Transition Culture

7 Mar 2014

Living with Climate Change: Cathy Verschoor in Deventer

“I am not sure what it is you are doing but it seems like a lot of fun. Can I join in?” This was the message I send to the Edible Deventer group in the Netherlands after reading yet another article about their local initiatives: household garden courses, creation of an edible, decentralized carbon sink forest by the free distribution of hundreds of nut trees, picnics in the park and the creation of ‘façade mini gardens’ (even in the shopping centre!) were some of them. What appealed to me especially was the clever combination they made of doing practical stuff with in the back of their minds the need of mitigation for climate change.

Greening the city, making it edible at the same time and getting people from several neigbourhoods directly involved, was a golden formula, it seemed to me.  It had taken me at least a year to write this email to the Edible Deventer group. My project as an international consultant just finished and I wanted to get more involved with my local community. The answer to my e-mail, almost two years ago now, was more than welcoming. Apparently someone put me on a mailing list and in no time my in-box was flooded with messages. It was slightly overwhelming but one of the ‘Edible girls’ assured me to just pick-out ‘whatever makes you happy’ and ignore the rest.

The first activity I attended was a gathering about Urban Farming where the Edible Deventer group would make an appearance. A bit anxious, as it would be the first time to meet my counterparts, I entered the meeting room. Wow. The room was packed with local farmers, shopkeepers, politicians, consumers, activists, policy makers and …the Edible Deventer group.

Apparently the local political party, who had organized the meeting, had looked all over the place for people involved in urban farming, before they realized that Transition Town was already ‘doing it’ right around the corner.  For me, I was amazed that there where all these people thinking about the same things as I did. And I didn’t have a clue! So this was what my towns(wo)men were up to when I was away!

The next ‘step’ was the Transition training that I attended soon after. I started to read The Transition Handbook and found out what the Transition movement was all about. Oh dear, this wasn’t just about fun and inspiring activities, this was heavy stuff! I did try to get away from it, “do we really have to talk about climate change and peak oil? Can’t we just stick to the fun stuff?” But really there is no turning back once you get into it.

I did like the way the training was set up though and how the trainers (Tara and Paul) guided us through the process and I did meet a lot of new and inspiring people. The Transition process can be frightening and lonely, sometimes. I was so lucky to have found a group that already existed, with like minded people to share thoughts, ideas, initiatives and yes to also have a lot of fun. I was also so lucky to be able to take on the next step last year: with a group of people from TT Deventer to create and form the ‘Groene Golf’ (Green Wave), a centre for practical sustainability and local resilience.

A place to meet people, inspire, create, dream and experience. A place where only recently we hosted this year’s national Transition conference and the LAUNCH training. If we let climate change go out of hand, Deventer will be on the new shore line of the Dutch lowlands. In my experience, working for a truly sustainable future can be fun and very rewarding when taking it on together. We’ve only just begun. 

Find out more about Transition Deventer here. 

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6 Mar 2014

Paul Kingsnorth on living with climate change.

Paul Kingsnorth wrote recently of the floods that have hit the UK, arguing that they represent the beginning of “a gradual, messy, winding-down of everything we once believed we were entitled to”.  It’s 2 years since he announced “I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching. I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity, and all the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I’m leaving, I’m going out walking”. What has he been doing since then, and what does “living with climate change” mean to him?

To start with, here’s the podcast in case you want to listen to our conversation while shampooing the dog or pruning your gooseberries.  

The first book of yours that I ever read was Real England which I really enjoyed and had the subtitle ‘The Battle Against the Bland’. Does the fact that you’re about to move to Ireland mean you think that’s a battle that we’ve lost?

I’m moving to Ireland for a number of reasons, not least because for a long time I have wanted to have a little bit of land that I can work on and live mortgage-free and educate my kids at home, and it’s just not something that I can afford to do in England any more. Interestingly, in Britain these days, if you want to live simply, you’ve mostly got to be rich.

In terms of losing that battle, what we’re looking at all over the western world is this continual advance of the corporate economy and it’s wiping out a huge amount of colour and character all over the place. In terms of what’s happened in England since I wrote that book, it’s a mixed bag actually. If you go back and read Real England now and start to look at a lot of the campaigns that I wrote about, you’ll find that some of those campaigns were actually won by the people who are fighting them, and a lot of the things they were talking about saving have been saved. You’ll also find that others have been lost.

But the general picture, certainly, is that this march of the monoculture is going on. How long it will go on for, in the face of climate change and peak oil and all the other things that we all talk about is a moot point, but certainly we can see what direction we’re moving in at the moment.

The piece you wrote a couple of years ago, the Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist which generated a lot of debate and discussion, you wrote “it’s all fine, I withdraw, I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching. I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity, and all the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I’m leaving, I’m going out walking”.  Where have you been since then? Can you give us an update on your walking?

That was a piece that I wrote at a point where I felt that environmentalist had hit a wall. I still feel that, actually, and I stand by what I wrote in that essay, What it also is, is a very personal essay. It’s not necessarily a piece of advocacy. I’m not suggesting anyone else should be doing the same thing. But I think the green movement has hit a wall and I think there are certain things that can’t be achieved and that’s not being talked about, which was why I wanted to withdraw from my involvement in it.

A lot of the journey that’s been happening since then has taken me up and down the dark mountain, if you like. It’s taken me to a point where I’m a lot more comfortable with not being in control, and I’m a lot more comfortable with not knowing. And I feel that broadly speaking as a society, as a civilisation, we tend to think we’re in control of what the future’s going to look like, or that we ought to be or that we can be, and I think that applies to a lot of environmentalism as well. We’re just not. We’re living in a country which is currently flooding in many parts of the landscape, and we have absolutely no control over that. We have no control over the direction our climate’s now going in. We can’t even reduce the emissions that we continue to pump up into the atmosphere at an increasing rate.

