Requiem for a Species

Book review: Requiem for a Species Why we resist the truth about Climate Change

Clive Hamilton

Earthscan 2010

Hdbck 286pp

Climate change is here with us now and the processes and feedbacks already underway will guarantee at least a global average of a further 4 degrees warming this century no matter what we do, with devastating effects for civilisation due to rising sea levels, loss of arable land due to desertification and water shortages, and consequent mass migrations on Biblical scales leading to unparalleled disruption, human misery and most likely a die-off of billions.

Irresponsible fear-mongering from a romantic- tragic prophet of doom? No, for as Australian philosophy professor Clive Hamilton convincingly shows in this eloquently argued and wide-ranging book, this is the inevitable conclusion from the best science we have, and we had better get used to it.

Hamilton’s book surveys the science we have on the subject, and then gives an interesting analysis of political responses, and relates these to the psychology of denial: why is it we have failed to act on the evidence to avoid catastrophe? Why is it that we are blind to the hopeless inadequacy of current proposed measures? Why are we so reluctant to face the music: the current way of life we have become accustomed to in the modern age is coming to an end.

In the chapter “Growth Fetishism” Hamilton argues that an overly-rationalistic economic model is partly to blame, reducing the measures need to address climate change to mere figures on a balance sheet: so much warming costs so much money. It is assumed by this model of economics that so long as economic growth can continue, climate change is merely another cost to factor in, an approach that ignores the runaway effect that now seems likely:

At its core, this preoccupation with growth is a religious urge, but one displaced from the genuinely sacred to the nominally profane.

In the next chapter Hamilton looks at the “consumer self” from a psychological perspective. Apparently at the extreme end of consumer hubris “it is now possible to buy capsules filled with 24-carat gold leaf which, when swallowed, make your excrement sparkle”. “Economic growth no longer creates happiness: [rather] unhappiness sustains economic growth.”

Hamilton also takes a shot at Green Consumerism and concepts such as ecological foot-printing which only reinforce the “personalising of responsibility”- he argues passionately throughout the book that only determined collective political actions can make any difference, switching light-bulbs just will not cut it when the future of the species is at stake.

The meat of the book is to be found in chapter 4 “Many forms of Denial” in which he discusses why we are unwilling to accept what is now established science about our likely fate, rather than make the significant lifestyle adjustments we need to before it is to late.

Quoting Festinger’s famous studies of cults in the 1950s Hamilton attributes this to the phenomenon of “cognitive dissonance”: “we surround ourselves with people who think as we do and ignore those who make us feel uncomfortable”. This he thinks helps us understand climate change denial: consumers or those unwilling to question the sustainability of their lifestyles are all to easily persuaded that scientists are biased and corrupt.

Hamilton traces the origins of this in the anti-environmentalist backlash that arose after the 1992 Rio Summit, when some on the Right in America saw the Green lobby as a threat to modernist progress. This lead to the development of fake citizens’ groups like The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) who had the strategy of linking climate fears with anti-smoking, anti-nukes and anti-GE, in an attempt to discredit these issues as unjustified social panic.

While opposition from the Right is familiar and unsurprising in view of the interests of the fossil fuel industry, attacks have come also from the Left. In the UK for example the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), in their journal Living Marxism in the 1990s criticized the environmentalists for putting up a “middle class indulgence and neo-colonial smoke-screen” deflecting attention from the more traditional concerns of the Left, poverty and class inequality. Hamilton claims there are links between the RCP and Martin Durkin, the director of the notorious climate-change denial film The Great Global Warming Swindle.

A few years earlier, Durkin had made an equally inflammatory documentary called Against Nature which, according to the publicity material, characterized “environmentalist ideology as unscientific, irrational and anti-humanist”. It created a furor after it was broadcast in Britain, not least for its extraordinary claims that modern environmentalism has its roots in Nazi Germany (Hitler was a vegetarian-get it?) and that self-interested environmentalists are responsible for enormous suffering in the Third World. It combined images of Third World children dying of horrible illnesses with commentary on how environmentalists oppose dams that would bring clean water and electricity, portraying them as callous fanatics.

