Robert MacNeil Christie, Author

The obvious can be very difficult for people to see. That is because people are self-correcting systems. They are self-corrective against disturbance, and if the obvious is not of a kind that they can easily assimilate without internal disturbance, their self-corrective mechanisms work to sidetrack it, to hide it, even to the extent of shutting the eyes if necessary, or shutting off various parts of the process of perception.

~ Gregory Bateson

The strange and apparently growing gap between scientific knowledge and public perception has intrigued me for quite a while. The above statement by Gregory Bateson expresses a lot about its source; that applies especially to financial-political elites, who have such great influence over public perceptions through their mass media propaganda.

On the other hand, I have long since lost count of the number of very good, very important research papers in scientific journals, news articles (especially in The Guardian), blog posts, position papers, and private communications on climate, ecology, politics, and economics. Many have described or advocated specific changes to escape or resolve the collapse of Holocene climate, the destruction of important ecosystems, or the decline of industrial civilization.

Now, after decades of increased scientific knowledge and directly observed confirmation of basic climate and ecological science, government and corporate responses are all rhetorical; concrete actions are next to none.

What I have not read or heard is serious or extended discussion of any viable method for achieving the extremely necessary goals of stabilizing the Earth System and society as well. I do not at all mean to denigrate or dismiss the excellent works of science and policy. Rather, my intention is to point to the fact that we now know quite well, what technically needs to be done. We just do not know HOW to do it. Greta Thunberg is a global hero and Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement, and other protest movements are great at drawing attention to the climate/ecological crisis. But they have not resulted in significant institutional or behavioral change.

Achieving a Livable Stable Planet

Of course, restabilizing, restoring, and repairing a wide range of planetary subsystems of the total Earth System is a very complex matter. Numerous specific actions in ecological restoration are needed and they are needed right now. That is why I applaud all such efforts, regardless of where I might think they belong in the long list of urgent priorities for transitioning to an entirely new regime of technology and political-economic authority. But no matter how well we all do in restorative efforts, they will ultimately fail unless ‘business as usual’ is stopped and replaced.

We must move away from, no, we must replace, the predatory political economy dominated by a financial and monetary system run by powerful elites whose sole goal is to accumulate more and more capital to everyone else’s including the planet’s detriment. We know that fossil fuels energize the entire system as it now operates. But think about that for a minute. Imagine all the institutions with which you engage daily or occasionally and how they affect your life.

What if they (and you) did not have access to the operations now energized by fossil fuels. Many sites of those operations, from households to corporate boardrooms and the extractive projects they direct, continue to destroy the viability of a stable planet. Without massive reorganization to stop the destruction, which can only work by including severe reductions in energy use, not only will the Earth System collapse into chaos, but so will industrial civilization.

Neither we, nor the climate, ecosystems, or the Earth System as a whole, can any longer tolerate the continued death and destruction caused by the ever-increasing burning fossil fuel and all the high-energy activities it enables.

What Needs No Debate

The so-called “climate debate” is over. That is not to say that very powerful forces keep trying to keep it alive, and often dominate public and social media with their propaganda. As some political scientists have demonstrated, for decades, very powerful fossil-fueled elites and their foundations, shell companies, lobbyists, and paid-for politicians have applied billions of dollars annually to deny, defer, and distort every important fact and necessary decision.

Well, that has worked pretty well. However, as the acceleration of frequency and intensity of climate chaos events continues, many more people will conclude that there is no climate debate and we must do something now. My greatest fear is that broad recognition and understanding of the urgency of the greatest predicament humanity has ever faced, will come only after a great deal of formerly avoidable tragedy, in the form of crop failures, starvation, climate migrations due to floods and droughts, resource wars, and related catastrophes.

The Tragedy of Industrial Civilization and the Hope of Transformation

I don’t know much about theater or drama. However, I understand that the essence of tragedy is that the protagonist, the hero, has a fatal flaw that s/he is forced to confront by the end of the play. Well, that seems to fit the structure of the approaching end of industrial civilization today. The decision makers at the top of all major institutions just cannot escape their compulsion, indeed their culture, of growth for growth’s sake—their fatal flaw. Even the politicians and CEOs who express ‘concern’ for ‘the environment,’ or even acknowledge ‘climate change’ (that bland term I have objected to since it replaced that other bland term, ‘global warming’), are promoting cover stories for business as usual.

We do not have a ‘tragedy of the commons,’ as Garrett Hardin had claimed in an essay in Science in 1968. Instead, we face the exact opposite resulting from unhinged hierarchy and domination: the abandonment of the global commons, a tragedy caused by industrial civilization overshooting the capacity of the Earth System to carry the load of its profligate extraction, production, consumption, and waste.

We are already undergoing the early stages of a new great transformation of industrial civilization, which without major intervention will clearly result in collapse, both for the Earth System that it has exploited and for the political economy and ‘technosphere’ the Earth System can no longer sustain.

The only hope left is for massive social mobilization and emerging social movements to cause the global elites to cooperate in initiating a New Great Transformation of the dying system with the goal of creating an ecological civilization, or get out of the way. To do anything less would be to participate in their madness.