Yet we labour under this illusion that if we can come up with the right plan we can sort things out, and we can’t. Once you accept that, you walk off into this strange wilderness in which you’re not in control of things. I’m exploring this territory in which we’re faced with an enormous change in the way that we live and an enormous change in all the assumptions that we base our lives on, and we can’t really get a grip on where things are going. It’s an unsure place to be. I think we need to have a lot more honesty about exploring those unsure places that we’re finding ourselves in. We’re moving into this age of really radical change and collapse and we’ve no idea where we’re going to be going or how we can keep a grip on the way that we live.

Over the years, I know with the Dark Mountain camps and some of the writing, there’s been overlaps and links between the Dark Mountain movement and Transition or people involved in Transition. How have you observed or thought about the relationship there? What’s in common and what’s distinct between them, do you think?

I’ve noticed a lot of Transition people involved in Dark Mountain, a lot of them kind of at the heart of the project actually. I think what the projects have in common is that they are both open to the reality that I’ve just been talking about, of this future in which things are going to change whether we like it or not. This path that our culture is on at the moment isn’t going to continue, and a different future needs to be prepared for in different ways.

There are obviously differences as well. Transition seems to be a much more practical engagement with the on-the-ground stuff. Dark Mountain is really an artistic project, it’s a writers’ and a creators’ project I suppose in the broader sense of the word. We produce books and we produce art and we hold events which feature music and all sorts of creative responses, and we’re talking about trying to reimagine the stories that we’ve told ourselves on a creative level. So there’s an obvious difference there.

The similarity between them is that they’re both responses that seek to, I think, have a realistic assessment of what’s possible and what isn’t, and often in the mainstream green movement I don’t see enough honest assessment of what isn’t possible. People don’t like to talk about that. I think at this stage, we need to be able to put our hands up and say well here are the things we can’t do, how do we live with that. I think as a culture, we’re very bad at doing that.

Within the more mainstream environmental movement, where does that inability come from, do you think? They keep telling this story that we can turn it all around, particularly the ones who say and we can still have growth too…

It’s so common.  It’s politics I think. What you’re really looking at here is a movement, if you look at the big green NGOs, they need public support. That’s where they get their funds from and that’s where they get their petitions signed and how they get people to go on their marches. If you look at political parties like the Green Party, they need to get the votes in, which means to some degree they’re going to have to tell people what they want to hear.

What people want to hear in a society in which we’re all soaked in material wealth is “It’s all going to be fine for you, you won’t have to give up your nice cars or your houses or your holidays in the sun. We can somehow make those things ‘sustainable’“. I’ve lost count of the number of ‘mainstream’ greens I’ve met or know who don’t really believe that for a minute, but they have to say it because otherwise nobody listens.

We have this cult of optimism in this culture where people don’t want to hear bad news. They just want to turn off. The Greens have discovered this to their cost over the last 50 years. Every time you tell people about climate change or any other horrible thing that’s happened already or is coming along, people just don’t want to hear it. We’ve got this whole global movement of climate change denial now which is an incredible thing really, psychologically. Millions of people out there, busily working away pretending it’s not even happening.

If you’re a mainstream green organisation and you need a lot of people to buy into your message it’s very difficult to give them bad news. It’s very difficult to question all of the stories and all of the assumptions that the whole culture you work in is based on. I don’t really blame anyone for that, you’ve got to work within the barriers that are set for you. But the limitations there I think are very clear and it just seems very obvious to me that you can’t give out any kind of honest green message on a wide scale in a society in which people are as addicted to material prosperity as we are here. It’s just not possible. And that leaves Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace and the Green Party and all the rest of them in a very difficult position, an impossible one really.

We’re in a situation where lots of Somerset is under water, Cornwall coastlines are crumbling into the sea, the river Thames is swelling … it’s been extraordinary in the coverage over the last week or two how rarely anybody’s mentioned climate change. Really, really extraordinary.  If you’re in a situation where the impacts are so clear and nobody puts two and two together, is there still a role for you in terms of raising awareness and talking about it?  Is the idea that we can get people to care about this a lost cause?

I think one of the reasons I moved on from green campaigning to the Dark Mountain kind of writing I do now, is I kind of gave up on raising awareness as a useful response. I think that there’s a false assumption within the green movement and within all political movements actually, that if you give people enough information, and you raise their awareness, that that will lead to action. I believed that for a long time, and I can remember in the early 1990s writing about climate change and campaigning on it, no-one else in the mainstream was talking about it, it was just a few greenies.

We all believed that if people knew about this on a big scale then obviously they would act, it’s just so obvious that they would act, isn’t it?  Now they know about it on a wide scale. It’s been on the front pages of newspapers for the last 10 years. Everybody knows about climate change, all the information is out there, and nothing is happening.

And as you say, you can get into this astonishing situation where half the country’s flooding and hardly anyone talks about it. They don’t even ask the questions. No-one in the media even asks the questions. What does it take? I think there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding. We assume people are being rational all the time and that if you give them facts they’ll act on the facts. That’s not really what happens. We all make assumptions based on our prejudices and intuitions and then we use the facts to back them up. Call me cynical but I think that’s the way that humans work. I think that’s the way that we all work.

If you start off on the assumption that if you raise enough awareness things will change, I think you’re in the wrong place. My conclusion personally is that the useful thing you can do is keep telling the truth, to keep being honest about what’s actually happening to provide information for people who want to act on it, but also just to hunker down really and get on with doing what useful work you can do at your local level without imagining that you can change the way that society is going, because I don’t think at the moment that you can.

Is there anything that you would march for now?

