The Curse of Kirkpatrick Sale
This manifesto published recently at Grist seeks to rewrite the climate activist playbook. Why do I feel it’s the prelude to a larger internecine struggle within the environmental movement?
Because there’s this growing belief among environmentalists that reversing the buildup of greenhouse gases is beyond our collective political, policy, and technical means. Forget about re-framing the global warming message, Adam D. Sacks, writes. It’s high time environmentalists “tell the truth” about humanity’s culturally malignant illness:
The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations. This should be no news flash, but the seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.
Yes, this all sounds familiar. So what does the author suggest, if we really want lick global warming and learn to live harmonically with nature?
We must leave behind 10,000 years of civilization; this may be the hardest collective task we’ve ever faced. It has given us the intoxicating power to create planetary changes in 200 years that under natural cycles require hundreds of thousands or millions of years””but none of the wisdom necessary to keep this Pandora’s Box tightly shut. We have to discover and re-discover other ways of living on earth.
And how do we do this in the era of increasing globalization? Obviously, shopping at your neighborhood farmer’s market will take you only so far, so Sacks says that
we will have to figure out how to live locally and sustainably. Living locally means we are able get everything we need within walking (or animal riding) distance.
Okay, if this means I have to stop taking the subway into Manhattan from my Brooklyn neighborhood, sign me up. (Then again, I’d have to find a new dentist. Damn!)
Seriously, there’s much to mock in this Back-to-the-Garden/anti-technology retread tract. There’s also enough in here for a year’s worth of George Will columns. He dines off this stuff.
Let me offer a constructive suggestion to Sacks and anyone else that seriously believes we need to hit the reset button on civilization. Don’t tell us, show us. That’s the first cardinal rule in story-telling, it should be the first cardinal rule for preachy environmentalists. Don’t tell, show.
So go ahead, show us how to do it. If you’re on to something good, I’m sure everyone will follow you down the yellow brick road.
There’s a book that “shows” Stormy Weather, 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change. It’s one of many, but this one’s quite good. Also check out my website, it’s got some good solutions for the UK market: http://www.ecochanges.co.uk. In the end we have to do with the know how and technology available which at the moment is far from perfect, but the world is waking up to our issues and it’s moving forwards. The problem is that dealing with eliminating fossil fuel is a very difficult task. It won’t be completed overnight, that’s for sure.
Keith, I think Adam Sacks *did* show us. His most important message was “Tell the truth” and that’s what his essay did. “Telling the truth” is a “doing.”
There are, for example, very few climate scientists telling us the truth. Most of them tell us about their little piece of the research pie, but never take the time or trouble to synthesize and explain the whole truth. Plus, the scientists made a deliberate decision at the end of the first IPCC meeting back in 1990 to not tell the whole truth, afraid that policymakers wouldn’t like it.
Certainly there’s not a single politician / government leader in a Western country who is telling us the whole truth. (Sometimes I wonder if they’re all waiting for the rest of us to pull off the daring mission of rescuing them all from the pockets of big corporations, where they’ve been imprisoned for decades.)
I don’t think anything near transformative enough will happen until the people are good and angry at their leaders. And that isn’t going to happen until people hear the truth — even if it’s a sad truth that they don’t want to hear. Indeed, how to get people to listen to the truth is just as big a challenge as getting the enviros, scientists and leaders to tell the truth in the first place. But tell it we must.
Julie
GreenHeart Education
Not Me!!!
I am all for them going back to the stone age.
But I WILL NOT follow.
To simply exist is no life.
I don’t think many humans would accept that without a Labotomy or heavy sedation. (Socialism in other words)
And they won’t force me either.
They all went nuts after they saw the first picture of the earth taken from space. As Mr. Sacks, called it this “little blue orb”, how quaint! BTW, Jim Hansen is an astronomer, not a climatologist. Amazing how they get away with all this nonsense. The keep saying 95% of scientists agree, but they can’t even give you a list of the IPCC scientists who agree and the only ones who speak are NOT scientists. The IPCC head is an engineer.
The loony enviros must live a lonely life and they are always those that are going to “save the world”….give me a break. Of course, it’s the world that needs saving from them. They always leave death and destruction in their wake….witness DDT ban which allowed millions to die.
Stop the baby-making. More humans are just more poison. What’s VHEMT’s slogan, something like … “May we live long and die out.” It’s the only thing that will save the planet and what’s left of its other species.
