Is There Hope?

This is the eleventh article in a series about the Earth-system – how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it. Read the series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10

In the face of climate change, people often ask me if I have any hope for the future. For it seems a bleak prospect to contemplate the fundamental unsustainability of industrial civilisation, as I’ve done throughout this series. It is, after all, the only way most of us know how to live. But without a shared context for what futures we understand to be possible or desirable, I find hope a slippery topic. It matters very much what we hope for.

Many of us simply ‘hope’ our world will carry on as it has been, while governments and corporations control global warming with technical fixes. But this attachment to a desired outcome without evidence that it’s possible is blind faith, not hope. Indeed much of what gets called hope today actually includes beliefs held contrary to evidence. These are fantasies or delusions, wishful thinking or wilful ignorance. All such false hopes are dangerous. They lull us into inaction. They guide us down wrong paths.

But real hope is essential for human thriving. And real hope is built upon the possible. It’s arrived at by facing hard truths, understanding what the challenges truly are, and contemplating the difficult tradeoffs. It isn’t passive; it arises through engagement.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

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As I’ve shown in this series, to significantly slow the rate of anthropogenic climate change and its underlying cause of ecological overshoot requires us to radically staunch emissions from combustible fossils while also broadly promoting global ecological integrity, including rebuilding fluidly equitable human societies within the dynamic web of life. This unavoidably entails commensurately radical and rapid changes to our global economy and sociopolitical systems. But whether and how these might occur or be achieved remain open questions. Nor are the answers limited to matters of global cooperation through officialdom. Revolutionary reforms centred on our relationships with the Earth and each other will not be technocratically mandated from the top down. Given all this, it seems clear that hope must find purchase not in fantasies of continuing the present patterns of civilisation, but in departures from the world we’ve known.

Thus, I posit no faith in ‘Green Growth’ as a mechanism for salvation, in which the world continues on as it is, but instead of using oil, gas, and coal we use ‘renewable energy’ to continue over-extracting and over-polluting for continuous growth in consumption. I do not have faith that energy-sucking technological fixes or capitalist imperatives can fundamentally change our current trajectory—for these are the very engines of the same catastrophe we now would ask them to set right.

I have no faith that Western-styled, exclusionary models of ‘nature conservation,’ which aren’t grounded in any genuine understanding of human interactions with the non-human world, will help to restore balance or mutualism between people and the rest of life. I don’t have faith that the present configuration of neocolonial geopolitics will promote social equity contributing to environmental sustainability. It won’t encourage wealth ceilings and austerity for the wealthy in order to end the present regimes of oppression, violence, and dispossession meted out against Indigenous peoples, disenfranchised social castes and classes and ethnicities or women, whose energies and resources are presently co-opted to enable elite over-consumption and power. I don’t have faith that any business-as-usual state of affairs—‘green’ or otherwise—can address our ecological overshoot. I don’t have faith that our extractive industrial system can continue plundering the Earth much longer before collapse.

However, faith in precisely such delusions is what gets promulgated as hope by most leading voices in the global conversations on climate change. Most of these are ensconced in the Global North or the upper-tiers of international wealth, deeply invested in maintaining the sociopolitical and economic structures of the present world. Most of these folks understandably fear actions that would fundamentally change this system. Thus, they generally avoid questions that expose the folly of our modern myths of growth, ‘development,’ ‘progress,’ and power while promoting the business-as-usual narratives of ‘Green Growth’ and techno-utopian solutionism. They keep global attention focused on the narrow problem of carbon dioxide emissions, ignoring the underlying predicament of ecological overshoot. They invite us to imagine only single-point, market-friendly fixes: Solar panels! Electric cars! Carbon capture!

