I have been thinking about whether to review the predictions for 2011 that I made - not from any great personal expertise, I should add, but from paying attention to those who are expert in these things - at the beginning of the year. But, to be honest, I really don’t want to. After the non-stop whirlwind of consequential global events of the past twelve months, a brief glance back at the predictions shows how many not only have come to pass but also are now self-explanatory.

I will get back to the predictions, I expect, because it seems to me that there is already much that is good and hopeful emerging from the past year’s turmoil. But, for now, I want to post a draft introduction to a “sustainability through experience” handbook I am compiling in the hope of making a contribution to the growing world-wide call for social change.

The handbook will explore ways of overcoming the immense social and psychological barriers that are preventing us from embracing sustainability and, importantly, of ‘outreaching’ active engagement beyond the already converted.

In an update to my April post, ‘Resistance is Fertile’, I mentioned ‘Just Do It’, a recently released documentary on the motivations that lie behind environmental direct action. The other day I watched a clip of a BBC interview with the film’s director, Emily James, and with Marina Pepper, one of the activist ‘stars’ of the film.

No doubt with the sensibilities of a middle-English audience in mind, the cosy breakfast-show interviewers pointed out the film’s one-sidedness in its sympathetic portrayal of climate change and climate justice protests without balancing this with the views of the corporate institutions protested against. As if the flywheel weight and momentum of the status quo somehow needs defending… 

You are deep in the woods at nightfall and it has started to rain.

With you are three work colleagues: the girl from reception you nod hello to in the mornings who is complaining now about her damp hair and no straightening iron; old so-and-so from accounts who is two years off retirement but knows his knots and lashings from when he used to run a Scout group; and some young intern you’ve never met before who actually seems to be enjoying himself and you have privately christened ‘Rambo’.

You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been ‘volunteered’ for some sustainability-team-building-thingummywhatsit that you only agreed to because you’ve just applied for a promotion. And now you are bracing yourself for a long uncomfortable night in a make-shift shelter a bit too up close and personal with your three unlikely companions.

We have arrived at a point in our infinitesimally short life on this 4.5 billion-year-old planet at which no part of the natural world remains untouched by human hand.

Vast inaccessible areas such as the deep ocean sea bed still remain unexplored and nature continues, of course, in that plants grow, the sun shines and rain falls. But no longer can we regard any part of nature’s cycles and patterns as being entirely natural. So it might seem surprising that, at this time of peak human interference with natural biological systems, we are rediscovering the benefits of getting closer to nature.

Increasingly we hear that the remove at which we live now from the natural world is a significant factor in why we do not cease from degrading it and that, to motivate a meaningful shift to sustainability, we need urgently to rebuild our connections. But a 2009 literature review for the Wilderness Foundation suggests that our new-found interest in nature is actually concerned less with modifying our destructive ways and more on how time spent in the natural world can help us cope with some of the more dysfunctional aspects of modern living. Whilst this review  - and an earlier one by Dr Roger Greenaway and me – shows strong evidence of valuable developmental and therapeutic outcomes, the emphasis is still on what we as a species can gain from nature rather than what we can offer to it to ensure the welfare of all life on the planet.

“As we know only too well, the impact of humanity on the planet is in danger of sacrificing the very ecosystems that provide the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the biological diversity for sustaining life. Failure to make changes will provide a planet which can no longer support our civilisation…

While progress has been made in raising awareness… we have yet to solve the systemic causes that continue to thwart meaningful, measurable change…”

Sir David King,  UK Chief Scientific Adviser 2000-2007

Envisioning Sustainability…

The first part of this article, Imagining Sustainability, discussed some of the institutional, social, and psychological barriers in Western societies that “continue to thwart meaningful measurable change”.

It also highlighted failings of population-scale information campaigns intended to motivate such change and indicated the better potential for small group and inter-personal approaches that engage deeper values-based motivation in overcoming unsustainability.

This second part considers in more detail some small group non-formal education approaches that show potential to achieve and maintain community-level shifts to sustainability.

Imagine if our Western democracies unanimously declared war on unsustainability and our efforts became culturally embedded…

Imagine if, as in other times of extraordinary endeavour, our leaders led by example, making stirring speeches that warn us of the unthinkable consequences of failure and unite us in our collective resolve…

Imagine if news and stories of our progress dominated the media daily, extolling our efforts and normalising our shared intent….

Imagine if our cultural role-models – the celebrities, sports icons and business entrepreneurs who bench-mark success in our societies – were routinely asked on chat shows and in magazine interviews about their carbon footprints and what they are doing in the war…

Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine are raising funds to print issue two of Dark Mountain by offering the chance to pre-order the book. This second volume of thought-provoking Uncivilised writing from the Dark Mountain Project is to be published in June.

