Climate Conversations
Share your thoughts on books or articles on climate change, and how they have impacted you.
All We Can Save: Truth, Couage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. (click here)
Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos. (click here)
I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The toxic state of public disocurse and how to clean it up. (click here)
Still Hopeful: Lessons from a life of activism. (click here)
Sacred Nature: Restoring our Ancient Bond with the Natural World. (click here)
How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future (click here)
Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast (click here)
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (click here)
The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed (click here)
All We Can Save: Truth, courage, and solutions for the climate crisis, 2020. (Johnson, A.E. & Wilkinson, K.K., eds.). One World: New York.
All We Can Save is a diverse collection of contributions about the climate crisis, written by women for everyone. All of these contributors embody a sense of courage to meaningfully address the challenges of a warming world, despite political inertia, corporate malfeasance, and personal fear. Mary Heglar writes: “But the community that prides itself on its scientific nuance can learn to embrace emotional nuance. It is absolutely possible to prepare for the disasters already, terrifyingly, upon us while also doing our damnedest to quit baking more in. We can acknowledge the storm of emotions that comes with watching our world burn. We can process those emotions and pick ourselves up to put the blaze out as best we can” (p.282).
One of the strengths of these writings is the sensitivity to intersectional issues relating to environmental degradation, best articulated by the aspirations of the Green New Deal which not only demands ‘secure clean air and water, climate and community resiliency, healthy food, access to nature, and a sustainable environment’ but relates it to the need to ‘to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of frontline and vulnerable communities, including Indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.’
In this vein, Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasse observes that the “overall lack of diversity within the patriarchal colonial paradigm has had a suffocating impact on creative intelligence and a divisive impact on society” (p.23). This monoculture of imagination tends to have a preponderance of techno-solutionism, like uploading our brains into The Singularity or establishing life afresh on another planet. But Mika McKinnon says, Earth is easy mode: “If we can’t maintain habitability here, we’re utterly f**ked trying to pull off long-term survival anywhere else” (p.141). In other words, we have to show a greater commitment to preserving a stable climate on our own planet.
There is also a general consensus in this collection that the climate crisis has not been caused by ‘mankind’, but by a small and identifiable group of individuals often referred to as the 1%. Rhiana Gunn-Wright argues that “fighting against a warming world depends on the ability to reroute power away from the 1 percent and back to the 99 percent and the political and economic institutions designed to serve them. If we are going to become an economy that serves people and the planet, then the people - all of the people - need power, and we need it now” (p.98).
But the main message for me was that people must get engaged – any way they can. Abigail Dillen writes: “We underestimate the power of contribution - of acting within our own sphere of influence to tackle the piece of the problem that is right in front of us” (p.58). Emily N. Johnston similarly says that “In any moment, we can choose to show up” (p.260).
Indeed, everyone is invited, it is a matter of showing up. No effort is too small.
Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, 2021. (Bendell, J. & Read, R., eds.). Polity Press: Cambridge.
First there was mitigation. With some long-term planning, some investment in new technologies the world could have decoupled the economy from material consumption and transition away from fossil fuels. That didn’t really happen. Next there was adaptation. Given that we have committed our biosphere to some warming, we should continue to try to mitigate against higher levels of heating while planning to protect ourselves from more severe heatwaves, drought, extreme weather events, rising ocean levels, etc. It doesn’t appear that this is really happening, either. The next step is ‘deep adaptation’ and, according to the book by the same name, we should be preparing for societal collapse.
By ‘societal collapse’, the authors of Deep Adaptation mean “an uneven ending of industrial consumer modes of sustenance, shelter, health, security, pleasure, identity and meaning. […] The term ‘collapse’ does not necessarily mean that suddenness is likely but rather implies a form of breakdown in systems that is comprehensive and cannot be reversed to what it was before. […] People who engage in dialogue and initiative for deep adaptation believe that societal collapse in most or all countries of the world is likely, inevitable or already unfolding” (p.2). Deep adaptation is, therefore, a form of ‘post-sustainability’ thinking (p.7).
Though there is some material preparation implied in Deep Adaptation, much of the discussion relates to the impact of extreme scenarios on human psychology. With respect to communicating the threats of climate chaos, there is “some evidence from social psychology to suggest that by focusing on impacts now, it makes climate change more proximate, which increases support for mitigation” and, further, “that ‘hopelessness’ and its related emotions of dismay and despair are understandably feared but wrongly assumed to be entirely negative and to be avoided whatever the situation. […] ancient wisdom traditions see a significant place for hopelessness and despair […] as a trigger for a new way of perceiving self and world” (p.60). The authors quote Tommy Lynch: ‘In abandoning hope that the one way of life will continue, we open up a space for alternative hopes.’ In other words, Deep Adaptation considers ‘hopelessness’ as a stimulus for meaningful change and for psychic strength.
The authors provide a conceptual map for the Deep Adaptation movement that involves resilience, relinquishment, restoration, and reconciliation. Resilience of human societies is conceived to be the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining valued norms and behaviours – presumably solidarity and civility. Relinquishment involves the letting-go of certain assets, behaviours and beliefs that will impede adaptation. Restoration involves people and communities rediscovering attitudes and approaches to organized life that have been eroded by hyper-individualist, market fundamentalist, incremental and atomistic behaviours in an acquisitive economy. Reconciliation, finally, is how we collectively suppress panic, how we work together and support each other, and how our efforts will make a positive difference despite the knowledge that our situation will become more stressful and disruptive going forward. (p.72).
But Deep Adaptation is mainly about communicating and how to approach societal collapse. In basic terms, this means “bringing the somatic, the affective and the relational – the wisdom of our bodies, hearts and communities – wholly to bear on how we face the unfolding predicament” (p.176). It also means, as Joanna Macy suggests, that “no longer hiding the facts, no longer holding back in the expression of our truths, and sharing within a benevolent collective all that we feel, provokes a revival of energy and a kind of release of enthusiasm leading to joy and action. […] Emotions are not enemies; denial is” (p.94).
The basis of denial is presented by the acronym e-s-c-a-p-e: Entitlement, Surety (or certainty), Control, Autonomy, Progress, and Exceptionalism. “The ‘ideology of e-s-c-a-p-e’ is a summary of mental habits that rise from, and maintain, restrictions on our affinity with all life – human and beyond. [They] give rise to attitudes like individualism, nationalism, fundamentalist religiosity and selfish spiritualities, as well as systems like colonialism, capitalism and neoliberalism” (p.124).
As an example, the authors provide a critique of our current ideology:
“There may be a habit of entitlement to avoid emotional pain like despair and to preserve their persona of an ethical agent of positive change. There may be an adherence to the project of natural science in an unsophisticated way, not admitting the fairly arbitrary socially constructed conventions that underlie the creation of subject disciplines and the norms of statistics, for example. That may suggest a need for surety to an extent that can lead to stupidity. Whether explicitly or implicitly, there is often a story that humanity is in control of our destiny within a turbulent environment and that we should somehow control our own emotions and those of people who listen to us. There is also the idea that individuals have the autonomy to change within our current system through voting, through consuming differently or through activism, as if we did not have bills and taxes to pay, creditors breathing down our necks, children to feed and clothe, intransigent politicians, security services infiltrating our activist movements and unrecognized ideologies calling us like sirens to our collective destruction. There is also a quasi-religious attachment to the idea of material progress and therefore the inability to conceive of courageous creative action without guarantee of material betterment. Then there are assumptions of exceptionalism, such as when activists ignore how it is already too late to avoid climate-driven collapse or catastrophe for many people who have experienced that already” (p.139)
Deep Adaptation is an approachable book despite the worldview being presented, which may be jarring for many readers. The basic message is that our current ‘ideology of e-s-c-a-p-e’ will be a barrier to current approaches to mitigation and adaptation. And that societal collapse is ‘likely, inevitable or already unfolding.’ As such, we should begin to communicate authentically - like it really matters. In conclusion, the authors “affirm the ethical imperative to do what we can to ensure a softer landing, to minimize suffering, to save what can be saved to prepare the ground for the possibility, at least, of life-sustaining societies that might not only survive but flourish on the other side of collapse” (p.201). The Deep Adaptation movement is forming affinity groups to advance this process – like it really matters (https://deepadaptation.ning.com/).
James Hoggan (2016). I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The toxic state of public disocurse and how to clean it up. New Society Publishers: Canada
My name is Braum and I am an engineer. Though one doesn’t want to give credence to stereotypes, I do like math. I like scientific measurement. I like probability and statistical significance. I like the laws of thermodynamics: the first, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; and the second, which is even better, that the entropy of any isolated system always increases (in other words, as Dylan sings: ‘That he not busy being born is busy dying.’).
You can imagine my dismay reading James Hoggan’s I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: Multiple times in the book he posits that ‘facts don’t change people’s minds’ … that ‘emotion is the key to change’. Hoggan shares the perspective of Lakoff: “To be an effective communicator, get clear on your values and start using the language of values. Drop the language of policy.”
So, how is one to deal with that?
My name is Braum and I am an environmentalist. Though one doesn’t want to give credence to stereotypes, I do like the natural world (even though we don’t really know what ‘nature’ is anymore). I like clean air, clean water and healthy soil. I like both the idea and reality biodiversity. And I like the type of human civilization that understands that it wouldn’t exist without these things.
You can imagine my dismay reading James Hoggan’s I’m Right and You’re an Idiot that the people who are knowingly pursuing their narrow self-interests to the detriment of ecological integrity and our collective wellbeing are not psychopaths and criminals. Hoggan shares a definition of ‘advocacy trap’, “which happens when we come to believe that people who disagree with us are wrongdoers” (p.14). Expanding on this, he offers the quote, “People don’t start out as enemies— it happens in stages. When people disagree with us, we first question their views, but eventually we question their motives and intentions. When they persist in their disagreement with us, we start to perceive them as aggressors. When they criticize our cause or condemn our reasoning, our defense mechanisms kick in. We are offended and start to get angry. When both sides in an argument draw their stance from the perceived behavior of the other, people eventually start treating each other as not just wrong, but as wrongdoer, and then as enemies. Once that happens, it is almost impossible to do anything over a sustained period of time other than futilely push one another.”
A sound observation, perhaps. But aren’t these people, deep down, still evil (even if we aren’t allowed to say it)? Don’t they remain Idiots?
Apparently not. Hoggan seems to believe that these perspectives will get us nowhere. And get this: as absurd as this might sound, the Other Side thinks the same things about you!
Maybe our feelings are a barrier to finding common ground and maybe, just maybe, it’s not just the deficiencies of the other person. Hoggan offers a series of interviews with thinkers about the state of public discourse, why it is toxic and how we might move forward. From the Dalai Lama to Peter Senge, Hoggan probes a range of topics from democracy, to linguistics, to fish sticks. He even discusses the choice of title for the book, which his publishers discouraged as being a bit off-putting. But the title describes the work, and the work is a serious contribution to exploring avenues to preserve the planet while continuing to engage unaligned worldviews. Perhaps, after all, constructive disagreement is a way forward? But, don’t worry, I’m confident that there will a time in the future to talk about entropy.
Maude Barlow (2022). Still Hopeful: Lessons from a life of activism. ECW Press: Toronto.
Recently, SAGE had the honour of co-hosting Maude Barlow’s participation at the Lethbridge Library’s Word On the Street festival. She shared readings and insights from her new book, Still Hopeful: Lessons from a life of activism.
This is an enriching book for those who dedicate their time and energy to making the world a better place (for humans and non-humans alike). Maude Barlow shares a wealth of experiences collected along her life-long trajectory through what could be roughly categorized as human rights – from feminism to the rise of corporate dominance and neoliberalism (focusing on water justice for peoples around the world) and to the defense of nature from, well, us.
The book offers both a synopsis of the issues, her involvement in these issues, and some insights for people engaging in efforts to address the problems. It is a captivating mix, though one does sense her passion discussing issues and her reluctance to talk about herself. Above all, it is a book about (meaningful) hope.
Barlow begins with ‘hope’: “American Zen Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax clarifies how she sees the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism, she says, can be dangerous as it doesn’t require engagement. Things will be better on their own, says the optimist, and if they aren’t, one can become a pessimist, taking refuge in the belief that there is nothing to be done. Optimists and pessimists actually have something in common, says Halifax — they are excused from engagement. She calls instead for “wise” hope, and wise hope most surely requires engagement.” This perspective, that hope requires engagement, is the foundation of the rest of the book, and is perhaps the inspiration people most need.
Vandana Shiva offers a caveat to this, saying “The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make. … And you can make the deepest commitment with total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them. But then you have to have detachment. And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me always to take on the next challenge because I don’t tie myself up in knots.” Commitment and engagement require a level of detachment to sustain hope. Barlow opens the book with a quote from the artist, Banksy, that supports this: “When you are tired, learn to rest, not to quit.”
Her insights are distilled in the book as follows:
- Governments and other powerful institutions are not going to give up power without a fight. Rights have to be fought for and taken.
- Oppressed peoples often internalize negative stereotypes about themselves and have to consciously reject them and support one another in creating new self-narratives.
- Gaining rights through a new law or court case, or a human rights or charter challenge, does not end the struggle. In many cases, it has just begun, and there will almost certainly be a backlash.
- Don’t wait for a path to be well trodden before you set out on it. You can be the one to walk it first.
- Go to the heart of the human story if you want to break down silos and come together in common cause.
Still Hopeful: Lessons from a life of activism is a wonderful book and couldn’t be more timely. If you want to read a book about ‘hope’ and actually be presented with a perspective that supports ‘hope’ (as opposed to sweet treacle that doesn’t make you want to empty your stomach), this is it.
Karen Armstrong (2022). Sacred Nature: Restoring our ancient bond with the natural world. Alfred A. Knopf: Toronto
Karen Armstrong is a renowned scholar of the history of religions. She has an uncanny ability to describe and compare sacred / religious experiences from the earliest oral traditions and written sources.
In this recent effort, Sacred Nature: Restoring our ancient bond with the natural world, Armstrong traces the sacredness of nature through the world religions while emphasizing the current and expanding abyss dividing our civilization from a sustainable relationship with the environment. Her basic thesis is that to avoid the worst consequences of our trajectory, we must reconnect with the idea of the sacred in the natural world: “While it is essential to cut carbon emissions and heed the warnings of scientists, we need to learn not only how to act differently but also how to think differently about the natural world. We need to recover the veneration of nature that human beings carefully cultivated for millennia; if we fail to do this, our concern for the natural environment will remain superficial” (p.17).
Part of what the author is advocating is to create narratives that build on compassion and solidarity, which she believes are inherent in most religious systems. She believes that our individualist and acquisitive society is a barrier to such notions: “We need good myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which challenges and transcends our solipsistic and tribal egocentricity. And, crucially, we need good myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, because unless there is a spiritual revolution that challenges the destructiveness of our technological genius, we will not save our planet” (p.24). After all, what is the point of finding technological solutions or changing our behaviours if we don’t value the goal of preserving the natural world (even for ourselves, let alone the rest of creation)?
To be clear, Armstrong is not a proselytizer, but she strongly believes that the essence of the sacred, fundamental to world religions and more secular movements like Romanticism, can be an inspiration to reintegrating within our worldview a notion of the interdependencies in nature. This renewed narrative would be a catalyst to a more sustainable relationship with our environment. “So, if we want to save our planet, we too must cultivate this ancient conviction that every natural thing is inseparable from our ultimate concern. We humans have the capacity to appreciate consciously, deliberately, and imaginatively the underlying unity of things” (p.150).
Sacred Nature: Restoring our ancient bond with the natural world is well written, interesting and, most of all, offers a realizable pathway to walk together – in the worlds of Coleridge, it is a way to rediscover a ‘joyous everywhere’ in our values and our actions.
Vaclave Smil (2022). How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future. Penguin Books: New York.
Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future (2022) provides a solid compilation of available data related to the energetics of our economy, particularly on the essential aspects of modern civilization (food, energy and material supply). And he offers some personal perspectives, unfortunately with the same confidence as the embodied energy values he cites.
What is troubling, for me, about this book is the insistence with which Smil plods along the golden mean – eschewing both doomism and slack-jawed techno-optimism. He wishes to portray the image of sober observer of destiny as played by the numbers. In the introduction, Smil says:
“Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances. But who is going, willingly, to engineer the former while we are still lacking any convincing, practical, affordable global strategy and technical means to pursue the latter? What will actually happen? The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas and proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities” (p.7).
This may be a valid perspective, but it doesn’t stress the importance of beginning the transition both in magnitude and speed (even without a complete plan) to address the scientifically obvious challenges and, more importantly, it doesn’t address targeting something more achievable than ‘complete’ decarbonization.
And this is the gist of my complaint about the book: Smil over and over again illustrates why we cannot meet demands of our current system for cement, steel and food – and perhaps this is valid – but what about meeting the needs of a planet full of people with lower expectations (particularly for the favoured fifth of humanity)? What about building a lifeboat first and expand from there? In a crisis, doesn’t it make sense to secure the basics of life before despairing about the lack of foie gras?
Take for example, electric cars, a topic on which Smil expends some pages. The discussion is about converting the whole fleet of internal combustion engines to electric and the challenges to battery storage and infrastructure – battery life-cycle impacts, generating electricity, providing charging stations, the capacity of electric transmission lines, etc., not to mention the challenges of long-distance travel and additional difficulties in cold climates. What seems to happen at this point in the conversation is that ‘it can’t be done’ which often means ‘we shouldn’t do anything’.
What about something less ‘complete’? What about converting urban commuter travel to electric vehicles where people might limit themselves to one car per family & where ICE vehicles would still be available to rent for (necessary) long distance travel until the infrastructure is able to meet this demand? What we are talking about here is a significant reduction in emissions from transportation with only inconvenience and reduction of luxury travel.
A similar argument could be made for all of the cases Smil explores: that is, reduce waste, reduce luxury consumption, transition where you can as fast as you can, and work at catching up where we are falling short. Smil says just this: “Solutions, adjustments, and adaptations are available. Affluent countries could reduce their average per capita energy use by large margins and still retain a comfortable quality of life. Widespread diffusion of simple technical fixes ranging from mandated triple windows to designs of more durable vehicles would have significant cumulative effects. The halving of food waste and changing the composition of global meat consumption would reduce carbon emissions without degrading the quality of food supply” (p.235). This was presented en passant, almost an afterthought.
It is like Smil dipped into his past books (which were typically more abstracted from social and environmental concerns), but added an introduction and conclusion that better reflected the current context. In the end, one could find an argument for almost any position you have on energy, society and the environment. His data point to grave concerns, but his more conservative worldview holds him back from expressing solutions in these terms.
Smil concludes by flinging out a real downer, asking: “Are the young citizens of affluent countries ready to put these distant benefits ahead of their more immediate gains? Are they willing to sustain this course for more than half a century even as the low-income countries with growing populations continue, as a matter of basic survival, to expand their reliance on fossil carbon? And are the people now in their 40s and 50s ready to join them in order to bring about rewards they will never see?” (p.260). And he notes, with respect to the reaction to the latest pandemic, “Failures revealed during crises offer costly and convincing illustrations of our recurrent inability to get the basics right, to take care of the fundamentals” (p.260). Yes, an energy transition will mean that the world’s affluent will have to do with less; and, okay Boomer, people are going to resist giving up their luxuries or what they believe to be their rights and freedoms; and certainly, governments will come up short on the courage and leadership required for a transition. We get it.
In summary, How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future says that we aren’t able to meet the material needs of a world economy based on ever-growing consumption of food, energy and materials; and that we (the favoured fifth who matter) will not likely give anything up for the future of civilization; and that we will punish any government that tries.
How does the world really work? It doesn’t.
Vaillant, J. (2023). Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. Knopf
“Fire has no heart, no soul, and no concern for the damage it does, or who it harms. Its focus is solely on sustaining itself and spreading as broadly as possible, wherever possible. In this way, fire resembles the unspoken priorities of most commercial industries, corporate boards and shareholders, and, more broadly, the colonial impulse.”
Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast is an eye-opening book that works at multiple levels: from the riveting story of the Fort McMurray Fire, to the climate context that created the conditions for this devastating fire, to the hungry fire beast that has emerged in our existential nightmares. And John Vaillant speaks directly about our culpability.
The book begins with the image of human civilization as a fire culture. “Never in Earth’s history, or in ours, have so many fires been ignited in so many places on such a continuous basis. At the most basic level, consider every candle, lantern, and cook fire across the globe: approximately 3 billion people around the world still cook and/or heat their homes with open fires. Then, consider every gas stove, furnace, and water heater; every coal-fired and biomass-burning power station; every generator; every human-caused brush and field and forest fire. Already, we are into many billions of fires per day, worldwide, and that is not even counting matches, lighters, or pilot lights, or more rarified sources like oil refineries, incinerators, and war. Nor does this tally take into account automobiles.” As for the internal combustion engine, with over a billion and a half engines igniting a half-million times each hour of operation, the number of fires each day is in the trillions. Fire is the basis of our civilization, when it is in our control. But when it is not, it is an existential threat.
