Who is that knocking?
Something is knocking. Entities with forgotten names roam beyond our walls, and hammer on the roof for attention. Some of us are watching at the windows, waiting. Some huddle, or hoard. Some had forgotten there was an outside at all.
…
I attended a strategy meeting a few years ago about coal and climate change. During the meeting, we were asked to imagine the pillars that support the fossil fuel industry, as a visual aid to understanding where efforts to replace fossil fuels in our economy and society should be focused. I couldn’t do it and tried to articulate why. The exercise was upside-down to me: politics, finance and ideas don’t hold up the fossil fuel industry in our society: it is fossil fuels that hold up our politics, finance and our ideas. Burning ancient carbon is the concrete slab, the load-bearing pillars and a series of massive joists holding together through their inertia the complex of our world. This is why we have not taken effective action on climate change. The whole house is built on causing it.
As a once-in-a-century pandemic rattles the windows, our misconception of where we stand in relation to fossil fuels, climate change and world around us is overturned. We come to understand that safety and comfort are illusions, elaborate stage-sets built and maintained for some of us by the rest of us. The coronavirus pandemic is expected to lead to a 4 percent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions. This is still less than the 6 percent annual reduction that could reasonably be expected to prevent global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees. Suddenly the abstract notion of steep emissions reductions is sharply outlined in its seeming impossibility, its otherworldliness.
Other abstractions are also becoming more real to us. Foundations which had been buried or obscured are made visible. Nurses, doctors, cleaners, teachers, shop-keepers, food growers. These are the occupations we need. Behind them lie crucial feed-lines: trucks delivering food to markets, manufacturers making toilet paper and tinned tomatoes, garbos picking up rubbish and taking it away, crews that run and maintain power stations, power lines, water mains, sewage systems, communications.
Like the water supply and like high voltage “base-load” power, this activity has been maintained at maximum pressure to ensure it flows without interruption into the part of the house where “ordinary people” live in the illusion of permanence and security. Money has been organised at high pressure, too, in interlocking networks of obligation that demand constant flow. There is “baseload” commercial activity that allows no period of slackness. In my innocence, I imagined an airport was a place, and it could simply wait, empty, idle, if planes stopped arriving and leaving. I imagined sport was an event, and it could be paused and held over. The pandemic shows that there can be no idleness, no sleep, no quietude because a pause in pressure precipitates collapse that threatens to cascade. One person’s rent is another’s mortgage repayment, which the bank in turn has promised to someone else again. The inter-dependence runs more deeply than I can fathom, chains of indebted companies, futures, shares, securitisation, contracts. Among these, debt has, for the last half a century, become the mechanism that has bound people, businesses and governments in obligations to continue the baseload flow of money, like a fire that must be fed and fed to keep us warm.
Underlying all of this is the planetary debt made possible by fossil fuels, our unlocking of the energy of the past with fire. How stark now is that imbalance: drawing the energy of ancient sunlight to create an illusion that we can live beyond the planet’s means. As Timothy Mitchell illuminates:
“… fossil fuels are forms of energy in which great quantities of space and time, as it were, have been compressed into concentrated form. One way of envisioning this compression is to consider that a single litre of petrol used today needed about twenty-five metric tonnes of ancient marine life as precursor material, or that organic matter equivalent to all of the plant and animal life produced over the entire earth for four hundred years was required to produce the fossil fuels we burn today in a single year.”
But now, planes are on the ground. Cities are empty of cars. The oceans have fallen silent. These vacancies beckon to us. Oil and coal demand have plummeted and so, briefly, has pollution. Another question beckons: what place would most of us have in a world of primary energy only? A world that did not borrow from the deep past to bankrupt the long future and create, for an instant, the illusion of security. Sensing that we may be wakening from the dream, people are building chicken runs, compost heaps and garden beds. They’re dropping notes to neighbours they hardly knew. They are getting agitated about the vision of the house breaking down. Could we ever attain the beautiful vacancy of a world emptied of cars, surplus goods and waste? Where need has meaning and we take again our place in nature? My vocation is not in healing, or growing and transporting food, making or repairing shelter, or maintaining modern convenience. People like me are appendages, fed and clothed by the machine, but wholly incidental to it. To such marginal members of society, the apparatus of high pressure debt, high pressure commerce, high pressure energy is unassailable.
What has brought about this slackening and this altered vision is not advocacy, direct action, negotiation or divestment. It is a virus, an ancient class of entities still largely mysterious to us that traverse the boundary between alive and not-alive, defying categories and illuminating complexity. This disruption is non-human and beyond our ken. Knowledge and mastery are revealed by it to be as illusory and impermanent as the machinery of comfort and convenience that has sustained us this past century. The story we have told ourselves is that our imagination and skills are greater than all circumstances, that we are able to understand, predict and control a world we know and master. We have created a global humanist religion based on this self-regard. That is understandable. Most of us alive today in the affluent bubble grew up in a world that appeared tamed by human technological and intellectual prowess. Carolyn Merchant describes this confidence as part of a world view that became dominant following the Scientific Revolution:
“Living within a mechanistic world in which predictions hold gives confidence in everyday life that crossing bridges, flying across oceans, and lighting and heating our homes will be safe and secure. Only in very rare instances does chance disrupt such expectations — an earthquake of extremely high magnitude causing a bridge to collapse, a sudden lightning strike of such force that a plane is broken into pieces, a tornado that sweeps up a home and destroys it.”
Merchant observes that climate change heralds the return of unpredictability and chaos to our lives. These are forces with which people in the West were once more familiar. We gave them names and stories — fate, chaos, nemesis. But technology and affluence nurtured hubris and made the natural world appear a mere setting against which the more important dramas of human power squabbles and notions were played out. We acted as if we were the only moving parts, the only agents. The era of climate disruption will be a reassertion of agency by entities too vast and powerful to be mastered by humanity. We will once again discover ourselves to be at nature’s mercy.
Story-telling is important in this process. Amitav Ghosh explores how climate change is bringing into our lives and experiences “forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space.” It’s not just time and space that are confronting us, and need a role in our story, but the non-human. Wind, rock, river, animal, plant, sky, virus. All of these are agents, are animated, and break into our lives in vast and intimate ways. To cease being merely an appendage, it seems to me that I would like to open the door to stories that have a role for the non-human world beyond mere backdrop. If I were designing a strategy discussion now, I would make it about more than just the house that coal and oil built. We need a new old way to think about all the animated beings and forces. The non-human is knocking at the door and we had better remember its names and its nature, before we answer.