Hamilton then goes on to describe the link between neo-conservatives and the spread of post-modernism and cultural relativist attacks on science as being “malleable, contingent and contestable.”

Modernism now finds itself under seige from both the dwindling band of academic post-modernists and resurgent neo-conservatives. Both reject the claims of science to objective truth. For the former the truth of modernism was socially constructed and the real truth is always contestable; the latter never accepted the elevation of matters of fact over matters of belief. For the sceptics and their patrons loyalty to belief is paramount and every piece of evidence that challenges their convictions represents a threat to their worldview and must be destroyed.

I feel that here Hamilton’s analysis falls short; the links between the environmental movement and post-modern relativism are in fact very strong; this is most clearly seen in the anti-GM lobby which seems more motivated by anti-science and religious beliefs that “Nature knows Best”; the consequences of these widespread delusions may indeed have lead to unnecessary suffering and death, as reported by Stewart Brand .

The links between pseudo-scientific beliefs in alternative medicine, the religious views of Steiner and other forms of nature mysticism; reactionary anti-modernism and Nazism’s cult of “Blood and Soil”; together with post-modern anti-science and the environmental movement’s tolerance for these strands in general, are important topics worthy of attention, but Hamilton naively lays the blame on the shoulders of the critics and sceptics alone, not the environmental movement itself.

Unless the Greens tackle their ambivalent attitude towards science and tackle the anti-science and reactionary views found all-too-frequently amongst their supporters, they will always be liable to this kind of critique from the likes of Durkin.

Hamilton continues his discussions on the philosophical and psychological reasons for our failure to act on climate change in the next chapter, “Disconnection from Nature” but I feel he fails here as well for the same reasons: “today we take a dead Earth as a given” he states, ignoring the influence of New Age spirituality which has gained a lot of currency under the guise of “Holistic Science”.

Hamilton seems ambivalent himself about the relationship to of environmentalism and science, on the one hand promoting science as the only way we can know about our predicament, on the other hand arguing that the scientific-industrial revolution has lead to a disconnection from Nature which “led inexorably to a stronger orientation toward a personal self”. While this may be partly true, it seems that it is only same science that can lead us back. Instead, he hints that he would see a return to some kind of spirituality as for our salvation, seeing Gaia as fulfilling this need.

Confusingly he asks “If our scientific understanding and technological control over the world allowed us to discard the gods, will the reassertion of Nature’s power see us turn again to the sacred for protection? Will the late surge of militant atheism come to be seen as a Homeric burst of pride before the fall?” Surely reverting to religion or superstition is the last thing to protect us!

The latter chapters discuss if there is a way out but Hamilton’s ambiguity about the environmental movement and the science lets him down here as well; he criticizes Lovelock for his anti-wind farm stance but when comparing the capacity of nuclear vs wind to replace fossil fuels quotes only Greenpeace, which itself seems to be an ideologically-driven interest group with an anti-science approach to nuclear power.

There is a lot of merit in this book and Hamilton opens a lot of discussion in areas not always explored in other climate change books, but seems contradictory in the places I have mentioned above.

His conclusion is however clear, that we must pursue climate justice and act politically if we can mitigate the worst effects of whatever warming we are now committed to:

And we can begin preparing for the impacts of climate disruption not by self-protection but by vigorous political engagement aimed at collectively building democracies that can ensure the best defenses against a more hostile climate, ones that do not abandon the poor and vulnerable to their fate while those who are able to buy their way out of the crisis do so for as long as they can. For we should remember that once the dramatic implications of the climate crisis are recognised by the powerful as a threat to themselves and their children they will, unless resisted, impose their own solutions on the rest of us, ones that will respect their interests and exacerbate unequal access to the means of survival, leaving the weak to fend for themselves. This is how it has always been. We must democratise survivability.