Slow … and rapid

It’s been almost a week … and I now dare put some words to it. This past weekend, Swiss voters rejected the CO2 Act, the law that had been negotiated as a path towards achieving the goals Switzerland committed itself to in the Paris Accords. The result is embarrassing and dumb, on several levels. The national commitments of the Paris Accords, as currently stated, are nowhere close to being ambitious enough to avert climate disaster. And we can’t even get ourselves to attempt that much. Alternatives might exist, but we’re stuck in emotional and institutional rigidities, keeping our thinking trapped. We’re heading somewhere decidedly unpleasant. I imagine for those experiencing the heatwave in the US, it’s currently quite visceral and present. Yet climate change may still feel like a slow development overall. It won’t feel slow much longer.

When I manage to detach, it leaves me curious, more than angry. How strange and wonderous we are as a species, no? Capable of so much, beautiful and terrible. Well capable of destroying the foundations of our own survival. We’ve done it before, albeit on a smaller scale. Since hearing the results of the vote, I keep thinking of a particular discussion years ago. It was in Jared Diamond’s course at UCLA. He wrote the bestseller ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel‘, but at the time was working on a new book: Collapse. For a semester, me and a few of my colleagues, all of us PhD fellows at RAND, would drive up from Santa Monica to attend his lectures. He described what societal collapse, as it has happened at various points in history, looks like. The most famous example is the collapse of Easter Island, prior to the arrival of the Europeans. [My great-grandfather, a few generations back, was on Easter Island in 1774 and wrote with empathy and sadness about those still living on the island, by that time a despairing place that lacked even a single seaworthy canoe.] If you know the story, then the Moai, the giant head statues that remain, appear like ominous warning signs, symbols of what can happen … and might happen again. A key feature of collapse, Prof. Diamond explained, is rapid population decline. One of my colleagues objected: why was Diamond so insistent on framing reduced population as a negative thing? Wasn’t overpopulation a major problem and therefore fewer people a good thing? Yes, Diamond acknowledged, it’s true that reducing population can be desirable, but … the key word to remember in this case was “rapid”. He explained in more vivid terms than I care to restate right now what ‘rapid population decline’ means when a society collapses. Ugh. We’ve seen flashes of this already, especially in places where ecological destruction is most pronounced. What happens if these horrors of genocidal intensity go global, pandemic-style, after large areas of land become uninhabitable and the hundreds of millions living there right now start moving and start fighting for resources and for their literal survival elsewhere? I used to think we had it in us to avert it or at least slow down. This week … I don’t know.

As an antidote, I’ve been also thinking of an old piece in the Onion. I have thought of this headline at least once a week, for the past few years. It makes me smile every time, still. That feels like a worthy start, on this Friday. Let that be the spirit, the beautifully flickering light within this proverbial tunnel. Wishing us all much joy.