Environmental Change and the World's Futures: Ecologies, Ontologies and Mythologies [1 ed.] 1138023299, 9781138023291

Table of contents :
Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Ecologies, ontologies and mythologies of possible futures • Linda H. Connor and Jonathan Paul Marshall
Part I: Intellectual and speculative engagements with ecological change
1 Towards an anthropology of the future: visions of a future world in the era of climate change • Hans A. Baer
2 The first draft of the future: journalism in the ‘Age of the Anthropocene’ • Tom Morton
3 Ecological complexity and the ethics of disorder • Jonathan Paul Marshall
Part II: The politics of engagement
4 Futures of governance: ecological challenges and policy myths in tuna fisheries • Kate Barclay
5 The work of waste-making: biopolitical labour and the myth of the global city • David Boarder Giles
6 From sociological imagination to ‘ecological imagination’: Another Future Is Possible • Ariel Salleh, James Goodman and S. A. Hamed Hosseini
Part III: Environmental change in specific places and cultures
7 Indigenous ontologies and developmentalism: analysis of the National Consultations for the Kiribati Adaptation Program • Felicity Prance
8 When climate change is not the concern: realities and futures of environmental change in village Nepal • Sascha Fuller
9 Ontologies and ecologies of hardship: past and future governance in the Central Australian arid zone • Sarah Holcombe
10 From good meat to endangered species: indigenising nature in Australia’s Western Desert and in Germany’s Ruhr District • Ute Eickelkamp
Part IV: Body and psyche
11 Climate change imaginings and depth psychology: reconciling present and future worlds • Sally Gillespie
12 What wrecks reveal: structural violence in ecological systems • Penny McCall Howard
13 Emergent ontologies: natural scepticism, weather certitudes and moral futures • Linda H. Connor
Part V: Technological mythology
14 Official optimism in the face of an uncertain future: Swedish reactions to climate change threats • Mark Graham
15 Geoengineering, imagining and the problem cycle: a cultural complex in action • Jonathan Paul Marshall
16 The creation to come: pre-empting the evolution of the bioeconomy • Jeremy Walker
Index

Citation preview

Environmental Change and the World’s Futures

Climate change and ecological instability have the potential to disrupt human societies and their futures. Cultural, social and ethical life in all societies is directed towards a future that can never be observed, and never be directly acted upon, and yet is always interacting with us. Thinking and acting towards the future involves efforts of imagination that are linked to our sense of being in the world and the ecological pressures we experience. The three key ideas of this book – ecologies, ontologies and mythologies – help us understand the ways people in many different societies attempt to predict and shape their futures. Each chapter places a different emphasis on the linked domains of environmental change, embodied experience, myth and fantasy, politics, technology and intellectual reflection, in relation to imagined futures. The diverse geographic scope of the chapters includes rural Nepal, the islands of the Pacific Ocean, Sweden, coastal Scotland, North America, and remote, rural and urban Australia. This book will appeal to researchers and students in anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, cultural studies, psychology and politics. Jonathan Paul Marshall is a senior research associate for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Linda H. Connor is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, Australia.

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Environmental Change and the World’s Futures Ecologies, ontologies and mythologies Edited by Jonathan Paul Marshall and Linda H. Connor

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 selection and editorial matter, Jonathan Paul Marshall and Linda H. Connor; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Environmental change and the world’s futures: ecologies, ontologies and mythologies/edited by Jonathan Paul Marshall and Linda H. Connor. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Global environmental change–Forecasting. 2. Climatic changes–Forecasting. 3. Twenty-first century–Forecasts. I. Marshall, Jonathan Paul, 1956– II. Connor, Linda, 1950– GE149.E59 2016 304.2′5–dc23 2015006863 ISBN: 978-1-138-02329-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77655-2 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors

x xi

Ecologies, ontologies and mythologies of possible futures

1

LINDA H. CONNOR AND JONATHAN PAUL MARSHALL

PART I

Intellectual and speculative engagements with ecological change 1 Towards an anthropology of the future: visions of a future world in the era of climate change

15 17

HANS A. BAER

2 The first draft of the future: journalism in the ‘Age of the Anthropocene’

33

TOM MORTON

3 Ecological complexity and the ethics of disorder

48

JONATHAN PAUL MARSHALL

PART II

The politics of engagement 4 Futures of governance: ecological challenges and policy myths in tuna fisheries

63 65

KATE BARCLAY

5 The work of waste-making: biopolitical labour and the myth of the global city DAVID BOARDER GILES

81

viii Contents 6 From sociological imagination to ‘ecological imagination’: Another Future Is Possible

96

ARIEL SALLEH, JAMES GOODMAN AND S. A. HAMED HOSSEINI

PART III

Environmental change in specific places and cultures 7 Indigenous ontologies and developmentalism: analysis of the National Consultations for the Kiribati Adaptation Program

111 113

FELICITY PRANCE

8 When climate change is not the concern: realities and futures of environmental change in village Nepal

129

SASCHA FULLER

9 Ontologies and ecologies of hardship: past and future governance in the Central Australian arid zone

145

SARAH HOLCOMBE

10 From good meat to endangered species: indigenising nature in Australia’s Western Desert and in Germany’s Ruhr District

161

UTE EICKELKAMP

PART IV

Body and psyche

179

11 Climate change imaginings and depth psychology: reconciling present and future worlds

181

SALLY GILLESPIE

12 What wrecks reveal: structural violence in ecological systems

196

PENNY MCCALL HOWARD

13 Emergent ontologies: natural scepticism, weather certitudes and moral futures

214

LINDA H. CONNOR

PART V

Technological mythology

231

14 Official optimism in the face of an uncertain future: Swedish reactions to climate change threats

233

MARK GRAHAM

Contents ix 15 Geoengineering, imagining and the problem cycle: a cultural complex in action

247

JONATHAN PAUL MARSHALL

16 The creation to come: pre-empting the evolution of the bioeconomy

264

JEREMY WALKER

Index

282

Illustrations

Figures 4.1 Catches (mt) of yellowfin, skipjack, bigeye, albacore and other species in the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission Convention Area, 1950–2005 10.1 Wooden carrying dish with bushfood designs 10.2 Wooden carrying dish with bushfood designs (obverse) 10.3 Deininghauser Creek (tributary stream of the Emscher) before renaturalisation 10.4 Deininghauser Creek after renaturalisation 12.1 Oil rising to the surface from the wreck of the Brothers fishing boat just north of Skye 12.2 Image from a GPS chartplotter showing the wreck of the Kathryn Jane 12.3 The Kathryn Jane and her net, as they were found on the seafloor 12.4 Feeling the ground 12.5 Looking from the boat into the sea along the wires attached to the trawl net 15.1 Australia’s energy generation mix 16.1 Coccolithophores such as Emiliania huxleyi are single-celled marine phytoplankton that produce calcium carbonate scales (coccoliths)

70 168 169 174 175 197 198 200 201 202 254

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Table 4.1 Contemporary stock abundance as a percentage of estimated stock abundance before industrial tuna fishing accelerated after 1950

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Contributors

Hans A. Baer is Senior Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He has published nineteen books and some 180 book chapters and refereed articles on a diversity of research topics, including Mormonism, African-American religion, socio-political life in East Germany, critical medical anthropology, medical pluralism in the US, UK and Australia, the critical anthropology of climate change, and Australian climate politics. He has authored four books related to climate change, the most recent being The Anthropology of Climate Change: An Integrated Critical Perspective (Routledge Earthscan, 2014) with Merrill Singer. Kate Barclay. As an Associate Professor, University of Technology Sydney, Kate Barclay researches the social aspects of fisheries. Since the late 1990s she has researched the sustainable development of tuna resources in the island Pacific in the context of changing governance systems and globalization. Current projects include multidisciplinary work to evaluate the social and economic contributions fisheries and aquaculture make to coastal communities in New South Wales, governance of bêche-de-mer supply chains in Papua New Guinea, and gender in coastal fisheries in Solomon Islands. Kate’s significant publications include Engaging with Capitalism: Cases from Oceania (Emerald 2013) and A Japanese Joint Venture in the Pacific (Routledge 2008). Linda H. Connor is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. She has worked in several countries and continents as researcher and academic, on topics of development, religion, ritual and healing, and environmental change. She is currently part of a research group undertaking a project funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘The Coal Rush and Beyond: Climate Change, Coal Reliance and Contested Futures’. Ute Eickelkamp is an ARC Future Fellow, Anthropology, University of Sydney. Since 1995 she has undertaken fieldwork with Anangu in Central Australia, focusing on the social and aesthetic history of local art, images of destruction, representations of kinship, and children’s social imagination and emotional dynamics through play. Her publications include Don’t Ask for Stories: The Women of Ernabella and Their Art (1999); the co-edited Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention (2008); and Growing Up in Central

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Contributors Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence (2011). Her current work explores how Anangu speak about nature, history and being.

Sascha Fuller is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, Australia. She first went to Nepal in 2008 to work in development aid with an international non-government organisation. Since then she has conducted extensive fieldwork there on issues of environmental relatedness within a Bahun community. Her current research focuses on environmental relations, environmental change, and development in Nepal. David Boarder Giles is a lecturer in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell. He writes about cultural-economies of waste and homelessness, and the politics of public space in global cities. He has done extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Seattle and other cities in the United States and Australasia with dumpster divers, grassroots activists, homeless residents, and chapters of Food Not Bombs – a globalised movement of grassroots soup kitchens. Sally Gillespie has recently completed a doctorate at the University of Western Sydney, with her thesis ‘Climate Change and Psyche: Mapping Myths, Dreams and Conversations in the Era of Global Warming’. She is the author of Living the Dream and The Book of Dreaming as well as a contributor to Depth Psychology, Disorder and Climate Change edited by Jonathan Marshall. Sally worked in private practice as a Jungian psychotherapist in Sydney for over twenty years, and served as President of the C. G. Jung Society of Sydney from 2006 to 2010. James Goodman is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, conducting research into social change and global politics. He convenes the Australian Research Council project, ‘The Coal Rush and Beyond: Climate Change, Coal Reliance and Contested Futures’, 2014–17. He has published twelve books, including Justice Globalism: Ideology, Crises, Policy (Sage 2013), and Climate Upsurge: An Ethnography of Climate Movement Politics (Routledge 2014). Mark Graham is Associate Professor and Head of Department at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. His research interests and publications cover the social and planning aspects of sustainable urban development, refugee studies, gender and sexuality, and material culture. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Ethnos. His latest book is Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory (Ashgate). Sarah Holcombe is ARC Future Fellow in the Australian National University School of Archaeology and Anthropology. She is currently undertaking an ethnographic project on the practice of indigenous human rights, ‘Global Indigenous Rights and Local Effect in Central Australia’. She has a diverse research background in remote indigenous Australia. This includes applied

Contributors xiii anthropology with Northern Territory land councils and research management as the Social Science Coordinator for the Desert Knowledge CRC. She has undertaken research on the social sustainability of mining in indigenous communities; alternative economies; indigenous community governance; and integrity systems in research with indigenous peoples. S. A. Hamed Hosseini, Ph.D. in Sociology and Global Studies, ANU, is a Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of Conscientious Sociology (2013) and Alternative Globalizations (Routledge, 2009/2011) which establishes an integrative approach to studying the ideological aspects of global social movements. He has conducted research and published a number of articles on ‘Transversal Cosmopolitanism in Occupy Movements’ (2013), ‘Youth Political Identity’ (2013), ‘Sociology of Ideation’ (2012), ‘Activist Knowledge’ (2010), ‘Global Justice’ (2009), ‘Alter-globalization Solidarities’ (2006), and ‘Sociology of Collective Cognition’ (2003). Penny McCall Howard has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Aberdeen, and is the National Research Officer of the Maritime Union of Australia. She previously worked as crew and as skipper on passenger vessels in the United States. Her academic research develops a labour-centred approach to human–environment and human–machine relations and shows how the ecology of places, the techniques people practice and the subjectivities they enact are significantly affected by market pressures and class relations. Jonathan Paul Marshall is Senior Research Associate in FASS at the University of Technology Sydney. He is currently working on the ARC Project ‘The Coal Rush and Beyond: Climate Change, Coal Reliance and Contested Futures’. Previous ARC-sponsored fellowships include ‘Chaos, Information Technology, Global Administration and Daily Life’, and the ‘Cybermind Gender Project’. He is author of Living on Cybermind (Peter Lang 2007), and Disorder and the Disinformation Society (with James Goodman, Didar Zowghi and Francesca da Rimini). He is Editor of the collection Depth Psychology Disorder and Climate Change (JungDownunder 2008), and Co-editor of special issues of Global Networks, Globalisations with James Goodman, and Global Media Journal (Australia) and The Australian Journal of Anthropology with Tanya Notley. Tom Morton is Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Technology Sydney and Director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. Before joining UTS in 2010 he was an award-winning journalist, broadcaster and documentary producer with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for more than twenty years. He won a Gold Radio Award at the New York TV, Film and Radio Festival for the documentary Shutting Down Sharlene. He is currently a member of the ARC-supported research project ‘The Coal Rush and Beyond: Climate Change, Coal Reliance and Contested Futures’. Felicity Prance is Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Business. Felicity is passionate about sustainable development policy and contributing to projects

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Contributors

that aim to deliver environmental and socio-economic outcomes simultaneously. Her research at the Australian Institute of Business is positioned within business management, organisational development and sustainable policy. Felicity is currently completing an M.Phil. in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Adelaide. Trading under Saxon Consulting, she has extensive experience in policy research and project management across numerous sectors. Ariel Salleh is Visiting Professor in Culture, Philosophy and Environment, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa; a Senior Fellow in Post-Growth Societies, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany; and Research Associate in Political Economy, University of Sydney, Australia. Her ‘embodied materialism’ is seminal to political ecology as the study of humanity–nature relations. She is a former Senior Editor of the US journal Capitalism Nature Socialism and was shortlisted for the International Sociological Association Buttel Prize for Distinguished Contribution to Environmental Sociology. Publications include Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern (2001), Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice (2009), and some 180 chapters and articles. Jeremy Walker has taught and researched at the University of Technology Sydney since 2008, having completed there a doctoral thesis on the unacknowledged yet mutually constitutive history of intellectual exchange between neoclassical economics, systems ecology and thermodynamics, and the implications of this history for contemporary policy in the neoliberal era. He has served as Visiting Scholar at the Centre Alexandre Koyré Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS, Paris) and the Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (CNRS, Montpellier). Current research interests include the reconfiguration of ecological science by the policy discourse of ecosystem services and its associated anticipatory research infrastructures, and the significance for economic thought of the ‘caring for country’ movement in Aboriginal Australia. These interests are being drawn together in a book with the working title Towards a General Bioeconomics of the Anthropocene.

