https://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_myth_of_human_progress_20130113/
Clive Hamilton in his
“Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change”
describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic
climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false
hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional
knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that
those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to
insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few
years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending
disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite
will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as
difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential
struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and
emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The human species, led by white Europeans
and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of
conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as
well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But
the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life
of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic
power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The
mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a
curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental
systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states
since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and
intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We
have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the
draft report of the
National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.
Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in
“The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in
“Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in
“A Short History of Progress”
have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The
difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go
with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to
exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate.
The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude
with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about
unrestrained greed and self-worship.
“There is a pattern in the past of
civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature,
overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,”
Wright
said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia,
Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period
of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a
lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the
Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples,
including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things
that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways
to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to
disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is
what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We
have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such
dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or
move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed
to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the
problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor,
the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be
enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2
billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early
1900s. That’s not progress.”
“If we continue to refuse to deal with
things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of
major catastrophe, sooner or later,” he said. “If we are lucky it will
be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out.
That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary
history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good
long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead
mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve
the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the
transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”
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Wright, who in his dystopian novel
“A Scientific Romance”
paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites
“entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the
human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And
all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal
economy, he says, are at fault.
