A powerful exchange, and a compelling conclusion to some real difficult topics.
I agree that collapse is inevitable at this point -- I'd say we're already experiencing it, just not all at the same time and place. What keeps me on the utopian side of things is that, perhaps unlike a lot of people, I welcome the collapse of much of this world that we know.
Other parts of collapse do cause me anxiety, but I'm convinced that we can care for each other and make it through the bottleneck, as we've done many times before (just not quite at this scale).
i agree completely. at the risk of wearing out Dougald Hine's name in this series—one of the most inspiring points in the Dark Mountain Manifesto (which Dougald co-authored) is this: "the end of the world as we know it does not necessarily mean the end of the world." there are other ways of being as we move through and beyond the challenges ahead. our humanity has always been forged and strengthened through adversity. it doesn't need to be all gloom and doom leading up to a very Christian conceptualization of the End Times. other options are available, and i look forward to exploring what those are.
I hear you about what is likely coming. It's true, as Elle says, that we're making a lot of progress on climate change. Carbon output is likely to peak sometime in the next decade, and that's good news. But on the other hand, most climate scientists will tell you that we're already seeing much more extreme climate effects than their models predicted for the level of greenhouse gases we have right now, let alone the increase that's baked into the system. (Sources for both those points come from Kate Marvel, senior climate scientist with Project Drawdown on the Ezra Klein show.) Then add to that that the 6th Great Extinction would be happening with or without climate change, which only exacerbates it.
A couple more destabilizing forces (or symptoms?) in addition to the ones you mentioned:
- the increasing uninsurability of large areas of our country (All State pulling out of the California home insurance market entirely, for instance). Our economy pretty much doesn't run if investments can't be insured.
- the draining of the Ogallala Aquifer in Kansas, which we began hearing about in the '90s and now means farms that had contributed huge amounts to world-wide food production have gone back to dryland farming, and their production is way down.
- I could go on!
My own thinking is we have to have a two-pronged approach: the first, supporting all those technical and economic fixes that may somehow blunt the climate crisis and support the 9+ billion humans that are soon going to inhabit this planet, getting them through the keyhole of climate-challenged food production and climate-fueled mass migration, while trying to also save as much of the non-human world as we can. Who knows? Maybe there will be enough technical fixes to manage it, ones that we can't entirely predict. Paul Ehrlich didn't imagine the Green Revolution, which has fed a whole lot of people. (Many would say that it just postponed things, plus the huge environmental drawbacks.)
And the second prong, doing the kind of community building right where we live so that when the excrement hits the oscillating blades (more than it already is), we'll have some sort of local resiliency to weather the storm without going full personal bunker. But that's really hard here in the US (and many other places, probably) when we're so atomized by culture and divided by politics. I'm really bad at that kind of community building, by the way, since I'm such a writing hermit, so I'm no one to talk.
One thing that did give me hope was this movie, Join or Die, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26081864/ . It's a documentary on Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone. (It's dragged down by the inclusion of some triggering political people, which I wish they'd omitted.) Maybe the solution to all our problems is for everyone to join some sort of club!
And now I have to post this, typos and all, and run off to our neighborhood's monthly lunch.
this is a great way to look at it. i think i'm more drawn toward the second prong—redefining that "we"—whereas Elle is advocating for the first prong. both are important, and i'm glad there are so many people thinking about different solutions. that's another source of optimism.
Powerful stuff. I read Dougald Hines’ At Work in the Ruins earlier this year and it shook my acceptance of the certainties I’d previously held about progress. (Well, the pandemic did that first, but Hines’ book helped me solidify my thinking). On my first read I didn’t fully realize the political implications but after reading it a second time through, I came to see that things are going to have to shift away from the familiar Right/Left framing due to the realities of climate change, ecological collapse and the failure of systems of technocratic control and planning.
I don’t know if that means we should move away from politics altogether. But I don’t know what a reimagined politics would look like either. Or a reimagined way of life. I think you’re onto something when you speak of taking clues from how other societies have handled apocalypses in the past.
Thanks again to you and Elle for sharing your correspondence. It has been fascinating to read, and really distilled a debate I’ve been having in my own head for a while now …
definitely! an effective democracy hinges on people's expectation that their participation will actually yield some results... it's not just about creating the mechanisms and the infrastructure, but—more importantly—about the confidence of voters. we've already adopted a "beatings will continue until morale improves" approach here in the U.S.: flagging confidence in institutions is portrayed as, at best, a misapprehension, if not an outright betrayal. unless those institutions can do some major self-repair before climate change really starts to hit, that trend will worsen.
that's one of the big flaws in utopian thinking: people can't be fixed (from the point of view of big institutions) without taking away their humanity.
Sep 16, 2023·edited Sep 16, 2023Liked by R. G. Miga
Thank you so much for this discussion, I feel we could have gone on endlessly from here, especially as I see no reason to be so pessimistic about the future!
