The optimism of the early morning

About ten years ago in Barcelona there was a morning radio presenter called Joan Barril who used a fabulous line at the same time everyday on his breakfast show. Not his own creation, but a paraphrasing from one of the most famous of Catalan poems, Ara Mateix by Miguel Martí i Pol:

"Són les set, i tot està per fer, i tot és possible"

(It's 7 o'clock, and everything is yet to be done, and everything is possible)

Giving the time of day is not part of the poem, but on radio, it makes the line perfect at that crisp clear hour. The optimism of the early morning. The optimism of having a blank page in front of you, and the time and imagination to fill it. As well as the energy - our biorhthymic ability to take a rest and then start afresh.

Yet the poem not only celebrates the fact that everything is possible, but also slightly tempers this with the reality that all the hard work still lies ahead too. That may be a welcome challenge at the beginning of the day. However, the question is, what happens as time goes by, if the things that we are sure need doing do not get done? Everybody's been in this situation at some point, so we know: you figure out what the problem is, you try and solve it, but in the end, solved or not, you adapt one way or another to the new reality - and having made this perceptual shift, you can still wake up the next day and see it optimistically as another blank page to be filled. Right?

Hmmm. There is also the possibility, when problems start occuring, of failing to recognise what is really happening, or of wilfully ignoring it. Maybe, for example, at a personal level, I am just so slow and unproductive as a writer that I should abandon this blog and most of my writing aspirations and look for a more satisfying way to use my time. And yet, it would pain me greatly to recognise that "failure". So I don't, for the moment at least.

But what interests me, and is in the end the motive for this no doubt unproductively-written post, is that the same thing can happen at a societal level. Problems can emerge which we manage to collectively deny. Collective denial can be easier, since the problems can seem to be nobody's in particular - yet they can also be infinitely bigger in scale and more self-reinforcing than our personal burdens. Despite the ability to refresh our perspectives and start again every morning, we can collectively end up like the cast of characters in the fantastical black comedy Ground Hog Day: they are a townspeople trapped in a 24-hour time loop, who wake up every morning and greet one another with an infectious enthusiasm as they start their day, yet they are unaware that it is always the same day - and whatever is achieved that day, good or bad, will be meaningless, because of this time warp which they are all unaware of except for the droll protagonist played by Bill Murray. Who is not nuts, I should point out. Just tired of an apparently unchangeable and therefore pointless existence. Which starts not at 7am, but at 6am:

And I hope I am not nuts either. However, I do wonder if some sort of planetary Ground Hog Day effect has taken hold, and only a relatively small proportion of humanity have managed to notice. Or perhaps the majority of people have our moments of awakening and lucidity, but then we manage to return to the deep, deep sleep of wilful self-deception.

I write this because I've once again been stirred from my slumbers by a book called La Quiebra del Capitalismo Global: 2000-2030 ("The Collapse of Global Capitalism: 2000-2030", with an earlier on-line version available, also in Spanish), published a couple of years ago, the last work by the Spanish ecologist Ramón Fernández Durán, who died in 2011. He straightforwardly asserts that the human race is at the beginnings of a long decline in our industrial-based civilization, which may unfold over a century or more, for the very simple reason that we have exceeded the limits of our planet: a combination of population growth, resource overexploitation and environmental destruction, which will lead via a variety of mechanisms to collapses, big and small: ecological, economic, social, maybe general. This book mostly deals with what he sees as the first phase, and the point here is that we can't avoid it, because we're already in it: our global system, structured on the possibility of continual growth, has begun to come up against our planetary limits - the end of cheaply-extractable oil being the major resource barrier we are already bashing against, with no game-changing alternative even in the pipeline. And the current global economic crisis is also the result of a growth-oriented financial system that is basically running out of ways to grow. Over the next 20 years Fernández Durán forecasts the splintering of our global capitalist system into essentially regional systems, strongly authoritarian and in conflict with one another to a greater or lesser degree for the planet's remaining economic spoils, - making it even more difficult than at present for humanity to move in an just and orderly way towards a more sustainable "Plan B".

Well, leaving aside the details, this forecast is not new, and that's just the point. It is a variation on a scientific warning about our common future that has been made repeatedly over the last 40 years. Only now we're already inside it.

Forty years ago I was a 12 year old growing up in New Zealand - a place where even city kids were able to get out into the wild very easily, and at a time when Apollo missions and communications satellites and youth culture were giving us a new planetary sense. In the 1972 New Zealand general elections, I remember being struck by this TV advertisement for the Values Party, the world's first environmentally-focused political party at national level. The idea was very clear:

"Economic growth means more money - so we're told. But can money buy us a new planet?"

And I remember thinking, this makes sense, this is the future. And suddenly a year later we were in the midst of the first oil shock, raising petrol prices exponentially and giving a pretty clear message about our global addiction to fossil fuels. The danger of our dependence on oil had become obvious. It seemed the start of something - but it wasn't. The Values Party reached a peak vote of 5% in 1975 and then declined to nothing, and at electoral level, green politics went back to sleep for 15 years in New Zealand, just like almost everywhere else.

The year 1972 had also been seen the publication of the ground-breaking report The Limits to Growth, for the first time employing computer modelling to try and rigorously test assumptions on our future planetary capacity for growth. The report found that if world population growth, consumption of resources and services, technological development, pollution levels, and food production all continued in line with then-foreseeable trends, that there would be some kind of economic and societal collapse during the 21st century.

