Boil, Baby, Boil

Welcome to Eco-Dystopia

Fictional dystopias are often intended as warnings to the present. In imagining the worst possible future, they tend to extrapolate the most dire possibilities from present trends, acc-ent-u-at-ing the negative to show what we could become if we don’t watch out. The twenty-first century has been a golden age for fictional ‘black mirrors’, and it’s difficult to separate this seemingly endless appetite for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic end-of-world scenarios from the very real dystopian turn of 21st century politics and society.

Shadow wars against an omnipresent terrorist enemy; Islamic State’s murderous utopias; the insane corruption of the Trump presidency; QAnon and the January 6 insurrection; the Covid pandemic; the weekly massacres of refugees in the Mediterranean; the denial of water to pregnant migrants at the Mexico-Texas border - these are only some of the routine ‘already existing dystopias’ of our era that would fit comfortably into any fictional realisation of the worst possible future.

But the most alarming manifestation of our current dystopian turn is the calamitous degradation of the natural world as a result of human activity, whose consequences are increasingly impossible for all but the wilfully blind to ignore.

Take the events of last week. On 24 July CBS News reported that preliminary experiments were taking place in the Florida Keys to assess whether sharks may be becoming addicted to cocaine, because of the amount of cocaine that has ended up in the ocean. I wasn’t aware of this before. Nor did I know that brown trout and other fish had become addicted to methamphetamine.

Call me humourless, but I’m not laughing at these wired ‘cocaine sharks’. Because human beings might ‘choose’ to be become addicts , but sharks and fish shouldn’t have late capitalism’s throwaway toxins foist upon them, and the fact that this is happening is another indication of the seemingly limitless and increasingly grotesque human alteration of the natural world.

In the same week the wildfires in Rhodes and Corfu provided another reminder of that transformation. Media coverage of the fires focused mostly on the novelty of tourists-turned-climate refugees fleeing from ‘nightmare holidays’ , producing a stream of images that would not have been out of place in a JG Ballard novel.

Women in swimming costumes, summer dresses and glamorous sunglasses speaking into mobile phones; lines of tourists in shorts and sandals dragging pullalong bags away from the red Brueghelian sky; evacuees clustered round beach huts beneath billowing clouds of black smoke; gyms and schools turned into makeshift shelters for stranded tourists - these were some of the pictures that made the front pages over the last seven days.

The Greek government claims that most of these fires were man-made, which may be true. But the reason they have spread is because we are now living through the hottest summer on record - hotter than the previous record last year - in which everything is drier than it should be and ready to burn.

So far wildfires have broken out in Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, and Spain. In Sicily wild fires forced the closure of Palermo airport and temperatures in Catania reached 47.6 C - making the air so hot and polluted that even breathing has become difficult. In Milan a heatwave turned into a freak hailstorm across Lombardy that sent slabs of ice flowing through a nearby city.

These storms took place after what had already been the hottest July in recorded European history, in which sea temperatures have also reached new records. The World Meteorological Organization has had no hesitation in attributing these developments to human activity. Nor has UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who announced this week that ‘The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.’

As if this wasn’t bad enough, the journal Nature Communications published the results of a study from the University of Copenhagen suggesting that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) which carries warmer water from the tropics to western Europe may slow or ‘shut down’ within the next decade as a result of climate change - a transformation that would make Europe colder and much of the rest of the world considerably hotter.

‘He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news’, Bertolt Brecht once wrote, but that is a lot of bad news for one week, and it ought to be a wake up call, except that so many dire wake up calls have already come and gone, without producing anything like the commensurate response.

You sometimes hear the sinking of the Titanic as an analogy for our current predicament, but unlike the Titanic, we can clearly see the multiple catastrophes coming towards us. We’ve been warned again and again, decade after decade, about the damaging impact of fossil extractivism, about the human impact on animals, about the threats to our survival as a society and even as a species.

Scaremongers and ‘Climate Scams’

We know what a climate change dystopia looks like, and what ecological collapse could look like, because so many people have spelt in out in great detail, and because so many of the things that were predicted many years ago have already started to happen. We also know the potential solutions, policies, and mitigating steps that we could implement to try and prevent these outcomes.

Yet here we are, in July 2023, staring into the ‘age of boiling’, and it’s not even August. Of course if you believe some people - and I highly recommend that you don’t believe them - none of this is really happening. For the last week now the hashtag #ClimateScam has coursed through Twitter, boosted by armies of bots and amplified by the usual suspects. In Sicily, the holidaying Julia Hartley-Brewer, could be found tweeting with her characteristic joyless gleeful malice:

Elsewhere, David Frost (again…sigh) informed the House of Lords that rising temperatures were likely to be ‘beneficial to the UK’ because more people die from cold than hot weather. At GB News, Neil Oliver accused the BBC and other ‘woke’ weather presenters of ‘scaremongering’ and generating ‘fear of the summer’ by using satellite images of ground temperatures to make it appear that the regions described were hotter than they were.

