Tag Archives: ecology

To succeed is to destroy ourselves; economic growth and fossil fuels…

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We all kind of know that the system of economic growth we are hooked on is not sustainable. However, it is so pervasive in how we understand the world that envisioning life without it is almost impossible. Take the concept of ‘economic growth’. Put simply, without growth we stagnate. Without an overall increase in the stuff we consume, own, or waste year on year, quarter by quarter, our economy is seen to be failing. In fact our politics dwells in the ever present fear of the spectre of of this terrible thing called recession. So much so that we allow them to sacrifice support to the poorest and weakest of our number by cutting social supports in the name of ‘stimulating growth.’

There was a brilliant article by George Monbiot in The Guardian yesterday in which he said this;

Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham.

 

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It’s 2.5 billion billion solar systems. It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

 

To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues miraculously vanished, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.

Put like that, the whole pursuit of economic growth is madness right? Monbiot says more than this however, he points out this kind of economic growth was only ever possible because of the fossil fuels that we have been burning for the last 300 years or so;

Economic growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained. But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hundred years – the phenomenon we now call sustained growth.

 

It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, with the accessible reserves exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our impossible proposition.

How do we stop this? Monbiot thinks that first of all we have to SEE it, but most of us simply do not;

The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result, they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle-class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.

 

Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.

Step forward then the politician who is prepared to say that economic growth is no longer desirable nor advisable, and that we need to learn to love what we have, to mend stuff, to share stuff and to live within our localities.

Who is going to vote for such heresy?

Or shall we just blame it all on the immigrants?

Save the world, become a vegetarian…

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I have been a vegetarian for about 26 years. I would like to pretend that this is for the highest moral purposes, fueled by compassion for the suffering of creation, but this would not be truthful. The fact is, when I was a student, desperate to find some kind of place of belonging in a world in which I was a rather dysfunctional outsider, I found myself surrounded by people who did not eat meat. Most of them were more confident, better looking and certainly more socially gifted than I was. One of them subsequently became my wife- and she was a passionate anti-vivisectionist who regarded eating animals as a kind of murder. Given that she still loves me after all these years might suggest that I made the right choice- one that we have both continued with even though this is more through developed habit than passion.

Our vegetarianism is not really about health benefits- despite all the concerns about red meat and larded-clogged arteries. After all, chips, chocolate, crusty bread and butter with deep red cheese and sugar loaded pickle are still every bit as challenging to my waistline.

If asked about the reason for my choice to eschew the burger and the lamb chop I could not have honestly claimed to be angered by the death of little furry creatures for our glutinous pleasure. As we look out there, we see a vast ecosystem of flesh clawing at flesh. Killing to eat is not something that I can find any real philosophical, theological or moral objection to- even though I have never killed anything on purpose then eaten it.

This is part of the problem- I became increasingly convinced that if I could not see the chain of meat production managed in a caring, responsible way, including the killing and the butchering, then how could I take my responsibility as a steward of the earth seriously?

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Since then there have been many reasons to be concerned about the weird world of meat production. Foot and Mouth disease, horse meat in beef burgers, the use of rotten ‘reconstituted’ chicken in hospital food, etc etc. All these scandals seem to be what happens when the messy business of killing is conveniently out of sight and enslaved to profit margins and the demands of the big supermarkets.

However, back in my student days, with pomposity and self righteousness that I blush about now, I would also mention another fact that influenced my lentil-love. I would point to the fact that land usage in some of the poorest parts of the world was being dominated by pastureland to produce beef for our burgers. In fact, rain forest was being cleared at alarming rates just for this purpose too. In those days I could probably even quote you numbers- read in the magazine New Internationalist. At the time McDonalds were forced to announce a change to their meat sourcing, insisting that beef came from local sources.

My musical hero also encouraged this view- remember the song ‘If a tree falls’ from Bruce Cockburn?

Cut and move on
Cut and move on
Take out trees
Take out wildlife at a rate of species every single day
Take out people who’ve lived with this for 100,000 years
Inject a billion burgers worth of beef
Grain eaters, methane dispensers.

Through thinning ozone,
Waves fall on wrinkled earth
Gravity, light, ancient refuse of stars,
Speak of a drowning
But this, this is something other.
Busy monster eats dark holes in the spirit world
Where wild things have to go
To disappear
Forever

The argument then was that our meat machine was wasteful, took productive land out of crop production, depended on stupidly high energy use and it was all for markets thousands of miles away from where the animals were raised. The alternative was to encourage local sustainable food production, local markets producing what local populations needed. Damn it, we might even be able to do this in the UK if we really wanted to- let alone in South America.

This all came back to me again when reading an article in The Guardian by Ian Jack.

An academic paper in the new issue of Nature magazine’s Climate Change journal warns of the consequences of eating red meat, not in terms of cholesterol levels and heart attacks but for its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Domesticated ruminants are the largest source of anthropogenic methane and account for 11.6% of greenhouse gases that can be attributed to human activity. In 2011, they numbered approximately 1.4bn cattle, 1.1bn sheep. 0.9bn goats and 0.2bn buffalo, an animal population that was growing at the rate of roughly 2m a month. Their grazing and feeding takes up a greater area than any other land use: 26% of the world’s land surface is devoted to grazing, while feed crops command a third of the total arable land – land that might more usefully grow cereals, pulses and vegetables for human consumption or biomass for energy production.

