De-centring the Carbon; or Turning the Carbon Clock Back (or Not)
I suppose we ought really to feel proud of ourselves, humans have surely achieved a miracle. We have quite literally reversed time! One needs after all to remember that carbon does not come from nowhere. On the contrary, a carbon rich climate was very much to the fore in earlier epochs of the earth’s history. Indeed perhaps there is a real natural progression here. Plants and animals gradually strip the carbon out of the atmosphere, bury it in the earth, and the planet cools down. The time of a living planet is a time of gradual cooling, As carbon (and with it the energy of old sunlight) becomes geological.
That is until humans come along, and want the sunlight, that free un-owned blind force, and with it bring up the carbon in which it was caught. To conjure up the myth of free power, was then to reverse the earth’s natural rhythm: The current problem of our times is then not that we have ‘destroyed the planet’ or raped ‘mother earth’ (whatever that might mean), but rather that we are suddenly risking jolting the planet back 120 million years or more, to the climate of the Coal Age (and early Triassic). It is then not that the planet cannot ‘cope’ with us (as if we were a much loved favourite child) but the far more basic fact that it does not actually care about us at all, and so it is all too easy for us to re-jig the climate such that we simply fall out of the picture altogether. Perhaps then the environmental movement’s war cry should not be ‘Save the Planet’, but rather, ‘Don’t let’s return the world to the habitat of the early dinosaurs!’.
There is of course a beautiful Prospero-like poetry in all of this, where to conjure up the past’s power is also to conjure up the climate that that energy was at home in. And yet at the point we all nod here (and I am nodding with the best of them) I think we also need to sound a note of caution. Of course this is true. Humans are getting their ‘come-uppance’ and yet one needs to understand that this come-uppance is, and must remain a human affair. I mean one needs to resist the temptation to see this in terms of a genuine morality, where if not nature, then the balance of nature at least, takes on human values. There is nothing human or moral here, merely an effect of physics and history.
But then the question immediately needs to be raised, ‘why does this distinction matter quite so much?’. The answer I think lies in the position which I suspect environmentalism needs to play within society to have a real, violent (and lasting) effect. Here I think a historical parallel might be in order. At the start of the nineteenth century, just as the industrial revolution was getting underway, something very odd happened to the religious life of Britain. There was an evangelical revivalist movement. The tendency of the eighteenth century toward enlightenment (and a degree of secularism) was thereby reversed, and religion once again mattered. Here I think one needs to remember the Marxist tag, that religion was the opiate that the people took to alleviate their suffering. It was more that Marx, always sharp eyed for forces that would undermine the revolution, thought evangelism a real threat. I mean here, that the ‘do gooders’ of evangelical factory reform alone might persuade the poor that the rich cared for them just enough to delay the revolution. A worry that of course was accurate enough, as (to quote another tag) it was Wesley as much as Marx that mattered for the Labour Party. Now the real point here is not the trivial problem about whether or not the revolution was or was not delayed by the likes of Mrs Gaskell, but rather the problem of exactly what her and colleagues were articulating. One only has to read Dicken’s ‘Dombey and Son’ or ‘Bleak House’ to understand this. London had suddenly grown: it had become an odd mixture of rural and country or poor and rich, or desperation and desire: evangelicalism was then a story which did not weave a narrative thread so much as pressed all this disjunction into a single ‘felt’, (i.e. pressed fabric) within which numerous distinct elements would be located. The power of evangelicalism then lay in its being able to interconnect apparent unlinkable elements of society. It represented therefore an urgency, a demand to find connections, a naming of a question, and the defining of a problem, for which there were then numerous local solutions,
It was then evangelicalism which became the rubric by which the mid and late Victorians could articulate their increasingly complex and diverse social responsibilities. It was the means by which their society could feel itself to be a whole, even as its elements remained apart. The link then to environmentalism (and I mean here, its political side) is then very clear. Both represent an attempt to create a fabric, a texture, which is deep enough, and rich enough not only to locate elements within a single fabric, understood in terms of a challenge or problem, while never simply compromising their differences; differences which form almost its very ‘stuff’. Each therefore, - Evangelicalism and Environmentalism - represented an attempt to understand a world which had not only become more complex (rural societies were also complex, one must remember), but also (and more critically) more interlinked. Victorian London found it could no longer ignore the poor, as they coagulated in the city streets. Likewise, the poor of the world, when they are not inconsiderately emigrating in search of wealth (and to do the jobs we do not wish to), are e-mailing us, or at least staring out from thousands of broken images. Environmentalism, which involves together poverty, development, historical legacy, and appropriate technology, a consciousness of the planet (and man’s effect upon it) is clearly as almost nothing else could, pressing together all these disparate dimensions.
Here another ludicrous historical parallel opens out. The mid-nineteenth century saw of course, the great rival to evangelicalism in Darwinian evolution. Perhaps as never before, a narrative based history accounted for everything, even, and indeed particularly, society. These two principles – ‘narrative’ and ‘felt’, - then competed with each other, and fought out numerous dark conflicts (one only needs to think of colonialism or education or slavery or the ‘fate of the poor’, or even the Irish Question); but every so often produced some great positive event (the building for London of an effective sewage system). The result of this conflict was of course complex. On the one hand one might say that the narrative won (as narratives always claim victory), after all, until recently at last, the Darwinian account has become the norm (and on a wider issue narratives abound). And yet on the grounds which evangelicalism chose to fight (and grounds, not narrative is deliberate here), it of course won, and changed or challenged everything. The Victorian cities became unthinkable, or at least unspeakable, and the problem of the poor, phrased as a problem of welfare and not elimination, became the ethical standard.
Again what has this ancient history to do with today? Well once again we have a grand narrative raising itself in almost direct conflict with the subtle positionings of environmentalism. I mean of course the anathema of the war against terror. Here once again the thread, or perhaps a noose, is spread over the globe, and not only are all conflicts, but also our rights (I mean the right not to be constantly watched, privacy and surveillance, not to say not being tortured!), are caught up in it. History then, is again breeding a farce in which to repeat itself. And yet with one key difference. The past saw science as on the side of narrative, and religion as on the side of the ‘being felt’, and now the situation is reversed, or at least should or perhaps could be. I mean that the power surely of environmentalism should lie not in the straight narrative story (man has his come-uppance, - leave that sort of thing to the merchants of narratives). Far better one suspects, to allow the science, which is itself gloriously complex, and the politics, to breath apart (and quite probably to breed new ‘felt’ in that being apart). The great challenge then is to avoid the Manichaenisms of the past, with its need for a moral tale of Good and Bad, and face up to the far more complex task of matching global complexities together. A task which then needs to be done not by narrative threads, or simplistic narratives, but rather by both inhabiting and juxtaposing the complexities of the world.
The world’s carbon count might then be returning us to the world of the dinosaurs, and yet we need in thinking about this problem not to indulge in the politics of Eden, but rather to use the fact that we are seriously in peril of falling of the edge of the planet’s history, to re-work exactly where and how we think of ourselves as political entities. And perhaps only in the ethics this move will breed within our minds, will it become possible for us to understand (and be worthy) of a planet and a universe which could so very easily ‘set the clock back’, and so do without us.