Ecologies, ontologies and mythologies of possible futures Linda H. Connor and Jonathan Paul Marshall

The aim of this edited collection is to investigate, from a variety of perspectives and different locations, the changing, socially based perceptions of uncertain futures. The futures we are contemplating generally arise from awareness of the complex, potentially disruptive impact of climate change and ecological instability on human societies. ‘Ecologies’, ‘ontologies’ and ‘mythologies’ are the key terms for this exploration, showing that environmental change is here understood as connected in manifold, non-linear ways to the conditions of human (and other) livelihood and existence in all their variety. We see changes in present and imagined future environments as posing existential problems that may lead people to question much of the taken for granted nature of social organizations and their embodied ways of engaging with the world. The book is distinguished by empirically based and multidisciplinary social science modes of inquiry, informed by a broad-ranging examination of the ‘futures’ based discourse, policy and politics that have become an intrinsic part of the contemporary world. A paradox of cultural, social and ethical life in all societies is that it is directed towards a future that can never be observed, and never be directly acted upon, and yet is always interacting with that social life. As a result, actions depend both on imagination and a political sense of ontology or being in the world and of the nature of that world. Future-loaded terms like ‘anthropogenic climate change’, ‘food security’, ‘sustainability’, ‘energy security’ and ‘biodiversity’ evoke a specific ontological politics that privileges scientific or economic knowledge, while potentially suppressing the contestations within, and between, those knowledges and modes of social existence. Remedies like carbon taxes, carbon trading, renewable energy and nature conservation, risk obscuring forms of social and cultural difference in favour of a proposed and enforced unity of ‘global humanity’ on a threatened planet. These ‘holistic’ projects suppress parts of the world, or particular social dynamics, in favour of others. By contrast, this book’s framework embraces an appreciation of difference and non-holism, as it is unlikely that one solution to the many disruptive futures imagined throughout the world can be found. Indeed any such ‘one solution’ may increase the disruptive effects found in local situations. Each chapter invites reflection on diverse ways of comprehending global warming, and other manifestations of environmental change, as well as on the forms, and shapers, of agency that influence people’s

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understandings and responses. There are diverse responses to those changes in different polities, cultures and places, and this divergence needs to be factored into our understandings and actions. The geographic scope of the chapters encompasses rural Nepal, the islands of the Pacific Ocean, Sweden, coastal Scotland, North America, remote, rural and urban Australia and, of course, planet Earth. Many chapters focus on new modes of organization, imagining and experience: including ‘biocivilization’, ‘synthetic biospheres’, ‘indigenized nature’ and ‘geoengineering’. All these modalities produce challenges to the monolithic ‘global’ realities constituted by the dominant politics of our era, even when they may appear to support them. Each contributor works with the three key ideas – ecologies, ontologies and mythologies – not as distinct categories, but as elements for understanding the processes and situations they set forth in their chapters. Each empirical study places a different emphasis on the interconnected domains of environmental change, embodied experience, myth and fantasy, political engagement, technological process and intellectual reflection, in relation to imagined futures. Humans can only speculate or imagine about, and attempt to influence, the future; and this affects our actions and understanding. Therefore the basis and nature of the tools with which we speculate or imagine and the contexts within which we imagine, may need examination. We now briefly explore each of the key terms of the book, based on the approaches and topics taken up in the chapters.

Ecologies Social and psychological life always occurs within a set of ecological systems in the broad sense. Being is never experientially singular. Human life involves a not always stable, and largely unpredictable, interaction among constituents of the world: the full being of embodied social actors; their imaginings; and their environments and the ‘actions’ of those environments. People extend out into their environment and the environment extends into them: boundaries and modes of effect are unclear and need to be examined. As Gregory Bateson (1972) proposed, we don’t ‘have’ a mind, we live in an ecology of mind. If humans think with words and sensory analogues, and the objects we affect, then we think with, and in, our environment, our ecology, our surroundings, our humanly created buildings, tools and so forth. It might even be possible to argue that by providing these analogues and shaping our habits, expectations, and sense of who we are, the environment thinks through us. Understanding the interdependence of the human body, mind, emotion and environment in responding to change and in producing solutions is fundamental to understanding how humans produce their future worlds and cope with potential disruption. Ecologies, with their various scales, are modes of existence out of which everything grows. They point towards the necessary immersion of life within wider interactive spheres, such as the environment, the social field or the technological field – all spheres that can be balanced, self-disruptive, conflicting and disrupted

Ecologies, ontologies, mythologies

3

from ‘outside’. In his chapter, Tom Morton writes about the problems for journalists that arise from the conflict between ‘ecologies’ of commercial information production and those of long-term climate crisis. Likewise, Sascha Fuller shows how some ordering knowledges from the ecology of climate change policy unproductively divert attention from Nepalese villagers’ own pressing problems and their existential realities. She argues that social scientists have to analyse climate within the broader context of environmental and social change and not the other way around. Sarah Holcombe highlights the connections between people and environment, in her account of indigenous ontologies rooted in generations of human survival in the harsh Western Desert environment of Pintupi-Luritja people, and the tensions that arise when neoliberal governance frameworks of community development and comfort are imposed by the modern Australian state. The things we live amongst, whether made by us or not, are part of our mind and our way of life. We are conditioned by others and the wider environment, and condition them in turn. Ute Eickelkamp discusses how ecologies are re-evaluated as ‘inherited objects’, as nature and culture, in two contrasting but personally meaningful places: the industrial Ruhr District in Germany and the Anangu Pitjantjatjara community in Central Australia. Damaged and degraded ecologies in these places can destabilize human life-worlds, replacing imagined futures with experiences of loss and endings. Ecological conservation and rehabilitation, as well as the production of heritage and its commodification, all contain people’s anxieties about self/world/environment disintegrations and bring new future imaginings into play.

Ontologies Despite the term ‘ontology’ apparently coming into being as recently as the early seventeenth century, there is a long and complex history of approaches to the nature of, and relationship between, ‘being’ and beings, human being and divine being, and the being of the world. Questions of being are vital to most of the ‘great philosophers’ of all cultures. Looking at their work, we are left with many notions of being (as one, many, flow, spirit, material, reasonable, extended space, unreachable, unconscious, will, power, event, process, and so on). It is doubtful that any philosophy, science or culture can proceed without implying some notion of, or some dispute over, the fundamental nature of existence or the nature of the world; notions of ‘being’ seem to change constantly. In this book, the term ontology is intended to direct our authors’ attention to issues of being in all its multiple and phenomenological richness: involving feelings, senses, tacit knowledge, ways of life and orientation towards the future. The chapters emphasize modes of human being in ‘society’ and in ‘nature’ while recognizing both these terms are abstractions which themselves do not exist in essence, or as one ‘thing’. In different ways, the analyses in each chapter strive to understand social life as part of the world’s complexity and inchoate interconnectedness, not confined to ‘the human’, or even to a single human–‘non-human’ interaction.

4 Connor and Marshall This view implies that being is not what we might think of as a ‘thing’, it involves a dynamic nexus of relationships through time. It likewise points to questions around the double relationship between being and epistemology (the on or ontos and the logos). How is it that we can come to know the nature of being? What is the nature of being that we think we can know about it? Being and knowing seem to form a circular mystery. Because of the mystery, people perhaps imagine, before they know, and after they know, but it is a circle without a starting place, or a fixed ground. Knowing may depend on the myths we tell and pass to others; which we may hold to be true and feel to be true, and the pains we suffer. But nevertheless humans appear to begin the process immersed in others, some of which appear like us, and some of which do not. If so, we exist within, and think and act within, an ecology that is a realm of beings. Beings that we have evolved with, and so in some sense must ‘know’ something about, tacitly or ‘biologically’, even if it is not knowledge in our conscious mind. Consequently it seems part of human ontology not to be able to penetrate the mystery of being itself, as there is no independent outside of being from which to experience. We are always uncertain and always discarding something. In her chapter, Sally Gillespie suggests that facing the feared and the unwanted, by looking at the creative imagery appearing in dreams, can actually help people adapt to change and crisis. Jonathan Marshall explores this uncertainty both as a basis for ethics, and as implying that when people try to reduce perceptions of uncertainty, they may produce further uncertainty when attempting to solve climate change through technology. Penny Howard describes the contradictions experienced by Scottish fishermen who work between two ontologies: good seamanship, and the market. Good seamanship requires avoiding risk, understanding the vicissitudes of the weather, and staying calm and collected in a crisis. It is an extension of the body. However, market ecologies push fishermen beyond physical endurance, into extreme weather, and dependence on ‘happy pills’ to maintain equilibrium. All of these chapters articulate an experience of being that is deeply entangled with the things of the world in ways that can only be partly articulated: the images and feelings recalled from dreams, the weather, the limits of the body, and so on. If being is a mystery, then being may challenge conceptions of ordered human/cultural rationality. If there is a grand narrative in Western science, philosophy and politics it surely involves a fear of disorder, and an assertion that being is ordered relatively uniformly; the universe is subject to laws. Yet maybe it is not? Maybe being is what we would call disorderly, or only partly ordered? Maybe, the modes of ordering we employ to create our ontology produce what we call disorder. Classically, this latter point resembles the Marxist thesis as described by Ariel Salleh, James Goodman and Hamed Hosseini in their chapter, in which the extending orders of capitalism produce further crises for capitalism, and for human survival, in turn calling forth new modes of being or new orders. A recognition of possible fundamental disorder in forms of collective being may have disorienting and unpleasant consequences for social scientists, as the

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orders we describe may be largely imaginative, fictive, inadequate or suppressing acknowledgement of being that escapes our order. Yet that does not mean the position is incorrect. Nor does it mean that an experience of only partial order, and much disorder, is not true of most daily life, with things being not completely controllable, of becoming untidy and apparently disordered, with multiple factors impinging upon us, and the future not going completely to plan. What we call disorder is also part of ontology. David Boarder Giles’ chapter on the production of waste in global cities makes the point that what we tend to neglect as waste is part of the material substrate of capitalist value, ontologically entangled with myths of the global city. The world is flux, eluding our theories of ontology. Living nature can only be conserved by force; it is always evolving and changing. It may have temporary balances and pools of order, but these do not endure eternally. Human cultures have various schemas for dealing with flux and the unknown, in cosmo-ontologies of impermanence, eternity, suprahuman origins and so on. With ecological change we face inherently fluxing, disordered and perhaps unorderable futures, which is why rather than making ‘reason’ or ‘representation’ our basis, we have opted to phrase understanding in terms of ‘myth’ and imagining.

Mythologies The terms ‘myth’ and ‘mythologies’ open up our purview to the non-discursive and mysterious nature of human experience; to the unknown and unknowable being of future worlds. Myths may be expansive, protective or diversionary. They may function as charters for behaviour and expectation. They may be defensive, convincing us that we have a solution in situations of crisis, when it is our pre-embraced solutions and myths that are partly (or largely) responsible for our problems. In anthropology the term ‘myth’ does not have any implications of untruth; we can have true myths, or at least myths as true as any other supposedly true statement. Indeed all myths are true to the extent that they express something about the group’s (conscious or unconscious) understanding of, and hopes for, human life in society and the wider world. When myths fail that understanding, then they may no longer be held as true or valuable. However, using the term ‘myth’ might serve to remind us that worldviews are never absolutely true and definitive. This includes science, the dominant Western understanding of nature, which is not independent of social action, politics or imagining. Assuming science is not ‘myth’ implies that we can and do understand the social and ecological world without distortion and that all we have to do is refine our truths to leave uncertainty behind. Jonathan Marshall’s chapter on geoengineering demonstrates how myth complexes about capitalism may indirectly influence our approaches to combatting climate change through applied science, and cause a neglect of the systemic problems involved. Whatever the truth of mythology, myths tell us something about the world at the same time as they conceal, as Heidegger (1977: 132–35, 173–78) suggests of

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ale¯theia, or ‘truth’ generally. For example, political philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy suggests the subjugation of governments to myths of ‘the market’ could be said to hide the obeisance by states to their real masters in the fragmented corporate and financial sector (Dupuy 2014). However, this depersonalization of the supposed ‘rulers’ into ‘the market’, as well as hiding the real rulers or benefactors, also reveals the unforseen and unpredictable consequences of contemporary life in complex worldwide systems. The myth asserts that if we please the markets then good things will happen. The evidence that these good things almost never happen as a result, means that the myth continues to serve its purpose, asserting that the problem was not systemic ignorance or unknown disorder, but inability to placate the beast, with the message that we must do better next time, giving still more heed to the demands of corporations and industry. More usefully perhaps, as Hans Baer suggests in his chapter in this book, we can use imaginings meshed with anthropological knowledge of different societies to conduct explorations of mythical social futures, freed from the constraints of the ‘everyday’. Similarly, Jeremy Walker’s chapter explores the neoclassical economic myths of industrial biotechnology’s appropriation of the microorganic world, which envision a bounteous future of economic growth in a fossil-fuel depleted planet. These myths obscure the intensive capitalization and privatization of the planet’s ubiquitous microbial life forms, with consequences that are destructive but also have the potential to be liberating. The ambiguity is inherent. Although ontology could clearly include the imaginative nature of humanity and its mythologies (just as it could include the social and ecological being of humanity), the separation of themes is deliberate. Emphasizing mythology emphasizes that we are interested in humans as beings who generate imagined ontologies, and that the future is most often approached in a mythological way, rather than in a supposedly rational way, no matter how much we may attempt the latter. Ultimately, the three ideas of mythologies, ontologies and ecologies, are interconnected aspects of the processes involved, not distinct categories. The themes of myth and imagination also allow us to suggest that difference is fundamental to human societies, even if much is shared. As Felicity Prance shows in her chapter on the vicissitudes of World Bank climate change preparedness projects in the Republic of Kiribati, groups of people brought together with ostensibly common aims may work from quite different ontological expectations of what is fundamental or important to the world, of what can be changed and of what cannot be changed. In other words, they have different notions of the being-of-the-world, and of being-in-the-world. Such differences have to be explored, and failure to do so can result in miscommunication with consequences that may go beyond the failure of a development project. These differences, and the misunderstandings that arise from them, exist within and between groups, but also within and between cultures, and are important in driving relations within and between cultures – and even between the chapters in this book.

