Category Archive

Surviving a threat has a way of focussing the mind. For the past few days, the question of priorities has been uppermost. What is important, what is not needed? What and who do I care enough about to invest time in, having been made aware that time is the defining resource limitation?

The heart attack has served to remind me of what might be considered my core philosophy, the essential, buck-stops-here points. Which, at the same time, serves to remind why I thought, a year or so back, that pursuing the questions posed by climate change, and switching occupations, were worthwhile.

Being enagaged in an enforced idleness at home, sat on a day bed contemplating the options of computer chess or daytime TV, I am reminded that, for me, the meaning of being, the purpose of existence, is tied intimately and inexorably to the well-being and happiness of others (you, if you like). A person’s life in and of itself, self-contained and complete (all false imaginings, I promise you), is a very little thing, of small significance. What makes a life big, what makes it full, what gives it meaning and value, is the manner and extent of its interactions with other people.

And here is the connection with climate change and the current state of discussions. Notwithstanding the few who insist otherwise, by and large we are aware that there is a sickness, a malaise, a problem with our world (our home). Whilst one or two will dispute the causes, of more concern is the disagreement over the solutions; how should we treat the patient?

I suspect that it is going to be difficult to decide the best treatments, though, unless we first establish the priorities for governments and industry. Beyond that, we need to establish the priorities for communities and social groups; beyond that, the priorities for families and micro-communities. Which also means establishing our own, individual priorities.

I have established, to my own satisfaction, my list of priorities for a happy and fulfilling life. It goes: People (here and now and present); people future; place/world (environment)[home] and all that it contains; the Future; the rest.

Here is an arrogant suggestion, then. Let’s try this as a template for good decision making about climate change, about adaptation and mitigation, about policy, ,investment and cost.

First priority goes to the problems which need dealing with now; Darfur, Timor, Zimbabwe, poverty, unnecessary death, AIDS, water, food…

Then there are the problems which need dealing with to secure the future for people; food, water, medicine, peace, justice, liberty…

The next priority are the problems which, if they have not already had to be addressed because of the above, relate to the environment, the world, etc; conservation, preservation, protection from exploitation, biodiversity… (though, not unsurprisingly, many of the problems of the first two sets of priorities also involve an attitude to the third set).

The next priority is to resolve the potential longer-term problems; sea levels, water supply, agriculture, resource exploitation…

And, finally, we can invest time, effort and money into to dealing with the other shit.

This set of priorities should be usable to guide us to making first decisions about where effort is needed and how important it should be compared to other issues.

More on that, later.

Two streams of thought arise from the announcement from the BAS that yet another chunk of the Peninsula’s long-term ice shelf is on the verge of splitting off permanently.

The first is to wonder why there are still people who can honestly (inasmuch as they believe it, even though it’s misguided) claim that GW is not really happening. In this category go all the people who spend endless hours attempting to undermine the temperature record in one way or another.

If all that’s left in my gooey grasp is a lolly-stick, there doesn’t seem to be much point in wondering whether the lolly has melted temporarily or on a more long-term basis. There doesn’t seem to be much point discussing whether or not lolly-melting temperatures have been synthetically arrived at by a cabal of lolly-scientists in search of hoards of lolly, or whether the official body responsible for lolly checking is staffed by political radicals with dubious sexual tendencies and atheistic views.

Not much point, because the lolly has gone. No lolly. Bye-bye, cold stuff.

The other stream is the one about what, in the face of the scale and enormity of the problem of climate change, we should or shouldn’t be bothered to do as individuals or consumers (in contrast to institutions and industry). It is easy to understand why some people feel that action on climate change is somewhat pointless, and that token behaviour is simply hypocritical, or perhaps simply self-deluding. It is also easy to see that such an attitude stems, ultimately, from the conception of the world as constituted of many individuals (including ourselves), none of which has substantive power, as opposed to being made up of loosely cohesive groups of people with common desires, aims and beliefs.

You don’t have to join a club to be a part; by doing you are being a part. You don’t have to wear woollen clothing or eat vegetables; there are very few things you might feel compelled to do, unless perhaps it is such things as consuming with thought, travelling with the cost in mind, ending the inclination to waste or replace. You don’t have to sign up to anything, or pay anything. First off, you need to work out whether you belong to a society or are distinct from it. Are you a part, or apart? If you can come to terms with your relative place in the world, then you can start to see the value in your own actions.

