The Garden, the Paradox and the Warning
Hyperobjects, absent aliens and a controversial warning
In the second half of August we had a family get-together at Burghley House, outside Stamford, Lincolnshire. It was the first time we’d all been together since before Covid. Burghley House is a beautiful sixteenth-century ‘prodigy’ house, conceived by William Cecil, who was the Lord High Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth the first. The house stands in some beautiful, extensive grounds with trees and rolling parkland. On arrival we passed a herd of grazing fallow deer.
My brother and I attended school in nearby Stamford, and every spring term we’d be forced to participate in the Burghley run, along a lengthy route through the grounds. Spring term was much colder in the 1980s — subzero temperatures were not unknown, and there was often snow on the ground when we sped around the circuit, even in March. Numb fingers and toes were common.
We had lunch in a large restaurant known as the Orangery. This was rammed, but we’d booked a reservation. Ordering was slightly strange. You had to order and pay at the service desk, after which the waiting people forgot about us. Perhaps it was because our table was at the far end of the restaurant, with a nice view of the rose garden through large windows.
After lunch, we wandered in the garden of modern sculpture. This was large, and we soon drifted apart. Actually, I was deep in conversation with my brother and we didn’t notice we’d lost the others. He lives in Cambridge, and for the last couple of years has been working on a film about the history of Blues music. He’s also a musician and like many in the entertainment industry has had a tough time during covid. So we had plenty to talk about.
The grounds in which the sculptures were set was designed by Capability Brown and reclaimed in 1994. The website talks about “an astonishing undulating landscape.” We passed Brown’s large lake, spotting the ornate boat-house on the other side. The boat-house, and the lake, was framed by low, wooded hills. Swans drifted across tranquil waters. Many of the trees are apparently “ancient.”
At one point, we wandered past the “charming domed ice-house,” a low building containing a large, cylindrical cavity that went deep into the ground. In the winter, servants used to skim the ice off the surface of the lake and dump it in the cylinder. Once packed together, the ice could last into the summer. (This practise occurred during what’s been called the “little ice age:” a period of regional cooling from the 16th to the 19th centuries. I doubt there’d be enough ice to do this today).
The sculptures themselves had been placed in varied and unexpected places; on trees, behind bushes, in dells. Composed of metal or natural materials, they were in the human form, or of animals, or abstract objects. The figure of a hollow man was hung against a tree trunk: another, spread-limbed, watched us from a high branch. A unicorn fled from us in a rhododendron patch. A large, rusted face materialised below a sapling. A wheel-spiral was in a frozen roll across a slope. There was a large hare and a very strange sculpture with a cat mounted on a duck. It was like a dream where you face a series of strange, seemingly illogical encounters that somehow go together to make up a larger, imperfectly understood whole.
Climate breakdown’s a lot like that. The ecological philosopher Timothy Morton has called it a hyperobject — something that is vast, highly complex, baffling, paradoxical, impossible to fully grasp. The more this object is known, the less it is understood.
Take the recent catastrophic flood in Pakistan and the drought in China that has no precedent in history.
(I’ll repeat that to let it sink in: the drought has no precedent in history).
On the face of it, these are directly contradictory events. How can climate change be responsible for both? (This video discussion by Simon Clark Explains how and why they’re related). No wonder many of us are confused. No wonder climate breakdown often doesn’t seem quite real. We’re really not evolved to comprehend it at all.
The (no) Alien Factor
For several years, I’ve been a member of the UKSRN, or UK SETI Research network. SETI stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. SETI means what is says. SETI researchers use radio telescopes and other means to scour the universe for evidence of little green people. One of the problems of SETI is that so far, despite decades of searching, no evidence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been found.
The absence of aliens bothered physicist Enrico Fermi quite a bit. Back in 1950 at the Los Alamos laboratories, Fermi was walking to dinner with fellow scientists Edward Teller, Herbert York and Emil Konopinski discussing UFOs (Webb, 2015). Emil had recently seen a Dunn cartoon showing aliens stealing New York dustbins and taking them back to their home planet. Fermi joked that the cartoon accounted for the absence of both dustbins and aliens. Then, at lunch, Fermi suddenly asked “where is everybody?” Fermi subsequently made a series of calculations that suggested we should have been visited long ago, many times over. The Fermi paradox is that despite this calculation — and UFO stories aside — we appear not to have been. We also have so far not yet found any trace of ET in this or other galaxies.