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Futures Cultural, social and ethical life in all societies is directed towards a future that can never be observed, and never be directly acted upon, and yet is always interacting with us. As a result, actions depend on imagination as well as human abilities to deal with, take advantage of, or ignore unintended consequences and unexpected events. Here we can point to Mark Graham’s use of the distinction between Merkwelt, the relatively clear world we perceive, and the muddy and messy Wirkwelt of the future impact of our actions, when he is talking about many Swedish householders’ tenuous understanding of the relationship between their present actions and the environmental consequences; especially when driven by myths of technological optimism. The future always escapes us. It literally never arrives: what we live in is always the present with unstable recollections and understanding of our pasts. This is not merely a philosophical truism; it is embedded in collective ontologies. Perceived futures are always imaginings, contested among many other imaginings. These imaginings are shared with others. They make use of sensory and mythic analogues: embodied, felt, heard, tasted, seen, theorized, worshipped and so on. As social and embodied, these imaginings may bring into being our habitual responses and expectations. They become part of the way that we habitually interpret the world and expect it to function. Linda Connor analyses the myth of ‘natural cycles’ that Hunter Valley residents in southeast Australia invoke to explain variable weather and climate conditions, and to challenge theories of human-caused global warming. This cyclical view of time and nature, anchored in multi-generational experiences of regional landscapes and weather, is part of a habitual mode of being that contests the dominant future imaginings of climate science. Entrenched myths also figure in Kate Barclay’s analysis of institutional attempts to achieve sustainability in Western Pacific tuna fisheries. She argues that it is difficult but necessary for new myths of ocean and fisheries to replace old ones if new modes of governance better adapted to current conditions and to tuna fish themselves are to endure in the future. In all cases it would seem the future is felt now, lived now, imagined now, even if it does not eventuate as expected; our views of it shape our dispositions, our habitual ways of feeling and thinking, and our expectations. Our imaginings, our myths, are tied into our modes of being. We move towards a future we believe in and imaginatively experience now, even if it is not the future we want. We know, because of the future’s inherent uncertainty, that we may not get the hoped for future. This is why it is important to add the destabilizing third to this dyad of imagining/myth and ontology: the ecologies of the world itself. Mythologies and modes of being have lived contexts (including ecological contexts), and changes in those contexts (such as from climate change) can change the mythologies, their meanings and relevance and the associated modes of being. In complex interactive systems, unexpected events occur and create further unpredictable events. Intentions may have little to do with results. As systems are connected, a disrupted system can spread its effects to many other places,

8 Connor and Marshall disrupting other systems. While perhaps a stable balance may be found and events return to normal, the new equilibrium may also show little trace of any of its previously recognizable nature. Humans may not destroy the Earth. It is, however, not uncommon for them to destroy or degrade their own civilizations, often through human-caused ecological damage.

The structure of the book The chapters have been grouped into five parts that foreground the key ideas of the book in different ways applied to diverse empirical material. I II III IV V

Intellectual and speculative engagements with ecological change The politics of engagement Environmental change in specific places and cultures Body and psyche Technological mythology

The divisions are somewhat arbitrary, and there are many intersecting issues, but there is a distinctive thematic emphasis within each grouping as well as strikingly contrasting topics that we hope will assist readers’ appreciation of the book’s aims. We begin with three chapters that highlight quite different domains of intellectual engagement with climate change and the future. Hans Baer argues that while climate change challenges anthropology, it has the potential to produce a new field, in which anthropologists ask: ‘How can we have an anthropology of the future that is relevant to the problems of that future?’ He proposes that we engage in thought experiments or imaginings to investigate myths of the future. As anthropologists claim to know a lot about different types of societies, they may be less likely to be blinded by the social conventions of dominant societies, and so can be particularly useful in assessments of future scenarios. Baer canvasses three myths of the future: business as usual which generates winners, losers and disasters, with positive feedback likely to lead further into chaos; reflexive modernization which involves positive attempts to overcome problems, but refuses to engage with the inherent problems of capitalism and its lack of political and economic equality; and eco-socialism which involves exploratory modes of being directed towards ecological relations. He outlines the role that a critical anthropology of the future can make to a democratic ecosocialist world, contributing to analysis and practice of transitional reforms. Tom Morton writes about the problems of a committed journalism dealing with the future consequences of the current set of crises. Journalism is currently situated in a set of changing ecologies, those of the ‘natural world’ and those of the ‘informational world’. These new realities clash with the previous guiding myths of journalism as being ‘the first draft of history’ and a search for objective truth, as the future is not objective. Phrasing the problem with journalism as purely a problem with communication misses the cultural, social, psychological and philosophical dimensions of climate change as an ‘existential problem’. The idea

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of the Anthropocene ‘fundamentally alters the ontology of human life as a species’: history must extend into deep time and encompass more than human affairs. Journalism has the potential to ask questions and foster debate on the critical issues of the Anthropocene, as well as to facilitate constructive new myths for public engagement with the traumas of the present and threatened catastrophes of the future that are so readily denied in the routinized discourses of the ‘global public sphere’. Jonathan Marshall combines ideas about disorder and ecologies with ethical thought. First he recognizes that ethics always involves argument and disagreement. If there is no disagreement then ethics is not in action. Recognizing this essential conflict has ontological consequences. Furthermore, complexity theory and contemporary knowledge about ecology suggest that ethics can no longer remain confined to humans; if we can harm the world (intentionally or not) then we may need to take moral responsibility for that capacity to harm, while recognizing that the world is suffused with conflict and harm. Our ontological relationship with the world is no longer isolated, simply or harmoniously ordered. This is an ethics without solid grounding as ethical axioms are always based in ethical decisions, myths and assumptions. Similarly we must be aware that as unpredictable consequences are central to life, an ethics cannot be based entirely on expected consequences. Marshall suggests that Albert Schweitzer’s thought enables an ethical attitude that recognizes these problems and provides a framework for action, without becoming an ethical system demanding that the world be ordered as humans might want. All visions of the future imply an ethics and a politics, and sometimes they imply hope of a better world. In Part II of the book, three chapters explore diverse contexts of political action oriented towards alternative futures: formal negotiation of environmental policies and governance in multilateral access to wild food stocks; countercultural activism against manifestations of global capitalism as waste; and production of a manifesto for another future by an alternative civil society forum of international scope. Kate Barclay describes the problems of governance of tuna fisheries. Tuna fish present some problems for myths of governance. Tuna do not confine themselves to national borders, and despite myths of inexhaustibility of the oceans, tuna populations are fragile given current catches. Governors have tended to see species in isolation from others (a myth of ‘atomism’). There are also myths of natural stability. These myths define the ontological positions of governors and fishery managers, producing actions that affect the whole ocean. Adherence to established myths can conceal problems and inhibit the imagination of new, more effective perspectives on problems. Ideas of maximum sustainable yield generate failure, due to fluctuations and lack of knowledge arising from myths of atomism, expectations of order and predictability, and expectations of futures unchanged from the past. Barclay suggests there may be some hope in the growing role of non-government organizations and what she calls ‘private governance’, both of which are challenging some of the old myths.

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David Boarder Giles develops the obvious but often forgotten point that capitalist economies depend on waste, disrupting dominant myths of harmless growth and production. ‘The more an economy grows, the more it must discard.’ Waste ‘is an ontological and material substrate of value itself’. The work of adding value to some things involves the work of diminishing the value of others. Our future may hinge on dismantling dominant myths of productivity and revealing the work of profligate waste-making as an index of unsustainable profit and social relationships. For example, throwing food away valorizes the ‘quality’ of the food that remains on the shelves making it suitable for the ‘world class’ city. Waste is deeply implicated in the organization of cities (clearing away the poor as rubbish), and in biopolitical/informational labour. Indeed, recognition of waste and materiality makes the stress of this labour more visible. With a change in ontological orientation, waste can become a matter of social activism, and Giles shows how ‘a transnational network of dumpster divers, squatters, and . . . anarchist soup kitchens’ works towards a new form of recirculatory labour and social being. Ariel Salleh, James Goodman and Hamed Hosseini begin with a manifesto – Another Future Is Possible, which was adopted at the People’s Summit in 2012 proclaiming a revolutionary new era of grassroots ‘justice globalism’, while the documents produced at the parallel UN Rio+20 conference extended business models into the entire biosphere, making it a ‘bio-economy’. The People’s countermanifesto aimed to promulgate models of ‘living well’ originating in a ‘biocivilization’ growing at the margins of capitalism. Due to the movement’s diversity and internationality, it needs communication and action across difference, and self-organization. This requires a relational ontology involving respect for commons, reciprocity, use of small scale local technology, and a focus on ‘being more’ rather than ‘having more’. After describing the movement, the authors move on to argue, in eco-socialist terms, that capitalism is inherently unsustainable, because of destructive competition between capital and labour and the tendency of capital to devalue and destroy the ecologies it depends on to maximize profit. In the face of this destructiveness, ecologies and labour (in their fullest modes of being) resist incorporation. As part of their being in society, humans, particularly women, engage in necessary labours of care, and this enables the forming of a ‘meta-industrial class’ with a non-extractive consciousness, carrying a ‘socio-ecological imagination’ which is expressed in this new movement and forms its base. We can learn much about the interconnectedness of ecologies, ontologies and mythologies through research on responses to environmental change or expectations of change in specific places and cultural groups. Communities living on ancestral or long-settled lands are characterized by deep familiarity with weather and landscape, traditions of dependence on soil and waters for livelihoods, knowledge and technologies fitted to local conditions, embodied ways of relating to the environment and other beings within it, and myths that locate phenomena of the ‘nearby’ within world-ordering cosmologies. In each of the cases considered in the four chapters of Part III, disordering processes are impinging on all aspects of community life: ecological damage from climate change, industrialization and

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population increase, commercial cropping and so on; rupture and fragmentation of relational ontologies; and competing mythologies – of markets, scientific knowledge, consumerism, and progress. These studies bring people’s experiences of environmental change and imagined futures into sharp relief. Felicity Prance describes the interaction of differing ontologies (those of locals and those that underpin World Bank programs), in an examination of the failure of climate change adaptation programs in the Republic of Kiribati. These differences are centred on different experiences of time (especially in relation to planning), ways of participating in social action, and attitudes towards sharing of knowledge/mythology. For the I-Kiribati, these are based on past forms of small island living. Prance also shows how the growth of the cash economy, affiliation with Christian churches and other forms of societal change are diminishing people’s traditional mutual safety nets of obligation and support and rendering people more vulnerable than they might otherwise be. The resilient past is being destroyed while planning for the future misses its mark. The UN-sponsored REDD-plus emission reduction program is well established in rural West Nepal, where local districts receive compensation for conservation and sustainable management of community forests. Sascha Fuller contends that despite the official prominence given to this program, with significant foreign aid funding, villagers are more immediately concerned about unchecked social and environmental changes (such as depopulation through out-migration, harmful intensification of agriculture through fertilizer and pesticide use, and unnatural increases of insect populations). These changes cause uncertainty and worry about the future, while climate change is a distant and abstract threat. Indeed, the REDD programs may further disrupt village life, and divert attention from local knowledge and concerns. The Brahman-Hindu identity of the village Fuller studied may further intensify these problems, as men in particular have gained enhanced status through outside education and ‘development’. They are thereby connected to ‘outside’ concerns, and wrapped in the ambiguities of unintended consequences. For the villagers, environmental mythology involves local, felt, embodied, personally lived ontological experiences, while ‘climate change’ involves a more superficial intellectualized knowledge which can disrupt forms of practical knowledge, reinforce gender and status hierarchies and undermine other imaginings of the future. In Australia’s Western Desert, the extremely harsh conditions of survival even without climate change impacts are part of an Aboriginal ontology that is structured in terms of demand sharing, deeply familial relational identities, a commitment to place, circular mobility and a highly labile social organization. In this ontology, people hold to a deep stoicism that is counter to modernist values of comfort and material accumulation. Sarah Holcombe analyses the different modes of governance that now shape people’s lives in Pintupi-Luritja lands. Traditional governance in these acephalous societies was egalitarian, with an asymmetrical patrilineal bias where male ritual was a core organizing feature and violence was a normative form of social regulation. There is a lack of emphasis on individual agency. In the neo-colonial context of contemporary Australia,