The collection includes pieces by some familiar names – such as Jay Griffiths and Naomi Klein - but also contains the work of new voices who are opening up our thinking and causing us to reconsider our assumptions about the world and how we live in it. Paul and Dougald have just released their joint editorial for the book – re-posted below – and you can find out more about the book and the project at www.darkmountain.net/blog.

In the final chapter of ‘World on the Edge’, his most recent big picture analysis for a sustainable Plan B, Lester Brown reiterates the need for a wartime scale of mobilisation if we are adequately to confront the severity of human ecological overshoot and escalating climate chaos. He asks “What contributions can we each make today, in time, money, or reduced consumption, to help save civilisation?”

Some would answer him that we are already making steady progress. Many of us have changed our light bulbs, some have invested in solar panels, and the three ‘Rs’ of sustainable consumption  – ‘Reduce, Reuse and Recycle’ – are now firmly embedded in our collective consciousness, if not always in our daily practices. A few hardliners have even committed to some additional ‘Rs’ – such as to Refuse (social pressure and the temptations of advertising), to ‘Repair’ (rather than renew or replace) and ultimately to ‘Return’ (our waste to the earth as ‘food’).

But Lester Brown reminds us that these virtuous but relatively trivial changes are nothing like enough. Global carbon emissions are still rising, consumption is still growing, and, after three decades of squandered opportunity, the scarcest resource of all now is time. Repeated incongruities between the rhetoric and actions of our leaders and manipulative disinformation campaigns by powerful oil and coal interests have undermined such meagre top-down efforts to engender public engagement as have been attempted, let alone the prospects for a widespread public mobilisation anytime soon. If we are ever to achieve the necessary scale of social change, then those of us who have comprehended the enormity of our predicament must do much more now than simply seek to inform and persuade. We must be willing to actively  ‘Resist’ the intractable forces that are marshalled against us.

Prediction:  “As primary resources become technically harder and riskier to extract and economies become increasingly unstable, corners will be cut leading to one or more man-made environmental disasters on the scale of the Gulf oil spill or the Hungarian toxic sludge”.

Hokusai’s famous 1820 painting of fishing boats battling through The Great Wave portrays a distinctly Japanese awareness of the vulnerability of human life amidst the tremendous forces of nature.  The Japanese people, living on their earthquake-prone islands where three tectonic plates meet on the Pacific Ring of Fire, have always been subjected to severe floods and hurricanes and, as the last few days have so tragically demonstrated, to the devastating power of earthquakes and the great tsunamis that can follow them.

It may seem premature to revisit predictions made for 2011 only two months into the year, but alarmingly interconnected events are already converging very fast and I have a growing sense that this year will be pivotal in achieving much wider understanding that our future reality will be very different from the comfortable assumptions most of us still hold on to from before the on-going economic meltdown.

It is still too much to hope that we will all collectively have awoken to the realities of our planetary predicament by the year’s end, but the signs are that, to a greater or lesser extent, we will all of us be feeling its impacts wherever we happen to live in the world.

   …or Why People Don’t Seem to Care About Sustainability.

 “Having an ecological consciousness in contemporary Western industrial society is an inherently schizophrenic experience, because most of us are embedded in the very practices, desires, goods, textures and sensations that contribute to our ecological ills.”

Renee Lertzman, of Portland State University, Oregon (and recently Cardiff University, Wales) is a communications researcher who specialises in the psychological dimensions of sustainability and climate change. Her research suggests that, contrary to some survey findings about public attitudes and behaviour, most people do actually care very much about the degradation of the environment – particularly their own immediate environment – but their ability to engage and act is inhibited by internal conflicts between enjoying the benefits of industrial civilisation and their rational understanding of the damage done by it.

Last week, an important report on a simple, equitable and viable method of reducing the UK’s carbon emissions was launched at the UK’s Parliament.

Sadly, the remarkable architect of this carbon rationing scheme, Dr David Fleming, who had been working on it since 1996, died suddenly last year. But he would surely have been proud of the presentation made by his associate, Shaun Chamberlin, to the All Party Parliamentary Working Group on Peak Oil and of the enthusiastic endorsements provided by MP’s John Hemming and Caroline Lucas and energy consultant Jeremy Leggett.

If the UK is seriously to attempt to achieve the 80% target for carbon emissions cuts established in the Climate Change Bill and to address the imminent economic impacts of Peak Oil, then a scheme for personal carbon trading must be introduced now for implementation at the latest within four or five years.

“If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”

 

Wendell Berry “A Poem of Difficult Hope”

 

 

 

Expressing strong opinions on environmental and social justice issues can often be seen by others as implying criticism of their own values and lifestyles. I have learnt to minimise the social discomfort I can provoke by holding back when conversation turns to the desirability of this or that new digital gizmo or how the winter’s heavy snowfall disproves global warming. Instead I confine my views to less contentious outlets such as this blog which other people can choose to read or not.