Holidays wrecked by summer wildfires warn of more climate danger to come, but will that stop people from flying? If not, is that because consumer lifestyles are addictive? What might that mean for greens stepping up to avert climate catastrophe?
Many people jetting to the Mediterranean sun this summer got more heat than they had bargained for. As wildfires swept through the tinder-dry island of Rhodes, threatening its tourist-filled hotels, holidays turned for thousands into what one family described as “a survival exercise”. Faced with deciding whether to flee to crowded evacuation centres or stay put and hope the fires burnt out, their experience was “surreal…like something out of a movie”. Instead of lazing on the beach, time was spent trying to contact the airline to ensure that they could get a flight out, a struggle leaving the family in question somewhat aggrieved: “They could have done a much better job of getting in touch with the people affected”. After all, things just aren’t supposed to come that close to breakdown.
It is possible to feel sorry, at one level, for those whose holidays were ruined, yet still find blackly comic the complete absence from frontline comments and reactions, as reported over the several weeks while this went on, of anything remotely along the lines of “We had this coming”. No one involved was recorded as voicing the recognition that this is what happens when an annual holiday accessed by aeroplane becomes a standard element in the Western lifestyle. Amid the indignant complaints and recriminations, no one seemed ready to register that here they had the consequences of all those carbon emissions, to which aeroplanes contribute so largely, coming home to roost – just as the climate activists had long been warning they would.
What are we to do with this gross and terrifying disconnect? It is gross, because you have to wonder how everyone setting merrily off on their package holiday could have missed the links between flying, climate destabilisation, heatwaves and wildfires which are now so well established and widely publicised. (Naturally, my particular flight never triggers a wildfire, but then my illicit hosepipe use never precipitates a drought, and yet people readily accept the rationale for hosepipe bans.) But the disconnect is also genuinely terrifying, because these now-embedded recreational habits are salient among those which will have to be urgently and universally broken, if anything like a catastrophe-averting transformation of Western lifestyles is to be achieved. And what could loosen the grip of habits like that, if holidaying on the edge of an inferno can’t?
One hope is that the habituated might be brought by accumulating evidence, determined truth-telling and the moral force of continuing non-violent protest to press for government action and even make the necessary changes for themselves. The new Climate Majority Project is founded on the belief that the terrain of debate has shifted towards mainstream acknowledgement of climate emergency. In 2017 Leo Barasi cited surveys conducted in Britain, Australia and the US showing that about 60 per cent of the population accepted the reality of anthropogenic climate change; in subsequent years the threats have only gained in immediacy. The media, even those in the pockets of robber capitalists, are now making these connections more readily, while in the UK, just before COP26, Ipsos Mori found that 76 per cent of people think the climate crisis is a global emergency. Mustn’t this level of awareness end by motivating the necessary democratically enacted transformations in collective behaviour?
But what if that behaviour is so embedded because people are now genuinely addicted to it? Addiction tries to meet a real need with a substitute satisfier, on repeated inputs of which the sufferer becomes dependent. In our kind of society, the relevant real need is for robust meaning and purpose, which a restless and alienating way of life destroys. The substitutes are commodities, including packaged recreation, with the restless churning endemic to capitalism’s profit-seeking drive supplying ersatz purposiveness in the form of competitive pursuit and acquisition. But this has huge implications for the possibilities of democratic transformation. For if the majority’s relation to the rampant general consumerism which is ultimately driving climate emergency is indeed one of addiction, rather than merely of reluctance to break bad habits, then bets premised on any majoritarian process are off. Addiction neuters the force of truth. The addicted can know themselves addicted, know how destructive that is, and know that they really should break free – but in the nature of the condition, their will in the matter is no longer their own.
If that were really the situation, responsibility for averting catastrophe must surely devolve on a green movement understanding itself as revolutionary vanguard. This inevitably minority cohort is likely to be found in many walks of life, but perhaps especially in the professions, in administration, in communications and in management. Lacking the kind of power which goes with being a governing oligarchy or economic class, they will still have their hands on or near the levers of efficacy and legitimacy for the fossil-fuel state. Without their cooperation, that state could not go on functioning. Were they to use that potential leverage in an organised way, they could bring pressure to bear wherever and whenever the structure started to show cracks. The hope must then be that deployment of this kind of institutional force, combined with the building-up of a shadow framework through organs of community resilience, plus continued pressure through existing representative systems, would threaten the existing state with serious destabilisation. This would sooner or later mean that it had to cede key areas of control to some emergent, though as of now very largely unpredictable, coalition of the climate-responsible. The resulting eco-state could then authoritatively legislate and regulate for the collective breaking of addictively destructive habits which the addicted could never be expected to break unaided.
Is the green movement up to assuming these exacting responsibilities? One might doubt it on past evidence, but don’t forget that these are utterly unprecedented times. Equally, don’t forget to pack the breathing apparatus and the emergency rations along with the suncream next summer.
John Foster is a freelance philosopher and Honorary Fellow at Lancaster University’s Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion. He joined the Green Party in the 1970s while it was still the Ecology Party, and remains a member – at least until they find out that he is writing politically incorrect stuff like this.
Realism and the Climate Crisis by John Foster is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £26.99.
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