12 Connor and Marshall alternative spaces for choice making are emerging that may re-imagine the neoliberal frameworks fostered by the modern Australian state, into something more adaptive and useful to the people. New governance regimes of ‘community development’ promoted by Aboriginal organizations exemplify the opportunities and the tensions of modernity for people in the Western Desert. Shifting ontologies and myths of the future are in evidence, as well as re-evaluations of economies and ontologies of relationship and those of accumulation and comfort. Ute Eickelkamp undertakes a ‘speculative inquiry’ into two life-worlds familiar to her that have experienced profound and irreversible changes, in an industrial region of Germany and Aboriginal Central Australia. She explores the processes of indigenization by which people in these two very different places cope with cosmo-ontological dislocations of postindustrial and postcolonial modernity. Engaging with the past involves a politics of indigeneity and tradition that asserts continuity of being despite unanticipated change and disruption. Traces of remembered culture and nature are re-evaluated and remade as heritage and art, commodified in ways that provide recognition and material reward but also opportunities for continual imaginative effort. These creative responses to change and destruction sustain people’s imaginings of meaningful futures. In Part IV, we look at how experiences of environmental change are deeply embodied in ways that involve the psyche in conscious and unconscious expressions. If our being-in-the-world links us indissolubly with our total surroundings, then we must take account of the psychological function of myths, unconscious fears, dreams and other experiences as they project onto, and work their way back to the body, psyche and political action. Sally Gillespie uses depth psychological research to investigate the difficulties people have in processing information and action about climate change and to explore the possibilities for emergent and more constructive ontologies. People get caught in ‘archetypal’ myths of the Apocalypse, Eden, or utopian fantasies. New myths are needed and, through action and attention, they can emerge from the creative unconscious in dreams. These dreams have the capacity to shape consciousness and interpersonal action, and free people from immobilizing fear and anxiety. Gillespie discusses her participatory research with a group of people concerned about climate change. She shows how acknowledging mythic fears, anxieties and the presence of death, in group discussions of dreams and nightmares, imbued participants with meaning and hope despite their transitions and uncertainties. Participants became more able to engage, and the process facilitated the sense of a new world view and the possibilities of new more constructive myths. This group process of attention to images and dreams fostered changes in social ontology and may generate more hopeful mythologies with which to face climate change. Reflecting on stories of wrecked fishing boats, Penny Howard shows how the possibility and even certainty of future crisis is incorporated into the bodies and psyches of Scottish fishermen through encounters with the recent wrecks of vessels that remain lying in fishing grounds. These past tragedies are felt closely through fishermen’s practices of ‘sounding’ the sea and ‘feeling’ the sea floor as they work

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around these wrecks, and extend their embodiment into the environment through an ontology of seamanship. Their understandings of the causes of these wrecks is complex, and ranges from seafood markets to financial institutions, political systems and the general risk and chaos of life. The wrecks themselves are a tangible and ever present reminder of the contradictory ontologies in fishermen’s lives: the practical craft of seamanship and the structural violence of global markets that overwhelms their capacity to survive but whose mythologies are misrecognized by those involved. In the Hunter Valley, Linda Connor explores how anxiety-provoking experiences of unpredictable and extreme weather are psychically contained in the idea of ‘natural cycles’ articulated by many residents, based on personal and mythic experiences of recurring droughts, floods, and fires that can be traced back to ancient climate patterns of the post-glacial Holocene epoch in this region of eastern Australia. Challenging the dominant ontology of climate science, and generally supportive of sceptical understandings of climate change, the ‘natural cycles’ view indexes an enduring mode of being that situates humans in a cosmos where mysterious forms of agency, often expressed as ‘nature’, exert powerful influences on planetary life. This view is associated with a strong awareness of fragile planetary life systems that is perhaps part of an emergent ontology grounded in unconscious as well as conscious relatedness to familiar and loved surrounding landscapes. In Part V, the final section of the book, three chapters explore the mythic promises of technology and its disordering effects that impinge on ontological certainties as well as ecological stability. Technological fantasies are intrinsic to the irrationality of scientific ontologies, begetting utopian imaginings of the future and suppressing awareness of chaotic dystopias that may also ensue, as we find in these studies of official policies of ecological optimism, myths of geoengineering, and the catastrophic as well as hopeful possible futures of ‘preemptive speciation’ in the emerging bio-economy. Climate change appears to present no threat of future dystopias in Sweden’s official policies of technologically based ecological optimism as analysed by Mark Graham. In this mythic world, it seems that the challenges of climate change can be met by technological advances, a kind of romance of the engineer that allows economic expansion to continue. This myth implies a faith in planning, with an ontology of predictable futures and a Newtonian/Cartesian world of objects, which are instrumentally amenable to human wishes. It creates disorders that can be denied as ‘externalities’ such as waste, death by cars and CO2 emissions elsewhere in the world. In this view, clock time is symmetric and reversible, so that past mistakes can be cleared up by better development. Graham draws on the example of an affluent eco-district in Stockholm to explore the limitations of ‘living green’ in a consumerist society where waste is the dark unconscious of consumption. Can Swedish ontology and mythology survive climate disruption? Jonathan Marshall looks at the unconscious of the technological processes of geoengineering, noting that geoengineering seems enmeshed in particular forms of myth and power relations, in which society is ontologically seen as less

14 Connor and Marshall manipulable than nature. The dominant forms of power (both social and technological) are to be preserved while nature is modified to suit them. This is despite the known uncertainties of geoengineering and the high likelihood that it could make the situation worse, combined with the known possibility of renewable energy becoming a viable and much less risky substitute. The ontological politics of geoengineering are briefly outlined, and the incoherencies discussed in terms of the ‘free-market cultural complex’ that hinders perceptions of other modes of behaviour and directs attention away from unintended effects. Finally, Jeremy Walker looks at the emerging industrial bio-economy, in which new mythologies of scientific progress articulate a future vision of new synthesized micro-organisms like algae becoming the genetic and biochemical machinery for industrial and fuel purposes, lowering non-biodegradable wastes, and ushering the decline of the petrochemical industry. Bio-economy invokes a vital materialism that could become a profound ontological critique of the anti-materialist and antibiotic tendencies of the myths of contemporary economics, both in theory and practice. Walker shows how this occurs both through reversing the appropriation of evolution and ecological theory by mainstream economics, making ecology primary, not derivative of economics, and through giving attention to mass extinctions at the same time as the neo-genesis or pre-emptive speciation of bioeconomics is proposed. These developments cannot be dismissed as an extension of neoliberal control by corporate markets, as they also contain the possibility of a democratized and decentralized form of action that could change the world for the better.

Conclusion The original research in these chapters presents a rich variety of perspectives on important challenges of life today and for imagined futures. We hope the book will stimulate readers to reflect on challenges of uncertain futures of ecological instability and climate change through contributors’ attempts to capture three important aspects of life: first, the immersion of life within wider interactive spheres, such as the ecology or the social field; second, issues of being in all its phenomenological richness, its intermeshing with others, and orientation towards the future; and third, mythologies as expressions of the unknown or non-discursive nature of experience, which includes the future, and guides our directions to it and our responses to inevitable unanticipated effects.

References Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler. Dupuy, J-P. 2014. Economy and the Future: A crisis of faith. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Heidegger, M. 1977. Basic Writings from ‘Being and Time’ to the ‘Task of Thinking’. San Francisco: Harper.

PART I

Intellectual and speculative engagements with ecological change

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Towards an anthropology of the future Visions of a future world in the era of climate change Hans A. Baer

Anthropology and imagining the future It has become increasingly apparent that climate change constitutes a major threat to human well-being and even survival for many people. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists have come to the conclusion that the warming of the planet and associated climatic events is largely anthropogenic, or the result of human activities particularly since the Industrial Revolution. The pace and effects of warming have been increasing; and this change in the world we inhabit threatens significant, if not severe, consequences for human well-being. Despite these momentous and potentially dire developments, the governments of the world, as a whole, have been slow to respond to this pending threat, as seen in the failure of a series of international climate conferences intended to generate an active response. Moreover, while manufacturing and agro-business producers of greenhouse gases have developed a public discourse of Green Capitalism, continued emphasis on unceasing expansion contradicts assertions that the world economic system can achieve sustainability. Finally, a corporate-supported global warming denial campaign has succeeded in sowing confusion which, in turn, has contributed to lowering of public concern about climate change despite ever mounting scientific evidence that anthropogenic climate change is real and pressing. All of these events have produced a significant challenge for anthropological relevance and for Sidney Mintz’s (1985: xxvii) vision of crafting an ‘anthropology of the present’ that entails detailed examinations and critiques of ‘societies that lack the features conventionally associated with the so-called primitive’. Yet, as anthropogenic climate change will manifest profound impacts on human societies as they move further and further into the twenty-first century, the still evolving anthropology of climate change can make an important contribution to the anthropology of the future. Historically, anthropologists have concerned themselves with either human societies of the distant past – the domain of archaeology – and of the recent past or present – the domain of sociocultural anthropology. When we consider how long we have lived as farming and herding communities, some 10,000 years, or

18 Hans A. Baer how long some people have lived in socially stratified state societies, some 6,000 years, our presence in such social arrangements is a tiny fraction even of the already brief timeline of our species when contrasted with the age of the Earth. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other scenario setters often speak of the state of humanity on this planet in 2050 or 2100 but generally not beyond. Sheila Jasanoff (2010: 241) suggests that ‘[c]limate change invites humanity to play with time’, including projecting the mind’s eye into the future as we might imagine it will unfold. Over the past several decades, anthropologists and other social scientists have often alluded to a cavalcade of ‘posts’ such as: post-colonialism, post-industrialism, post-Fordism, post-socialism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, and postfeminism. Anthropologists might entertain the possibilities of two other ‘posts’, namely post-capitalism and post-anthropogenic climate change. While in the 1970s and 1980s, various anthropologists grappled with imagined future scenarios for humanity, the demise of the Soviet bloc countries and the disillusionment with grand theory under the guise of post-modernism appear to have predisposed a younger generation of anthropologists to steer away from seemingly grandiose projects of attaining a better world based upon both social justice and environmental sustainability. Yet a revival of the anthropology of the future strikes me as long overdue. Fortunately, John Bodley (2012) in the six editions of his book Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems concludes with a chapter on ‘The Future’ in which he envisions a sustainable planetary society. Climate change compels us to engage in what Immanuel Wallerstein (1998: 1) terms utopistics, which he defines as ‘serious assessment of historical alternatives, the exercise of our judgment as to the substantive rationality of alternative possible historical systems’. In seeking to assess possible future scenarios with respect to climate change, one must consider the possibility of a dystopian future with the hope that this will contribute to the realisation that serious mitigation efforts will require an alternative to the capitalist world system, one that is based on both social equity and environmental sustainability and that will allow humanity to reach a steady state for itself and other forms of biological life, both large and small. In this chapter, I explore three possible scenarios for the future of humanity: (1) A dystopian future characterised more or less as ‘business as usual’, with ongoing economic growth, and increasing social inequality. This is a fortress world in which the affluent attempt to protect their privileged lifestyles, amidst environmental degradation and runaway climate change; although in the end they might find themselves in situations analogous to the experiences of elites during both the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, albeit on a much more global scale. This is a future stuck in the myths, and modes of being, of contemporary capitalism, incapable of acting on, or accepting, any other view of life, or assuming that disastrous consequences can arise from ‘normal behaviour’;

Towards an anthropology of the future 19 (2) A future of ‘reflexive modernisation’ which emphasises ‘ecological modernisation’ (renewable sources of energy, energy efficiency, improved public transport, etc.) and ‘sustainable development’, with ongoing social inequality but some amelioration of global poverty, and some mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. This represents a society with a slightly more flexible political economy than the first, but still unable to imagine a significant alternative to the current world order; and (3) A democratic eco-socialist revolution which would entail public or social ownership of the means of production, highly democratic processes, increasing social equality, a steady-state economy, environmental sustainability and a safe climate. This assumes a society capable of open imagination and ready to explore alternate modes of social being.

