For most of us the world we see around us is “normal.” We see little difference between the natural, social, and economic worlds – they are mostly one experience. We are born into cities, suburbs, small towns, and (rarely anymore) farms. We see history through the limited scope of textbooks once read as required and through the pop-history of the mass media. Large historical changes are not easily seen in our everyday lives. We view the past as quaint times when people didn’t know much or have much. Yet, increasing numbers of things don’t seem to be quite so normal anymore.
Today we are inundated with technological change and the material “progress” that is made possible by the ever-expanding application of debt and capital to technical innovation and industrial production. The smart-phone, the iPad, and mobile connectivity, along with all the previous technical innovations that have changed the world of employment as well as social life, are all quickly absorbed into our view of the natural order of things, which is, however, heavily dependent on the pervasive culture of corporate consumerism and an endless supply of materials for their production. “Server farms” and “the cloud” are vague images of the information age no clearer in our minds than the National Security Agency’s “data mining” of everyone’s phone calls, email messages, and credit card records. The dominant culture of debt-driven economic growth and the rise of the “security-surveillance state” have become culturally detached from, yet remain completely physically dependent on Nature.
We have lived most of our lives surrounded by rapid change (at least as compared with previous eras in human history). We are accustomed to the changing conditions that have resulted from the economic-growth imperative that has driven our world since the dawn of the industrial revolution – though we are largely aware of only the present and very recent past as represented by our personal experience and the mass-media shaped “reality” constantly presented to us at various stages of our lives.
We are not paid to engage in critical thinking or to reflect on the course of human history beyond the roles we play – or roles we have lost to “outsourcing” – in the growth economy. Yet we know that something is terribly wrong. The contradictions between what we are told and what we experience keep growing. We know that the “financial crisis” continues as a giant pyramid scheme; we know that natural resources are being used up rapidly; we know that the progress we expected in the form of “The American Dream,” is just not happening for “the 99%.” We know that while profits grow exponentially, stagnant wages and longer work hours buy less and less of the endless array of the products of economic growth. Most now realize that it’s time to set aside the propaganda of the industry-funded “climate denial” propaganda and face the known scientific facts of how the biosphere works and is being disrupted by the emissions from fossil-fuel combustion. And, we have now begun to experience directly the climate disruptions that scientists have been forecasting for a couple of decades and we recognize that something has to be done.
But what is most difficult to imagine is what it will take to avoid the catastrophic results of even a 2º Celsius increase in average temperature on the planet. Look around. Where do you see infrastructure that is not dependent on fossil-fuel based technology? Survival requires that most of that infrastructure be eliminated or somehow converted. But what will replace it? The ‘political’ answer is to do more research on “alternate fuels,” which simply dodges the question. But many alternative technologies for producing and conserving energy already exist and new ones are emerging. These need to be implemented now. To describe them all and how they might be implemented rapidly would take a book-length discussion. But the coming “great transformation” will require that we reorganize the ways we use energy from the local to the national level. That means reorganizing the way we live.
Even climate advocates rarely talk of the massive societal reorganization needed to achieve their goal of returning to 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere needed to re-stabilize the climate. Speculations are desperately needed on the actual changes in people’s lives and on how to transform social relations and institutions required to meet the challenge of climate disruption so that the biosphere can be stabilized and we can survive on the planet. It is hard to forecast the future; many have tried and failed. But it is even more difficult to imagine what everyday life will be like when climate disruptions force humans to drastically reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. A viable response must be comprehensive ecologically, which means we will have to change the way we want to continue living and others (in the third world) want to live.
The societal implications of radical reductions in fossil-fuel consumption and conversion to carbon-neutral and carbon-negative ways of living will take very different kinds of innovations than we are used to – including major cultural change for a new ecological economy. Those innovations must come in the form of both appropriate technology and appropriate social organization. Part II of this essay will consider what seem to be some of the key logical necessities and possible strategies for the coming greatest transformation of all time.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 