What has all this got to do with climate breakdown? Possibly quite a lot.
In 2019, I picked up a copy of David-Wallace Wells’ book The Uninhabitable Earth. The book suggested that climate breakdown would be all-encompassing, possibly rendering the earth unliveable for human beings and other mammals. It’s a truly terrifying read, in an already pretty terrifying genre. Towards the end of the book, Wallace-Wells discusses Fermi and suggests that the answer to non-contact “might be as simple as climate.” (Wallace-Wells, 2019, p. 221). In other words, the very presence of a technological society with an extractive economy on a planet with a biosphere might in the long run be so damaging that both civilisation and biosphere end up destroyed. So we haven’t heard from anyone because technological civilisations of our kind are by their nature too destructive to survive.
This somewhat grim thought was the basis for a presentation I made online at the 2020 UKSRN symposium. In this, I explored emerging evidence that suggests that the very presence of tool-using intelligences might be enough to kick-start extinctions. One of the papers I’d discovered suggested that the enlargements of brains during early hominin evolution seemed to predict carnivore extinctions in East Africa (Faurby et al., 2020). Basically, pre-humans arrive and lions start to die off.
Another paper that I found used predator-prey equations to model the human relationship to the environment (Mottesharrei, Rivas & Kalnay, 2020). The idea was that human civilisations have the same relationship to the environment that predators have with prey animals. The equations predict that as prey is decimated, then after a lag, predators will also be decimated, because they are dependent upon their prey to survive. So we damage the environment, and only later suffer the consequences.
On the other hand, high carbon emissions are actually a recent problem. A substantial portion of the damage has been done only in the last thirty years. The above diagram illustrates this pretty well, in terms of a person’s lifetime. If you were only 30 years old in 2017, you will have lived through over 50% of the carbon emissions; if you were 85 then you’d have lived through more than 90%. This acceleration is because the doubling of carbon dioxide has an exponential factor, broadly visible since before the beginning of the industrial revolution. (An example of exponential growth: take a penny, double it. Soon you’ll be a millionaire).
Scholar’s Warning Controversy
This talk went down well at the symposium. I didn’t get any negative pushback. In fact, afterwards there was a lively discussion of existential risk, Fermi and SETI. So as far as I was concerned, the public discussion of possible collapse was an at times scary but academically ‘safe’ topic. This was confirmed by the statements of some very high-profile scientists, warning of the danger of existential catastrophic risk. For example, in 2003, the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, had stated that he thought the odds were “no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilisation on Earth will survive the end of the present century without a serious setback.” (Rees, 2003, p. 8)
Fast-forward to August 2022:
The forty-degree day in the UK meant that for me the possibility of existential risk was shunted from an abstract idea to a lived reality. And because I did not see public discussion of collapse as especially controversial, I had no reservations in signing Jem Bendell’s Scholar’s warning letter. The letter had been published in the Guardian and Le Monde in 2020, but an online version was still open to anyone with a doctorate to sign. It stated that “researchers in many areas now consider societal collapse to be a credible scenario this century.” Also that “the way modern s
ocieties exploit people and nature is a common concern,” urging policymakers to discuss the possibly of collapse so “communities and nations” could “begin to prepare….”
Pretty reasonable comments I thought, given our current circumstances. But Bendell and colleagues had stirred controversy. They’d even been labelled ‘doomers.’ And you always know that a controversy has arrived when one side invents a slur for the other.
I suspect that there were several underlying reasons for this controversy.
The first was that Bendell had publicly discussed his belief that due to a global failure to tackle climate and ecological breakdown was already inevitable. In his view it "is now too late to stop a future collapse of our societies because of climate change.” This had been perhaps understandably seen as overly alarmist. He was also accused of getting the science wrong. Finally, it was claimed that such stark claims might spread unnecessary panic, de-motivate people and destroy hope. Bendell had made what seemed to me reasonable responses, but the controversies persisted.