I think this stuff is really about distinguishing between what you can do and what you can’t do. It’s very simple. I’ve been involved in a campaign to stop a supermarket being built in my town for the last three years. I’ve been involved in that quite heavily because it feels like a winnable battle. It’s not going to stop the march of supermarkets more generally but it might save this small town centre and that seems to be worth doing.

If there’s something specific to be marching against then it’s a good thing. Marching against the Keystone XL pipeline seems like a good thing. That might be a winnable battle as well. But there’s a difference between trying to prevent a particular pipeline or a particular fracking rig or a particular supermarket and trying to change the whole of human behaviour and stop climate change. They’re not the same thing. I think you can win small battles and local battles and I think you can protect what you can protect, and I think you can continue to tell the truth. But if you set yourself up to try and change the behaviour of industrial society, or stop the climate changing or change the direction of material progress then you’re going to be very disappointed as a lot of people have been.

When one takes that step across, when one goes up the Dark Mountain as it were, and accepts that there’s not a great deal that you can do and that the climate is going in a particular direction and that’s just how it is … what gets you out of bed in the morning?

The funny thing is, this was a surprise to me really. People sometimes look at Dark Mountain from the outside and assume it’s very depressing and doom laden. They say “Where’s the hope? Where’s the hope? We want hope!” People have this addiction to hope. They want to be able to hope for things even if there isn’t a basis for it. But I’m finding that since I gave up on false hope and since I gave up having to pretend that we can save things we couldn’t save or stop things we couldn’t stop, I feel a lot better I have to say, because I felt for a long time and I know other people have felt this too, that I was like a priest who didn’t actually believe in the religion I was telling everyone about but felt I had to keep telling them because that was my job.

I get this sense from a lot of green leaders and spokespeople and all the rest of it, they don’t really believe in what they’re saying in a lot of ways. They don’t really believe that the world can be turned around and we can stop climate change and have a peaceful, sustainable development for 10 billion people. But they kind of have to say it because they don’t know what else to say.

But once you stop saying it, and once you stop saying things that you actually believe to be untrue, the alternative is not to collapse in despair. It’s to think – OK, well what can I actually usefully do then? Here I am, at this moment in time. These changes are happening and I’m living through them. What can I usefully do?

Everyone will have different answers to those questions. My answer is I can continue to write in a way which I know inspires and informs some people. I can continue to make my life as low impact as possible. I can have some land and work on it, I can bring my kids up in a way that I consider to be good, and that’s what I do. That seems to be a useful response with the kind of powers that I’ve got, and that will be different for everybody. But once you stop having to pretend that you can do everything, the alternative is to say, well I can do something, what is it? I suppose that’s a great weight off my shoulders.

I suppose for lots of people the idea of giving up on the idea of being able to hold things back feels like an acceptance of something that just feels completely unacceptable really.

I think so, and I think that’s because of our illusion of control. This whole culture of ours, this whole civilisation is built on this illusion of control. It goes right back to the Enlightenment and beyond the idea that we’re going to control nature, we’re going to control the future, we’re going to have a great plan that we’re going to roll out for how civilisation’s going to look. It’s not going to happen. We need to learn to accept, as most traditional cultures have accepted, that we’re not in control of the wider world beyond our culture, and we should learn to let go of some of it.

We’re going through a climate change event now. It’s not the first this planet has experienced by any means. It’s the first one on this scale that humans have experienced. We created it. It’s happening now. The levels of carbon dioxide are higher than they have been for thousands of years. They’re going up at a record rate. That’s not going to turn around and even if it did at this point, the change is coming. There’s no point in pretending that it’s not happening. It doesn’t help anybody. It’s better to be flexible and say well, here we are. Here we are.  That doesn’t mean you can’t do anything to prevent things from getting worse. It doesn’t mean give up. It just means that you adjust your expectations, I suppose.

But looking back through history, there have been times when people have mobilised, have made big changes happen. Even the changes of attitude towards smoking in public over the last 10 or 15 years – one can point to examples where people have led, within a relatively short period of time to quite major changes in how we do things.

That’s possible. I’m sure that will continue. You can see that our changes to the environment have been quite rapid over the last 20 years or so. People’s ideas about things as basic as recycling. Even things like flying and driving are starting to change a little bit in countries like this. But it’s not relevant to the scale of the problem. It’s not that it’s not happening, it is happening and will probably happen a lot faster when people make the final connection between climate change and the weather events that we’re having, which I think they will because as this goes on and on and gets worse and worse, people are not going to be able to pretend it’s not happening any more.

I think that will happen, it’s inevitable that people’s attitudes will change and people will do things. People will keep doing things like campaign against fracking, which hopefully will prevent it from happening and that’s all good. I don’t’ want to be critical of it or say that people shouldn’t do it. In the grand scale of things, we are now committed to a big climate change. In the grand scale of things, there’s now a rolling extinction going on which hopefully we can hold back as much as possible, but isn’t going to stop. We’re not getting back to the point we were at 50 years ago. It’s not going to happen.

But that doesn’t mean you’ve lost, you give up, you go home and cry, it just means you adjust to the rolling reality of it. We’re going to have to go with it now. The floods aren’t going to stop coming at this point.

Did you see any of the stuff recently that David Holmgren’s paper Crash on Demand generated?

I haven’t read the post but I’ve seen lots of people writing about it.

His basic argument was that economic growth and the growth-based economy is the thing which is frying the biosphere and pushing us over the edge, and the only way to have any hope of saving that is to deliberately engineer economic collapse because that’s the only way it stops growing, and that actually we would be well advised to put some or all of our energy into actually withdrawing our support from the economic growth model in such a way that we deliberately bring about its collapse.  I wondered what your thoughts were on his approach?

