Jonathan Franzen may have seen the light but it’s not time to give up just yet
Maybe Franzen will get over it too, eventually, but at the moment he thinks we’re doomed, and all we can do is little things to slow the apocalypse down a bit, and relish the brief time we have left.
‘‘It’s fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to come,’’ he writes, ‘‘but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning.
Keep...trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes.’’
We really shouldn’t be surprised that he thinks like this.
Franzen’s Wikipedia entry (I take my research seriously) say that he was heavily influenced by Franz Kafka and Albert Camus, so stylish despair is his default setting.
But it’s not time yet to give up on the big things, like survival.
First of all, change your perspective and stop deploring the human race’s failings.
A million years ago, our ancestors were clever apes.
Even ten thousand years ago, they were all hunter-gatherers who had little time or motive to worry about the longer term.
Don’t write us off because we’re still not very good at it.
Now we’re in really deep trouble, and all our evolutionary baggage means that we’re still having difficulty in acting to avoid disasters that are only a decade or two ahead.
We may be able to rise above it when the crisis becomes present and palpable, but the procrastination, the disbelief and the delays were inevitable.
In fact, it’s a safe bet that if there are other intelligent species who have recently built high-energy civilisations – and there probably are, given 400 billion stars and two or three times as many planets in this galaxy alone – then they will doubtless be facing similar planetary crises, and having to deal with evolutionary baggage of their own. Any intelligent species is bound to have knuckle-dragging ancestors up its evolutionary tree.
So here we are, and it’s going to be tricky. We are almost certainly going to crash through 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere in less than 15 years, which in the natural course of events would take us up through +2 degrees C about a decade later. Welcome to the climate apocalypse.
Unlike Jonathan Franzen I do talk to climate scientists, and it’s hard to get them to say this on the record. They don’t want to sow panic.
But if you back them up against a wall and threaten them with a knife, most will admit they think going beyond 450 ppm is nearly inevitable now – mainly because human politics can’t change fast enough to stop it.
But what the climate scientists all know, and some think might save us, is that 450 ppm and +2degrees C are not indissolubly linked.
What we need is more time, and it is theoretically possible to hold the global temperature down while we work frantically first to get our emissions down, then eliminate them entirely, and finally draw down all of the excess CO2 that we have already put into the atmosphere.
There are several potential methods for doing this, all of them controversial. The leading proposal at the moment is injecting sulfur dioxide gas into the stratosphere. (No living things up there.)
That would reflect a small portion of incoming sunlight and keep the planet below +2degrees C and its attendant calamities for the time we need. There are no safe and painless courses left, but there are still choices to be made. The game is not over.
Reflection on an act of shocking brutality can take you to some unexpected places. For me, reflecting on where New Zealand, especially Canterbury, is six months on from the mosque massacres in March has taken me back decades, and to another continent.
I’m hugely grateful for the incisive contributions to the Stuff Opinion section since March of Donna Miles-Mojab and Lana Hart, particularly in the last week and a half.
I’m lucky enough to be the first person to read them once they’re filed and on my first read-through of Donna’s column last week, a line hit me in the heart and made me think ‘‘Yes!’’
"This is the promise of multiculturalism: the ability to interact and learn from other cultures in order to enrich our collective experience.’’
I haven’t always thought that way.
Columns like that usually invite letters, questioning their claims that multiculturalism is a good thing. Variations on the ‘‘Christchurch was a Church of England settlement and we’d like to keep it that way, even though it’s 169 years since the first four ships arrived’’ theme.
Though to be fair, some of those letters have also been responses to me arguing for what I still believe is a necessary change to the Crusaders’ name.
Lana’s column last Monday perfectly complemented Donna’s a few days earlier. She talked about the Contact Hypothesis, which ‘‘makes a simple claim: with more interaction with members of other groups, the rate of prejudice about that group drops’’.
Human relations, a subject in sharp relief in our neck of the woods since March, but in reality front and centre of global discourse for several years, because of the unfolding car crash of some of the worst examples in modern history.
The combined effect of those two columns took me back 10 time zones and about 40 years. I realised I’d been born and raised in a society governed by laws diametrically opposed to the Contact Hypothesis.
Yes, apartheid, literally separateness, and there were pieces of legislation that gave practical effect to the principle, like the Group Areas Act and the Mixed Marriages Act, dictating where you could live and who you could marry according to your race.
But it’s the former that has been on my mind this week.
Enacted in 1950, after the election of DF Malan’s government in 1948, it did exactly what its name suggests, assigned specific geographical areas to specific races.
Surprise surprise, the whites got all the best areas, and the country’s indigenous population, by far the biggest group, found themselves subject to forced removals, destroying communities.
Thoughtco.com has this to say on the subject: ‘‘The Group Areas
was on the other side of them. I wish I’d more actively tried to get past them.
Our individual journeys to understanding are unique, but I’ve spoken to some Kiwis this week whose experiences growing up in overwhelmingly white communities like Christchurch and Dunedin weren’t all that different from mine, aside from the legislation.
Happily, we’ve each come to realise the value of diversity, what multiculturalism can teach us when we engage respectfully, as equals, when we manage to ditch the stereotypes, and make ourselves vulnerable and willing to learn. What Lana calls our ‘‘lizard brains’’ may be predisposed to be drawn to those like us and defensive towards outsiders, but I refuse to believe that’s how we’re supposed to be.
I realise there are fears the atrocity of March 15 is starting to fade from the consciousness of some in the Christchurch and Canterbury communities not directly affected. There may even be some whose Islamophobic views have been strengthened in the wake of that heinous deed.
But I hope deeply that for the majority of us, the desire to build bridges, to embrace and learn from our differences and to find common ground, will continue to grow. If the lasting legacy of March 15 was to be enhanced, enduring unity across an increasingly diverse community, wouldn’t that be the best possible answer we could give to an act of unspeakable evil?