I highly recommend the book What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill who, in a moral inquiry on why we need to protect future generations, also goes through every possible doomsday scenario for the future and walks through the stats on why they actually won't be as bad as the media makes it out to be, and how we can protect it from being so.
And then, even more, I recommend the newsletter Future Crunch, which reports weekly on all of the ways we are making human progress worldwide. Including all of the ways we have been coming together globally to create solutions to climate change, including protecting the environment, switching to renewable energy, and making immigration easier around the world. https://futurecrunch.com/
Some other books I would recommend:
Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
And this is where we most differ in our worldviews: yours perspective is one of pessimism or maybe distrust in our systems and their inability to avoid things getting worse from here on out. But that is a worldview that is directly linked to a media ecosystem that only reports on the problems and never reports on the progress we have been making against them. That's why I am offering alternatives sources. And why I have picked an essay about that for my newsletter on Monday. 🥰
We are already overcoming many of the hurdles you have mentioned in this post. The sad thing is that our media system will never report on that, it doesn't sell as well! And so we are left with the only worldview the media will allow us: nihilism.
absolutely! this has been a ton of fun. we could definitely keep going endlessly, largely because i (still) wouldn't characterize my position as pessimistic. i'm just optimistic about different things. i don't believe that our humanity is inextricable from the precarious, inefficient, and often dehumanizing structures that we inherited from past centuries. maybe we'll have time to build something better before our coastlines start disappearing; maybe we won't. but *if* we don't, it's not as if all hope is lost. the available options are not limited to utopia and dystopia. there are other ways of being in the world. our species has a long and inspired history of overcoming adverse conditions, across time and space, without relying on building or being in a "good place." that's what i'm optimistic about.
I still refuse to let you be my nemesis! Because I absolutely agree that we can still be hopeful and optimistic and live good lives, even if the structures don't perfectly support us in doing so. It's worth improving those structures and making them as good as they can be (and I will still research how that might work!), but it's also worth going on living and still creating a good life within them or apart from them (and I hope you will still work on that!). Our angles are not exclusive, and they are both utopian!
A powerful exchange, and a compelling conclusion to some real difficult topics.
I agree that collapse is inevitable at this point -- I'd say we're already experiencing it, just not all at the same time and place. What keeps me on the utopian side of things is that, perhaps unlike a lot of people, I welcome the collapse of much of this world that we know.
Other parts of collapse do cause me anxiety, but I'm convinced that we can care for each other and make it through the bottleneck, as we've done many times before (just not quite at this scale).
i agree completely. at the risk of wearing out Dougald Hine's name in this series—one of the most inspiring points in the Dark Mountain Manifesto (which Dougald co-authored) is this: "the end of the world as we know it does not necessarily mean the end of the world." there are other ways of being as we move through and beyond the challenges ahead. our humanity has always been forged and strengthened through adversity. it doesn't need to be all gloom and doom leading up to a very Christian conceptualization of the End Times. other options are available, and i look forward to exploring what those are.
I hear you about what is likely coming. It's true, as Elle says, that we're making a lot of progress on climate change. Carbon output is likely to peak sometime in the next decade, and that's good news. But on the other hand, most climate scientists will tell you that we're already seeing much more extreme climate effects than their models predicted for the level of greenhouse gases we have right now, let alone the increase that's baked into the system. (Sources for both those points come from Kate Marvel, senior climate scientist with Project Drawdown on the Ezra Klein show.) Then add to that that the 6th Great Extinction would be happening with or without climate change, which only exacerbates it.
A couple more destabilizing forces (or symptoms?) in addition to the ones you mentioned:
- the increasing uninsurability of large areas of our country (All State pulling out of the California home insurance market entirely, for instance). Our economy pretty much doesn't run if investments can't be insured.
- the draining of the Ogallala Aquifer in Kansas, which we began hearing about in the '90s and now means farms that had contributed huge amounts to world-wide food production have gone back to dryland farming, and their production is way down.
- I could go on!
My own thinking is we have to have a two-pronged approach: the first, supporting all those technical and economic fixes that may somehow blunt the climate crisis and support the 9+ billion humans that are soon going to inhabit this planet, getting them through the keyhole of climate-challenged food production and climate-fueled mass migration, while trying to also save as much of the non-human world as we can. Who knows? Maybe there will be enough technical fixes to manage it, ones that we can't entirely predict. Paul Ehrlich didn't imagine the Green Revolution, which has fed a whole lot of people. (Many would say that it just postponed things, plus the huge environmental drawbacks.)
