Monthly Archives: February 2009

Mark, you say:

“But when presented with a choice of hard work and sustainable simplicity, or resource-hungry luxury, I fear that human beings of all cultures and backgrounds are programmed to go, in their bulk, for the easier option. Whether Amazonian tribesman or newly-comfortable middle-class Chinese or Indian.”

Yes, most people make that choice, but it’s interesting what is wrapped up in your statement. When you describe it as you have, it paints a picture of humans being driven by greed, base desire and the easiest option. It makes all of us into ‘a bad lot’ and that we will inevitably decimate the planet because of the way we are ‘programmed’.

The time I spent with Helena Norberg-Hodge in Ladakh taught me a great deal about these issues. She set up ISEC (International Society for Ecology and Culture http://www.isec.org.uk ) as a result of what she was witnessing in Ladakh, a Tibetan Buddhist community high up on the Tibetan plateau. Their borders had been closed due to their proximity to China. She was there when the first tourists came in late ‘70’s, and witnessed the radical change to their culture as a result of the influence of western ideals.

She also heard the same old phrase “Oh, well it’s inevitable that the place will get spoilt, it’s the same all over the world. It’s what the Ladakhi people want, and who are you, as a westerner, to try and stop them in their ‘progress? Which would you choose, after all?”

Helena was incensed by what she saw. This was a combination of at least two things:

· Ladakhi people who were seduced by the apparent ‘paradise’ of western lifestyles (based on tourists with apparently large quantities of money and time and fancy technology).

· Western companies who ‘pushed’ their products onto unsuspecting local people who simply didn’t have the info to know better (eg powdered milk is much better for your baby than breast milk; insecticides will help you grow veg….and so, on I’m sure you know the line)

She set up ISEC with the intention of introducing renewable technologies into the culture so they could ‘leap frog’ the industrial age, as well as consciousness raising about the ill effects of western culture – so that they could make a real choice. (and much more besides….)

One of the projects was to bring community leaders to the west to be shown our shadow side – I hosted a couple of women in the early 1990’s. They would then go back and tell the tales of anorexic women in hospital, people sleeping on the streets, sex shops, and so on. Not the paradise they imagined, (and of course not to deny that some of the great things we have)

The point of this is that it modernity would have us believe it has to be ‘either/or’ – either “hard work and sustainable simplicity, or resource-hungry luxury”. ISEC has shown that when people are presented with a more rounded picture of what happens when you take this path or that one, many of them make different choices – not about staying in the past, but about moving into more comfort without destroying their environment. It’s not that we are programmed for this or that.

Moving from hutongs to modern flats would seem like a very healthy choice when people don’t have the complete picture.

And onto your other point about what lies ahead. I agree – talk talk talk, build community, and prepare as best we know how. I think that the Transition Movement has all of that.

OK – I said I was going to take a break from blogging on climate change, but Mary-Jayne Rust has come back with some important comments which deserve an airing and a compassionate response. No pictures on this one, but I’ll think of something for the response above…

Mary-Jayne writes: You compare the two living spaces in Beijing and ask: Where honestly would you like to live?

I’m not sure it’s so straightforward for me. I suspect there was probably far more community in the Hutongs. So while much has been gained materially, I suspect much has been lost in human relations. 

I completely understand them choosing the modern option, but while this may seem a good swap right now, I wonder what they will feel when there is no more fuel to run the VW in the garage or to heat the new houses. Perhaps in many cases the old dwellings might then seem more desirable. In Mongolia people are moving out of the city back into a nomadic existence, living in yurts, precisely because they realise what has been lost in urban life.

My honest choice NOW would be “the third way”, not old-style Hutongs nor modern flats, but carbon-zero communities where we can survive the oncoming onslaught as best we can. 

It’s a great great shame that the Chinese who have the vision to build the new eco-cities were not also the planners of zero-carbon Hutongs in Beijing with roofs upon which they can grow vegetables….and so on. 

No, I would have no desire to live in those soulless modern flats. I do understand why people chose that, but it’s sad, even criminal, to have been so misled by western ideals.

Now, onto another strand of this discussion.

We agree on Lovelock’s prediction that human beings will be radically reduced in numbers. Are you still of the opinion that humankind is finished? I suspect so. 

