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https://www.technologyreview.com/...ons-from-a-genocide-can-prepare-humanity-for-climate-apocalypse/
According to Lloyd’s of London, which in 2015 commissioned a study on food security, any single significant shock to the global food system “would be expected to generate major economic and political impacts.” But as Earth’s climate transforms into an environment human civilization has never before witnessed, we should realistically expect not one shock but an unending series of them. And this is presuming that global warming continues only at current rates, rather than accelerating nonlinearly as a result of the cascading feedbacks previously mentioned.
All of this will happen day by day, month by month, year by year. There will certainly be “events,” like the events we’ve seen in the past decade—heat waves, massively destructive hurricanes, the slowdown in vital Atlantic Ocean currents, and political events connected to climate change, such as the Syrian civil war, the Mediterranean refugee crisis, France’s gilets jaunes riots, and so on—but barring nuclear war, we are unlikely to see any one global “Event” that will mark the transition we’re waiting for, make climate change “real,” and force us to change our ways.
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Climate change is happening—that much is clear. But the problem remains beyond our grasp, and any realistic solution seems unimaginable within our current conceptual framework. Although the situation is dire, overwhelming, intractable, and unprecedented in scale, however, it is not without historical analogues. This is not the first time a group of humans has had to deal with the failure of their conceptual framework for navigating reality. This is not the first time the world has ended.
Poets, thinkers, and scholars have pondered cultural catastrophe again and again. The ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of humans surviving civilizational collapse caused by ecological transformation: Gilgamesh “brought back wisdom from before the flood.” Virgil’s Aeneid tells of not only the fall of Troy but also the survival of the Trojans. Several books of the Torah tell how the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar conquered the Jewish people, destroyed their temple, and exiled them. That story provided later generations with a powerful model of cultural endurance.
One historical analogy stands out with particular force: the European conquest and genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Here, truly, a world ended. Many worlds, in fact. Each civilization, each tribe, lived within its own sense of reality—yet all these peoples saw their lifeworlds destroyed and were forced to struggle for cultural continuity beyond mere survival, a struggle that the Anishinaabe poet Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance.”
The experience of Chief Plenty Coups and the Crow, as Lear explains, is that after the coming of the white man and the passing of the buffalo, “nothing happened.” That is, when the Crow way of life collapsed, the Crow people could no longer find meaning for individual acts and occurrences within a rich web of shared signification, values, and goals. The Crow had survived, but they did not live as Crow had lived. In a strong sense, occurrences no longer had any meaning at all—which is to say there was no longer any such thing as an “event.” The Crow faced the destruction of their conceptual reality.
Despite this, Plenty Coups offered his people a vision of a future in which meaning and events might once again become possible. He framed his vision through a dream he’d had of the disappearance of the buffalo. Within the dream, a chickadee teaches Plenty Coups to listen carefully, learn from his enemies, and “learn to avoid disaster by the experiences of others.”
Today the Crow—just like the Sioux, the Navajo, the Potawatomi, and numerous other native peoples— live in communities that struggle with poverty, suicide, and unemployment. But these communities are also home to poets, historians, singers, dancers, and thinkers committed to indigenous cultural flourishing. The point here is not to glamorize indigenous closeness to “nature,” or to indulge a naive longing for lost hunter-warrior values, but to ask what we might learn from courageous and intelligent people who survived cultural and ecological catastrophe.
So we have to confront two distinct challenges. The first is whether we might curtail the worst possibilities of climate change and stave off human extinction by limiting greenhouse-gas emissions and decreasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The second is whether we will be able to transition to a new way of life in the world we’ve made. Meeting the latter challenge demands mourning what we have already lost, learning from history, finding a realistic way forward, and committing to an idea of human flourishing beyond any hope of knowing what form that flourishing will take. “This is a daunting form of commitment,” Lear writes, for it is a commitment “to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is.”
Nevertheless, the fact that our situation offers no good prospects does not absolve us of the obligation to find a way forward. Our apocalypse is happening day by day, and our greatest challenge is learning to live with this truth while remaining committed to some as-yet-unimaginable form of future human flourishing—to live with radical hope. Despite decades of failure, a disheartening track record, ongoing paralysis, a social order geared toward consumption and distraction, and the strong possibility that our great-grandchildren may be the last generation of humans ever to live on planet Earth, we must go on. We have no choice.
https://www.technologyreview.com/...ons-from-a-genocide-can-prepare-humanity-for-climate-apocalypse/