The climate is changing. What happens next depends on how we all behave.
Twenty or more years ago, I was asked to write about climate change. The company employing me didn’t have a view they wanted to promote; neither did I. It was an eye-opening commission – the scale of the change both already underway and predicted was enough to give anyone sleepless nights. And what have I done since? I carry on with my life more-or-less as it was. Little of what I do has been modified in any major way by the climate chaos that I read about then and that’s now upon us.
Yes, like a lot of people, I have done some more or less superficial things – recycle a bit more, drive a bit less, turn the heating down a bit, walk a bit more, cycle a bit more … and so on. That’s all worthwhile. But I know full well that we – you and I – should be doing far, far more. I know we should and could. But we don’t.
The evidence the climate is changing is everywhere. You don’t have to be a genius to know that all our lives will change hugely in future – if they’re not changing right now. The planet’s climate underpins everything and to try and contain the current and potential damage we need to act while we still can. But to do so, before it’s too late for all of us, all our current lives will have to be radically different. However, so far, for most of us, modifying our lives isn’t even on our agendas. Why? Why this contradiction?
There are plenty of issues and possibilities. Take your pick.
- Perhaps people simply like their current lives too much to act with the future in mind – what they have determines their thinking. ‘Yes, I know about the climate stuff but …’
- Perhaps they are deliberately not looking or thinking to any serious degree at what’s happening and what’s looming, opting instead to put their efforts into willful ignorance. ‘Oh, I can’t be bothered with all that climate stuff.’
- Perhaps they think humans either aren’t or aren’t significantly responsible for the climate changing. They’ll shrug their shoulders and point to sun spots or volcanic activity or anything else as the cause.
- Perhaps people unconsciously default to totally blind hope. If pushed they’d say something like ‘I don’t know about all that, but I’m sure it’ll work out fine.’
- And there is always greed and stupidity – two recurring drivers in human behaviour for as long as there have been humans – that can easily dominate what people do.
- Perhaps they’re dominated by what they learned in their youth. Once we become adults all humans default to believing whatever will reinforce whatever they’ve become accustomed to. Moving away from beliefs acquired in this way is hard for any of us. (Often, this amounts to being a version of the first point, above.)
- Perhaps they’d like to act but – for whatever reason – they simply haven’t the energy and/or opportunity to.
- Perhaps they can’t see what they can do that they believe will actually make a difference; they can’t find something they can personally believe in, commit to and act upon.
- Perhaps they believe they understand the position they’re in but are just resigned to their fate and their fears and anxieties are focused, instead, on whether the looming climate chaos will overtake them before they die.
- And so on.
I suspect an additional, and key, aspect is that if we actually, properly, fully took on board the threats to all our lives that a significantly changed climate means, we couldn’t cope. We’d be overwhelmed. And so, to prevent despair, we unconsciously moderate and water-down our reaction to the threats before us. Yes, this means we cling to carrying on with our current way of life even if it contributes to climate chaos. If that seems somewhat insane it’s also, in a sense, sensible: without faith in the future, everything about our current lives will feel hollow. Faith in the future, however flimsy, is vital to ward off despair.
If warding-off despair goes some way to explaining our continuing with climate-damaging actions, another convenient opt-out lies in believing our lives aren’t significant in any big scheme of things, and thus whatever climate change we are personally creating doesn’t matter anyway. ‘My impact on the planet accounts for nothing compared to …’ and here you can insert your personal bogeyman. ‘I can travel the world (or whatever) because its impact is negligible compared to this new power-station or that government policy or … (whatever)’. Bingo, just like that, you’ve an all-purpose get-out clause.
But in contrast, in reality, whoever you are, absolutely everything you do during your own life contributes to the impact you make and the mark you leave. It all matters. Everything. It all counts. And none of us can predict or control what will happen because of our lives and how we live them. Even inactivity might have significant consequences.
The even bigger picture, though, is that however our lives turn out and whatever our impact, we can be certain that we will be living in the context of a climate that’s changing rapidly and very significantly.
Hence, with that certainty at the forefront of our thinking, we should all be consciously working to manage what we do right now, to make sure that every aspect of our lives inflicts as little damage as possible to the planet and all the life on it. Combating climate change – it’s not a case of ‘why bother’ but ‘why wouldn’t you bother’. Because whatever you do will count one way or another, to some extent or another.
But if, or perhaps when, we are working to adopt and live a new future, the absolutely vital, fundamental element is the need to take into account human nature. That includes all the good things and all the bad we’re all capable of – not just in how most of us live day-to-day but in all we’re capable of in all circumstances. Including all the deliberate blind spots we manufacture. Including all the get-out clauses we invent. Because however you hope or believe humans actually are, the bottom line is that the combined, collective components of you, me and everyone else are the causes of the climate chaos that’s now upon us. Without recognizing the causes of a problem, any attempts to deal with its consequences are futile. Human behaviour has made the mess we’re now in. To create a sustainable future, we humans have to decide how we can change how we behave – and then actually enact that change.
Forging a different way of living for the coming years is possible. There are plenty of people who will try to sell continuing with the status quo – it’s comfortable and often profitable too – and they’ll use any number of tactics. But how we live our lives is our choice, not anyone else’s. We can create change from the ground up. Governments can be forced to respond. And by finding and adopting a new approach to our own lives, we’ll be able to look anyone in the eye and tell them what we’re doing and why. And in finding a new approach we’ll have found a new reason to hope for a new and better future for ourselves and everyone else.
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