As you know, I don’t agree that we can be so definite. I think our differences are probably based on our different attitudes to science. While it’s a fantastic tool, I don’t believe that science can see the whole picture. 

I don’t think (concludes Mary-Jayne) I’m in denial about the reality of what we are in – just that we have different perspectives on it. It would be good to respect our differences of opinion as I suspect we will not persuade each other out of them!

With James Lovelock warning us in his avuncular way at age 90 this week that mankind is going to be reduced to one billion or so souls by the end of THIS century (and I am, as you know, convinced he is right), it’s time, I think, to call a halt for a while to climate change comments on a blog of which I’m probably the only reader anyway. (Prove me wrong!!)

I’ve needed to write this, and I’m glad I have. It’s a record of the key things I have come to understand, too late like most of us, about where we stand as a species, and what that means for us existentially and emotionally.

In talking to non psychotherapists about climate change and what we may have to offer, I find myself thinking about the ‘one foot in one foot out’ dance well known to psychotherapists in practice. This building of a witness position averts the flip-flop from denial to apathy/despair.

In the background, with that response to Mary-Jayne now posted below, there have needless to say been some further interesting developments in recent days on the climate change front – with a view to the left of cooling steam I captured rising at dawn from a nuclear power station in Lyon, France.

First, this morning, we hear from one of the principle authors of the last IPCC report on climate change less than two years ago that the prospects for global warming and its consequences had been severely underestimated.

The severity of warming over the next century, said Professor Chris Field, will be much worse than previously believed, and future temperatures “beyond anything” predicted.

Interestingly, BBC Radio Four this morning placed this item second in the news after an account of planned employee bonuses to be paid by Lloyds Bank. Audiences and the wider global community still find it so hard to accept this narrative as overarching everything else – although I suspect that is very likely to change quite soon, as people begin to register the fear that is coming.

Second, one of the world’s leading NGOs dealing with humanitarian aid, the Feinstein International Centre in the US, has warned this past week that the cost of dealing with global warming-related disaster, already significantly on the rise, will increase in the coming years by between 32% and 1600%. And having attended a conference with these folk 18 months ago in the US, I know they think the outcomes are likely to be even worse.

Continuing, we learned this week that Northern China (where I was based for three years in the mid-80s) is currently experiencing its worst drought in 50 years. No-one has died, so in the nature of news, the story has had rather less attention than the Australian fires. But the underlying message is the same. Alarming shifts in climatic behaviour.

The picture here is part of one I took two years ago in that self-same Northern China, of a reservoir north of Beijing, the Miyun. Look closely, and you’ll see what’s left of the water that I used to windsurf on to the left.

In the 1960s, when the reservoir was built, the water reached up to the bottom of the second row of mountains in the blue background.

Today, even before the current drought, the water is almost gone. In a very few years, this and many other North Chinese reservoirs and rivers will be dry – and the region will be on the brink of desertification. I cannot see how Beijing can avoid becoming virtually uninhabitable within a few decades at most. It’s that bad.

Another thought. It isn’t just climate and rainfall changes that are going to render the wider planet uninhabitable. What has so far been largely left out of the public debate is the sheer pressure of human population – that algal bloom on Gaia’s surface. But could that be changing?

The BBC news website this week published an important comment, immediately denounced two-to-one as most intelligent reports seem to be by the usual blogger army of climate-change sceptics, naming what writer John Feeney called the elephant in the room of runaway population growth, and urging the environmental movement to stop running scared of this controversial topic. Well worth a read.

And in perhaps another indication that commentators, in the face of so much resistance, may just be starting to find courage to name the unnamable, you may have seen Channel 4 News on Friday night carrying a discussion on a new report by Britain’s Mechanical Institute of Engineers appealing to this country’s government not just to try to prevent the effects of climate change, but to focus on adapting to what the report called its inevitable impact, including flooding, volatile storms, droughts and heat waves.

The government should, the report says, take preparatory measures including building power plants at flood-proof locations, planning for rising sea levels and knocking down sections of inner cities to create ventilation areas to cope with the extreme heat. And if you think that the IPCC’s outside prediction of 6.2 degrees warming by the end of the century sounds severe, do read this Engineering report, which foresees rises in some parts of the inhabited globe, including coastal China, of up to 13 degrees and more.