The road to dystopia Climate change scenarios prompt us to imagine dystopian visions of the future, if for no other reason than to forewarn us to take serious measures to counteract possible doomsday events. In his book Six Degrees, journalist Mark Lynas (2007), based on his perusal of numerous climate scientific reports, vividly portrays climate change scenarios of between 1°C and 6°C increases in the global temperature, most of which will have negative impacts on human population. Given that an increasing number of climate scientists are envisioning a 4-degree or even hotter world by 2100 (see Christoff 2014), if humanity does not seriously begin to curtail its greenhouse gas emissions, Lynas envisions a 4-degree world that would result in the following: (a) Loss of one-third of Bangledesh’s land area, resulting in the displacement of millions from the Meghna Delta; (b) Flooding of low-lying islands and deltaic cities such as Shanghai, Mumbai, Alexandria, Boston, New York, New Orleans, London, and Venice; (c) Massive shrinking of Greenland’s ice sheet into the centre of the landmass; (d) Slowing and shutdown of the North Atlantic Conveyor Belt, which would have a significant cooling impact for the countries of northwestern Europe; (e) Spreading of new deserts in southern Europe; (f) Possible July and August temperatures of 48°C in Switzerland, accompanied by wildfires and diminished water supplies; (g) A completely ice-free summer in the Arctic Ocean; (h) Release of methane contained in frozen Arctic soils. In a 5-degree world, human populations would be greatly restricted in terms of habitable areas due to drought and flooding, northern Europe would possibly constitute a crowded refugee area, and Patagonia, Tierra de Fuego, Tasmania, the South Island of New Zealand, and the ice-free Antarctic Peninsula could serve as other refugee areas. In a 6-degree world, the eruption of oceanic methane might

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result in massive human extinction. I would add to these latter scenarios the possibility of warfare and conquest along the way as people try to control useful areas or obtain such areas from those occupying them: a scenario that could arise even earlier. James Lovelock (2006: 180–181), the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, recommends that humanity stabilise its population at 500 million to 1 billion and warns that Gaia will cull those who break the rules. He argues that future society will be ‘tribal’ and even more fractionated than presently between the privileged and the poor (Lovelock 2006: 171). In The Vanishing Face of Gaia, Lovelock (2009: 11) identifies portions of the Earth that may be inhabitable in a dystopian future. These include the northern regions of the United States and Russia, Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia, Patagonia, southern Chile, and island nations or states, such as Japan, Tasmania, New Zealand, and the British Isles. Lovelock (2009: 61) predicts that the summer heat of Continental Europe will become increasingly unbearable, even with the use of air-conditioning which would itself contribute to climate change, particularly if the electricity involved is generated by coal-fired or natural gas power plants. Lovelock (2009: 56) contends that a 4°C hotter planet may only be able to sustain a population of ‘as little as 100 million if the carrying capacity of the land surface of a hot Earth falls to 10 percent of what we have now’, which might in reality again result in massive conflict as human populations compete for limited resources. Perhaps frustrated by the cumbersome nature of global and national governance practices, various scholars have argued that democratic processes are moving too slowly to contain climate change and they suggest that eco-authoritarian, or even eco-fascist, regimes are needed. James Anderson (2006: 245) argues that the ‘radical changes necessary to sustain capitalism could indeed turn out to be an extremely authoritarian counter-revolution’. Shearman and Smith (2007) maintain that ‘democratic states’ are too dominated by special interest groups and materialism to create effective climate change mitigation policies. They assert that liberal democracies need to be replaced by authoritarian states, such as Singapore, which will be governed by ‘natural elites’ who have been socialised from childhood to address complex problems such as climate change. Shearman and Smith (2007: 134) assert that climate change will create an economic and ecological disaster that will require a future government led by ‘specially trained philosopher/ecologists’ following a Platonic notion of leadership committed to environmental sustainability. In a somewhat similar vein, Lovelock (2009: 61) maintains that ‘orderly survival . . . may require, as in war, the suspension of democratic government for the duration of the survival emergency’. This would be especially the case if millions or even billions of people were culled to maintain some semblance of affluence on the part of the rich and powerful. Lieven De Cauter (2008: 111) suggests that climate change may contribute to a future world that ‘looks like some version of Mad Max, a trash sci-fi movie in which oil scarcity has turned the planet into a low-tech, chaotic, neo-medieval society run by gangs’. Indeed, in recent years a rich genre of climate change science fiction has begun to appear and generate its ‘myths of the future’, although some

Towards an anthropology of the future 21 time ago George Turner (1987) published a dystopian novel about Melbourne in which much of the city becomes submerged under rising sea levels in the middle decades of the twenty-first century. At any rate, De Cauter argues that environmental disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 are contributing to what Naomi Klein has termed disaster capitalism, under which the affluent sequester themselves from the victims of disasters in gated communities and green zones, or a ‘sort of security stronghold as well as an ecological safe haven’ (De Cauter 2008: 115). Disaster does not just open a well of suffering but opens a series of contentions in which different groups of people and their different imaginings of the world struggle for supremacy. In capturing the imaginary of a dystopian world, a precursor of it is exemplified in the ‘winners and losers’ paradigm framed in terms of the myths of neoclassical microeconomics that have even permeated the IPCC assessment reports. In terms of climate change, the losers will be developing countries near the equator, and low-lying islands in the South Pacific, as well as the Maldives. Conversely, the biggest winners will be countries in the far north such as Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Russia and the Scandinavian countries, and in the far south perhaps Argentina, Chile and New Zealand. As a result of retreating ice in Greenland, various mining companies are hoping to gain easier access to various minerals and Alaskan politicians view climate change as a factor that potentially will spur even further development, including oil and natural gas exploration in the North Slope (Emmerson 2010). They may imagine that burning the oil and gas would generate even more ‘favourable’ climate change, ignoring other consequences.

Reflexive modernisation The prominent German sociologist Ulrich Beck in his various books about ‘risk society’ tends to eschew any specific reference to global capitalism but repeatedly refers to it as ‘industrial modernity’ or ‘Western modernity’ (Beck 2007). Nevertheless, he recognises that: [I]n the light of climate change, the apparently independent and autonomous system of industrial modernization has begun a process of self-dissolution and self-transformation. This radical turn marks the current phase in which modernization is become reflexive, which means: we have to open up to global dialogues and conflicts about redefining modernity . . . It has to include multiple extra-European voices, experiences and expectations concerning the future of modernity. (Beck 2010: 264) Beck calls for a form of ‘cosmopolitanism’ which transcends national interests and has the potential to create a green modernity. In keeping with this emphasis on ‘reflexive modernisation’, among at least those who take the findings of climate science seriously, ecological modernisation has become a virtually hegemonic imaginal stance that asserts that environmental sustainability and effective climate

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change can be implemented by adopting more efficient, environmentally friendly and low carbon-emitting energy sources and manufacturing processes. Ecological modernisation is part of what goes under the rubrics of ‘green capitalism’ or even ‘climate capitalism’. Newell and Patterson assert: So the challenge of climate change means, in effect, either abandoning capitalism, or seeking a way to find a way for it to grow while gradually replacing coal, oil, and gas. Assuming the former is unlikely in the short term, the questions to be asked are, what can growth be based on? What are the energy sources to power a decarbonised economy? . . . What kind of climate capitalism do we want? Can it be made to serve desirable social, as well as environmental, ends? (Newell and Patterson 2010: 9) In essence, they seek to imagine a decoupling of increasing greenhouse gas emissions from economic expansion. In a somewhat similar vein, Lester R. Brown (2009: 23–24) has devised ‘Plan B’, a scheme designed to save civilisation, which has four components: ‘cutting net carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2020, stabilising population at 8 billion or lower, eradicating poverty, and restoring the earth’s natural systems, including its soils, aquifers, forest, grasslands, and fisheries’. However, his scheme does not challenge the treadmill of production and consumption or the need to constantly grow, which are all integral parts of global capitalism and its guiding myths about reality and human ontology. Furthermore, while Brown acknowledges the need to eradicate poverty, his scheme does not even suggest the need for a drastic redistribution of wealth or a shift to pronounced social equity. Murphy (2008: 111–125) has drawn up a ‘Plan C’ that includes the following components: (a) A drastic reduction in the consumption of fossil fuel energy and fossil fuelderived products; (b) A shift from a growing economy to a contracting economy; (c) An emphasis on small communities; (d) The consumption of less food, dietary changes, reduction in meat consumption, purchase of local organic food, preservation and storage of food, and creation of gardens and/or henhouses; (e) A shift to energy-efficient cars and sharing rides; (f) The erection of smaller homes. For the most part, the suggestions delineated in Plan C might be more appropriate for most people in developed countries and the more affluent sectors of developing societies than the poor in developing societies who may not eat enough food to begin with, nor have cars. His call for a shift from a growing economy to a contracting economy is laudable but ultimately seems incompatible with global

Towards an anthropology of the future 23 capitalism and thus would require a transcendence of it, something that Murphy does not explicitly suggest. Various parties have been calling for a Green New Deal (UNEP 2009; Simms 2009). In one version of the Green New Deal, Tim Jackson (2009: 7), economics commissioner of the Sustainable Development Commission in the UK, argues that the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 offers humanity a ‘unique opportunity to address financial and ecological sustainability together’ by questioning the ‘underlying vision of prosperity built on continual growth’. In keeping with the Jevons paradox, he acknowledges that improvements in energy and carbon intensity tend to be offset by increased economic growth and consequently greater usage of fossil fuels. He calls upon governments to invest in public infrastructure, reduce social inequality, redistribute existing jobs and reduce work hours, reverse the culture of consumption, implement resource/emissions caps, and shift to alternative energy sources that will help stabilise CO2 emissions. Jackson (2009: 103) argues that a ‘macro-economy predicated on continual expansion of debtridden materialistic consumption is unsustainable ecologically, problematic socially, and unstable economically’. As a green Keynesian economist, Jackson appears to assume that global capitalism can function as a steady-state or nongrowth economic system, while history has repeatedly told us that, by its very nature, it must grow or die out. To the contrary of Jackson, Foster maintains: A society based on economic contraction cannot exist under capitalism . . . Getting rid of capitalists and banning wage labor, currency, and private ownership of the means of production would plunge society into chaos. It would bring large-scale terrorism. (Foster 2011: 29) Ultimately, green capitalism fails to address the treadmill of production and consumption that contributes to depletion of natural resources, environmental degradation, and climate change. It tends to either be oblivious to social justice issues or at best tends to downplay them or pay them lip service, and ignores the strong possibility that capitalists or the corporate sector will resist changes which imply a limiting of profit-making. It is important to note that some components of ecological modernisation – such as renewable sources of energy (solar, wind, and geothermal), improved efficiency and building construction and design, and a massive shift from private vehicles to energy-efficient public transport systems – have the potential to serve as important mitigation strategies. However, as anthropologist Alf Hornborg persuasively argues: What ecological modernization has achieved is a neutralization of the formerly widespread intuition that industrial capitalism is at odds with global ecology . . . The discursive shift since the 1970s has been geared to disengaging concerns about environment and development from the criticism of industrial capitalism as such. But the central question about capitalism should be the

24 Hans A. Baer same now as it was in the days of Marx: Is the growth of capital of benefit to everybody, or only to a few at the expense of others? (Hornborg 2001: 25–26) Thus, ultimately, technological innovations that on the surface appear to be more environmentally sustainable and energy-efficient must be part and parcel of a shift to a steady-state or zero-growth global economy if they are to circumvent the Jevons paradox. The imaginary of ecological modernisation is exemplified by the burgeoning Australian think tank called Beyond Zero Emissions, which has joined forces with the Melbourne Energy Institute at the University of Melbourne in seeking to shift Australia from its use of fossil fuels to that of renewable energy resources, particularly solar, of which Australia has great abundance. In fact, BZE proposals have obtained endorsements from both major Coalition and Labor politicians and the Green Party. Conversely, BZE rarely addresses issues such as how much energy is enough, the distribution of energy, and whether energy production should be socialised or nationalised. Ariel Salleh (2010/2011: 126) views the BZE scheme as a profound example of ecological modernisation, which might cut emissions but ‘will do nothing to stop the extractive assault on the societynature metabolism’.

Toward a democratic eco-socialist world system While the powers that be around the world are seeking to address climate change within the parameters of global capitalism, climate change may be a consequence of global capitalism, as Naomi Klein (2014) has so forcefully argued. As Simms (2009: 184) has observed, ‘global warming probably means the death of capitalism as the dominant organising framework for the global economy’, or the death of the globe. Thus, it appears imperative to construct an alternative to global capitalism as the ultimate climate mitigation strategy, even though it will not be achieved any time soon, if indeed ever. As humanity enters an era of dangerous climate change accompanied by tumultuous environmental and social consequences, it will have to consider alternatives that hopefully will circumvent dystopian scenarios of the order delineated earlier. Thus, in this section I propose the imagining and creation of a democratic eco-socialist world system such as Erik Olin Wright (2010) terms a real utopia. My proposal draws from the critical anthropology of climate change which Merrill Singer and I have developed over the course of the past seven years or so which posits the following premises: (a) Social systems do not last forever, whether at the local, regional, or global level. (b) The capitalist world system or global capitalism has been around for about 500 years but has come to embody so many inherent contradictions and destructive tendencies that it must be transcended to ensure the survival of humanity and animal and plant life on a sustained basis.

Towards an anthropology of the future 25 (c) There is a need for an alternative global system, one that is committed to meeting people’s basic needs, social equity and justice, democracy, and environmental sustainability. Proposals for such an alternative system have come under various terms, including global democracy, Earth democracy, economic democracy, eco-anarchism and eco-socialism. Despite all the baggage associated with the term socialism and the desire of various progressive thinkers to substitute other terms for it, it is important for people oriented towards a survivable future, socialists or Marxists, to grapple with the ideals of socialism and the social experiments that have been labelled socialist, both at national and local levels. As Amin so aptly asserts: The expression counterculture is fraught with difficulty – because socialist culture is not there in front of our eyes. It is part of a future to be invented, a project of civilization, open to the creativity of the imagination. (Amin 2009: 22) In other words, socialism remains very much an active myth, and way of imagining a world without unconstrained capitalism, with which various individuals and groups continue to grapple, often by seeking to frame it in new guises. As Stilwell (1992: 211) argues, ‘liberated from Stalinist legacy, it now makes sense to start asking what a progressive socialism involves’. In the nineteenth century, various revolutionaries and reformers sought to develop alternatives to an increasingly globalising capitalist world system. Efforts at the national level to create such an alternative started with the 1848 Paris Commune and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 and included subsequent revolutions in other countries, including China in 1949, Vietnam in 1954, Cuba in 1959, and Nicaragua in 1979. Unfortunately, as Wright (2010: 106) observes, ‘these attempts at ruptural transformation . . . have never been able to sustain an extended process of democratic experimentalist institution-building’ for a variety of complex reasons. Scholars have spilled much ink trying to determine whether these societies constituted examples of ‘state socialism’, ‘actually existing socialism’, ‘degenerated workers’ states’ or ‘post-revolutionary societies’ which constituted transitional societies between capitalism and socialism that required some kind of democratic revolution, ‘state capitalism’, or ‘new class societies’. They also asked why many of these societies, particularly the Soviet Union but also China, later became fully incorporated into the capitalist world system. Suffice it to say that the failure to achieve authentically democratic socialist societies was related to both internal forces specific to each of these societies and external forces that created a hostile environment. According to Wright: Perhaps the failure of sustained democratic experimentalism in the aftermath of revolutions was because revolutionary regimes always faced external pressure, both economic and military, from powerful capitalist countries, and felt a great urgency to consolidate power and build institutions of sufficient