The Indian government’s own commitment to fighting climate change includes building more solar farms and hydropower dams—megaprojects that lead to ecosystem destruction, loss of species, and the mass displacement of Adivasis and others already living low-consumption lifestyles, in order to promote higher consumption among a wealthier set. India also intends to build more coal power plants, which emit massive greenhouse gasses and noxious particulates. The purpose of this destruction is to meet the rising demand for energy that industrial consumerist lifestyles require—our common aspirations of socioeconomic rise and ‘development’ being effectively the same as an aspiration to increase our energy and materials consumption—including fossil fuels.

But to fight climate change, it’s the whole system—the social, cultural, technological edifice of modern society—that will need to change; whereas, India’s official responses are largely targeted at shifting our place within the existing system. The present blueprint to create more energy is no path toward sustainability: It doesn’t promote the recovery of the biosphere. It won’t forestall the heating of the planet. It can’t dismantle the economically centralising forces of the present economy that steal from the disenfranchised peripheries to fortify consumption at the centre. It’s merely a fantasy in support of economic growth built upon commonly imagined entitlements to unlimited energy and materials.

In fact, all mainstream climate-change mitigation proposals, globally, are intended primarily to reduce atmospheric carbon without changing anything else. They will require a massive acceleration of mining activities in order to produce the necessary materials to build more high-tech gadgetry of colossal scale—requiring an intensification of fossil fuel use to support the rate of mining and transportation and manufacture required. All of that mining will accelerate ecocide, including pollution of land, air, and water, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and displacement of marginalised peoples around the world. And as the quality of available mineral ores is rapidly depleting, the ravages of mining will extend ever further, even deep into the seas, because more intensive mining will be required to produce the same amount of desirable material. Meanwhile, mining specialist Simon Michaux has demonstrated that there may not even be enough metal still left to be mined in order to produce all the solar panels and batteries and whatnot required to deliver ‘renewable’ energy equivalent to the fossil energy used today around the world—let alone to continuously increase it in support of economic growth.

However, plans for ‘Green Growth’ seem to presume an ability to continue providing energy and materials in the same fashion as today. There’s not even apparently any accounting for such considerations as, for example, that making steel depends upon coal, not only as a heating fuel, but as a reagent in the ore-refining process. Or that industrial processes are fundamentally dependent upon petrochemicals. That most modern goods—including electric cars!—are substantially made of oil-derived plastics and coatings. Or that the manufacture and movement of raw materials and goods can never be as cheap and easy as they are today, when they’re underwritten by the unique properties of oil.

The true hopelessness of techno-optimist ‘solutions’ is that they take into account neither the Earth’s biophysical limits nor the injustice of the resource-grabs or environmental damage they entail. They wholly miss the ground reality of our predicament: that we’re mired in ecological overshoot built upon deep, multilayered histories of environmental and social over-exploitation. Yet the arbiters of the global conversation on climate change regard only ‘Green Growth’ and technological solutionism as hope, championing our present system along with its existential requirement for vast and growing amounts of energy and its intrinsic violence. They trenchantly disallow any other notions of hope, labelling alternative narratives merely as doom.

But what about the hope that we might dismantle this brutal system and find new ways to live? What about hoping we could rediscover our human impulses toward community, creativity, and mutual aid? That, during the crises and changes of the coming decades, we will be learning to let go the hierarchies and unnecessary trappings of techno-modernity—that we’ll be transitioning into simpler, more egalitarian, lower-energy and more sustainable societies, instead? Or the hope that people will again find value in time spent attending to others in their lives, to their local ecosystems and watersheds, to the authentic and simple experiences of everyday living and creating, rather than chasing consumerist pleasures and status markers? What about the hope not for billions of electric cars on the roads but perhaps no private motorized vehicles at all?

Hope can encompass an understanding that there is no technological solution that will suddenly fix climate change—let alone the ongoing collapse of our biosphere. That we will adapt ourselves to an altered world. Hope can accept that there are no adequate responses that governments and corporations (and many individuals) won’t see as ‘radical’—even though nothing could be truly more radical than the consequences we’ll face if we don’t do everything possible to cohesively navigate a transition to different ways of life.

