Crossing Over
It was over a cracking line to the UK that I interviewed Calum McFarlane last year. The father of two had thought deeply and written eloquently about having and raising children in an age of climate uncertainty. His thoughts were moving in their honesty and his investigations had clearly brought on a very dark chapter in his life where he had questioned his choice to bring children into a world whose future was at best utterly unpredictable. How could you prepare the next generation for a planetary state without precedent? How do you convey the violence inherent within civilisational collapse without lying? How can you explain intergenerational treachery to the generation that will foot the bill? All these questions Calum considered with steely-eyed honesty.
His journey required he confront one of the final taboos within the climate movement - that it may already be too late. To be clear this does not assume that there exists too much carbon within the atmosphere at present but the far more ominous knowledge that our civilisation is doomed as insane. In other words - to prevent the worst of climate change requires not tweaking our circumstances but instead a radical shift in our own nature - a nature that has for all of civilisation remained more or less static for the millenia of recorded history. Within this context the 10 years we have to achieve any shift renders the task impossible. It is with this toxic knowledge that Calum reckoned as he watched his children play and grow in a world with an approaching but unreadable expiration date.
There is an overabundance of catastrophising within the climate movement but mostly it is considered a tool - a hell on Earth to be summoned at command to threaten the population with lest they mend their ways. That we are doomed right now is taboo because it is considered as a moral failing. That it shuts the door to hope and in floods despair drowning everyone inside. Such opinions of ‘doomers’ have until now been fringe.
The uncertain future arrived for me on December 21 on the Hume highway driving toward Sydney just before Goulburn. A southerly change brought smoke from Australia’s worst recorded bushfires as sudden and solid as a cloudfront that turned the sky from smoky blue to a hellish ochre. A weight entered our lungs and rested on our chests like a boot. Giulia and I drove in silence. The moment the oil light flashed yellow then switched off, my thinking cleared to operate on instinct. 200 km out from Sydney had the sky remained blue I would have winged it but it suddenly became vital I make the right decisions in the right order. We stopped at a service station - got oil, petrol and water for us. The service station attendant said she could light up right here and nobody would ever know. Outside the coloured hellscape floated almost liquid a drained and scorched Atlantis where a Mcdonalds sign stood unlit like a monument to a past civilisation.
We continued in silence. The road ahead was closed - fire had overtaken the four lane highway - and we had to divert to the coast. Approaching the final turnoff - a long train of semi-trailers was parked roadside. These bearers of the consumer market that seemed so reliable were stopped in their tracks - goods down the road would not arrive on time. Perhaps shops would be empty. After turning off - we saw a deer fleeing the fires then a kangaroo. It was getting late and we stopped at a hotel and asked a lady in a dressing gown smoking outside if there were rooms - she was fleeing the fires too as was most people in this hotel, she said.
We made it to Sydney eventually but all the guarantees of stability seemed to vanish the moment the sun blocked out and the oil light appeared on the dash. This story is utterly quotidian today yet would have been exceptional just a few months ago. The realisation - that we have now arrived in the climate future at the very moment the clock was about click over to 2020 has slapped many Australians across the face, waking them from the dream that climate change was something that would happen far in the distant future. While many Australians continue indulging in our national pasttime of denial at all costs, others are waking up to fight and hope. Yet a third class exists those that have surrendered to the toxic knowledge - that it is too late.
Right. So now what? Or, more precisely, where does this thinking lead? There are groups and individuals that have trod the path of sweet surrender before. As Nietzsche says “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” This year I’m opting to look into these movements. While I do not believe that it is too late it seems intellectually cowardly not to follow it as a line of enquiry. At least to open the door just a crack, see what is on the other side and ask what do humans do with knowledge like this? How does it transform them?
I have had a glimpse into the void. The landscape ranges from those that have given up all hope - such as (Guy Macpherson)[https://guymcpherson.com/] with his blog Nature Bats Last - a thick reel of posts detailing how Near Term Human Extinction (NTE) is imminent. To give an indication of tone - in a side-panel is a video where Macpherson advises those considering suicide to get help. On the other end are those like (Chris D Thomas)[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/02/inheritors-of-the-earth-chris-d-thomas-review-gaia-vince] that accept that the collapse of the antropocine is inevitable but propose that nature will ultimately adapt and thrive.
Most remarkeable to the newcomer is the Dark Mountain project. It begins with a (manifesto)[https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/] rich in poetic references and even has a literary progenitor, poet Robinson Jeffers. Dark Mountain looks past the ashes of catamity and see into a world that has finally dispensed with the myths of progress and human separateness from nature. The courage and hope required in such a vision is breathtaking - to confront the end of everything and to find peace and harmony on the other side.
From what I can see the only unifying characteristic of those that believe it is already too late, apart from the idea itself, is solace found in art and poetry. Even amongst those as hopeless as Macpherson there is a tendancy away from the grinding gears of data and graphs and a draw towards artistic expression. This makes the trip to a world where human emotion is experienced without irony - where beauty of the natural world is celebrated - worthy in itself.
I am not sure it is possible to dip my toe into a subject like this. Perhaps it is foolish to even try. But the opportunity to trace the line to its ultimate destination and witness those that have had the courage to confront climate change without discarding any possibility as too awful, then to exist beyond it deserves consideration at the very least.