We must stop lying to young people about climate catastrophe: face a future of less and less

In one of his Sabbath poems, Wendell Berry gives this advice for answering young people when they ask the old about hope: “What will you tell them? Tell them at least what you tell yourself.”

I remember the first time I told a class at the University of Texas at Austin, where I taught for twenty-six years, what I thought about the future. It was around 2005, and I don’t remember what the topic of discussion was that day, or what prompted my remarks. But in a seminar that asked students to think about the responsibility of intellectuals—a framework many borrowed from Noam Chomsky—we launched into a discussion about ecological crises. Without planning it, I said something like this:

I grew up in a world of infinite generosity and increasing material prosperity, with a belief in perpetual economic growth. My generation was told there would always be more, and the task was to figure out how to share them with everyone in the world. The moral challenge for us was how to solve the problem of inequality and figure out how to feed the world. Your generation is growing up in a world that will be defined not by expansion but by contraction, and it won’t be easy to share more equitably when there is less of everything. I think the moral challenge for you, assuming you continue to live in a wealthy country like the United States, is how to cope with life in the midst of massive, slow-moving human mortality in other parts of the world. You will have to figure out how to live through a time of human suffering that we cannot imagine.

The room was silent. I doubt all thirty students in the class agreed with my assessment, but no one scoffed or tried to make a joke. I saw no reason to insist and no one seemed to want to continue. After a moment of reflection, we moved on. But a student came into my office later that day to thank me. “I think about this stuff all the time,” she said. “It’s nice to know I’m not crazy.” »

These thoughts weren’t crazy then, and they certainly aren’t crazy today. But a few caveats are in order.

First, I was not predicting when or how such a situation might occur. I was simply noting that the trajectory of the human species is heading toward such an outcome—not in some science fiction future, but quite possibly within this century, in my students’ lifetimes.

Second, I did not mean to suggest that people have not faced overwhelming moral challenges in the past. Human suffering, which most people cannot imagine, is part of various eras of human history and is part of life today. But the global nature of catastrophic ecological collapse will be unprecedented.

Third, I am not suggesting that the extreme inequality in the distribution of wealth today is insignificant or unworthy of our attention. But focusing on this inequality today, as we are obligated to do, will not automatically lead to an ecologically sustainable human presence on Earth.

The limits of growth

This classroom experience led me to be a little bolder in raising these points in front of the progressive groups I was a part of. Instead of thinking about distinct environmental problems and distinct solutions, I began to think more about the warnings of environmentalists, echoed in books that explained our ecological footprint and the overarching problem of “overshoot” – when a population exceeds the capacity of its territory to generate energy. resources necessary for life, to treat waste and to provide adequate space for activities. Instead of focusing solely on the failures of specific political and economic systems, I began to think about the “temptations of dense energy” that are at the heart of uncontrolled growth.

So in 2008, I gave a talk called “The Old Future Is Gone: A Progressive Strategy Amid Cascading Crises” to an interfaith social justice group. In 2011, I gave a talk on “Nature Beats at Last: Notes on Revolution and Resistance, Revelation and Redemption” at a peace group convention. At a 2013 talk at a Unitarian church, I began using the phrase “We’re All Apocalyptic Now.”

At the time, I was afraid of overdoing it or being too dramatic, which seems ridiculous to me now. But it was ridiculous at the time, too; the books I was citing had been published decades before. The famous and extremely prescient study of The limits of growth came out in 1972, when I was starting high school. Warnings had been issued – and backed by research – long before I started taking them seriously.

But by the time I finally started paying attention, as the Cold War was ending and the “victory” of U.S.-led capitalism over Soviet-style communism was being celebrated, talk of the limits to growth was passé. Technological fundamentalism—the belief that advanced, high-energy technologies would solve all problems, including those created by earlier technologies—was a delusion of choice, on both the right and the left.

This fundamentalism still stands in the way of clear thinking, although with reports of climate change and environmental challenges making the news every day, the threats are being more seriously debated. Some of these reports even allow for discussions of “degrowth.” But almost everyone involved in these debates continues to argue that there are solutions that will allow the human enterprise to advance in the 21st century on roughly the same scale as in the 20th.

Technology will not save us

But there are no solutions to the multiple, cascading crises of our time – if by “solutions” we mean ways to provide for eight billion people on Earth, let alone eight billion people, a significant number of whom continues to live in high-energy conditions. advanced technology companies. I believe we need to prepare for a future where “less and less” — where fewer people consume fewer things.

It is important to increase the production of renewable energy. Research into more efficient technologies is important. But technology won’t save us, and these advances won’t matter much unless we can move towards fewer things. Admittedly, this is a view that is not very popular. Politicians don’t run on platforms that promise to shrink the size of human enterprise. Universities do not create departments to plan for such a future. Most people find it hard to imagine, let alone accept, a future of less and less.

Here’s what I want to say to the young, the old and anyone who doesn’t think it’s crazy:

Whatever hope there is, we will find it in our deep individual thirst for meaning and in our deep, evolving experience of collective life. We all need to find work in the world that is meaningful to us, and we should all try to find others who want to contribute to building a less and less populated world. Changing our political and economic systems is essential to making a decent human existence possible in the larger future, but learning to live within existing systems in a decent way in the little things of today is equally essential. I have no clear idea how to do this, nor any ready-made plan to offer anyone.

But that’s what I tell myself.

Robert Jensen is professor emeritus at the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is It’s questionable: speaking authentically about sensitive topicsfrom which this article was adapted. You can subscribe to their mailing list here.