in the miracle that we live on this blue planet. It is the only blue planet that we know for certain in the entire universe.
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[1] This “coercive power” is not necessarily an centralist overlord or dictatorship; it could be a set of cultural norms that our communities embrace. For example, we could signal ‘being successful’ by how much land we regenerate into vibrant biosphere, rather than showcasing large vehicles or tidy our lawns… cultural norms are powerful in changing our behaviour!
I agree with this: “Let’s build local success stories that create a sense of agency in our community – YES WE CAN – and empowers us as an incoherent diverse bunch” I have an idea for one such initiative which would link, for example, your farm and ours. Contact me if you are interested.