Climate at the Crossroads

At a recent panel, a professor I work with asked, “What would happen if we had a climate crisis and nobody came?” When I read news reports (for instance this AP story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091022/ap_on_re_us/us_climate_poll) that suggest a lack of concern on the part of the public, the overwhelming impression is of a crisis barrelling towards us in slow motion, almost so imperceptible that there is no imperative to action.  An unusually cold winter day, or a cool front in summer, is enough to quiet talk of climate change for most people.  This stems from the difficulty of connecting the way we normally experience weather (embodied, specific, localized) to the larger processes of climate change. We have a difficult time connecting to scientific processes of an immensely vast scale, which is entirely understandable.

            But the timeline of the effects of anthropogenic climate change increasingly is measured in years, not centuries or millennia.  With each new scientific study the dimensions of the crisis loom larger, not smaller. For instance, this recent article (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091026/hertsgaard) by Mark Hertsgaard discusses how the German government’s most recent survey of climate change suggests that even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s draconian proposed reductions in carbon will be inadequate to avert a grave crisis. 

            In some sense, the chances for action are better now than they were a year ago. For one thing, we have a president who actually does believe human-driven climate change is occurring and will have negative effects on the planet, and there is at least a serious climate change bill on the floor of the Congress (although, as I mentioned in my last post, it is weighed down by giveaways to polluting industries, to the point that many environmental organizations opposed the final House version). And while President Obama talks tough on climate change, reports indicate that the administration is colluding with Western European governments to weaken even the inadequate targets of the Kyoto protocols (http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/10/obamas-bad-influence).

            I’ve been thinking a lot about how to connect my own research interests in the British Romantic period to the current crisis, and one important connection, I think, is that it is in this period that personal consumption came to be understood as a political act.  The work of Timothy Morton (in The Politics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic and, more recently, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics) is of great interest here. Morton traces how consumption-as-politics, however well-intended, can play into what he calls, borrowing from Hegel, the “beautiful soul syndrome,” sometimes to the detriment of the concrete public, state-oriented action that is needed.  But the dimensions of the crisis are such that it cannot be addressed by individual or NGO-based activism alone, but requires the kind of coercive state action that can dramatically curb consumption.  The danger is that, by giving political import to our lifestyle choices (buying organic food, turning off the air conditioner, recycling, biking or taking the bus instead of driving—all of which are important and vital on an individual level)—we can run the risk of neglecting the field of what’s been called “hard politics,” the field in which, for better or worse, the decisions that determine the fate of the planet will be made.