And the second prong, doing the kind of community building right where we live so that when the excrement hits the oscillating blades (more than it already is), we'll have some sort of local resiliency to weather the storm without going full personal bunker. But that's really hard here in the US (and many other places, probably) when we're so atomized by culture and divided by politics. I'm really bad at that kind of community building, by the way, since I'm such a writing hermit, so I'm no one to talk.
One thing that did give me hope was this movie, Join or Die, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26081864/ . It's a documentary on Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone. (It's dragged down by the inclusion of some triggering political people, which I wish they'd omitted.) Maybe the solution to all our problems is for everyone to join some sort of club!
And now I have to post this, typos and all, and run off to our neighborhood's monthly lunch.
this is a great way to look at it. i think i'm more drawn toward the second prong—redefining that "we"—whereas Elle is advocating for the first prong. both are important, and i'm glad there are so many people thinking about different solutions. that's another source of optimism.
You attend a neighborhood monthly lunch? that sounds like community-building to me!
We try. But there were only 3 of us this time!
Powerful stuff. I read Dougald Hines’ At Work in the Ruins earlier this year and it shook my acceptance of the certainties I’d previously held about progress. (Well, the pandemic did that first, but Hines’ book helped me solidify my thinking). On my first read I didn’t fully realize the political implications but after reading it a second time through, I came to see that things are going to have to shift away from the familiar Right/Left framing due to the realities of climate change, ecological collapse and the failure of systems of technocratic control and planning.
I don’t know if that means we should move away from politics altogether. But I don’t know what a reimagined politics would look like either. Or a reimagined way of life. I think you’re onto something when you speak of taking clues from how other societies have handled apocalypses in the past.
Thanks again to you and Elle for sharing your correspondence. It has been fascinating to read, and really distilled a debate I’ve been having in my own head for a while now …
definitely! an effective democracy hinges on people's expectation that their participation will actually yield some results... it's not just about creating the mechanisms and the infrastructure, but—more importantly—about the confidence of voters. we've already adopted a "beatings will continue until morale improves" approach here in the U.S.: flagging confidence in institutions is portrayed as, at best, a misapprehension, if not an outright betrayal. unless those institutions can do some major self-repair before climate change really starts to hit, that trend will worsen.
that's one of the big flaws in utopian thinking: people can't be fixed (from the point of view of big institutions) without taking away their humanity.
Thank you so much for this discussion, I feel we could have gone on endlessly from here, especially as I see no reason to be so pessimistic about the future!
I highly recommend the book What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill who, in a moral inquiry on why we need to protect future generations, also goes through every possible doomsday scenario for the future and walks through the stats on why they actually won't be as bad as the media makes it out to be, and how we can protect it from being so.
And then, even more, I recommend the newsletter Future Crunch, which reports weekly on all of the ways we are making human progress worldwide. Including all of the ways we have been coming together globally to create solutions to climate change, including protecting the environment, switching to renewable energy, and making immigration easier around the world. https://futurecrunch.com/
Some other books I would recommend:
Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
And this is where we most differ in our worldviews: yours perspective is one of pessimism or maybe distrust in our systems and their inability to avoid things getting worse from here on out. But that is a worldview that is directly linked to a media ecosystem that only reports on the problems and never reports on the progress we have been making against them. That's why I am offering alternatives sources. And why I have picked an essay about that for my newsletter on Monday. 🥰
We are already overcoming many of the hurdles you have mentioned in this post. The sad thing is that our media system will never report on that, it doesn't sell as well! And so we are left with the only worldview the media will allow us: nihilism.
absolutely! this has been a ton of fun. we could definitely keep going endlessly, largely because i (still) wouldn't characterize my position as pessimistic. i'm just optimistic about different things. i don't believe that our humanity is inextricable from the precarious, inefficient, and often dehumanizing structures that we inherited from past centuries. maybe we'll have time to build something better before our coastlines start disappearing; maybe we won't. but *if* we don't, it's not as if all hope is lost. the available options are not limited to utopia and dystopia. there are other ways of being in the world. our species has a long and inspired history of overcoming adverse conditions, across time and space, without relying on building or being in a "good place." that's what i'm optimistic about.
thanks for letting me be your nemesis!
I still refuse to let you be my nemesis! Because I absolutely agree that we can still be hopeful and optimistic and live good lives, even if the structures don't perfectly support us in doing so. It's worth improving those structures and making them as good as they can be (and I will still research how that might work!), but it's also worth going on living and still creating a good life within them or apart from them (and I hope you will still work on that!). Our angles are not exclusive, and they are both utopian!
I have not read What We Owe the Future but recently read this well-reasoned critique (here on Substack!) https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/radical-longtermism-and-the-seduction?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2
I will have to add the book to my list because it is a question of key importance and I am interested in learning more.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
I think most of the people following on this thread would have read this book: The World Without Us https://a.co/d/2ccY2NV
i haven't yet, but i'll add it to my reading list for this winter. thanks for the recommendation!