This was not true - weather maps are not designed on that basis, and Oliver’s claims were immediately and comprehensively debunked, but not before at least two million people had seen his video on social media. Why are ‘they’ frightening people? Because, according to the gimlet-eyed Thane of Mordor, ‘they’ want ‘to get control of people again’ just as they did with Covid. This is why images like this have been circulating on social media, parodying media ‘scaremongering’:

It would be easy to ignore such stupidity, and certainly better for anyone’s blood pressure, were it not for the damage these ‘climate change denialists’ do, and the amount of people they reach and try to reach - often with considerable financial support from fossil fuel companies and billionaires with far more to gain from the propagation of such views than the ‘woke’ BBC has to gain from instilling ‘fear of summer.’

Some of these people will be the kind of voters who rejected Labour in protest at Sadiq Khan’s (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) ULEZ policy, and the kind of voters who Sunak’s Conservatives and - to a lesser extent - Labour itself are now courting as they row back from the policy they once supported, and retreat from climate change mitigation in general.

While there may well be valid criticisms that can be made of this policy in terms of its impact on low-income travellers, it’s only through policies like these that we will have a chance of making our cities healthier places to live in, and stave off the catastrophes that may otherwise become uncontrollable and unstoppable.

We need to understand that we are not separate from nature, but an integral fleshy part of it, and that we are now the custodians of the planet on which our survival depends. ‘Numberless are the world’s wonders and none is more awe-inspiring than humanity,” wrote Sophocles in Antigone many centuries ago. ‘This thing that crosses the sea as it whorls under a stormy wind/finding a path on enveloping waves/It wears down imperishable Earth, too.’

The earth may be imperishable, but it can be made unfit for human life and for many other forms of life, and humanity will not be so awe-inspiring if we allow our common home to become an overheated desert, and cannot find the collective will to do something to prevent it when we still had had the chance to.

To call this a tall order would be something of an understatement, and we need to recognise the possibility that we may fail to pull it off. It is possible that the stupid, the dishonest, and the selfish streak that runs through humanity - supported by social and political structures that have no interest in humanity becoming anything else - may prove to be more powerful than the proactive development of collective responsibility for the damage we have already done and may yet do.

Because if we walk - not even sleepwalking but with eyes wide open - into the ‘age of boiling’, then it won’t matter that humanity once produced the likes of Bach, Hendrix, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Picasso, Buddha or Rosa Parks, because all the great men and women, and all the geniuses, and all the expressions of ordinary humanity that distinguish our species at its best will not have been enough to save us from humanity at its worst.

If we fail, then it won’t matter who we loved or what we cared about, and what kind of world we wanted our children and grandchildren to live in. It will mean that we have succumbed to the worst of us, and listened to the worst of us, and voted for leaders who could not be bothered to save us. It will mean that the history that nineteenth century bourgeois scientists once believed was based on progress and the pursuit of perfection was in fact the tragic story of a species that was smart enough to dominate the planet but not smart enough to save it.

Last year William Shatner - the original Captain Kirk in Star Trek - wrote movingly of his first trip to real rather than fictional space at the age of 90. Shatner described the contrast between the ‘feeling of deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration’ that he expected to feel, and his ‘deepest grief’ ‘contemplating our planet from above’:

What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

We don’t need to go to space to understand that ‘welcoming warmth.’ We witness it every morning when we wake up and draw back the curtains; when we turn out the lights at the end of the day and close our eyes to sleep. We can see it when we go for a walk in our local park, when we go to the beach or the mountains, when we feel the rain and cold; when we watch the delight with which children respond to the world in which they find themselves.

We need to save all this - for ourselves and for others, and for those who come afterwards. We need leaders who can help us save it. We can’t accept any other kind. No ifs. No buts. No postponements or adjournments. No more fetishization of ‘growth’.

No one can say this will be easy. There are powerful vested interests that will do everything to prevent such action, or simply seek to sow enough seeds of doubt to encourage inaction. No species has ever been required to take collective action like this, because no species has ever been in the position in which we find ourselves - masters of the planet and yet still dependent on it even as we contribute to its ongoing ecological collapse.

Yet during the Covid pandemic we showed - up to a point - that we can act collectively to save ourselves, that we can cooperate and make sacrifices for the common good.

The climate emergency requires the same urgency, and the same levels of planning, foresight, and cooperation.

It’s so much easier to do nothing, and tell ourselves that nothing needs to be done, or that nothing can be done. But if we succumb to inertia or self-interest, or despair, we will find that the ‘already-existing dystopias’ of the present are just the beginning.

And at the risk of sounding ‘scaremongering’ or inducing ‘fear of summer’, it’s worth pointing out that dystopian dramas may make for riveting Netflix series, but we will not want to be spectators of the real eco-dystopias that may be just around the corner.