Three different future scenarios were actually tested - some of the original graphs are shown below, with the world population from 1900 to 2100 highlighted in red in each one. On the left-hand Standard Run, the "business as usual" scenario, the model predicted that world population would rise to a peak in about 2030 and then fall, after societal collapse; the middle Comprehensive Technology option hypothesised that humanity would develop high-tech solutions to enable a larger population to continue living well for longer, but would still fall apart in the later 21st century; and only the right-hand Stabilised World option avoids disaster - but only through assuming that drastic intervention in population growth, resource use and pollution issues would begin in the 1980s.

But instead the 1980s saw the planetary Ground Hog Day syndrome take over definitively, with the 20th Century's Second Coming of free market capitalism. Indeed, big business took the reins to such an extent that even when the end of the Cold War removed the largest political obstacle to a common front against global problems, no agreement was reached on the emerging problem of climate change: the US/USSR rivalry had ended, but the US as the only remaining superpower at that point, was unable to surrender any of its corporate and commercial interests, and hence unable to give the necessary leadership to a global consensus against global warming.

And the wider lost opportunity: the acceptance of climate change as a paramount global issue could have been a unifying wake-up call. For the first time, here was a specific and extremely serious ecological threat to our collective well-being that was easily understandable and scientifically demonstrable, and human activity was almost certainly the cause of it. A clear global policy on it starting in the 1990s could have led on to the even more important realisation that climate change is just one of many related threats we face as long as the unrestrained exploitation of the planet continues: destruction of a multitude of interconnected natural systems, exhaustion of resources, overpopulation. You can't hope to solve one of these problems on its own in any more than a temporary patch-up way; you have to look at them all. Broader systemic reform is necessary, but if a framework of cooperation had been in place with regard to climate change, the process could have been to transpose and extend it to other spheres.

Instead, we in the developed world have allowed ourselves to get drunk on the promise of our technology booms and financial bubbles, while the climate change debate, with massive funding of the skeptical viewpoint from the industries that reap a short term profit from the continuation of "business as usual", has turned into a kind of courtroom filibuster. It is so farcically bogged down in the issue of whether we are 95% sure of the details of what is happening, or perhaps only 85% sure, that those involved may well be still be there, in the metaphorical courtroom, debating over the details in the umpteenth appeal, when they are overtaken by events. And it won't be the actual rising of polar meltwater around the shiny leather of their lawyers' and lobbiests' shoes. Probably more likely some kind of social uprising following, perhaps, a collapse of agricultural production resulting from, say, a mass extinction of bees. Or a disastrous epidemic of a new virus, spread globally in next to no time thanks to world travel and impoverished biodiversity. Or a war resulting from resource scarcity, or from the tensions of large numbers of desperate emigrants, or from one of a hundred other possible breaking points arising from the planetary stresses of unrestrained growth.  

The Limits to Growth report received its share of criticism at the time and afterwards. But in the last few years, a number of studies (like this one) have looked at how well the forecasts were standing up to what had actually actually happened since 1972. It turns out that the actual figures are evolving very closely to the "Standard Run" scenario modelled in 1972, as shown in the graph below (adapted from a New Scientist magazine article on the subject, with data updated to the start of the 21st century).

I've added the "You are here" mark, as if it were a tourist map. Perhaps instead of a grey shaded line indicating where we are right now, I could have made it brown in colour and called it "Shit Creek"...

So if this is a shitload of bad news, what's to be done? According to Australian ecologist Paul Gilding in this very good TED talk on the subject, entitled "The Earth is Full", the only good news is precisely the face that this is very bad news, bad enough to make us eventually wake up to it, and that when we humans wake up to a problem and get into crisis mode, we can achieve things surprisingly fast. He quotes the examples of the virtually-overnight reconfiguration of the US economy after Pearl Harbour, of the way companies can suddenly find the ability to make previously-unimaginable changes if they face bankruptcy, of how people completely change their lives and priorities around when told they have a life-threatening illness. So a little bit of fear, a sense of crisis, can be a good thing - Gilding's solution to the Ground Hog Day syndrome, if you like:

"We are smart, in fact, we really are quite amazing, but we do love a good crisis. And the good news, this one's a monster. Sure, if we get it wrong, we could face the end of this civilization, but if we get it right, it could be the beginning of civilization instead. And how cool would it be to tell your grandchildren that you were part of that?"

So I hope I've made this blog post a little bit scary. But somehow I think it needs to be a whole lot scarier, if that's the secret to moving on from our global Ground Hog Day.

And I might just conclude by saying that it might have been scarier if I'd left out some of that whining "if only people had acted earlier" stuff - but this is a blog post built from my personal outlook, written after a period of silence and which I have struggled to write, finally falling on the subject which at a political level is easily the most meaningful for me. In fact, in Paul Gilding's talk he also refers to a "grieving" process, of coming to terms with the reality that our current way of life is coming to an end and has to change - and reflecting on that, I can see the "if only" comments are part of my personal process of figuring out how we got to where we are today. So no apologies.

Necessary to get out of a rut. To move forward. To be able to wake up tomorrow morning and face our world as it really is, in the crispness of the early hours, with so much still to be done, but so much still possible.