Well, not so  much a hiccup, actually, more a small heart attack.

Happened a week last Saturday Night (probably the fourth of a short series),

Operation on Thursday put in two stents.

Now home and recuperating, but obviously, not overly active, for a while.

Honest, it had nothing to do with the paper…

This will probably give me a bit of time to trawl around the blogosphere and irritate a few folks.

Apologies to all those who were expecting to hear from me. Now you know why.

Some interesting may conceivably follow in the days to come.

It’s not even as if I’m actually really that old, you know….

This is for Blog Action Day.

We are like them, perhaps; we know we wish to ’save the Shire’,  to conserve or preserve that which we hold valuable in our homeland. We know without thought, given the choice between the industrial and the bucolic, between keeping or losing that which around us is of Nature, that we prefer to keep, to protect, to preserve for others into the future.

This is a real transformation in the nature of  our thought, and has steadily seeped into our consciousness for the past few decades, until now it can be said that, for many people in the developed world, the quality of civilised life is intimately tied with a sense of connection to that which is yet untouched by civilisation.

This does not mean that we are thus obdurately pastoral or romantic about this other part of the world which remains outside our city walls, but suggests that a respect for the otherwise-than-possessed  (that which is not acquired, worked or transformed by us, for us) is now a reality.

But against this hopeful picture we must place that other picture of our relationship exemplified by the servants of the ‘Dark Lord’. The desire for power, the lust for possession and control, the eagerness to rule, or to share in power, which places us as privileged in competition with other humans. We may feel as if we care for Nature, that Nature matters to us and for us, and yet we are still ‘citizens’, members of a human community which is defined by the construction of its cities, its walls and fences, farms and ‘land improvements’.

And so we live uneasy, many of us in  the social, sub-urban, sanitised greenness of a compromised rural idyll somewhere between the Big City and the Wilderness, enjoying the benefits of our civilisation yet dreaming of being liberated from civilisation’s constraints, whilst outside our privileged places in the developed and technologically sophisticated parts of the world, we know there are millions for whom this is a meaningless triviality, for whom the lack of development is a challenge to survival and comfort which remains to be resolved.

And so we face a challenge ourselves. We have a standard of what ‘good living’ is which allows us, through wealth and complex social support mechanisms, to want to save the environment, and yet we also have a standard which persists in telling us that the preservation and protection of our human lives is also a ‘good’, demanding that we prevent, if we can, the unnecessary human suffering which we know of without ourselves being victims.

Somehow, we must find a way to help others in the world attain that standard of ‘good living’ which we now take for granted, without doing what we did (as societies) in order to reach that standard ourselves; without appropriating the wilderness, without cutting down the forests and planting crops, without building power plants or burying the land beneath a layer of concrete and pesticides.

And so we look at what is already in the world, what exists as resources ready-to-hand, what  the sum of human property and wealth is, and measure it against the sum of need. And we find…we find that, whilst constrained by logistics and location, there is already enough to go around, enough for all to share the standard which is our ‘good life’. So why do those others go hungry, why do they still need to ‘develop’ where once was nature? In part, it is a product of those logistics; the goods needed for good living must be within reach. In part it is a product of imbalances in some places, where the capacity of the land to sustain the population and survive itself has been compromised and we find ourselves compelled to push further along the path of destruction because it is too late to go back.

So what makes us like hobbits? Without getting into arguments about the cultural or ethical assumptions embedded in Tolkein’s work, there is a model in there of what Tolkein and his friends saw as the  ‘way of goodness’ in us ordinary mortals. We are placed in a world of forces much greater than ourselves, where individuals and institutions have huge and seemingly unassailable potency, compared to us.

And yet there is a task for each of us, a job to do, which we can choose to accept or not (to a void issues of determinism, we can also choose to define, first). We know it entails a burden, a self-sacrifice, an effort at the limit of our capacity to attain, a determination in the face of adversity, a trust in each other and a faith that there is in the world something which is worth preserving, worth giving up everything to save.

