Climate change activism faces a known problem, which is that the more overwhelming the scale of the problem, both politically and scientifically, the more inclined people are to just surrender to its inevitability.
The answer for a lot of activists is to try and chunk the problem down somewhat to compartmentalized, human-scale targets: named fossil-fuel multinationals (skirting the intractable problem of nationalized fossil fuel extraction and refinement in Russia and elsewhere), carbon taxation and sequestration policies, encouragement of renewables and conservation, and so on. There’s also a debate about whether to encourage hopeful narratives (showing political victories, useful adaptative technologies, etc.) or to try and motivate publics and policy-makers by showing the fearful consequences of climate change. People debate whether this is a communication problem that can be solved with simple strategic shifts that will reach more people and command more electoral power or a deep structural problem that can only be tackled through mass mobilization and demands for fundamental change.
Those are important conversations and real choices. The end goal in either case is a profound transformation of our lives. There is no getting around that: a world that slows anthropogenic climate change to a halt is a world where we consume less and we consume differently, where wealth and power are redistributed, where the rules of local, national and global politics are reset. Most of us won’t be flying all around the world on a regular basis, or driving long distances on a frequent basis. Some of our profligate use of energy will be curtailed at all scales, even in a best case ‘soft landing’ to renewables. We will eat differently and eat less. Some jobs, at least, will go away for good, even if they’re replaced rapidly by a great many other jobs and work processes. We may continue to be cosmopolitans through our online connections, but we’re less likely to routinely move from city to city to mingle with pluralistic communities of highly educated voluntary migrants doing high-skill labor, or to go thousands of miles to study at a university in another country if that means going back and forth four or five times a year. (We might travel those distances for work or education, but my best guess is that we’ll do it via much slower modes of global transport—solar-powered ships, zeppelins, etc.)
The scale of global human life will change, and I think that will be a great good for other reasons, especially if the transition is voluntary and its disruptions minimized, a prospect that is looking less and less likely each passing day.
I think, however, that there’s a change that we may have to begin right now that is so momentous and complicated that most activists, even the most far-seeing, hesitate to undertake it. It’s not just because it is a challenging project. It’s because it’s not even clear to me that it’s a good change, regardless of whether it’s a necessary one.
We’re living in a moment where we can begin to understand climate change mitigation in terms of benefits to ourselves and our immediate families. That’s a familiar discourse for most of us, encouraged by powerful institutions in our world: the discourse of trade-offs. What would you give up for more climate security? How much climate insecurity can you tolerate? Climate activists would protest correctly that it doesn’t work like that: you don’t get to choose a la carte off a menu that says “5ft sea level rise, 1.5C, not too many new mold or mildew infestations, electrical car and stove but I keep the gas sitting mower, price of bananas and coffee doubles.” You have to accept whatever is necessary to keep warming under 2C or thereabouts, and you have to live with whatever happens, both the predictable outcomes and the unpredictable ones. Even so, once people can see more clearly what’s going to happen to them, they’re more amenable to doing something about it. Unfortunately, the more clearly people can see what’s going to happen to them, it’s probably too late to do something.
The scale of action required on climate change, and the ways it will dramatically affect all of our lives, mostly for the worse in a material sense in the short-term (without even necessarily fully stopping the magnitude of climate change that people alive today will experience in the 21st Century), may mean that to undertake it, many of us will have to think differently about what we value. Many climate activists would argue (accurately, I think) that many materially comfortable people alive today can accept less material wealth without feeling a dramatic loss, and many materially impoverished people might well find their circumstances improved in the changes that climate action will bring. At least some would also argue that there are moral or spiritual satisfactions possible in pursuing a less materially driven life and in contributing to the greater good.
It’s that greater good that interests me and worries me. Because I suspect for climate action to succeed at the necessary scale and to be pursued for the indefinite future (after all, this is not a short-term fix but instead a permanent new global ethic), we have to believe that making life better for people far distant to us in the future matters more to us than our own needs and desires.
I’m not talking children, grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren, our personal descendants whom we know already or might hope to know before we die. I’m talking people a century or two (or longer) in our future, people who are completely hypothetical to us. People who will likely be so different from us that we can barely imagine the material, spiritual or social foundations that will shape their lives, to whom we likely could not relate.
Imagine, for example, a person in 1800 in the United States trying to think about what people in 2021 would be like. In a very general way, some tried: the authors of the Constitution and their associates discussed what they thought might happen or could happen over time. Jefferson and Adams at one point in their letters to one another projected that in some centuries time, corruption might eventually overwhelm the republic, for example. You could argue that they had the people of the far future in view in their political work, and were even willing to at least risk their own well-being by fighting against British control. But that risk was primarily motivated by a desire to materially and ethically improve their own circumstances. None of them were really able to imagine the people of the future except in vague universalist terms, through new ideas about moral, cultural and economic progress. Almost all of them failed to imagine—or refused to imagine—some of the most obvious transformations that were already visible as possibilities in their own world: a world where citizenship didn’t mean holding property, didn’t mean being white, didn’t mean being male. They couldn’t really envision any of the material specifics of the future world (an effort that defies most modern futurisms).