For all the reasons I’ve outlined in this series, I don’t have faith that we can stop the breakdown of our unsustainable capitalist-consumerist industrial civilisation. But I do have hope that social forces can arise to help soften the transition to new modes of life through pro-social innovation, benefiting more people more broadly. Civilisations have ended before, more times than we even know. But as archaeologists and anthropologists, such as Joseph Tainter, have shown, many peoples actually experience the breakdown of their encompassing ‘civilisation’—that moves wealth and power away from the imperial peripheries toward its centre—as a liberation at least as much as a disaster. As the industrial world disintegrates—under the impacts of climate change, collapsing ecosystems, and other biophysical limits to its demands for ever-increasing energy and materials—alternative futures can arise. Diverse communities around the world can and will respond in ways that liberate them to practice bottom-up governance and mutual care.

We stand on the cusp of a transition in the human enterprise no less profound than the one that took our ancient ancestors from lives of nomadic foraging to our modern age of industrial petro-capitalism, a transition that’s taken many hundreds of generations. That transition changed our stories of ourselves and our world, giving birth to entirely new forms of religion, social and political structures, living arrangements, dietary norms, frames of identity. And so must we open ourselves to a human cultural future that’s a departure from the present.

Of course, we don’t have hundreds of generations to drift through profound sociopolitical changes, even though, like our ancestors, we also can’t know how our future world will look. Yet we must have intention to change in some very particular ways: reduce excessive consumption; decrease ecological destruction; expand mutual-aid social constructs and local cooperation; phase out the mechanisms driving inequality.

Make no mistake: this is not about reviving socialism or communism or any similarly growthist, power-centralising sociopolitical paradigms born of the Industrial Revolution. The restructuring that’s required in pursuing a goal of greater ecological balance falls outside the limited political frames of reference that constrain our modern imaginations. It is time to crack open our hearts and minds to understand something of our larger human potential. In this we have only the advantage of our historical perspective. We know something of where we’ve come from and where different choices can lead. We know also that very different ways of life are absolutely humanly possible, that many other ways of life can be perfectly desirable—even preferable, for many—compared to the way we live now. This is why growing numbers of heterodox economists and degrowth scholars are working outside the mainstream, shaking up the models used in their disciplines to align economic imperatives with ecological and biophysical limits and actual human social behaviour.

Scholars and activists from around the world are already coming together to envision alternative paths for the future, prioritising social equity through ecological balance. Though they yet remain marginal to the hegemonic conversations, many have been writing, speaking, organising to pull power away from the imperial center—the corporations and nation-state governments and wealthier segments—and restore some degree of self-determination to communities who retain ancestral knowledge for living within the constraints of the land. Among these are a range of Indian environmentalists and activists, from Ashish Kothari to Vandana Shiva. More people are rejecting the mythologies that keep the present system dominant; more are peering through to understand what human beings are actually capable of, how we might live differently.

The human animal is every bit as capable of creating social norms based around cooperation and mutual aid as anything we’ve built today. The present world of competition and excess and hoarding are actually a gross anomaly in human history, certainly not any ‘developed’ or ‘normal’ condition of our species. Knowing this, I have hope we can abandon the myths that disconnect us from our planet and each other. That our impulse to find alternative ways to move forward will grow—based not in utopian fantasies, but in ground realities. If Agriculture was a Revolution, and Industrialism was a Revolution, we might hope in the coming decades and centuries for something like the Biospheric Integrity Revolution.

I cannot know if a genuinely just transition will be achieved, before our biospheric crisis is too far advanced. But if it might be, it will begin by working to change ourselves, our expectations and aspirations, our values and ideas of what’s possible. That’s the topic of the next and last essay in this series.

‘Technology will not save us if we don’t want to save each other.’ —Gaya Herrington

Usha Alexander trained in science and anthropology. After working for years in Silicon Valley, she now lives in Gurugram. She’s written two novels: The Legend of Virinara and Only the Eyes Are Mine.