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Hans A. Baer strength to withstand that pressure . . . Or perhaps the problem was mainly the low level of economic development of the economies within which revolutionary movements succeeded in seizing political power. (Wright 2010: 106)

The collapse of communist regimes created a crisis for people on the left throughout the world. Many socialists had hoped that somehow these societies would undergo changes that would transform them into democratic and even possibly ecologically sustainable societies. While efforts to replace the term socialism with new ones are understandable given the fate of post-revolutionary societies, progressive people need to come to terms with both the achievements and flaws of these societies and to reconceptualise the concept of socialism to help with imagining the future. Socialist democracy need not be synonymous with total state ownership and centralised planning but would entail ‘several forms of property – collective, cooperative and small private or individual property’ and even some small businesses (Lorimer 1997: 22). Over the past three decades or so, various leftists have become more sensitive to the environmental travesties that have occurred not only in both developed and developing capitalist societies but also in post-revolutionary societies. As a result of this, they have sought to develop an eco-socialism (Gorz 1980; Foster 2000, 2009; Kovel 2008). Merrill Singer, Ida Susser, and I, in our work in critical medical anthropology, have utilised the notion of democratic eco-socialism, which entails the following principles (Baer et al. 2013: 309–403): (a) An economy oriented to meeting basic social needs – namely adequate food, clothing, shelter, education, health, and dignified work; (b) A high degree of social equality; (c) Public ownership of the means of production; (d) Representative and participatory democracy; (e) Environmental sustainability. Democratic eco-socialism rejects a statist, growth-oriented, or productivist ethic and institutions, and recognises that humans live on an ecologically fragile planet with limited resources that must be sustained and renewed as much as possible for future generations. Our vision of democratic eco-socialism closely resembles what world systems theorists Terry Boswell and Christopher Chase-Dunn (2000) term global democracy, a concept that entails the following components: (1) an increasing movement toward social ownership of productive forces at local, regional, national, and international levels; (2) the development of an economy oriented toward meeting social needs, such as basic food, clothing, shelter, health care, and environmental sustainability rather than profit-making; (3) the eradication of health and social disparities and the redistribution of human resources between developed and developing societies and within societies in general; (4) the curtailment of population growth that in large part would follow from the

Towards an anthropology of the future 27 previously mentioned conditions; (5) the conservation of finite resources and the development of renewable energy resources; (6) the redesign of settlement and transport systems to reduce energy demands and greenhouse gas emissions; and (7) the reduction of wastes through recycling and transcending the reigning culture of consumption. Developments in Latin America, particularly Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba, although filled with contradictions, raise the hope of creating a ‘socialism for the 21st century’ (Harnecker 2015). As environmental sociologist John Bellamy Foster so aptly argues: It is important to recognize that there is now an ecology as well as a political economy of revolutionary change. The emergence in our time of sustainable human development, in various revolutionary interstices within the global periphery, could mark the beginning of a universal revolt against both world alienation and human self-estrangement. Such a revolt, if consistent, could have only one objective: the creation of a society of associated producers rationally regulating their metabolic relation to nature and doing so not only in accordance with their own needs but also those of future generations and life as a whole. Today, the transition to socialism and the transition to an ecological society are one. (Foster 2009: 276) While at the present time or for the foreseeable future, the notion that democratic eco-socialism may be eventually be implemented in any society, developed or developing, or in a number of societies may appear absurd, history tells us that social changes can occur very quickly once economic, political, social structural, and demographic have reached a tipping point, a term that has also become popular in climate science. The imaginary of democratic eco-socialism in part was exemplified when Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, convened the World’s Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba in 2010, only a few months following the failed UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. Over 35,000 people attended this conference and Morales asserted that ‘either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies’. The People’s Agreement drafted at the conference called on the developed countries to take the lead in returning the planet’s carbon dioxide level to 300 ppm. It called for the creation of an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal with the legal capacity to judge and penalise states, industries, and people with regard to their contribution, either through commission or omission, to climate change.

Applied anthropology of climate change: implications for public policy and social action Proponents of the various theoretical perspectives within anthropology, including within the burgeoning subfield of the anthropology of climate change, tend to

28 Hans A. Baer acknowledge that their research has an applied component, both for specific groups or societies that constitute the focus of their research or the future of humanity in general. Shirley J. Fiske (2009) maintains that anthropologists should become actors in the climate policy process. However, as Fiske (2009) observes, US congressional committees have tended to draw on parties that ultimately do not radically question the parameters of the existing global political economy when it comes to climate policy. While I agree with her that anthropologists should seek to enter high-level policy-making circles, they might find that the various state/provincial and local governments, NGOs and grassroots organisations, particularly those functioning within the climate movement, may be more amenable to their input because they are not invested in larger political-economic structures or the myths of capitalism and capitalist ontology (Burgmann and Baer 2012). Crate (2011: 186) notes that ultimately climate change constitutes both a human rights and human security issue and calls for a critical collaborative ethnography that seeks to engage in ‘actual dialogic exchange between local and global discussions of climate change’. Anthropologists need to become involved as observers and engaged scholars in applied initiatives seeking to respond to climate change at the local, regional, national, and global levels because they have a relatively wider knowledge of alternate ways of human social being; they do not have to assume that capitalism is either ‘natural’ or the ‘only way to live’. This requires that anthropologists be part of larger collective efforts to mitigate climate change, whether it is on the part of international climate regimes, national and state or provincial governments, NGOs, and climate action and sustainability groups. As anthropologists and other progressive social scientists form too small a group to act as a vanguard in the struggle against climate change and capitalism, they must form links not only with anti-systemic movements, including the labour, anti-corporate globalisation or social justice, peace, indigenous and ethnic rights, and environmental movements, and the climate justice movement (Baer 2008; Baer and Singer 2009, 2014). Ultimately, it is my contention that addressing climate change in a responsible manner will entail nothing short of commitment to what John Bellamy Foster (2009) terms an ‘ecological revolution’ – one that will over the long run lead to a new world system based upon social equity and justice, democratic processes, and environmental sustainability. Because corporations and most governments have not been not acting in a responsible manner in terms of serious climate change mitigation, despite much rhetoric to the contrary, much of the collective effort will have to spurred by these anti-systemic movements. These include the burgeoning international climate movement, which is quite variable in terms of addressing social justice or equity issues, with scant familiarity with modes of life and livelihood in the capitalist periphery (Baer and Singer 2009; Baer 2012; Connor 2012). As Hardt and Negri (2009: 94–95) suggest, ‘only movements from below’ possess the ‘capacity to construct a consciousness of renewal and transformation’ – one that ‘emerges from the working classes and multitudes that autonomously and creatively propose anti-modern and anticapitalist hopes and dreams’.

Towards an anthropology of the future 29 The transition toward a democratic eco-socialist world system is not guaranteed and will require a tedious, even convoluted path, one in which anti-systemic movements will have to play a central role. A critical anthropology of the future in my view, however, will entail the following transitional reforms: (1) The creation of new progressive, anti-capitalist parties; (2) The creation of a strong alternative media that counters the dominance of the corporate-controlled mass media; (3) The implementation of greenhouse gas emissions taxes at the sites of production that include measures to protect low-income people; (4) The socialisation or nationalisation in various ways of the means of production; (5) Increasing social equality within nation-states and between nationstates; (6) The implementation of workers’ democracy and the general expansion of democratic processes in social life; (7) The shortening of the working week; (8) The adoption of renewable energy sources, energy efficiency, appropriate technology, and green jobs; (9) The expansion of public transport and massive diminishment of a reliance on private motor vehicles; (10) Creation of green cities; (11) Resistance to the capitalist culture of consumption; (12) The creation of sustainable agriculture, eating habits and forestry. (Baer 2012: 213–243) These transitional steps constitute a loose blueprint for shifting human societies or countries toward democratic eco-socialism and a safe climate, but it is important to note that both of these phenomena will entail a global effort, including the creation of a progressive global climate governance regime, as well as national and local climate governance regimes. In terms of the foreseeable future, Immanuel Wallerstein maintains: I do not believe that our historical system is going to last much longer, for I consider it to be in a terminal structural crisis, a chaotic transition to some other system (or systems), a transition that will last twenty-five to fifty years. I therefore believe that it could be possible to overcome the self-destructive patterns of global environmental change into which the world has fallen and establish alternative patterns. I emphasize however my firm assessment that the outcome of this transition is inherently uncertain and unpredictable. (Wallerstein 2007: 382) As Wallerstein’s remarks strongly suggest, as much as we social scientists would like to forecast future scenarios, as I have done in this chapter, our imaginings are filled with contingency and even unpredictability.

30 Hans A. Baer Nevertheless, anthropologists and other social scientists can play a small but critical role in contributing their analytical skills and insights to a much larger struggle for the future – one in which we as a species learn to live in harmony with each other and with nature. Perhaps more than any other issue, climate change allows critical social scientists to illuminate the contradictions of the existing capitalist world system and to contemplate the creation of an alternative world system based upon democratic eco-socialist principles – and indeed to test whether they have a real understanding of social action. Anthropology is a discipline that has the potential to present the ‘big picture’ while drawing upon observations of ‘small pictures’ in different societies and cultures around the world. It has been very good at looking at human societies in the present and in the past, both the immediate past and even the distant past. With a few exceptions, anthropology has been rather weak in attempting to look at the future but hopefully new imaginings, prompted by the seriousness of anthropogenic climate change, will inspire anthropologists to engage with an anthropology of the future and be part of the larger project of developing a critical, and future directed, social science.

References Amin, S. 2009 ‘Capitalism and the ecological footprint’. Monthly Review 61(6): 19–22. Anderson, J. 2006 ‘Afterword: only sustain . . . the environment, “anti-globalization”, and the runaway bicycle’. In Josse Johnston, Michael Gismondi and James Goodman (eds) Nature Revenge: Reclaiming sustainability in an age of corporate globalization, pp. 245–273. Toronto: Broadview. Baer, H. A. 2008 ‘Global warming as a by-product of the capitalist treadmill of production and consumption: the need for an alternative global system’. Australian Journal of Anthropology 19: 58–62. Baer, H. A. 2012 Global Capitalism and Climate Change: The need for an alternative world system. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press/Rowman and Littlefield. Baer, H. A. and Singer, M. 2009 Global Warming and the Political Ecology of Health: Emerging crises and systemic solutions. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Baer, H. A. and Singer, M. 2014 The Anthropology of Climate Change: An integrated critical perspective. London: Earthscan Routledge. Baer, H. A., Singer, M. and Susser, I. 2013 Medical Anthropology and the World System: A critical perspective (3rd edn). Westport, CT: Praeger. Beck, U. 2007 World at Risk. London: Polity. Beck, U. 2010 ‘Climate for change, or how to create a green modernity?’ Theory, Culture and Society 27(2–3): 254–266. Bodley, J. 2012 Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems. Plymouth: AltaMira Press. Boswell, T. and Chase-Dunn, C. 2000 The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Brown, L. R. 2009 Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to save civilization. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Burgmann, V. and Baer, H. 2012 Climate Politics and the Climate Movement in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Christoff, P. (ed.) 2014 Four Degrees of Global Warming: Australia in a hot world. London: Earthscan Routledge.

Towards an anthropology of the future 31 Connor, L. 2012 ‘Experimental publics: activist culture and political intelligibility of climate change action in the Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia’. Oceania 82: 228–249. Crate, S. A. 2011 ‘Climate and culture: Anthropology in the era of contemporary climate change’. Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 175–194. De Cauter, L. 2008 ‘The Mad Max phase’. In R. Plunz and M. P. Sutto (eds) Urban Climate Change Crossroads, pp. 111–117. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Emmerson, C. 2010 The Future History of the Arctic. London: Bodley Head. Fiske, S. J. 2009 ‘Global change policymaking from inside the Beltway: engaging anthropology’. In S. Crate and M. Nuttall (eds) Anthropology and Climate Change: From encounters to actions, pp. 277–291.Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Foster, J. B. 2000 Marx’s Ecology. New York: Monthly Review Press. Foster, J. B. 2009 The Ecological Revolution: Making peace with the planet. New York: Monthly Review Press. Foster, J.B. 2011 ‘Capitalism and degrowth: an impossibility theorem’. Monthly Review (January): 26–33. Gorz, A. 1980 Ecology as Politics. Boston: South End Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2009 Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harnecker, M. 2015 A World to Build: New paths toward twenty-first century socialism (trans. Fred Fuentes). New York: Monthly Review Press. Hornborg, A. 2001 The Power of the Machine: Global inequalities of economy, technology, and environment. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Jackson, T. 2009 Prosperity without Growth. London: Earthscan. Jasanoff, S. 2010 ‘A new climate for society’. Theory, Culture and Society 27(2–3): 233–253. Klein, N. 2014 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. London: Allen Lane. Kovel, Joel 2008 ‘Ecosocialism, global justice, and climate change’. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 19: 4–14. Lorimer, D. 1997 The Collapse of ‘Communism’ in the USSR: Its causes and significance. Chippendale, NSW: Resistance Books. Lovelock, J. 2006 The Revenge of Gaia. London: Penguin Books. Lovelock, J. 2009 The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A final warning. Camberwell, VIC, Australia: Allen Lane. Lynas, M. 2007 Six Degrees: Our future on a hotter planet. London: Fourth Estate. Mintz, S. W. 1985 Sweetness and Power: The place of sugar in modern history. New York: Viking. Murphy, P. 2008 Plan C: Community survival strategies for peak oil and climate change. Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers. Newell, P. and Patterson, M. 2010 Climate Capitalism: Global warming and the transformation of the global economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salleh, A. 2010/2011 ‘Climate strategy: making the choice between ecological modernisation or living well’. Australian Journal of Political Economy 66: 118–143. Shearman, D. and Smith, J. W. 2007 The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy. Westport, CT: Praeger. Simms, A. 2009 Ecological Debt: Global warming and the wealth of nations (2nd edn). London: Pluto Press. Stilwell, F. 1992 Understanding Cities and Regions. Leichhardt, NSW: Pluto Australia. Turner, G. 1987 The Sea and Summer. London: Faber and Faber. United Nations Environment Programme. 2009 ‘Green New Deal: an update for the G20 Pittsburgh Summit’. September, www.unep.org/pdf/G20_policy_Final.pdf. Wallerstein, I. 1998 Utopistics: Or historical choices of the twenty-first century. New York: New Press.