And here, as people who have chosen to care for our environment and the lives of the people within it, ‘our people’, ‘our homeland’, we have become, strangely, like a hobbit. Not for us the magic swords of power, or the imagined glory of the battlefield. Not for us the face-to-face encounter with an embodied representative of darkness, an epic heroic stand. We must walk, one step at a time, with those around us with whom we share a trust in mutual goodness and goodwill, an undistinguished path, to an uncertain future, without expectation of reward, beyond the knowledge that we are doing what little we can, giving what little effort we have, to save what is for us both greater and more important than ourselves; our world and all the goodness in it.

Gracious!

Sorry for the laboured title. This post has in mind discussions which have gone on with Michael, Dennis, William and David, among others, on the subject of Lomborg, economic analyses of climate change such as the Stern report, and similar issues.

It’s going to be a bit of Ethics 101, I’m afraid, so for those of you for whom this is old ground, my apologies. maybe someone reading will learn something useful.

The argument about mitigation has largely been conducted in terms which suit policy makers and governments, dealing with the costs and benefits of action against inaction, or the opportunity costs, for example. Those against mitigation argue that the cost is so great in the present and near future, that any potential future benefit is outweighed by the damage (loss) incurred. Arguments such as those presented by the Stern Report generally attempt to refute this by demonstrating that the claim is false.

This causes some discomfort amongst some of us; the language in which the argument is framed seems somehow not right, though it isn’t always clear why. This is an effort to offer a possible explanation.

The frame of reference, the context, in which these discussions take place is important here. For the purpose of such analysis, it is assumed that what matters is the instrumental value of the environment and the atmosphere; this is often determined as the physical transformation value of the resources available to us; what they are worth if they are transformed into something of (normally) economic worth. The focus of attention is inevitably on us, humans, as the objects of interest, those for whom the value of the resource is significant. It is thus also generally anthropocentric as well as instrumental. This appears to be the case whether we take an approach which argues for resource exploitation, resource conservation, or resource preservation. In each case, what is being debated is the value to humans of a resource.

So far, I have used language which derives from contemporary ethical/philosophical discussions of the environment and environmentalism in general. This appears to be the terminology in which discussions of the value of the atmosphere and climate have also been framed; what signifies is the effect that a changing climate will have on a range of resources, including water, food and energy. Against this is placed the value of the energy resource in the form that it currently takes,  as a derivative of fossil fuels which produces CO2 and GHGs as a by-product.

But it is my contention that all of this is wrong. What is wrong is that we appear have chosen a set of criteria for evaluating the resources available to us which fails to take into account the specific and unusual character of climate, and which define ‘value’ narrowly and not necessarily accurately.

What is exceptional about climate, as compared to any other environmental issue, is that whereas most objects of environmental concern involve species, habitats or even large-scale ecosystems, none of them has the universality of climate.  The usual environmental objects are also to some degree tangible, whereas climate is not. Finally, they are concerned with object which, in most cases, do not involve the survival prospects of humans, not necessarily as a species, but certainly in large numbers, as social or national groups placed in vulnerable topographies.

Both the atmosphere and the climate are the  necessary conditions of our existence on Earth. Without a certain atmospheric composition,and a certain climate, the ability of our species to thrive is curtailed, or in extreme cases, threatened. Not only this, but a world in which a certain degree of ‘ecologic’ richness persists is probably also of vital importance, and this richness is most of all what is threatened by climate change.

So the value of the resources available to us for use need to be measured against the immeasurable value of the holistic environmental resource, a vital ecosystem in a relatively narrowly confined range of climate. This is the case whether we are exploiters, conservers or preservers. None of these addresses the magnitude of the matter in question, which is the value of the world as a fit habitation for us.

It should be simple enough to see, then, that the instrumental value of the climate is not a big enough measure to describe something without which we can not flourish. inasmuch as climate belongs to that variety of environmental object, such as the entire biosphere, on which the grounds of our existence depend, it should be seen as having an intrinsic value - a value in and of itself. And in the interpretation I hint at here (it is so very incomplete), intrinsic value trumps instrumental value every time.

If, then, what is at issue when the discussion about the mitigation of climate change takes place, is the threat such changes pose to the viability of a proportion of our ecosystem - a large proportion of our ‘home’ - then measuring such a thing in terms of economic, or instrumental benefit, becomes a nonsense.

This is a large subject and I have not put the case completely here, but I hope it gives some taste of what I understand is wrong with our current discussions of the ‘value’ of the environemnt in general, and of the climate in particular.