From this compelling metaphor of fire, Vaillant describes the Fort McMurray Fire through the eyes of fleeing citizens and the first responders trying to wrap their thinking around something they had never witnessed before. The description is spellbinding, as the fire approaches the city, and crosses the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) into Fort McMurray, breaking all the rules. The fire is a Beast, as it devours home by home. Neighbourhoods transform into its energy source, as our dependence on petroleum-based building materials and furnishings becomes manifest. Fathoming the unfathomable sends people bolting for their lives. It is horrific to read.
But Vaillant doesn’t leave this simply as an account of a terrible disaster. First, he describes the weather conditions that allow for such a blaze to energize to such proportions. And then he soundly links these conditions to our changing climate, and our own culpability. And our culpability is directly related to our dependence on fossil fuels: “According to another energy historian, Daniel Yergin, the world economy was worth around $90 trillion in 2019, and nearly all its energy (84 percent) was derived from fossil fuels. We are burning through this energetic trust fund like there’s no tomorrow: on any given day, the human race consumes about 100 million barrels of crude oil”.
An important revelation pertaining to our dependence on fossil fuels is presented, as petroleum companies and (captive) governments choose to ignore the mounting scientific evidence of carbon dioxide emissions and the greenhouse effect, beginning in the 1930s onward – even evidence and projections compiled by trusted scientists working within the petroleum industry. Vaillant writes: “Currently, we live in a dangerously bifurcated reality where senior executives at forward-thinking, publicly traded global companies like Exxon, Shell, JPMorgan, and the Bank of England accept the science of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and the threat it poses, and still continue to—literally—pour gas on the flames. Like the Lucretius Problem, this behavioral dissonance reveals a glitch in human nature. It is a downside to our species’ extraordinary adaptability that appears to be triggered by artificial abundance and exacerbated by the profit motive, which could be defined as ‘commercial entitlement’ (or greed). Once an arbitrary standard has been set for production, profits, and their attendant gratification—something fire and fossil fuels have enabled us to do as never before—that expectation, however unsustainable, becomes the new baseline, and anyone attempting to revise it, or even question it, faces serious social and economic consequences.”
While ignoring the swelling mass of scientific evidence, the frequency and intensity of fires continue to increase around the world. The author compiles global fire events and shows the face of the Beast that is stalking our civilization. The Beast, Vaillant argues, is beginning to create its own habitat. It is a positive feedback loop that with each catastrophic fire, more greenhouse gases are emitted which, in turn, create the climate conditions that encourage more and larger fires: “Since roughly 2000, an inversion has begun: the world’s great terrestrial carbon sinks—the Amazon rain forest and the circumboreal forest, along with many other less famous forest systems around the world—have become net carbon emitters. In other words, what used to be a reliable source of carbon storage is now generating more CO2 than it is sequestering. This grave reversal is one of the most pernicious developments of the Petrocene Age. As forests heat up and die—from disease, beetle infestation, fire, logging, land clearing, and drought, they skew the CO2 balance even further. It is not that living, growing trees don’t continue to absorb carbon, it is that they are no longer keeping pace with the emissions of their sick, dead, and burning neighbors.” It is one of many dimensions of run-away climate change, where the notion of humanity being able to restore the climate to habitable conditions has exceeded our grasp.
The conscious decision not to act on scientific evidence was augmented by acts of deception, ‘predatory delay’, which is defined as is “the deliberate slowing of change to prolong a profitable but unsustainable status quo whose costs will be paid by others.” Meanwhile, the largest financial institutions in the world have loaned publicly-traded global petroleum companies $3.8 trillion since 2016. Largely, it seems, this accrued debt represents a massive liquidation of the value of the corporations to shareholders, leaving the banks (and, therefore, the government) with enormous and unpayable debts. It is a crime that we are watching in real time.
In Fire Weather, Vaillant courageously tells the story of the future. And it is grim.
Vaillant, J. (2011). The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. Vintage Canada.
