There certainly are actions we can still take to reduce our impact on our environment and avoid the most catastrophic effects of global warming – from transforming our methods of food production and diets to ceasing large-scale clearances of forests and investing heavily in renewable energy while keeping fossil fuels in the ground – requiring the combined efforts of individuals, governments and corporations across the world. So why are we still finding it so difficult to get to grips with this?
Perhaps we are simply overwhelmed by the scale and severity of the problem combined with the complexity of coordinating global efforts in overhauling our way of life. The fear of how daunting the task is has paralysed us into inaction. Some people are already throwing their hands up in defeat, claiming there is nothing we can do. Yet this eco trauma seems to be having an influence on the environmental dialogue; stories are emerging that focus less on panic and catastrophe and more on providing solutions. The Australian documentary film 2040 (directed by Damon Gameau, 2019), for example, envisions a future in which climate change has been solved using the technology available to us today. Its optimistic message is intended to provide hope and inspiration, a call to action.
One of the reasons Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek franchise has endured so well, with multiple TV serials, movies, tie-in novelisations, video games, reboots and spin-offs from its inception in 1966 right up to the present day, is the way it offers fans a positive vision of future possibilities. According to the fictional ‘timeline’ that lies behind the show’s twenty-third-century spacefaring and utopian Federation, the middle decades of the twenty-first century saw a general collapse on earth due to war and environmental degradation. Only when humankind had sunk so low was it possible to come together and rebuild a harmonious and rejuvenated world.*
Nevertheless, many of our climate apocalypse stories still tend to play more on our fears. There are those that handle it more thoughtfully and accurately, as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s scrupulously researched and carefully worked-through ‘Science in the Capital’ trilogy,* a near-future extrapolation of today’s climate change trajectories into a plausibly written near future that highlights the urgency of the situation – many of the characters are scientists, and they are not shy about explaining to other characters the various implications of climate science. But many more prefer to throw science to the wind in a melodramatic fashion. Writers and filmmakers need to inject excitement and narrative thrills into what is not, in its purely environmental-science sense, a very exciting story. A vitally important story, don’t get me wrong, but a slow, aggregative and encroaching story, rather than a sharply delineated good-guys/bad-guys rollercoaster of the kind Hollywood prefers.
Contemporary culture mimics contemporary society: caffeinated and sugar-high, often pepped up with drugs, our society has been so bombarded by stimulants we have developed a tolerance that can only be overcome by ever-higher stimulation. Our culture, today, is a hyperstimulant. Climate change is poorly served by such an agitated and agitating popular discourse, but it can be hard to grab people’s attention any other way.
People understand immediate threats – the image of ice sprinting across the floor after the protagonists in The Day After Tomorrow is a very clear and present danger. The reality of climate change is that it is gradual and therefore people don’t necessarily grasp the urgency, even if they understand the importance. Although the effects are already on display, they are being felt unequally around the globe. We can all gasp at the images of Australia on fire, but it is not the same as it happening to you. Most people are not yet seriously suffering the consequences. And so a warning of ten years seems deferrable, and a warning of a hundred years might as well be a million. What doesn’t filter through is that solving the problem is also a slow process, that we need to take measures now as they will only have an effect over time. As the writer William Gibson astutely remarked on Twitter, ‘We’ve never had a cultural model for an apocalypse that lasts for a century or two. We don’t even know how to make a movie or a pop song about such a slow catastrophe.’*
The environmental campaigner George Marshall conceptualises climate change ‘as the ultimate challenge to our ability to make sense of the world around us. More than any other issue it exposes the deepest workings of our minds, and shows our extraordinary and innate talent for seeing only what we want to see and disregarding what we would prefer not to know.’† According to Marshall, our failure to act is a result not of a lack of knowledge or of political will, but of our inability to grasp what is going on. We are presently not acting in a way equal to the reality because that would mean acknowledging that it is actually happening. The problem, in other words, is that the crisis is environmental. Our environment is what surrounds us, we are immersed in it, and that’s what makes it so hard to see. We can allow ourselves to ignore the problem and let it fade into the background and into the future.
So, although we are afraid of climate change in theory, in our minds it is an issue that doesn’t yet directly affect many of us in the Western world and therefore is not prioritised over issues that are pressing right now. Fear of change and disruption, having to give up the luxuries we have come to rely on and enjoy, outweighs the fear of a threat that is down the line. One of the arguments against transforming the way we live, for example, is the economic