It’s interesting because I think there’s going to be a lot more of this in coming years. You’ve probably seen the rise of Deep Green Resistance as well, that’s another slightly more radical, angry response to this idea that the thing that’s destroying the world is the capitalist machine and therefore you must destroy the capitalist machine.

It’s quite right really. Obviously the thing that’s destroying the world is economic growth. More broadly, the thing that’s destroying the world is advanced capitalism. What you do about that, on the other hand, is another matter. I haven’t read Holmgren’s paper so I can’t really comment on it.

In terms of withdrawing your support from the machine as it were, it seems like a great idea to me. That’s what I’m trying to do myself. I don’t think you’d ever get enough people to withdraw your support from it to crash it, but to be honest I think it’s starting to crash itself anyway. It seems to be completely unsustainable. Again, this is a question of everybody’s individual response to the crisis we’re going through now.

I think everybody’s individual response will be different, and his seems to be, as far as I can tell, quite sensible. Whether it will have the effect that it wants to have, I don’t know but what’s clear from an ethical point of view to me is that this industrial machine is destroying the world. We know that. It seems to be an obvious ethical obligation really to withdraw your support from it and your engagement with it as much as possible.

But of course, the reality is that we’re all stuck in it. Just by being born into our generation in this country it’s almost impossible to completely withdraw yourself. But you can still do what you can do. You can’t predict the future. How many people are going to do that kind of thing? We don’t know. Anything could happen over the next 10 or 20 years. It could be another economic crash, it could be a rapid climate change event and everything could change and everybody’s attitudes could go out the window.

One thing that is exciting I suppose is that we shouldn’t underestimate how quickly people’s attitudes can change when circumstances change. If we had a giant economic collapse, if we had rolling climate change, if we had all this stuff coming at once and making it very very obvious that we weren’t going to keep on going in the same direction then anything could happen. That doesn’t mean we could reverse everything and get back to how it was, but we could have a very very different attitude. At some stage, our intellectual assumption that capitalist growth and progress are the only game in town is going to collapse. How soon that will be, I don’t know, but it will happen because it so obviously is undermining even its own assumptions, and when that happens then things start to get really interesting, but in what direction we have no idea at all.

Is there not a case that actually what’s needed now more than anything is people who have a real understanding of the situation and the context and where we find ourselves actually putting themselves forward for positions of leadership, whether at the local or the national scale, and actually stepping up rather than retreating? Is this not a time for the people who have spent so many years working on this stuff to actually try and step across and take some kind of leadership at this point?

My feeling on that is that we’re living in a decaying system and trying to take leadership roles within a decaying system is not going to lead to anything. You can’t offer solutions with the same mindset that created the problems and look what’s happened to the Green Party.

You can spend 50 years trying to get seats in parliament. If you try and stand for leadership roles or step up to leadership roles in the society we’re in at the moment, you will automatically get sucked in to that society’s assumptions about growth and progress and all the rest of it.

I think it’s more interesting.  I think we’re in what’s called a “pregnant widow moment” at the moment, where the old king is dead and the king’s wife is pregnant and we don’t have a new king yet and we’ve no idea what the new regime’s going to be. We’re strangely in transition actually between the old world of growth and progress and material assumptions of wealth and a new world which is going to see much more environmental chaos and much more poverty and instability but also probably completely new forms of politics and philosophy and all the rest of it, that are going to come from the changes that we’ve already initiated. We don’t know what shape they’re going to take.

I think the most useful role for people who you might call leaders, anyone who’s been working on the stuff we’re talking about is to actually keep doing what they’re doing to stand apart from things.  Not to necessarily become leaders in what’s going on at the moment. But to stand apart from things, to keep cranking out the radical ideas, to keep thinking about how things are changing and to stay nimble and to improvise, not to get bogged down by ideologies or get stuck in party systems or any of that stuff. But just say “things are changing radically. The useful stuff to do at the moment is to protect what we can protect and keep developing our ideas as things happen”.

I think there will be more and more appetite for people who have radical views or what we see now as radical views over the next decades because so clearly the thing is coming apart and the answers are not going to come from within, so actually standing outside and maintaining a clear focus and continuing to expose what’s wrong and trying to come up with alternatives, I think is the most useful thing to do at the moment. 

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5 Mar 2014

Getting back to the BBC about Lord Lawson’s ‘Today Programme’ appearance.

Here is an Open Letter which responds to the BBC’s letter defence of the recent appearance of Lord Lawson on the Today Programme.  My original complaint can be found here. 

Dear Ceri Thomas,

Thanks for your response setting out the BBC’s defence of Lord Lawson’s appearance on the Today Programme (reprinted in full below).  I understand that I am one of a large number of people who complained and who received your letter.  What puzzles me, and why my complaint to the Lawson piece still stands, is your assertion that it is right to “offer space to dissenting voices where appropriate as part of the BBC’s overall commitment to impartiality”.  While it could be argued that Lawson might have something to contribute to a discussion on policy, I would suggest that his determination to rubbish even the basics of climate science rule him out, given that he doesn’t accept the basis for the discussion.

In the recent book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, which looks in depth at the generation of “doubt” in relation to climate change by various advisers and lobbyists, the authors write:

“The notion of balance … may make sense for political news in a two-party system (although not in a multiparty system).  But it doesn’t reflect the way science works.  In an active scientific debate, there can be many sides.  But once a scientific issue is closed, there’s only one “side”.  Imagine providing “balance” to the issue of whether the Earth orbits the Sun, whether continents move, or whether DNA carries genetic information.  These matters were long ago settled in scientists’ minds.  Nobody can publish an article in a scientific journal claiming the Sun orbits the Earth, and for the seam reason, you can’t publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal claiming there’s no global warming.  Probably well-informed professional science journalists wouldn’t publish it either.  But ordinary journalists repeatedly do”. 