The paper’s authors argue that, with more than 800m people chronically hungry: “The use of highly productive croplands to produce animal feed is questionable on moral grounds because this contributes to exhausting the world’s food supply.” Other well-known consequences include tropical deforestation and the erosion of biodiversity, but unless governments intervene (the paper calls for “increased awareness among public and policy makers”) it seems unlikely that the demand for animal flesh can be curbed. But which popularly elected government will ration meat or deliberately price it as a luxury? More and more people, especially among the newly prosperous in India and China, have the taste for it. Animal meat production stood at a global figure of 229m tonnes in 2000 and at present rates of increase will have more than doubled to 465m tonnes by 2050.

The Japanese appetite for whale meat has disgusting results, as does the Chinese fascination for ivory trinkets; but elephant and whale slaughter is surely no more than a peccadillo in the context of the great, ever-expanding, overheating slaughterhouse that the world feeds from. Animals with single stomachs such as pigs and chickens produce negligible amounts of methane; perhaps – setting aside the cruelty question – we should rear and eat more of those.

The arguments are stacking up. If you want to save the planet, start by changing your own patterns of consumption. A vegetarian diet is no panacea, but it starts to make a lot of sense when you take a long look at it.

Others are starting to reduce their meat consumption, or pay-more-buy-local- finding out where the meat comes from, how it was looked after etc. Some are even doing that admirable thing- producing their own. We have chickens and a veg patch, but some of my friends keep pigs and sheep too.

People often ask me if I miss meat. I can honestly say that I do not. The smell of bacon in the morning is still a pleasant smell however, even though I doubt I could actually eat it. Burgers always look disgusting these days, cooked or uncooked. I have never enjoyed fish even before becoming vegetarian, although Michaela sometimes eats it. There are of course as many problems with over fishing and farming as with land meat production.

Pass me a carot will you?

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The Dark Mountain Project…

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I came across this project a while ago, and got very excited by it.

A lot of my writing on this blog has been an attempt engaged criticism with our economic/political/cultural malaise. I suppose I am seeking to make sense of where we are up to, and looking for what is changing, for good or ill. This means that some of the discussion in this blog has delved into the shady world of economics and that I find it impossible to avoid political statements.

But I am not an economist, or a politician. I approach these things as a writer, a poet, a person interested in theology. You will understand my interest then when I read about the Dark Mountain Project. This is how they describe themselves;

The Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself. We see that the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling, and we want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it.

The Project grew out of a feeling that contemporary art and literature were failing to respond honestly or adequately to the scale of our entwined ecological, economic and social crises. We believe that writing and art have a crucial role to play in coming to terms with this reality, and in questioning its foundations.

The first thing that the project did was to publish a manifesto, funded by a crowd funding appeal, which sets out what they are about. If this is of interest it is well worth reading the whole thing, but here are a couple of extracts that made me shout YES!

The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors: without it, our efforts cannot be sustained. Onto the root stock of Western Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up. On the top floor is human perfection. It is important that this should remain just out of reach in order to sustain the sensation of motion.

Recent history, however, has given this mechanism something of a battering. The past century too often threatened a descent into hell, rather than the promised heaven on Earth. Even within the prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed to deliver the goods. Today’s generation are demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before. They work longer hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social back- ground into which they were born. They fear crime, social breakdown, overdevelopment, environmental collapse. They do not believe that the future will be better than the past. Individually, they are less constrained by class and convention than their parents or grandparents, but more constrained by law, surveillance, state proscription and personal debt. Their physical health is better, their mental health more fragile. Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look…

…We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace — a figure predicted to rise to 80% by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us…

…We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be. Of all humanity’s delusions of difference, of its separation from and superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing down. For a very long time, we imagined that ‘nature’ was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now…

…Creativity remains the most uncontrollable of human forces: without it, the project of civilisation is inconceivable, yet no part of life remains so untamed and undomesticated. Words and images can change minds, hearts, even the course of history. Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings. It is time to pick up the threads and make the stories new, as they must always be made new, starting from where we are…

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We believe that artists — which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams — have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken — and that only artists can do it.

Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?…

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This response we call Uncivilised art, and we are interested in one branch of it in particular: Uncivilised writing. Uncivilised writing is writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project. Apes whose project has been to tame, to control, to subdue or to destroy — to civilise the forests, the deserts, the wild lands and the seas, to impose bonds on the minds of their own in order that they might feel nothing when they exploit or destroy their fellow creatures.

Against the civilising project, which has become the progenitor of ecocide, Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective—we remain human and, even now, are not quite ashamed — but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession. It offers an unblinking look at the forces among which we find ourselves….

So, uncivilised as it might be, let us rise to the challenge! They are having a meeting at Whiston Lodge in Scotland next year- I may even try to get along…

I noticed that one of my favourite musicians is involved in the Dark Mountain Project- the wonderful marmite on toast songwriter Chris Wood. I feel an uncivilised song coming on…