32 Hans A. Baer Wallerstein, I. 2007 ‘Climate disasters: three obstacles to doing anything.’ Commentary, no. 205. Fernand Braudel Center. 15 August 2007. http://www2.binghampton.edu/ fbc/archive/205en.htm. Wright, E. O. 2010 Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso.

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The first draft of the future Journalism in the ‘Age of the Anthropocene’ Tom Morton

On Sunday 21 September 2014 an estimated 600,000 people took part in a global People’s Climate March calling for urgent action on climate change and cuts to carbon emissions (Westbrook 2014). Organizers claimed it was ‘the largest climate march in history’ (http://peoplesclimate.org/), with 2,646 separate marches and protest events taking place at locations in 162 countries. Given the global nature of the protest, and its distributed nature, these figures can only be considered speculative, but an independent analysis by a mathematician from Carnegie Mellon University estimated that more than 300,000 people marched in New York alone (Foderaro 2014). The march was timed to coincide with the United Nations climate summit in New York the following week, and was attended by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. Late on the Monday afternoon after the march, I happened to glance up at the western skies above Sydney. A skywriter had traced the words ‘This Will Never Last’ in white letters which were fast smearing and dissolving in a southeasterly breeze. The phrase struck me immediately as a poignant afterword to the previous day’s protest, and one which resonated on a number of levels. Above all, it evokes a sense of loss, a feeling that we live in a vanishing world. It could be understood as an elegy for the current state of the biosphere, and for the species, landscapes and ways of life which will disappear if climate change continues on its current trajectory. At the same time, however, these four words could be read as a call to action. The words themselves, and their brief, evanescent appearance and disappearance, conjure up Marx’s famous phrase from the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto ‘all that is solid melts into air’. We might choose to interpret them as an obituary for neo-liberal capitalism, and the attendant habits of consumption and structures of exploitation which must come to an end if catastrophic climate change is to be averted. I subsequently discovered that the skywriting was part of an ongoing conceptual art project entitled ‘This Will Never Last (self-fulfilling prophecy)’ by the Sydney-based artist Will French (www.willfrench.com.au/never.html.). In an email, French told me that: the work was not specifically intended to be about the march or the environment, however it fits into the broader meaning . . . The way we are

34 Tom Morton heading we are causing our own undoing, the environment can’t sustain this level for much longer, we all understand this, and those who don’t are not in reality. (Will French, personal communication, 9 October 2014) French’s art project echoes – albeit unintentionally – some of the sentiments which inspired the People’s Climate March. It also speaks to some of the key themes of this book; in particular, the notion that climate change poses an existential problem, and that our response to it is an embodied response, which brings to the fore issues of ‘anxiety, imagining and mortality’. In this chapter, I explore some of the ways in which journalists and journalism might respond to the existential problem of climate change. Journalism has traditionally been an activity focused on the present. In George Brock’s pithy definition, journalism is ‘the systematic, independent attempt to establish the truth of events and issues that matter to society in a timely way’ (Brock 2013: 8). Daily news reporting aims to produce an account of contemporary events based on verifiable facts, authoritative sources and the testimony of eyewitnesses. In a formulation usually ascribed to a former publisher of the Washington Post, Philip Graham, journalism is ‘the first rough draft of history’. This evocative phrase suggests that journalism is an activity which is, by its very nature, provisory, and incomplete. Long-form journalism often seeks to engage with a longer and more leisurely time-scale, looking back to reconstruct a sequence of events and the actions and motivations of those involved, or forward to the possible consequences of current events and policies in the future. Rarely, though, does journalism engage with a horizon beyond the next five or ten years. In this chapter, I propose that the reality of climate change demands that journalists and journalism engage with a radically different time-scale. While the effects of climate change are tangible and measurable in the present, its full – and possibly irreversible – consequences will only manifest themselves fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years from now. Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) propose that we are now living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans have become the principal force shaping the biosphere of our planet. I attempt to explore what this formulation might mean for journalists and the practice of journalism. This is not an essay on the future of journalism. However, in considering the questions I have just outlined, it is important to acknowledge the far-reaching changes taking place within journalism itself.

New media ecologies and mythologies Over the last two decades, the ecology of the media in the Western world has undergone a rapid and dramatic transformation. This transformation has been driven partly by technological and economic forces, most notably the rise of the Internet and the decline of the business model which sustained newspapers for much of the twentieth century. Perhaps more important, however, for the

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long-term future of journalism is a more subtle shift in its perceived and actual role in liberal democracy. Journalists have traditionally argued that they, and the media institutions for which they work, play a central role in a flourishing liberal democracy. McChesney and Pickard contend that an ‘informed citizenry’ is the basis for a functioning democracy, and that ‘the Fourth Estate is the institution with primary responsibility for making an informed citizenry possible’ (McChesney and Pickard 2011: ix). In the new media ecology, this contention is increasingly difficult to sustain. As George Brock, a former managing editor of The Times has written, ‘journalists are skilled at writing their own story in heroic terms’, but the myths which have sustained journalism for much of the twentieth century need to be separated from the facts (Brock 2013: 5). Public trust in journalism has been undermined by the phone-hacking scandal in Britain, and the American media’s uncritical support for the war in Iraq, with the decline in trust not as sharp in most (but not all) EU countries (Brants 2013: 17). According to Chris Peters and Marcel Broersma, journalism’s claim to act in the public interest: may work well in constitutional documents and philosophical treatises, but it’s a fairly unconnected and wishful self-definition in the current multi-media, digital environment. (Peters and Broersma 2013: 3) In the early twenty-first century, journalism is suffering from a crisis of legitimacy, an economic crisis and a technological crisis. It could be argued that these crises are now disrupting and undermining the ontological foundations of journalism itself. Peters and Broersma attribute this to a number of factors, most notably ‘de-industrialization’ and ‘de-ritualization’. ‘De-industrialization’ describes the process whereby the mass production of news and the information monopoly enjoyed by the mass media are breaking down. The ‘one-to-many communication’ which characterized both print and broadcast media in the twentieth century has been replaced by a networked communication model in which consumers ‘assemble information associatively by interacting with it online’ (Peters and Broersma 2013: 4–5). Similarly, newsroom convergence and the creation of news by algorithms are transforming journalistic processes (Primo and Zago 2014). At the same time, the social rituals and habitual patterns of news consumption which characterized broadcast media in particular – watching the evening news on television, listening to the radio at breakfast – are disappearing. We inhabit a constant information flux in which ‘reading, shopping, voting, playing, researching, writing, chatting’ blend seamlessly together (Livingston 2004, quoted in Peters and Broersma 2013: 8). Running parallel to, and conditioned by these processes of de-industrialization and de-ritualization, is a fragmentation of the mass audiences which twentiethcentury media took for granted. Replacing these mass audiences is a conglomeration of ‘information groups’ (Marshall 2013). Loyalty to a particular group determines which kinds of information we are likely to accept as credible and

36 Tom Morton which we are likely to reject; as Marshall argues, ‘group identification leads to the valuing of both information and doubt’ (Marshall 2013: 7). So, for an example, an individual’s ‘receptivity to climate change data’ will be shaped by ‘long-term political allegiance’, rather than by the scientific consensus on climate change; scientists become perceived as just another information group among many, rather than representatives of an authoritative body of objective knowledge (ibid.). Over the last decade, many commentators have remarked on the fragmentation of what might be called the ‘classical’ bourgeois public sphere (as conceived of by Habermas), and the emergence in its place of a ‘networked public sphere’ and a ‘networked Fourth Estate’ (Castells 2008; Fraser 2007; Benkler 2013). This networked public sphere is itself giving rise to new journalistic modes of production, such as the non-profit, non-partisan, watchdog journalism organizations which have emerged in the US and Britain, often funded by philanthropic foundations and with close links to universities (Lewis 2014: xxiii, 234–235). It has also enabled a proliferation of environmental news sites, blogs and social media initiatives which, according to Robert Cox, now ‘exert influence on mainstream narratives and compete with established, traditional news media outlets (Cox 2013: 182). While the classical public sphere was closely identified with the nation-state, the networked public sphere transcends national boundaries. Some scholars speculate that a ‘global public sphere’ is emerging, within which new forms of ‘global journalism’ and a ‘global news style’ can address issues of ‘space, power and identity’ (Berglez 2008). Lisa Lynch has drawn attention to Wikileaks and the ‘Cablegate’ disclosures as an example of this ‘evolving practice’ of global journalism (Lynch 2013: 58). Lynch shows how bloggers, independent journalists and interested citizens were able to generate stories from the cables released by Wikileaks which resonated beyond the Anglo-Saxon media sphere and the global North: These included stories about Chevron’s activities in Ecuador (La Hora 2011), a Taipei Times piece on China’s perspective on Taiwan (Hsiu-Chuan 2011), a story on the Mexican casino industry (Prensa Latina 2011) and [. . .] a UN investigation of an incident in Iraq in which an American soldier shot a child in the head. (Lynch 2013: 70) Lynch argues that the Wikileaks disclosures were an attempt to ‘author a story with global implications’, and a step towards building a global public sphere, although she concedes that, as yet, such a space exists only in ‘an embryonic – or at best nascent – form’ (Lynch 2013: 71). We should not overplay the influence of this embryonic global public sphere. Corporate interests continue to shape the news agenda of the mainstream commercial media in the West, and through them, to exercise considerable power over public opinion (Schulman 2014; Lewis 2014; McKnight 2013). Similar

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pressures face the thriving and diverse media landscape of India, the world’s largest democracy (Ram 2012). The Party/state continues to exercise a pervasive, though not uncontested, control over the public sphere in China (Hassid 2008, 2011). Moreover, the global public sphere need not necessarily serve progressive ends: when ISIS/ISIL released video footage of executions on its website in 2014, it was able to bypass established media organizations and address a global audience. It could be argued that the idea of a global public sphere is itself a myth; but it is nevertheless one which sustains the hopes of activists, NGOs and many journalists to create a more inclusive media ecology in the twenty-first century, and one which challenges the practices – and prejudices – of the traditional media.

Journalism, climate sceptics, and the case for climate action Over the last decade, scholars have begun to pay close attention to the reporting of climate change and its impact on public debate and policy formulation. In particular, they have examined the ways in which widely accepted ethical norms in journalism – such as the need for balance in reporting – have served as a pretext or justification for coverage of the views of climate sceptics. In a pioneering article in 2003, Boykoff and Boykoff analysed the coverage of climate change in the ‘quality’ American press. They concluded that: adherence to the norm of balanced reporting leads to informationally biased coverage of global warming. This bias, hidden behind the veil of journalistic balance, creates both discursive and real political space for the US government to shirk responsibility and delay action regarding global warming. (Boykoff and Boykoff 2003: 134) Quoting Entman (1989: 30), they describe balance as a journalistic norm which aims for neutrality, requiring that ‘reporters present the views of legitimate spokespersons of the conflicting sides in any significant dispute, and provide both sides with roughly equal attention’ (Entman, quoted in Boykoff and Boykoff 2003: 126). In an earlier, pithy formulation Tuchman describes balance as a ‘strategic ritual’ (Tuchman, G. 1972, quoted in Bacon 2013). It could also be said that this ritual helps to sustain another of twentieth-century journalism’s foundational myths, the notion of objectivity. This myth is increasingly being challenged by scholars and by journalists themselves (Brock 2013; Sambrook 2012; Rosen 1993). In a recent publication, Maxwell T. Boykoff identifies an evolutionary shift in US newspaper coverage of climate change since 2005, from ‘explicitly “balanced” accounts to reporting that more closely reflected the scientific consensus on attribution for climate change’ (Boykoff 2011: 135). No such shift is evident in the Australian media. In two studies published by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, Wendy Bacon has analysed the coverage of climate change and climate science in the Australian print and online media. Amongst the key findings of Bacon’s study, several stand out. She concludes that ‘most Australians receive very little information from their media

38 Tom Morton about peer-reviewed climate science findings’ (Bacon, 2013). Slightly less than one third of the 602 articles analysed did not accept the scientific consensus that human beings are major contributors to global warming. Perhaps most worryingly, ‘climate scepticism gets substantial favourable exposure in mainstream Australian media’ (ibid.). Bacon argues that these findings constitute a challenge to media accountability in Australia. She also suggests that the myth of journalistic balance continues to be deployed by Australian journalists and their editors to justify coverage of climate scepticism and undermine climate science. While certain sections of the mass media can and do act as an amplifier for climate scepticism, others have sought to communicate the reality of climate change at a global level – creating what Ulrich Beck calls a ‘cosmopolitan event’ (Beck 2010: 260). One example is the nine-part television documentary series Years of Living Dangerously, produced by the American cable and satellite network Showtime, and broadcast in 2014. Years of Living Dangerously is an ambitious attempt to portray climate change in a way that will appeal to mainstream television audiences. Produced by two former investigative journalists with 60 Minutes, the series features celebrity reporters – actors such as Harrison Ford, Matt Damon, and Jennifer Alba – and high-profile journalists and commentators well-known to American audiences. The executive producers of the series include James Cameron, the highly successful director of Hollywood blockbusters such as Avatar, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, actor and former governor of California. Over the nine episodes, the reporters visit Indonesia, Bangladesh, Greenland and Syria, as well as numerous locations in the United States, and explore issues such as deforestation, extreme weather events and climate change, the fossil fuel industry’s campaign against renewable energy, and the links between US coal exports and ocean acidification.1 The series focuses heavily on the personal stories of individuals caught up in climate politics or affected by climate change, and brings their experiences of ‘anxiety, imagining and mortality’ to the fore. In other words, it attempts to communicate the characters’ emotional responses to climate change as well as a scientific rationale for action. Despite initial broadcasts in a prime-time spot on Sunday nights, heavy promotion, and an enthusiastic reception from television critics, the series attracted an audience of less than 1 per cent of the available broadcast audience. James Cameron told the industry magazine Fortune that he and his fellow executive producers were prepared for the low ratings, because: historically people tend to not tune into something that’s environmentally themed or climate change related. It’s just something they don’t want to know about. It’s part of the whole denial process that we’re all in as a society. (Gaudiosi 2014) In the new media ecology, television ratings may not be the best or most accurate measure of how a ‘cosmopolitan event’ such as Years of Living Dangerously might function. Cameron points to the Facebook and Twitter audiences of the