Take a journey into one of the planet’s most remote areas; Primorye in northeastern Russia, squeezed between The Peoples’ Republic of China and the Sea of Japan. Converging in this area are 4 distinct bioregions marked by Siberian taiga, Mongolian steppes, Korean and Manchurian subtropics and northern boreal forests – a Boreal Jungle in the author’s terms. It’s not easy being a human here, eking out a living collecting pine nuts, trapping animals and logging – but it’s becoming impossible for the Siberian Tiger to thrive in this, one of the last regions on earth in which they roam.
Russia is not usually thought of as keen on conservation, yet it is the first nation ever to undertake a comprehensive survey of this keystone species and, in 1947, to call for a moratorium on hunting. Russian biologists may have been hampered by rigid Stalinist interpretations of Marxism and its reductionist view of nature, but they and the tigers were driven to their knees by Perestroika, the consequent destruction of Russian state political systems and the opening of the border to China and international poaching. Enter the world’s greatest capitalists and a game changing 1993 New York Times report by Suzanne Possehl: Russia and America Team up to Save Endangered Tiger.
Team Tiger is well funded and supported by the US and Russia, proud and confident in their ability to protect both Amur tigers and humans, certainly confident to resolve the 1997 incident of a man eating tiger in Primorye. But what a strange tiger tale it is; in a part of the world where indigenous peoples revere the animal and where most believe tigers will only hurt if they have been hurt – the Russian team is confronted with the death of a hunter named Markov whose remains would fit into the chest pocket of a sports shirt, tiger tracks that indicate an animal of such size it could drag a grown man without breaking stride and a crime scene in which everything the victim owned – from hunting dog to drinking ladle, to the door of Markov’s cabin – has been mangled, mauled and utterly destroyed. “Why” wonders one of the investigators at the scene “is the tiger so angry with
him?”
A thoroughly well documented and engaging read that roams about in politics, anthropology, history and biology and will give you more information than is strictly necessary to answer the question of tiger vengeance.
Vaillant, J. (2006). The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed. Penguin Canada.
A fascinating story of our human relationship with the natural world. The Golden Spruce was literally golden due to an inability to hold chlorophyll, a condition that should have killed the tree, but instead it grew for 300 years along the banks of theYakoun river in Haida Gwaii. The tree is old enough to have stood while Europeans made first contact with the many Native nations along the coast, through the times of massive overexploitation of the sea otter but not quite through the excesses of the logging industry.
Such a unique tree was also golden in its role in the myth and history of Haida who called it, K’iid K’iyaas, Elder Spruce Tree. Golden too, in his way, is the man who cut the tree down in protest. Grant Hadwin was a robust, smart and industrious forest engineer, blessed for his hard work with financial success, family and the ability to work in the forests he loved. Hadwin’s work however was destroying what he loved and perhaps that is what laid the seeds of madness or, if you like, of epiphany; estranged from his wife and following a stint alone in the woods, Hadwin felt he had a spiritual experience and been given a mission – to wake the world to the depredations of logging.
On the night of 20 January 1997, Hadwin swam the frigid waters of the Yakoun river with a chainsaw kept dry in a plastic bag. With a skill honed over many years, he expertly cut into the 50 metre tall, over 2 metre wide trunk of the Golden Spruce, so undermining its foundation that a stiff wind a few days later brought the massive tree crashing down. In doing so Hadwin made an enemy of everyone in the vicinity, the Haida who revered the tree, MacMillan Bloedel/Weyerhaeuser who had let the tree live in a small “set aside” that
masked surrounding clear cuts, people reliant on tourism and environmentalists all over the world.
Before he disappeared Hadwin told a reporter for the Queen Charlotte Islands Observer: “We tend to focus on trees like the golden spruce while the rest of the forest is being slaughtered…. Everybody’s supposed to focus on that and forget all the damage behind it. When someone attacks one of those freaks you’d think it was a holocaust, but the real holocaust is somewhere else. Right now, people are focusing all their anger on me when they should focus it on the destruction going on around them.”
Hadwin was charged with the crime and, fearing for his life if he took a public ferry or plane, set out in a kayak to his court date; he has not been seen since. Also not seen since is a means of resolving the moral and cognitive dissonance of living in modernity and destroying what we love. This is a moving and informative read from a talented Canadian author who respectfully touches on First Nations history and ethnography, contact hostilities, the rise of Britain as a world power through her navies and a frightening overview of how quickly the logging industry has altered our landscapes.