If the “dissenting voices” that appear on the BBC seek only to undermine established science, to sow doubt where there is none, then they are not appropriate, contribute nothing and do the listener a great disservice.  Your piece wasn’t just about policy, it was also about whether a link between climate change and the floods can be established.  It really needed to be one thing or the other.

As I noted in my previous letter, Lawson repeatedly misled your listeners, either cherry-picking or misrepresenting the science.  Any listeners who were seeking insights to help them “judge how to assess the recent bad weather in the context of climate change” were appallingly badly served.  They were misled, lied to, led to believe that there is a level of doubt in the science that is not a reality. 

While it may be the case that ‘Today’ has a track record of interviewing climate scientists, I haven’t heard any of them and I am a regular listener.  The Lawson piece was different in that it was served up in the prime 8.10am slot reserved for leading political figures or commentators or scientists with relevant insights on the stories of the day.  Lawson is none of those things.  He runs a think tank which refuses to reveal its funding sources and which lobbies for policies which benefit fossil fuel interests. 

By all means have discussions about what we do about global warming, how we allocate funding and design policy as a response.  But please, do not offer airtime to politically motivated deniers who seek only to sow doubt where none exists, and whose contributions to discussions about policy are undermined by their still being rooted in a fantasy world where climate change is a non-issue. You state that “this was the first interview on ‘Today’ with a climate change ‘sceptic.’“.  I hope that the feedback you have received will mean that, as well as being the first, it will also be the last. 

Thanks

Rob Hopkins – Transition Network.

* * *

Thank you for your email. The BBC is committed to impartial and balanced coverage of climate change. Furthermore we accept that there is broad scientific agreement on the issue and reflect this accordingly. Across our programmes the number of scientists and academics who support the mainstream view far outweighs those who disagree with it.  We do however on occasion, offer space to dissenting voices where appropriate as part of the BBC’s overall commitment to impartiality. The BBC Trust, which oversees our work on behalf of licence fee payers, has explicitly urged programme makers not to exclude critical opinion from policy debates involving scientists. 

As was clear from the discussion, there is no conclusive proof as yet of a direct link between the storms hitting the UK this year and climate change. It was therefore reasonable for Justin Webb to ask Sir Brian Hoskins about the limits of scientific knowledge, in particular how the lay person should judge the evidence. But he also rigorously challenged Lord Lawson – in particular on his assertion that focusing efforts on developing green energy sources was a waste of money and that resources would be better spent on improving our defences against bad weather. Both lines of questioning were designed to help listeners judge how to assess the recent bad weather in the context of climate change. 

Scientists do have a crucial role to play in this debate. ‘Today’  has a track record of interviewing distinguished experts on climate change such as Lord Krebs, Sir John Beddington and Sir Mark Walport; All three have appeared on the programme in single interviews in recent months. But politicians and pressure groups also have their place and in six weeks of flooding, this was the first interview on ‘Today’ with a climate change ‘sceptic.’  

Whilst there may be a scientific consensus about global warming – that it is happening and largely man-made –  there is no similar agreement about what should be done to tackle it; whether money should be spent, for example, on cutting carbon emissions or would be better used adapting our defences to the changing climate. Lord Lawson is not a scientist, but as a former Chancellor of the Exchequer is well qualified to comment on the economic arguments, which are a legitimate area for debate. 

We believe there has to be space in the BBC’s coverage where scientific consensus meets reasonable argument about the policy implications of that consensus view. That said we do accept that we could have offered a clearer description of the sceptical position taken by Lord Lawson and the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the introduction.   That would have clarified in the audience’s minds the ideological background to the arguments. 

I hope this helps explain our thinking, 

Yours sincerely 

Ceri Thomas 

Head of News programmes

 

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4 Mar 2014

"Blow wind and crack your cheeks": introducing a month on living with climate change

This month our theme is “living with climate change”.  We’ll be exploring that from a variety of angles, speaking to climate scientists, hearing contrasting opinions as to what it could mean in practice, looking at the inner impacts it has on us.  We’ll hear from Transition folks around the world as to what climate change looks like where they are, starting today with Joanne Poyourow in Los Angeles.  It has been an extraordinary few weeks in the life of climate change here in the UK.  I realise that any readers in Australia, Thailand, parts of the US, the Philippines, Alaska etc. will be thinking “welcome to our world”, but this felt like the moment climate change reached these shores, made its presence felt in a way that it never has before.

Much has been written about the floods and extreme weather, but for this piece I want to turn to a commentator on such things who I haven’t seen referenced in recent coverage, William Shakespeare.  In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear has foolishly divided his kingdom between his three daughters on the narcissistic basis of which of them loves him the most.  Cordelia, the one daughter who really loves him, tells him she thinks it’s a ridiculous process, for which he banishes her and divides everything between his other two daughters.  

Eventually they cast him out, destitute, heartbroken and losing his reason, onto a heath in a storm.  There then follows one of the most powerful passages in the English language as he hurls his anger and deluded self-pity into the face of the deluge:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!

Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once

That make ingrateful man!

Here is Sir Ian McKellen performing it:

 

While an extraordinary piece of writing, it also, unfortunately, seems increasingly to reflect the reaction of a substantial number of people to the recent storms.  All manner of people and organisations have been, metaphorically at least, stood on the top of the nearest hill, screaming into the face the most extraordinary storms in living memory, believing that somehow their indignation, their sheer belief, their rightness, their complete absolution from any responsibility for what is occurring, can subdue and overcome nature’s fury and return everything to “normal”.    

First there’s the government.  Driven, in part, by the need to appease the UKIP elements of their own party, discussions about the storms have rarely mentioned climate change.  When David Cameron initially suggested the two may be linked, at Prime Ministers Questions, he was booed … by his own party.  

