doomerism is dead, long live the imagination!

on storytelling in a crisis

Hi friends,

Welcome to another edition of The Murmuration, a biweekly newsletter which digs beneath the topsoil of our life on this planet. I’m glad you are here!

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‘We tell ourself stories in order to live’ wrote the American essayist Joan Didion, who attempted in The White Album to pinpoint the cultural shifts taking place in America during the 60s and 70s. She argued that we are all inclined to interpret the world ‘by the imposition of a narrative line’—‘Or at least we do for a while’ she added; her self-contradiction a writerly trademark.

Today I want to unfurl some of the dominant stories that are currently on offer to us with regards to the climate. These stories form part of a discursive tug-of-war which has been taking place within the ranks of the environmental movement for decades. This is a battle about which stories should be used to characterise the climate crisis, who gets to tell those stories and precisely how they should be communicated to the wider public: people like you and me. Maybe these are stories you identify with, or maybe they elicit a strong negative reaction: either way, we’ll try to figure out their usefulness and how far they might take us in our efforts to heal the planet.

Doomerism est: 2018

Grasping one end of the rope are advocates of what we might term a ‘realist’ story; that our climate is already in a deep crisis and that humankind is hurtling towards a dystopian nightmare in which the very basic things the human race needs to survive—water, food and stable climatic conditions—will become more scarce. The narrative tone of realist storytellers is usually a sense of exasperated, bewildered desperation: 'we’re screaming at people to get off a sinking ship!’ they cry ‘but nobody is listening!’ —only radical action will spur the kind of change we need in the time we have.

Extinction Rebellion (XR), the main proponents of this narrative arc, burst into the public consciousness in dramatic fashion in April 2019 when protestors brought central London to a standstill through several coordinated acts of civil disobedience. The messaging was deliberately stark, insurgent and provocative: ‘WE’RE FUCKED’ read one banner unfurled from Westminster Bridge. Another important narrative strand to XR’s campaigning was the notion that time is ‘running out’. Their hourglass symbol serving as an ominous reminder of the 2018 IPCC report, which offered a twelve year window in which to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

Satellite XR groups started to form around the world, helping to shore up the status of XR as the major grass roots climate network of the 21st century. But simultaneously, some of most pessimistic originating influences of XR started to permeate the wider consciousness. I speak namely here of the Deep Adaptation paper written by Prof. Jem Bendell, which invited people to ‘reassess their work and life in the face of what I believe to be an inevitable near-term societal collapse due to climate change.’ The controversial paper, which went viral thanks to write ups suggesting it was triggering depression amongst its readership, has been criticised by climate scientists, with Prof. Michael Mann simply referring to it as ‘crap’. Bendell, a Professor of Sustainability Leadership, has refuted critics who have labelled his work as providing the basis for a ‘doomerist’ logic, arguing that accepting the probability of societal collapse offers a basis from which we can rethink (constructively) how to prepare for and live in light of ‘our predicament’.

‘Our predicament’ seems a somewhat understated turn of phrase for the impending collapse of civilisation, but it has become shorthand for those who share Bendell’s perspective. Take Michael Dowd, an ‘eco-theologian’ who posts Youtube videos which he describes as ‘post doom’ conversations. His videos have titles like ‘accepting & trusting unstoppable collapse’ and almost exclusively seem to spotlight the wisdom of white people over fifty.

It wasn’t long before people started to highlight some major plot holes in XR’s storytelling approach. XR have been lambasted for marginalising ethnic minorities and the working classes, and generally being out of touch with the more immediate concerns facing society. Actions which involved road blockades and disruption to the rail network seemed to symbolise a movement which lacked empathy for the same people it claimed needed to be saved from the climate crisis.

Ok Doomer and the shitty first draft

The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.

Ann Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Five years on and both XR and Jem Bendall appear to be listening to their critics. XR’s next planned action, ‘Unite to Survive’, still couches the threat in stark terms, but promises ‘not to disrupt the public’ and to ‘leave the locks and glue behind.’ In the 2020 update to his Deep Adaptation paper, Bendell also appeared to make a concession, acknowledging that near-term societal collapse is his opinion rather than a scientifically accepted fact.

However, this softening hasn’t stopped people taking things into their own hands, believing that work is needed to be done to address the damage that ‘climate doomers’ have wrought. Jessica Kleczka is a climate psychologist who argues that climate doomism actively harms the environmental movement:

Doomism is not compatible with social justice. It ignores those at the frontline of climate impacts, who do not have the luxury of giving up. Talking yourself into accepting death, destruction and societal collapse is not “adaptation”. It’s siding with those who benefit most from the status quo and do not want us to act.

Every week, Jessica profiles things that ‘went right’ for the planet through her social platforms. Did you know, for example, that seed-planting drones are helping to reforest Canada, or that 26 Australian species are no longer at a risk of extinction? Me neither!

To borrow from our friend Ann Lamott, I’m inclined to think of these climate stories as shitty first drafts. Extinction Rebellion represents an earnest attempt to articulate a different story about our relationship to the climate, one which prioritised action over apathy, and recognised the role that power plays in facilitating the status quo. Like many grassroots movements before it, XR has had its fair share of messy, incoherent and downright embarrassing foibles, but it has also proven itself willing to go back to the writer’s desk and embark on another round of edits.

