End of Days diary #01

I pray to the god who doesn’t exist that I can look back 18 months hence, and shake my head at the ‘hysterical’ position I was in back in June 2023.  I hope I can join in the jeers of those climate denialists and ‘lukewarmists’ who say with condescension that fear of imminent collapse/apocalypse are just signs of a disordered personality and creeping millenarianism, of having lost a sense of progress (sometime in the 90s? Have you checked down the side of the sofa?) and therefore fallen for the oldest narrative of all – an imminent collapse where the goats and the sheep, the wheat and the chaff, will be sorted. Many many tickle upskirting.  

Mad Max meets Logan’s Run meets The Last of Us, meets any number of dystopias we like to scare ourselves with, that rehearse how we will behave.

And so to this series of blog posts.  I want to write this because

a) I need to get back into the habit of regular brain vomits 

b) I want to be able to capture for ‘posterity’ (and hopefully hilarity) what it felt like to be watching the oceans spew out heat, watching the ‘natural’ disasters unfolding, and to see that – outside of Climate Twitter – there was just a deathly hush in the mass media and

c) to spark conversation with like-ish-minded people about what they are feeling and thinking.

I’ll try to explore some of the reasons why we are where we are, without getting toooooo bogged down in the technical, in the academic (in the worst sense).  I’ll throw in a little light Gramsci (passive revolution, hegemony), some of the eco-feminist stuff I’ve liked, and whatever comes to hand, via comments, tweets (if any). Send me stuff you think I should read, I guess.

The point is not to map a ‘way forward’ where somehow – if we all followed My Perfect Plan To The Letter – we get the prize of clinging on to the systems that have made life very very comfortable and convenient for a small sliver of people who, mostly by dumb luck (certainly so in my case), found themselves able to put food on the table and have clean water coming out of the tap, while ALSO having freedom of information and ‘education’ (we will come back to that one!)  when there was relatively decent public health, antibiotics and so many ‘mod cons’.

That’s off the table, imo. There is going to be very radical change quite soon (it may not be in the next eighteen months, sure, but I would be very very surprised if it isn’t in the next 18 years – i.e. by 2041.)  This idea that we can keep insulting the climate system, that we can keep poking the beast with sharp sticks and for it not to wake up (yes, yes, “anthropomorphising,” “introducing punishment narratives,” “not scientific,” to which all I can retort is “look at the numbers and then FUCK OFF”)…

So what am I talking about? I’m not talking about sea-level rise – though every centimetre makes the status of cities vulnerable to floods/storm-surges more interesting!  I am not talking about bushfires which choke actors on Broadway, or incinerate billions of animals. I think I am talking about two particular things

1. Heatwaves that affect our agro-industry systems and mean that there are crop failures because significant proportions of crops simply failed to germinate (night time temperatures over a certain threshold for three or four nights running tends to do that).
2. The knock-on political, economic, military, cultural effects of food price increases in countries without social safety nets (i.e. most of them) – of despair, violence, counter-violence.   

It’s not that we’re going to drown or burn (though obviously some will). It’s that the infrastructure built in and for a Holocene world will be exposed as failing and doomed to fail as the Anthropocene/Capitolocene/WhatsMyCene kicks into gear.

Right now, “we” are studiously avoiding that. Look at any newspaper, listen to any radio broadcast (I can’t speak for TV, but can’t believe it would be different). Is anyone explaining what is happening in the oceans, in the Antarctic, how the scientists are agog at the temperatures they have been seeing in May/June 2023?  Nope, silence. Crickets.  

The reasons are varied – it’s not just that journalists write what’s easy (what has come via press release), that they simply don’t understand. Yes it would be great if more hacks ‘woke up’, and their editors/gatekeepers did likewise. But it’s structural, and I guess I will talk about Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model.

But it’s more than that. It’s not that we don’t see, it’s that we don’t want to see, and in fact, we can’t see.  It’s too big, too scary and we (especially the breeders) have to look away to “keep functioning”, even if that’s slow-motion suicide. Blah blah TS Eliot mankind can only cope with a very little amount of truth blah blah Stanley Cohen States of Denial blah blah.  I want to write about disavowal, lacunae, aporias.

It will be so hard to explain to our future selves (if we’re here) and to others born later what the hell was going on.  Maybe future generations won’t care about the details, will be too busy trying to survive to hurl recriminations. Who knows?

For now, the plan is to bash out a daily 1000 words, rough as a badger’s arse, and post them for … well, anyone who cares to read them.  These won’t be polished; I’ve far more pressing things to do with the most part of my intellectual energy, over the coming months. But at least first drafts will be there.  Maybe the laws of physics will get rescinded, and the extra heat in the world system won’t cause all manner of havoc and chaos, and I can look back in 18 months and wonder how I got myself in quite such a mental state of dread. Fingers crossed, eh?