Although he has subsequently stated that climate change is “one of the most serious threats that this country and this world faces“, this is hard to reconcile with his acting as though the opposite were the case: pledging to somehow defy physics and revive the North Sea oil and gas industry (have you seen the production decline graph?), giving tax breaks for fracking, pledging to increase airport capacity and re-open some coal mines, planning for a fourfold increase in shipping by 2050, and so on.  

This, remember, is a government whose Environment Secretary recently stated that climate change “is something we can adapt to over time and we are very good as a race at adapting“.  Try telling that to people in Somerset whose living room is three feet deep in silt and sewage.  It is also a government whose Energy Minister Michael Fallon, argues that “unthinking climate change worship” has damaged British industry. 

Nigel Lawson, the former Conservative chancellor and now director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and whose views on climate change represent those of many rank-and-file Conservative MPs, made a highly controversial appearance on Radio 4’s Today Programme (which we complained about here).  “This is a wake up call”, he announced, but not to do anything about the causes, rather to “focus on making sure this country is really resilient and robust to whatever nature throws at us, flood defences, sea defences and so on”.  He may just as well have climbed onto the table and recited “blow wind and crack your cheeks”. 

The deluded belief is that we are so clever, so powerful, so brilliant, that all we need to do is to spend enough money and flex our technological muscle and we can overcome anything.  It runs deep.  King Lear would have recognised a kindred spirit, similarly trying to hang on to a world view whose time has passed, to a sense of control that is no longer appropriate.   

Our media have been quite happy to join the politicians, hurling insults and indignation at the squall.  According to Carbon Brief, just 206 of 3,064 press articles on the UK’s recent floods mentioned climate change (see right).  Virtually everything that I heard or read was about how we needed better defences, the need to build better dams and drains, to dredge the rivers to get rid of the water faster.

Some economists are also joining in with this approach of sticking their fingers in their ears and singing “la la la”.  The Telegraph recently reported that the flooding of prime farmland in the UK and droughts and other extreme weather episodes in other parts of the world, are leading to rises in food prices.  For example, droughts in Brazil, which grows 40% of the world’s coffee beans, have led to a 50% rise in coffee prices. Economist Kona Haque, head of agricultural commodities research at Macquarie, is quoted as saying:

“Suddenly, out of nowhere, we have have seen weather risk creep back into the market”.  

“Out of nowhere”?!  This metaphorical hilltop has become an increasingly crowded place of late.  Those government ministers and the press have been joined, among the sodden bracken and wind-lashed trees, by the very small but highly influential band of climate sceptics, who one had hoped these floods would have inspired to crawl off under a rock somewhere to rethink things in the light of the bleedin’ obvious. 

Lord Lawson has been the most prominent one of late, but the BBC’s commitment to ‘balance’ meant not just that Lawson was featured prominently on the Today Programme alongside respected climate scientist Sir Brian Hoskins, but also Andrew Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Delusion (yawn) was brought in to debate with Kevin Anderson.  Montford’s “we’ve dealt with these things in the past, we can deal with them in the future” wins our Idiotic Statement of the Month award, echoing the even stupider statement by arch climate sceptic William Nierenberg in 1983:

“Not only have people moved, but they have taken with them their horses, dogs, children, technologies, crops, livestock and hobbies.  It is extraordinary how adaptable people can be”.  

Of course in the same way that debates on evolution no longer require the input of Creationists for ‘balance’, discussions on climate change now should be achieving balance by having guests who accept that climate change is happening, but disagree on what to do about it.  For example, Kevin Anderson and Sir Brian Hoskins might have been interesting …  just a thought.

About once a month on Twitter, climate sceptics round on me for a few hours before going off to have a pop at someone else.  During one exchange, as a way of proving his point once and for all, one of them posted the following graphic which captures the sceptic position beautifully: 

 

His point was that “10’s of 1000’s of deaths (erm, caused by substandard housing, not by responses to climate change), higher taxes (a tiny proportion of taxes go to doing anything about climate change), etc, versus a few °C”.  “A few °C?”  We haven’t seen one degree rise yet and the Arctic ice is in its death spiral (as captured in this chilling animation), parts of Austalia are becoming uninhabitable, typhoons are acquiring a previously unseen potency, Alaska is sinking into the permafrost and so on.  Yet the sceptics continue to argue that there are flaws in the consensus. 

There’s a beautiful encounter on YouTube between Naomi Oreskes (co-author of Merchants of Doubt, who we’ll be interviewing later this month) and Nick Minchin, a prominent Australian climate sceptic.  In it she puts her finger on where such people are coming from:

“It makes me wonder if the reason you want to reject the science is that it has consequences.  It has consequences for us about how we live our lives, how we run our economy, what our taxation policies are.  I think what you don’t like are the implications, the political, social and economic implications.  But what you’ve done, along with a lot of other people, is say “let’s shift the debate, let’s argue about the science, let’s keep the debate about the science going, because as long as we argue about the science, we don’t get to the question of what it means for us politically, socially and economically”. 

This makes more sense again in the context of who many of these sceptics are.  As Henry Porter put it in the Guardian recently, “Lawson, Lord Monckton, Christopher Booker, Samuel Brittan and Viscount Ridley – names that begin to give you some idea of the demographic”.  And all the time the “debate” rumbles on, those “few °C” become an increasing inevitability. 