Now that’s radical, fact-based and alarming writing. Yet, interesting, as with the BBC this morning, how Channel 4 needed to balance the determinedly serious comments of an Institute scientist with reassurances from Lord Smith of the Environment Agency, that the government was across this, and that, for example, the Thames Barrier would hold for another 80 years.

Ah, said the C4 News’ usually thoughtful presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy, so we don’t need to worry just yet?

And that’s the point which scientists, therapists, politicians, journalists, environmental activists, have to get across. That yes, we do really really need to worry, now. To the planet, and in the context of possible human survival as a species, 80 years is no different from eight. But how do we do this without putting people off.

If we don’t start to worry, quite badly, and name that worry, we truly are toast.

Mary-Jayne, in a comment to the last post, has asked an important question. If the game is up, and as a species we are toast, then what would I (as representative, I guess, of said species claiming, partly as therapist, to have something worthwhile to say) like to see happen in the time we have left?

It’s a question that goes to the heart of how to conduct the discussion around climate change and sustainability.

Overdo the alarm, and your interlocutor gives up, and reaches for the hemlock.

Underdo it, and people carry on with business as usual, hoping the problem will go away, or that someone else will solve it. A spiral, only somewhat gratuitously illustrated left with a lovely 19th-century staircase from a Kerala lighthouse in India…

My own take, Mary-Jayne, is that we DO need, especially as therapists claiming some understanding of human consciousness and the unconscious, to name the unnamable, firmly and regularly. Arguing as we do two things.

a) If it’s true that it’s not yet too late, as some insist, then it certainly will be unless we take truly drastic action NOW. And since that’s not happening, people need as I see it to be alarmed, into taking the danger seriously.

b) And even if it is too late, as I believe (not that it isn’t theoretically doable, just that humankind isn’t, as I argue elsewhere in this blog, psychologically capable facing up to and implementing what needs to be done), then we must still continue firmly to name and talk about the unnamable, and prepare, like a patient with a terminal diagnosis preparing to go into a hospice, to die well.

That process could open a difficult but also meaningful and in some ways even precious time for humanity to reach out to itself and connect, to find compassion and loving, to begin to let go with grace and dignity. Yes, pigs might fly. And a lot of what is coming our way won’t be at all pretty.

But if we don’t name these truths as we see them, then we will in effect be colluding with denial and acting out in a way we would never allow ourselves to do with individual clients or groups in therapy.

So, I hope that goes a short way to addressing your question, Mary-Jayne.

Mary-Jayne, in a comment to the last post, has asked an important question. If the game is up, and as a species we are toast, then what would I (as representative, I guess, of said species claiming, partly as therapist, to have something worthwhile to say) like to see happen in the time we have left?

It’s a question that goes to the heart of how to conduct the discussion around climate change and sustainability.

Overdo the alarm, and your interlocutor gives up, and reaches for the hemlock.

Underdo it, and people carry on with business as usual, hoping the problem will go away, or that someone else will solve it. A spiral, only somewhat gratuitously illustrated left with a lovely 19th-century staircase from a Kerala lighthouse in India…

My own take, Mary-Jayne, is that we DO need, especially as therapists claiming some understanding of human consciousness and the unconscious, to name the unnamable, firmly and regularly. Arguing as we do two things.

a) If it’s true that it’s not yet too late, as some insist, then it certainly will be unless we take truly drastic action NOW. And since that’s not happening, people need as I see it to be alarmed, into taking the danger seriously.

b) And even if it is too late, as I believe (not that it isn’t theoretically doable, just that humankind isn’t, as I argue elsewhere in this blog, psychologically capable facing up to and implementing what needs to be done), then we must still continue firmly to name and talk about the unnamable, and prepare, like a patient with a terminal diagnosis preparing to go into a hospice, to die well.

That process could open a difficult but also meaningful and in some ways even precious time for humanity to reach out to itself and connect, to find compassion and loving, to begin to let go with grace and dignity. Yes, pigs might fly. And a lot of what is coming our way won’t be at all pretty.

But if we don’t name these truths as we see them, then we will in effect be colluding with denial and acting out in a way we would never allow ourselves to do with individual clients or groups in therapy.

So, I hope that goes a short way to addressing your question, Mary-Jayne.