What if climate change was not this thing but another thing
Climate change is like quantum mechanics in that if you think you understand it, you probably don’t. By which I mean that both are vast ideas; far more vast and ephemeral than can be neatly snapped into our brain. Certainly not mine. Climate change is not what my old boss liked to call a ‘thing’, no matter how much people wrap it in the language of statistics in order to try to make it a ‘thing’. Timothy Morton calls it a ‘hyperobject’; too big, too all-encompassing in its everything-ness for us who in every sense live entirely within it to properly understand.
It can join the club. Pretty much everything around which we ostensibly agitate in politics, perhaps in life itself, is some kind of abstract concept which we attempt to make sense of by trying to make it a ‘thing’. Inequality, poverty, economics, love, war: gelatinous, unbound half-ideas which we clumsily pour into ‘thing’ moulds. To say that is not at all to say it is not important to do anything about them, but simply to say that even having a stab at understanding what ‘they’ are— putting a fence around them — is an act of story telling. It’s an irreconcilable part of being human that we make narratives out of chaos, which have a ready similarity to things we think we already understand (which are in themselves, when poked into, infinitely diffuse).
And so we reach for metaphors, as we do with everything. We gird ourselves for the ‘war’ on climate change, as if it made any sense to poke a bayonet at earth systems chemistry. We set out on a ‘path’ towards zero carbon emissions, as if there was anything but thick undergrowth ahead. We hope for a peaceful ‘Apollo program’ on renewable energy, as if the Apollo program itself wasn’t about stiffing the Russians. Stories all.
As with the coronavirus there are two inevitable consequences of thinking about big ideas as narrow ‘things’. The first is that what to do about the thing is defined by the rules of that thing. If we see climate as a war or a fight then we need enemies (tricky: we don’t all agree on the enemies though) and we need good guys (tricky: we may not all be as noble as we think) and we need things we can shoot at and kill, and most importantly we need to have the ability to in some sense ‘win’. Or declare victory at least. Which would all be fine if we were actually talking about jackbooted thugs turning up at your door and trying to kill you, but we’re not, we’re talking about what James Lovelock calls the “homeostasis” of an entire planet. Tricky.
When we talk about climate change what we are perhaps grasping for is a way to give us agency and hope in the face of the way the universe actually works and as the children of a planet we are the same as in the same way my fingerprints are part of my mother’s heart. It matters what stories we hang onto — which realities we construct — because the real challenge here is not a one-off war against marauders but something we’ll never really be able to properly put in a neat box with a ribbon on it: how to make sense of it being a miracle we were ever here at all, that the universe couldn’t really give a rat’s arse either way, and that more prosaically there’s only so much of everything we need to exist to go round.
The second consequence is that every time we make something a thing, we are not making it another thing — with the solutions that might flow from that thing. What if climate change wasn’t a war thing, but was a different kind of thing? Here’s just one thing I made up based on the top headline on the BBC News website just now, unsurprisingly about the virus, which I’ll ham-fistedly apply to climate change just to make the point.
Climate change requires quarantine. There is something infectious which people can have (Temptations? Money? Power? Emotions? Words?) which means we need to keep them away from other people in order to save the rest of us. Most of us will be OK, but we just can’t let those who are the most dangerous go around spreading their infection. Solution: lock away those who are the most powerful vectors for the transmission of planetary sickness.
I’m not saying at all that that is what I think, before anyone gets upset with me on social media. I could have picked a trillion other casually-invoked metaphors at random and ended up with a different solution [1]. But the solution makes a strangely poetic kind of sense, within the bounds of the metaphor we choose to define it.
We all have to pick the stories that work for us and the fact that no metaphor is remotely good enough for the tremendous everythingness of climate change shouldn’t mean we sit in the park and wait quietly for it all to end. As Lovelock (again) has said, “the problems of our ailing society inhabiting an unhealthy planet are serious and this is no time to quibble over the rules”; let’s get on with what appears to work. And I get that war / Apollo / path metaphors work for making a thing that is not a thing a thing, and the essence of being alive is that we need to make a thing that is not a thing a thing.
The basic point is that given no metaphor for climate change will be anything other than desperately partial and constraining, perhaps the most useful thing to do is not to try to pick the ‘best’ metaphor for but to always just be acutely aware that the way we instinctively think about the world is only one of an infinity of ways to think about it.
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[1] Indeed quarantine itself (as applied to keeping potentially sick people away from everyone else for a bit) is itself used as a kind of metaphor, as its original meaning comes from the initial forty (quarante) days that 15th century Venice required docking ships to be isolated from everyone else in the days of the Black Death. And I probably didn’t do that metaphor justice anyway.