There was also an issue with professional boundaries. Previously, the discussion on the dangers of climate change had been dominated by climate scientists. The scholars’ letter was open to anyone with a doctorate. This presumably could include signatures from people with little or no expertise in relevant topics. Bendell himself wasn’t a climate scientist. Wasn’t it better to leave the existential risk assessments to the experts?
Bendell and Read also responded to this criticism (Bendell & Read, chapter 1). They suggested that the collapse possibility was of such importance that it should not be left to climate scientists alone. They also pointed out that the story where climate scientists developed policy recommendations and policy makers acted on them wasn’t working very well. In fact, they claimed it was false. After COP26, especially, I was inclined to agree that the relationship between the climate experts and policymakers was at best a dysfunctional one.
There were also clashing philosophies. Much of the climate breakdown scholarship that I’d read took place within what might be called a ‘modernist’ framework. This means, crudely, prioritising reason over personal revelation. Science is seen as crucially important. This frame is also liberal and progressive. The idea of technological progress in particular is key: many ‘modernist’ writers promote at least partly technological solutions to climate breakdown.
Bendell and his collaborator the ecological philosopher Rupert Read didn’t seem to agree with this philosophy at all. Read has been very critical of individualism, liberalism and the idea of progress. He saw the technological focus of our civilisation as part of the problem, not the solution (Read, 2022). Bendell and his collaborators, meanwhile, drew heavily on post-modern critical theory to critique modernity (See especially chapters 5 and 6 of Bendell & Read, 2021). He saw modernity in very negative terms — for example, as the source of colonial exploitation.
It’s too simple to see this sort of fight as “modern (rational) pro-science” versus “postmodern (irrational) anti-science.” For example, both Read and Bendell rely upon climate science to make their case for the likelihood of near-term collapse. However, both critique ‘scientism,’ or the assumption that science, especially hard science, has all the answers. They also promote attention to things like indigenous approaches to climate breakdown. So the fight between Bendell, Read and their critics was about more than mere facts. It was about conflicting approaches to reality, people and life.
The suffering of the global south
As privileged people in the global north squabbled, climate breakdown was causing terrible suffering in the global south. In September, Oxfam reported that 19 million people were facing starvation in the global south because of extreme weather. In The Guardian on the 9th September 2022, Fatima Bhutto stated bluntly that “the global south will not survive this century without climate justice. You in the west are talking about paper straws, we in the global south are talking about reparations.” Soon after this, a number of vulnerable countries petitioned the UN for a global tax to pay for the loss and damage caused by climate breakdown. So we in the global north, who have gained so much from the carbon burn, face a reckoning.
A.C. Grayling has recently suggested that “genuine and effective democracy is the key to solving the world’s problems.” (Grayling 2022, p. 188). This is because democracy breaks the self-interest of those who aggressively pursue power and money to the exclusion of everything else. Democracy here means a shift to a truly de-colonised future, where solutions are found through mutual cooperation as opposed to being imposed by the wealthy and privileged.
At the moment, I’m anything but confident that this could happen. But think of how much better the world would be if the reduction of suffering and the preservation of all life on Earth became the top priorities of global civilisation. Think how different things would be then.
References
Note: I have attempted to fully reference the factual statements above via links. I apologise for any omissions or errors, which will be corrected if necessary.
Bendell, J. & Read, R. (2021). Deep adaptation: navigating the realities of climate chaos. Polity.
Faurby, S., Silvestro, D., Werdelin, L. & Antonelli, A. (2020). Brain expansion in early hominins predicts carnivore extinctions in East Africa. Ecology Letters, (2020) 23: 537–544.
Grayling, A.C. (2022). For the Good of the World: Why Our Planet's Crises Need Global Agreement Now. OneWorld.
McIntyre, L. (2018). Post-truth. MIT Press.
Mottesharrei, S., Rivas, J. & Kalnay, E. (2014). Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies. Ecological Economics 101 (2014) 90–102.
Read, R. (2022). Why climate breakdown matters. Bloomsbury.
Rees, M. (2002). Our final century: will civilisation survive the twenty-first century. Arrow.
Wallace-Wells, D. (2019). The Uninhabitable Earth. London: Allen Lane.
Webb, S. (2015). If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life. London: Springer.