All the institutions that we think of as having been created for the benefit of the present but also the indefinite future weren’t really imagining the future at that scale or length. The founders of 19th Century colleges in the United States were serving local communities and specific religious congregations with modest educational aspirations that largely focused on shaping moral character and gentlemanly behavior. They had no vision or conception of those colleges enrolling pluralistic, secular, global student bodies who were pursuing meritocratic goals and professional training within a post-industrial capitalist world. Whatever they contributed in terms of funding, land or labor to those colleges wasn’t done on behalf of that future. This is even more acutely the case with surviving medieval or early modern European and Islamic universities.
Imagining human beings some centuries hence is hard enough. What we might have to do is imagine that we owe them some measure of sacrifice, some form of downward mobility. The rise of ideologies of progress in Europe, disseminated outward into a wider world during the 19th and 20th Centuries, has let most of us think about our relationship to the future as inevitably benevolent, that regardless of what we do with our lives, our descendants will have it better. Even the West’s famous bent towards nightmarish worries about the apocalyptic alternatives (sometimes visible among climate activists) envisions the alternative to progress as a sharp rupture, a single cataclysmic event after which the future is gone or drastically circumscribed in a way that puts little ethical weight on ordinary people in the present. What can I do about nuclear war or a physics experiment that creates a microscopic singularity in the Earth’s core or nanotechnology that remakes the world into goo? What obligations do I incur in my everyday life that involve avoiding a world-ending designer plague or a massive asteroid strike? There are things that can be done about most of those possible or improbable risks, but they’re a problem for experts or the product of a particular geopolitical folly that I can at best nudge through political participation.
Climate action, though? At the necessary scale, that is going to affect my current circumstances. And not in terms of trivial consumer substitutions like using green dishwater cleanser, having personal carbon offsets or even switching to a vegetarian diet. If we get to the point where we’re slowing climate change to a crawl, we’re all going to be travelling far less frequently and over much shorter distances. Anybody living a middle-class life in big cities will experience multiple kinds of downward mobility that are not just individual performances of virtue. We won’t eat as much and it won’t be as varied. We won’t have as much. We’ll have to deal with hotter weather without much or any air conditioning, or air conditioning will be only in large communal buildings that serve primarily as shelters in dangerously hot weather.
To endure these changes without the kind of popular resentment that brings down governments, we’ll have to accept on some level that people we’ll never know and can barely imagine deserve a better life than the one we’ll inflict on them if we don’t make these changes. I listen to people saying that today as if it is obvious and easy to make that commitment and I think, “only so long as those changes aren’t yet happening”. What do we owe, after all, to people that far after us? No one ever really thought about us that way. If they had thought of what it would be like to be us, there never would have been slavery. There never would have been industrial capitalism. There never would have been colonialism. Honestly, at the potential scales of time that climate change is going to be meaningful in the global future, you could go back and ask why the people who were getting trapped in dependency on settled agriculture didn’t think ahead to what miseries agriculture would bring to the world and stopped right there and then with their improved foraging techniques. You could observe that nobody could be expected to see ahead to the harms that would follow, but the slaves saw it right away. The conquered survivors of colonialism saw it right away. The new workers in the dark satanic mills saw it right away. The early farmers surely saw some of the fearful shape of the future they were part of—the toil, the lengthening hierarchies, the risks of being stuck to one place. And so did some of the supposed beneficiaries of those systems. Nobody who could decide would have decided otherwise for our sake, way out there in the centuries yet to come. The best they might have done was about their sake, and that always means at best a mild amendation or redirection of what is already underway.
So to really do what needs doing, we will have to be the first human society to comprehensively give up a substantial portion of what we have for the sake of people we’ll never know, who might not even be people as we know and care for them today. We will need some conception of universal human possibility that is so much vaster and vaguer than anything familiar to us now, and it will need to be profoundly and intimately motivating.
I’m not sure it’s possible. I’m not even sure it’s desirable. I will be long dead whenever those future people and the rest of life on the planet struggles with conditions that I played some part in making. I’ll never have to feel sorry for what I did or witness the consequences that will be far, far beyond what I will see in my life. And they’ll scarcely know in any real way how I lived, either: they’ll be in their world and whatever it is, that will be their normal. We may shake our fists at the people who put chains and curses upon our lives, long past. We may topple them from plinths and strike their names from buildings. We may try to undo the long awful cumulations of their choices, but we also live in the future they made in the one life that any of us get. We still breathe and live and love and find our joys, if we can. So will they, on a poisoned, drowning, overheated world where life that couldn’t adapt is long extinct. Only we would really know just how bad that is compared to now, and we won’t be there to see it. Anybody who assures you that of course we should save those people that we’ll never know and that a radical ethic of care is something that all people have felt over history is not being very thoughtful about the challenge ahead. It’s not easy and it’s not obvious. We will be the first to really feel that way if we can manage it.
Image credit: Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash