I ran across a fascinating and very important article the other day on LinkedIn, thanks to Erica Gies, author of Water Always Wins, who reposted it from Charles Eisenstein’s Substack.com platform. The importance of Eisenstein’s essay is that it clarifies the often-blurred line between the ideal and the real in what many loosely call ‘climate action.’
The Carbon Cycle and Us
Before industrialization, there was not much to say about the carbon cycle; so little was known. However, even in the early days of the industrial era, some scientists had already discovered the effects of CO2 injected into the atmosphere. During the nineteenth century, several scientists became aware of the relationship between CO2 and atmospheric temperature.
Scientists learned and better understood the ecological and climate consequence of altering the chemical balance of the atmosphere early in the twentieth century. By the time NASA climate scientist James Hansen testified before the U.S. Senate in 1988 on the complex dangers of ‘global warming’ for the Earth System, Exxon Mobil scientists had known of the dangers for years yet kept the knowledge secret.
However, things are often not nearly as simple as we would like. The industrial-consumer political economy had been wreaking havoc in all sorts of dimensions. Climate chaos, of course, causes multiple disruptions in the various subsystems of the whole Earth System. Yet, virtually every activity of the industrial-consumer economy of unlimited growth, from extraction and transportation of materials to manufacture and transportation of components and finished products, to their display in big-box and boutique retail outlets, and their transport in an oversized gas-guzzling SUV by a housewife or husband, damages elements of the Earth System in multiple ways.
Carbon emissions, including methane, nitrogen molecules, and various toxins emitted into the air, all seriously disrupt natural processes and life in its many forms. However, so are all the forms of pollution and other direct damage by human built machines. To paraphrase an old electoral slogan, “It’s the system, stupid!”
Not Either/or, Rather Both and All
Eisenstein’s complaint is that the environmental movement focuses too much on carbon while ignoring all the many ways industrial civilization disrupts and damages nature’s living systems and the land and water as well. I think he makes a very important point. One of the problems with the dominant culture of linear thinking and simple notions of linear causality is that a strong tendency to focus on a single ‘cause’ permeates efforts to ‘solve’ problems.
That form of tunnel vision inevitably misses many very important factors, especially those involving the dynamics of systems—which includes almost everything about complex living systems such as the whole Earth System itself and all its subsystems. But even more fundamentally, it fails to recognize the interconnectedness of the many elements in any large complex living system, whether a local ecosystem or the very Earth System itself.
To understand all this, however, we must not only look to the origins of the rational-legal framing of traditional science, technology, and industrial modernism, as well as the culture of unlimited economic growth, which does not directly improve happiness in nations with extreme economic inequality.. If we are to find any genuine ‘solutions’ to the climate crisis and the interconnected crises of multiple disintegrating living systems, including species extinctions and destabilized ecosystems as well, we have to face some other fundamental facts. Both the deep infrastructure of industrial modernism and the culture of endless economic growth work tirelessly to prevent the very kinds of societal changes that are necessary to initiate genuine climate/ecological action for repair and restoration of natural systems.
Systems Thinking and the System of Domination
We live in a very hierarchical system veiled in a façade of democratic symbolism and hollow electoral procedures with little if any competition of ideas for future survival. “Establishment” and extreme plutocrat-funded political parties and candidates choose voters via gerrymandering, voter suppression, and outright cultural manipulation. Corporate, financial, and individual-wealth elites choose politicians and legislation. That is exactly why only the most mild ‘green growth’ gestures toward environmental restoration pass Congress.
Even the “Green New Deal,” which failed under attack from the right that it was ‘extreme’ or ‘radical,’ environmentally well intentioned though it was, is framed within a vision of infrastructure growth with renewable, if not all clean, forms of energy. It assumed the same excessive energy use as the status quo. It had virtually no emphasis on reduced energy use or on conservation. Meanwhile, the expansion of the industrial-consumer political economy continues along with the carbon emissions and environmental destruction it always entails.
Given all this and more, it seem to me that the only viable path to effective human ‘intervention’ to slow if not stop the accelerating spiral of Earth System destabilization leading to mass human starvation, infrastructure devastation, and societal chaos, is a ‘full-court press.’ The only limit I would put on that is to stop wasting resources on industrial-mentality projects of “geoengineering” like chemo-mechanical carbon capture, which are part of the problem not part of the solution.
Some important efforts, like reforestation for restoring natural carbon capture (and ecosystem restoration, if we can just stop the deforestation first) take time but are nevertheless important. We have no time to spare. Others, like reducing carbon emissions, ‘we’ can execute immediately, at least in theory. To execute such a strategy, however, which we somehow must, will entail massive societal transformation from high-energy based to low energy-use operations and institutions.
It is interesting to note that if industrial nations were able to stop or even significantly curtail their carbon emissions, which would inherently entail stopping or transforming the operations of many other components of the Earth-System destroying industrial-consumer economy. The two go together; each one entails the other.
Carbon emissions emanate from the industrial-consumer political economy of endless growth, and Earth-System destroying endless growth is the source of carbon emissions. Both in and of themselves and together destroy many of the complex living systems upon which we all depend for survival and, potentially, a ‘wonderful life.’ To reach a new Earth-System equilibrium will require a New Great Transformation of societies unlike any great transformation of human societies in history.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 