Here’s some truth, a new peer-reviewed paper by MIT Climatologist, R. Linzen states the IPCC has overestimated temp. increases by a factor of 6. Long wave radiation leaves earth’s atmosphere 6x faster than the IPCC estimated. Any and all efforts, even confirmed by the EPA, would only mitigate temps by a few thousandth of a degree.
One undisputed fact, verified by any agriculturist, doubling CO2 would increase crop production by a third. CO2 is a LIFE -substaining gas, not a pollutant. I will wager not one single so-called enviromentalist has ever bothered to read any contradictory evidence. That’s why all the name-calling because they know that if people ever decide to check for themselves, they will discover the truth! I know, because I bought into all this before I studied to the point that I could no longer deny that I was being lied to, big time.
Goldman Sachs will be one of the biggest benefactors of cap and trade as well as Chase and all the other big banks and GE….you know all the corporations that enviros hate…they all are greased to make billions off this whole trading of “air”. So much for fighting the big corps!
Looks like the Unabomber was ahead of his time!
Interesting collection of thoughts and junk. I’ll focus on one specific: gofer’s “undisputed fact” that CO2 enhances crop production. CO2 enhances SOME crop production and not others. For instance, poison ivy thrives on it. It’s not so helpful for many of the things we actually want. Meanwhile, it still causes global warming which will kill us off.
I’m with Adam Sacks. He may not have said anything new, but he said it well.
Gofer, I hope and pray you are right, but the wildfires in Greece, Canada & Australia, the thermokarst landscapes of Canada, Alaska, & Russia, the rapidly increasing melting of glaciers everywhere, including Antarctica, the shifts in seasons globally, the bubbling tundra and Arctic Ocean, the relentless destruction of rainforests, etc etc etc disagree with you. Time will tell.
Very interesting premise: You must be a chicken to smell a rotten egg. Is that really true?
The truth is that even a hypocrite, or a stopped clock, can be right.
And Al Gore is not a liar just because he rode in an airplane to present his “Inconvenient Truth,” and did not walk barefoot in a hair shirt.
The technical name for this stuff: straining at a gnat, while swallowing a camel.
Meanwhile, the Japanese and Europeans produce a dollar of their GDP using half the energy of the U.S. So saying Sacks’ point is an invitation to the stone age is yet another exaggeration.
Please, spare us the propaganda.
Shodo, so how long until you unplug your PC and get out there to your yurt in the country? Have you ever grown your own food and woven your own cloth from fibers grown in your little patch of ground? You enviro-wackos have no stinking clue how difficult life was before the industrial revolution. You’re all a bunch of spoiled pansies that have never had a tough day or a moment of hunger in your pathetic lives. Spare us the moralizing and get on with your personal de-industrialization. Go ahead and set an example for the rest of us “sinners.”
Keith,
I appreciate your position, but you seem to presuppose their *must* be a solution, we only have to look for it.
What I think Alex has pointed out, is that there is no real way to sustain a population of 6+ billion for any amount of time.
This is difficulty for us to comprehend, because we usually have a technological solution for everything.
Basically, we’ve been pinning our hopes on scientific breakthroughs, and those are simply not materializing. We’ve run out of time. Too little, too late.
I might have appreciated Adam Sacks post if he’d been practical. I think a declaration of failure isn’t useful to anyone, and its far to early to say we have failed. The most fundamental problem is OVERPOPULATION, and that will cause people to starve in the 3rd world. I agree that we may see very significant climate changes everywhere, but I do not think this at all implies the end of technological civilization. Technology and global trade are not dependent on fossil fuels. If you study history, you learn that all that started long before people began burning coal. Electricity is the same stuff, whether it comes from sun, wind, or a natural gas turbine. Electricity can be used to manufacture all the elements of technology, metals, plastics, semiconductors, etc. etc. We will only cease making these things for ourselves if we forget how. How much do you think the raw material in your mp3 player cost to make? If you doubled that cost, would you still own an mp3 player? I most certainly would, and even if I spent twice what I now spend on food, I’d still have plenty to eat. I raise all my own chickens, make milk from organic soybeans, and my husband bakes all of our bread from local organic whole wheat flour.
None of us knows how severe climate change will bet, but my husband just read a journal article which examined the probability space, which suggests the damping effect of the oceans will
prevent full-scale unstable feedbacks. We may have about 100 years to get our emissions under control. We should not give up yet!
Cheers,
Susanna