Workers Unite!
Last week, Ethan Hawke was on Bill Maher’s Real Time discussing his 2017 film First Reformed. In it Hawke plays a priest in a small parish once part of the underground railroad, moving former slaves North to safety. With Maher, Hawke explains how abolitionists that are today venerated as heroes, were then seen as zealots or fanatics.
Abolitionists were risking their lives and people thought they were crazy… with the benefit of time we respect them. Well, it’s [also] easy to write off these diehard environmentalists… Well what are we doing now? It’s a good question.
It’s a great question. This week I finally reached an item my reading queue - The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. It’s a long, grim read but an important one. After a hefty qualifier stating what follows is a worst-case scenario the reader is treated to a lengthy description of an environmental dystopia - acid seas, a thick uninhabitable band around the equator, immense forest fires, food and water shortages and perpetual war. All this for thousands of years.
Put Hawke’s comments with the New York Magazine piece and you are thrust into the minds of those struggling to eke out an existence from a furious earth that has pushed them back to primordial conditions. How will future history judge inaction today? Learning the history of slavery or the Holocaust questions perpetually burned in the background: how could people stand by? Was inaction tantamount to complicity? At what point does a humanitarian crisis become so urgent and horrific that radical even violent action is required?
David Wallace-Well’s piece confronts the question of inaction. It offers the answer that we struggle to comprehend events in “deep time” - when a catastrophe can emerge with such slowness. A disaster explained through science is extrapolated with mostly with numbers that render a reality that is too abstract. How much more powerful is a scene of bleached coral than a number representing pH levels?
Wells is letting us off the hook a little too easily. It is not a failure of imagination that has lead here. With every immense storm, protracted forest fire or drought we are treated to a glimpse into our increasingly probably future. The question now is not if, but to what degree. Unfortunately the time to act has arrived at the very moment that society is fragmented to a greatest degree in a century. This also happens to be when the democratic process is hamstrung by corporate money and the left is preoccupied with politics of division and separation. Instead of having the courage to raise our voices in a chorus against what should be humanity’s greatest threat we bicker over who has the right to speak.
Yet there is strength to be found in broader causes that would not exist in the old white dominated left discussion of class struggle. Take the example of native Americans struggle stopping the North Dakota pipeline or the Wangan and Jagalingou people’s fight against the Adani mine. These cases have provided powerful resistance and have been strikingly effective. The question is now - can we apply this tactic to the broader issue of climate change as a whole? Can we rely on the confluence of causes to overcome apathy? On this we are moving forward with organisations like 350.org, movements that are exciting and transcend the politics of division. Hopefully they move fast enough.