For me though, I’ve found the experience of the storms of recent weeks far more deeply unsettling.  Rather than trying to shout down the storms, I’ve experienced them on a visceral level in a way I never have before.   What has arrived on these shores is a deep sense of uncertainty, of loss of control, a trauma over not just the scale of what happened but the intensity of it.  Here are a few snapshots:

***

About 15 minutes before I leave work to cycle home, I note the ominous colour of the sky, take a photo from the office window (right) and tweet it, writing “Another wave of dark dark clouds moving into Totnes. Whatever’s in those clouds is what I have to cycle home through”.  As I step out of the door the hail starts.  During the journey home, it comes down in pulses of varying intensity.  In all my 25 years as a cyclist, I have never ridden a bike in such conditions.  It’s like trying to cycle in a car wash while a frenzied maniac throws icy cold gravel in my face from close range.  Three times I have to get off the bike, stand with my hood held pulled down over my face, until that pulse passes.  I eventually arrive home, sodden, freezing, the tops of my legs bright scarlet, and traumatised by the whole experience.

***

I’m in Dawlish, a seaside town close to Totnes, where 2 weeks previously, the beautiful, and precarious, stretch of trainline that links the South West to London and the rest of the country, crumbled into the sea at the height of the storms.  John Clatworthy, Devon county councillor for Dawlish, was quoted in The Guardian as saying “I have been here for 44 years and we haven’t had storm damage like we have now. The storm last night was unbelievable”. I’ve travelled to Dawlish to see it for myself, although Network Rail and a security firm are ensuring that you can’t actually get anywhere near the damaged section of rail. 

My son and I are up on the cliff path, the only place you can see the breached sea wall in the distance.  We get talking to an old man on a bench, who tells us how it was a storm unlike anything he had ever seen before.  After a while I ask him if he attributes it in any way to climate change.  Not at all, he tells me, he doesn’t believe in climate change.  He does however, he tells me, believe that it is inevitable that all the gases and pollution we have put into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution have had an impact on the global climate, but no, he doesn’t believe in climate change.  Go figure. [We’ll be picking up on what the psychology of this might be later this month in an interview with George Marshall]. 

***

I’m lying in bed trying to get to sleep, and outside a wild wind is raging.  The mental picture that comes to mind is of the Wild Things from ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ all leaping around in the trees.  The noise being generated is incredible, like something from a Hollywood action movie.  I’ve never known a gale like it. This all feels like I’m experiencing an intensity in the weather where I live which I’ve never felt before, and it’s deeply unsettling.  

*** 

Near the end of Lear’s speech, he exclaims, as he begins to sink into heart-breaking self pity:

“I am a man more sinned against than sinning”.  

This has been a strong strand over recent weeks, that we are more sinned against than sinning.  The very idea that our actions might be in any way to blame in any way for what we experienced is considered ridiculous.  For Lawson, we should be blaming a “crazy and costly policy of littering the countryside with wind turbines and solar panels”.  The Daily Mail blamed the foreign aid programme, arguing that it was crazy to be sending money to help people overseas when people in the UK were being affected by flooding.  A UKIP councillor, David Silvester, blamed gay marriage.  Christopher Brooker in the Spectator (see right), blamed environmentalists, the EU, the Environment Agency, anyone who places value on biodiversity and nature conservation. 

Yet it is clear that our sins, our foolishness, like Lear’s, are coming home to roost. It’s not entirely our doing though, as the recent paper that pointed out that two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions were produced by just 90 companies made clear.  As Dame Julia Slingo of the Met Office put it recently in relation to the UK storms:

“All the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change. There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.” 

It is clear that we are now, indeed, living with climate change.  It’s a new world.  That’s a given.  But what do we do, how to we act, how do we live with climate change?  Do we decide, as Paul Kingsnorth will argue in an interview we’ll publish here in a couple of days, that:

“We have no control over the direction our climate’s now going in.  And yet we labour under this illusion that if we can come up with the right plan we can sort things out, and we can’t. Once you accept that, you sort of walk off into this strange wilderness in which you’re not in control of things”

Or do we go with Kevin Anderson’s statement in his presentation to December’s Radical Emissions Reduction Conference that:

“Avoiding dangerous climate change remains a feasible goal of the international community.  Just”.

I know where I’ll be directing my energy.  This is no time to hurl our rage at the storm, to fall prey to self pity.  For so long as Kevin Anderson’s “just” exists, these recent tempests have redoubled my motivation.  They have refocused, for many people, attention on the link to climate change and the urgent need for action.  They have given us a dose of what climate change will look like (i.e. not all sitting around in tshirts in our own vineyards topping up our tans).  But perhaps the most important thing we can do right now is to find some space in our busy lives to sit with how the events of the last few weeks have impacted on us personally.  How did those storms feel? How did they affect you? It’s a question we hope you might find time to sit with this month. 

We hope you will enjoy this month’s theme, and look forward to your comments and to any thoughts you might have of what else we might cover this month.  

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2 Mar 2014

Living with Climate Change: Joanne Poyourow in Los Angeles

As I write this, we’re experiencing an extraordinarily severe “biggest rainstorm in two years” (which may bring our total annual rainfall up to 3 inches, approximately the level of a prior “record drought”).  Soon we’re headed into what are traditionally our dry months.  In a normal year, zero rain typically falls between May and November.

Water wars

Up until this past week, statewide reservoir lakes were at an all-time low, and the mountain snowpack which should fill those reservoirs was at 12% of normal.  Note that isn’t “down by 12%”.  It is at 12%, which means down by 88%.  Even with the current freak storm, the water situation continues to be very grave.

Some towns in California are now running out of water.  Political debates are already underway between state agriculture versus city populations over who gets what water there is. 

Agriculture is already affected.  Some farmers have reduced their plantings; ranches are selling off livestock.  Big parcels of land are going unplanted — not even with cover crops.  Although we have not yet had Dust Bowl-style winds, the agricultural situation is the perfect setup for massive-scale topsoil loss.

A recent infographic warned the nation that extreme-to-exceptional drought in California will mean supply and pricing issues for 15 key foods.  California produces 90 to 99% of U.S. almonds, walnuts, broccoli, strawberries, and tomatoes.