Acts of the imagination

On the other end of our tug-of-war rope are a group of policy-makers, artists, scientists and organisers. They want the story to go in a different direction to the way it’s played out over the past few years, and argue that the growing alarm that it is ‘too late’ to save the planet is a byproduct of a deeper psychological problem: a failure of the imagination.

In his book ‘From what is to what if?’ Rob Hopkins highlights the work of social reformer John Dewey who defined the imagination as ‘the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise’. If we could find more ways to unleash our collective imagination, he argues, then things can be radically different. He draws on successful examples of collective imagining, like the Transition Towns movement in Totnes, and asks what if? What if we recognised beavers as an integral part of rewilding our landscape? What if birdsong drowned out the traffic? Have we become so accustomed to accepting a less-than world that we’ve lost our ability to dream?

I was fortunate to recently work with CIVIC SQUARE, an organisation based in Ladywood, Birmingham, which is undertaking a daring and radical approach to transforming their community by engaging in a number of ‘what if’ questions. What would it look like to live in a community which is good for people and planet? They ask. What if we took ‘dream matter’—helping people reimagine their future—as seriously as we take other aspects of our civic infrastructure?

In my opinion, CIVIC SQUARE are doing some of the most important work that can be done in this time. But as any artist will tell you, envisioning an alternative future is no walk in the park. Novelists often sit at their desk for years at a time with little to show for it. But by committing to their practice they commit to facilitating the creation of new worlds.

Ushering in New Worlds

adrienne maree brown is a writer, organiser and philosopher who is pioneering this new work, and is heavily influenced by the science fiction of Octavia E. Butler. She brings together in collaborative and creative ways artists and educators whose stories inspire and engage. This work is necessarily drawn from people with different backgrounds and lived experiences who are ‘rediscovering the human spirit in baffling times, under challenging circumstances.’

Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organising is science fiction. Organisers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds …

We want organizers and movement builders to be able to claim the vast space of possibility, to be birthing visionary stories.

Walidah Imarisha, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements eds. adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha

I like adrienne’s approach. It recognises the scale of what needs to be done, but invites us to begin addressing these problems in the places and contexts we already inhabit. I think one of the major downfalls of previous stories has been the tendency to offer a grand-unified-theory-of-everything, in which the diagnosis and solution were always presented as non-negotiable and ‘out there’.

Another problem with the ‘old stories’ is that they were orientated around individuals within the human species rather than communities and the infinitely complex ecology with which we share the planet. The realist story said: it is up to ‘me’ to save the planet. That’s heavy stuff for a human to carry: but we don’t need to carry these things on our own. We can look at the monumental size of the problem, but then also look around at our communities and gatherings and recognise that it is together that we must start to build a new world.

The writer Sophie Strand argues that stories which center the human-species at the expense of all other living things are narratives with profound limits. We need to rewild our stories, and develop a new ecological language for our time: ‘perhaps, freed of the stories we thought we were bound by, we will stumble upon more fertile narratives’ she suggests.

Like fungi and plants, we are co-becoming with our ecosystems. Ecosystems that are ruptured, polluted, and confused by our culture’s deracinated idea that you can live without a root system. But if we are going to survive, we are going to need to tie our roots to other roots. Resilience ecology tells us that landscapes with more biodiversity, more overall connectivity, are better able to withstand natural disasters and climatological pressures. We are going to need to drop below human exceptionalism into the underworld of symbiotic co-creation. 

What is the underworld? by Sophie Strand

Revision, revision, revision

There is a lot to process here. Stories which once served as our north stars are fading, and new porous, malleable narratives are entering into the fray. When things are messy and sketchy some of us might be inclined to turn away: we want order, a plan, a manifesto. And those things may come. But I think embarking on this new draft which is rooted in the imagination offers a more humble story about humanity’s relationship to climate change. The way out of this mess requires nothing less than the transformation of ourselves and our ego.

To quote the African-American visionary Toni Cade Bambara, we need to find ways to ‘make the revolution irresistible’ —so let’s sharpen our pencils and get to work.

A TOOLKIT FOR THE IMAGINATION

1. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to think like a 21st Century Economist by Kate Raworth

   This book is CIVIC SQUARE’s foundational text. A brilliant call to action that redefines economics for a world in crisis. If you squirm at the language of economics than do give it a read, it will transform your understanding!

2. This interview with Bayo Akomolafe

   ‘Oh, the times are urgent’ says Bayo ‘let us slow down. Slowing down is losing our way. Losing our way is not a human capacity or human capability.’
   Bayo explains that our crisis is not just a climate crisis, but a crisis in form. We are coming up against the limitations of our stories about our systems, which expects them to work in coherent ways: ‘the world is too messy, too promiscuous, too agential, to be predictable, to be algorithmically convenient or conservative.’

3. adrienne maree brown interviewed by Krista Tippett for On Being

   I had to listen to this podcast a few times before I could fully absorb it. So much to love and engage with here, and a great introduction to adrienne’s thinking.

Take care,

Grace

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