Next-to-no-rain means that deep-rooted trees and perennials in areas without artificial irrigation aren’t getting sufficient water this year.  Some large plants will likely be lost.  Others are probably ripe for massive onslaughts of pests and diseases, as has happened in previous (lighter) drought years.

In 2014, we’ve already had wildfires.  Up until this decade, fires in January were pretty much unheard of (and I’ve lived in this area all my life).  When our “normal” fire season arrives this summer and autumn, it’s going to be truly horrific around here.

In the meantime, this week’s freak rain storm is causing flooding, mudslides, mandatory evacuations, and property destruction as stormwaters rush unbounded through areas that suffered last year’s firestorms. 

In our home gardens

At garden gatherings around L.A., everyone is noticing changes in seasonality.  Tomatoes are over-wintering, summer crops are sprouting months early, fruit trees are flowering at odd times, and there are massive pest attacks on our normal winter crops like broccoli and kale.

Already we’re threatened by the rapid spread of nonnative pests, such as an Asian psyllid which carries a plant disease Huanglongbing deadly to citrus trees, and the glassy-winged sharpshooter which spreads the disease-causing bacterium Xylella fastidiosa, which kills grape vines.

Soil fertility will likely be troublesome this summer, since irrigation solely with our alkaline tapwater intensifies the pre-existing alkalinity of our soils.  It will be a continual battle to add more-acidic material to our soils to bring them into the range that vegetable plants like.

If summer months bring any form of water rationing, our nascent urban agriculture is woefully unprepared.  Most veg gardens here are set up on the paradigm of English or U.S. East Coast gardens, with raised beds and water-intensive vegetable selections, rather than the waffle-style gardens and drought-tolerant varieties we should be using. 

Status quo continues

The vibe around town is that people have been highly aware of the lack of rain.  Yet there still seems to be little in the way of large-scale, mainstream, emissions-reducing habit shift.  No change in the social glamor of air travel, no inclination to eliminate unnecessary car trips.  There are still very few people who acknowledge the ties between globalized chainstore consumerism and global warming emissions. 

Despite the drought, lawns in my neighborhood are still unnaturally green (that means they’re still being irrigated) and gutters often run with water wasted by sprinkler overspray.  The California governor has asked for 20% decrease in water use, but politicians are insisting that it be voluntary participation, rather than mandatory rationing.  And there has been no progress on expanding any permissions for on-site greywater.

Studies the end of last year revealed that media reporting of Weird Weather events carefully dodge any connection to human-caused climate change and global warming.  Locally, the deniers have adjusted their soundbites, from denying global warming is happening, to denying that it is human-caused, or denying that our 500-year drought is related.  (Nationally, with Weird Weather taking a turn toward deep freeze, global warming deniers are having a heyday.) 

Many people will undoubtedly look to this week’s freak rainstorm and presume it “solved” the drought; most are blissfully unaware of the scale necessary to deliver water to 11 million people.  “California is running out of options to deal with the fact that it has basically been relying on more water than it has long-term access to,” warns David Hayes, a former U.S. Interior Department official.  Yet most people still don’t get it.

Through it all, L.A. is continuing to expand freeways, continuing the debate over how to expand LAX airport, and trying to figure out how to “grow” the stalled economy. 

The welling-up of meaningful action

In our Transition groups (and in oh-so-many groups that are not labeled as “Transition”) there has been a surge of interest in growing food.  Water-wise food gardening and rainwater harvesting are highly-requested speaking topics.  It feels to me as if people are insecure and “sense” that deeper troubles are coming.

In the poorer areas of town, I observe a lot more bicycling being used as transportation, but I’m guessing this is due to the price of gasoline and ongoing economic troubles (a recent study found that 27% of L.A. County residents live below the poverty line).

Beneath the headlines on local events, I’m seeing subtle shifts in the organizations themselves.  Organizations which weren’t founded for environmental or climate-based issues, are now folding these topics into their descriptions of why they do what they do.

Organizations that never before were about environmental action are putting in place programs which could definitely qualify as “transition”-style projects, such as a local church diocese encouraging all of its church properties to grow food gardens, and a local art college setting up a Minor in Sustainability (which I am thrilled to mentor).

L.A. City is poised to ban fracking.  A larger nonprofit is creating sweeping goals for the region for 2050, which reach beyond economic measurements, and in many cases overlap with what we might call “transition indicators.”

And through it all, L.A. has the heroic Andy Lipkis, who seems to be single-handedly barging forward with a paradigm-shifting way to overhaul L.A.’s water infrastructure which involves making wise use of what rainwater we do get. With the connections Andy has built around the city, particularly within city politics, if anyone can achieve this mighty goal, that person is Andy Lipkis.

But ultimately, when it comes to Living with climate change, we have to come back to that Living part.  To me this means the quality of our lives and our connections, as we all weather this Wacky Weather together.

Earlier this month, our group helped host Seed School, a 7-day exploration of all things related to heirloom vegetable seeds.  We shared marvelous information, but even moreso, the gathering grew astounding connections.  Some people were doing seed-related activities for social justice, hunger, and poverty reasons.  Others were doing it for education and kids reasons.  Still others had ecological and biodiversity as their drivers.  But altogether, this was a shining example of common action, collaboration across the miles, and the realization that, all over Southern California, there are so many people DOING really great stuff, which is all contributing to a new energy, a new culture, a new way of looking at life.  That is living with climate change right now in Los Angeles. 

Joanne Poyourow directs the Environmental Change-Makers, a cornerstone of the Transition movement for Southern California.  Joanne blogs at Transition US, and is the author of several books, including 10 Practical Tools for a Resilient Economy.  Follow her on Twitter @TLAJoanne

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