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celebrity reporters on the series, and a planned collaboration with the National Wildlife Federation to turn the series into curriculum materials for schools, as evidence that it can reach multiple audiences over time (Gaudiosi 2014). The series certainly functions as ‘global journalism’ which ‘seeks to understand and explain how economic, political, social and ecological practices, processes and problems in different parts of the world affect each other, are interlocked, or share commonalities’ (Berglez 2008: 847). The series and its producers explicitly frame the environmental movement’s failure to generate a political consensus for climate action as a problem of communication. In an interview with the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, Arnold Schwarzenegger offers one solution: I was always wondering why is it that this message doesn’t penetrate. Maybe scientists have to take acting classes because sometimes . . . They [think] they have to throw around the numbers and the facts and the statistics and all of those things. But the things that they talk about, a lot of times, doesn’t really resonate with the general public. [. . .] I think the environmental movement only can be successful if we are simple and clear and make it a human story. We will tell human stories in this project. (Doyle 2014) Schwarzenegger’s views about why the ‘message doesn’t penetrate’ are at odds with the conclusions of some further recent research on media audiences and climate change. Greg Philo and Catherine Happer carried out a longitudinal study of ‘attitude formation’ in relation to climate change and energy security, once again involving focus groups in the UK. Despite the ‘systematic attack’ on climate science, they conclude that ‘the majority of the population still believes in manmade climate change, and there remains strong support for renewable energy’ (Philo and Happer 2013: 145). They argue that there is an opportunity to rebuild public support for climate action, but that the catalyst for such action must come from scientists. While our research shows that politicians, due to their low public trust, are not best placed to defend climate action with the science, they are still required to use their role as primary definers to raise the profile of the issues. (Philo and Happer 2013: 147) In other words, it is up to politicians to put climate change on the media agenda, while scientists and experts must ‘propel the debate’ by arguing for ‘evidencebased action’ (ibid.). The assumption here is that climate politics can be reduced to a problem of communication; if only scientists can present the evidence for anthropogenic climate change in a clear and compelling way, the public will be convinced of the need for action. Facts, not ‘human stories’, are what is required. Another recent study from the UK approaches the problem from a different angle. Stuart Capstick and Nicholas Pidgeon used focus groups and a national quantitative survey to explore and refine what is meant by climate scepticism.

40 Tom Morton They conclude that there are two types of climate scepticism: ‘epistemic scepticism, relating to doubts about the status of climate change as a scientific and physical phenomenon; and response scepticism, relating to doubts about the efficacy of action taken to address climate change’ (Capstick and Pidgeon 2014: 389). Capstick and Pidgeon argue that ‘response scepticism’ is more likely to be susceptible to persuasion. In other words, presenting people with concrete and credible strategies for climate action is more likely to change their views than simply reiterating the scientific consensus (Capstick and Pidgeon 2014: 399). There are clear lessons here for journalists and the media about how they might frame their reporting of climate change, and in so doing, strengthen a sense of ‘purposeful agency’ in their audiences (Rosewarne et al. 2014: 1). In my view however, framing the failure of climate politics first and foremost as a problem of communication is too narrow an approach. It misses the cultural, social, psychological and philosophical dimensions of climate change as an ‘existential problem’ which this book attempts to foreground. It is to these, and their implications for journalism, that I now turn.

The ‘Age of the Anthropocene’ In 2000 the chemist Paul J. Crutzen and the marine scientist Eugene F. Stoermer published an article entitled ‘The “Anthropocene”’ in the Newsletter of the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP). That article, scarcely more than a page long, has proven extraordinarily influential. In it, Crutzen and Stoermer proposed the naming of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, which would ‘emphasize the central role of mankind’ (sic) in shaping the geology and ecology of the earth (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 17). Crutzen further developed the concept in the journal Nature in 2002: It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch [. . .] The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens to coincide with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784. (Crutzen 2002: 23) The notion of the Anthropocene is broadly accepted within the geological sciences, and is becoming increasingly influential within the humanities as well. There is now even a transdisciplinary academic journal dedicated to the Anthropocene called The Anthropocene Review. Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that the notion of the Anthropocene calls into question some of the most fundamental assumptions of the discipline of history. Historians, writes Chakrabarty, have tended to follow the British historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood, in separating human history from natural history.

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In this reading, history is a product of ‘purposive human action’; an account of events, social processes, and institutions that is made by human subjects (Chakrabarty 2009: 203). Since there is no purposive consciousness in nature, according to Collingwood, ‘the events of nature are mere events, not the acts of agents whose thought the scientist endeavours to trace’ (ibid.). It follows that the ‘events of nature’ are not of interest to the historian; ‘all history properly so called is the history of human affairs’ (Collingwood, quoted by Chakrabarty: ibid.). Viewing history from the perspective of the Anthropocene reveals a radically different picture of the relationship between human and natural history. For the first time in our history, and the history of our planet, humans as a species ‘now wield a geological force’ (Chakrabarty 2009: 206). We are shaping nature in ways unprecedented in the history of our species, or our planet. The growing influence of the Anthropocene within the humanities and social sciences is not without its critics. In a recent, and often scathing commentary in the Anthropocene Review, Malm and Hornborg deplore the breaking-down of the Enlightenment distinction between ‘Nature and Society’ which Chakrabarty and others advocate. In accepting uncritically a concept drawn from the natural sciences, they argue, the acolytes of the Anthropocene have abandoned one of the fundamental concerns of social science, namely ‘the theorization of culture and power’ (Malm and Hornborg 2014: 62). The emergence and development of the fossil-fuel economy in the eighteenth century was a product of concrete social and economic conditions – ‘a largely depopulated New World, AfroAmerican slavery, the exploitation of British labour in factories and mines, and the global demand for inexpensive cotton cloth’ rather than the consequence of some evolutionary or biological imperative (ibid.: 63). In their view, Chakrabarty’s insistence that the reality of the Anthropocene requires a form of ‘species thinking’ obscures this reality, dehistoricizing and depoliticizing the causes of climate change. For all their robust and thought-provoking critique, Malm and Hornborg seem to me to miss something crucial: the highly productive nature of the Anthropocene as a concept which has transcended its origins in the discourse of the natural sciences. In the words of as sober a body as the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, the Anthropocene is ‘a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change’ (see Chakrabarty 2009: 210). We might go one step further and speculate that the Anthropocene has followed a trajectory from metaphor to myth, or what the German philosopher of science Hans Blumenberg (2010) calls an ‘absolute metaphor’. Blumenberg has demonstrated the centrality of such absolute metaphors to the development of the natural sciences. Myth and metaphor may constrain or close off certain forms of knowledge or self-knowledge, as is the case with some of the myths of twentieth-century journalism touched on above, but can also have a creative, emancipatory potential, opening up ontology and ecology to the recognition of the unknown. In arguing for the centrality of the Anthropocene to the humanities and social sciences, Chakrabarty makes explicit a conclusion which is only implicit in

42 Tom Morton Crutzen and Stoermer’s formulation of the concept; namely, that the Anthropocene fundamentally alters the ontology of human life as a species. It is not just one ‘mode of psychosocial life’ that is altered, but all. In challenging the notion that history is the ‘story of human affairs’, he also raises questions for journalists, who have traditionally assumed that their work was to write the first draft of that story.

Journalism and the Age of the Anthropocene Neither journalists nor historians are normally or primarily concerned with the future. In his Notes Toward a Definition of Journalism G. Stuart Adam makes explicit this affinity between journalism and history: Michael Oakeshott, a British philosopher, once defined ‘the world of history [as] the real world as a whole comprehended under the category of the past’. The world of journalism, by contrast, may be the real world as a whole comprehended under the category of the present. (Adam 1993: 13)2 The Anthropocene demands that both professions think in, and with, time-scales beyond their customary horizons. As some of the authors in this volume have argued elsewhere, coming to grips with the Anthropocene is ‘an affective, cognitive and political task’ (Rosewarne et al. 2014: 156). For journalism, that task demands engagement with three key themes: imagination, contingency and trauma. The first, and in my view the most important of these, relates to the way in which journalists frame and craft the stories they tell. One of the most widely observed conventions of journalism, one taught in the first semester of every journalism course, is that every story must have a human face. Across print, broadcast and online media, journalists tend to focus on a particular character or characters in order to tell a larger story through their experiences, struggles and motivations. Arnold Schwarzenegger invokes this convention in his comments quoted above, when he argues that ‘the environmental movement only can be successful if we are simple and clear and make it a human story’. In this view, environmental journalism can only be, first and foremost, a ‘story of human affairs’. Yet the stories of individuals confronting the reality of climate change are themselves embedded in myths – cultural narratives about humanity’s relationship with nature which journalism both draws on and reproduces. In episode 8 of Years of Living Dangerously, Burna, a Bangladeshi activist who works with sex workers on the island of Banishanta, shows the actor Michael C. Hall how the coastline is gradually being eaten away by rising sea levels. ‘You can’t fight nature’, she tells him. This simple statement resonates with irony, as it is humanity’s transformation of nature which is causing the seas to rise. The Anthropocene challenges journalists to ask a simple question: what is the subject of environmental journalism? Is it humanity – or is it nature?

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Put another way: the Anthropocene asks journalists to be conscious of, and bring into consciousness, some of the deep philosophical contradictions within the environmental movement itself. As Rosewarne et al. have argued, the ‘upsurge’ of climate politics in the first decade of this century sought to ‘expose the contradictions of the human-nature dialectic which have defined the Anthropocene’ (Rosewarne et al. 2014: 156) Those contradictions remain embedded within the climate politics of climate change, and they inform the perspectives and assumptions which journalists bring to the story of climate change. The climate movement itself consists of a broad spectrum of groups and political orientations, ranging from ‘climate pragmatism’ to ‘climate radicalism’ (Rosewarne et al. 2014). Different strands of the movement give differing weight to strategies of mitigation or adaptation, and differing priority to human needs and aspirations, as opposed to the needs of the biosphere. These differing priorities themselves reflect deep currents within the history of ecological politics and the philosophical traditions which inform them (see Barry 2007: especially chapters 1, 2, 4 and 10). One current of the environmental movement is informed by a belief that ‘by protecting nature, man is still first and foremost protecting himself’ (Ferry 1995: 132). Typical of this orientation, according to John Barry, are theorists such as Habermas, for whom the primary aim of environmental politics is ‘the protection of the lifeworld’ (Barry 2007: 99). From this perspective, the preservation of nature is important only if it contributes to the flourishing of the human lifeworld. Running counter to this current within environmental politics is a ‘posthumanist’ orientation, which sees the interests of the biosphere as fundamentally separate from, and often in direct conflict with, the interests of humans. An extreme version of this ‘post-humanist’ ecological politics can be found in the writings of the British political philosopher John Gray. Gray is strongly influenced by James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which ‘is essentially anti- or nonanthropocentic/humanist, in the sense that its focus is not humanity or its interests or its long-term survival, but the planet and its living and non-living entities and processes considered as an interrelated whole’ (Barry 2007: 147). Gray takes the implications of the Gaia hypothesis to their logical conclusion in his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals: Humanism is a doctrine of salvation – the belief that humankind can take charge of its destiny. But for anyone whose hopes are not centred on their own species, the notion that human action can save themselves or the planet must be absurd. [. . .] It is not of becoming the planet’s wise stewards that Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter. (Quoted in Barry 2007: 148) This is not a vision of the future which many of us are likely to embrace. Yet this is precisely the future which Alan Weisman strives to imagine in The World Without Us. Weisman’s book is a thought experiment which asks what the world would look like if humans had all suddenly vanished from the face of the Earth

44 Tom Morton and the biosphere were left to repair itself from human influence – in other words, from the depredations of the Anthropocene. Underlying Weisman’s exploration of this imaginary future is a question: would it matter if humans went extinct? Would the world heave ‘a huge biological sigh of relief . . . or is it possible that . . . the world without us would miss us?’ (Weisman 2007: 3–5). In a sense, Will French’s artwork This Will Never Last asks us to undertake another, not dissimilar thought experiment. If the world as we know it cannot last, what do we, as individuals, and as a species, want to replace it? In attempting to imagine a future which is not irremediably scarred by the consequences of climate change, what do we value most about the human lifeworld and the natural world as they exist in the present? Which elements of both should we seek to preserve at all costs, and which are we prepared to sacrifice? What kind of world is it that we want to save? Journalism cannot presume to answer these questions, but it can try to ask them. It can also seek to bring a sense of historical contingency to the politics of the present. Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, recently told an audience at the opening of a new coal mine at Caval Ridge Mine in central Queensland, that the coal industry has a ‘big future, as well as a big past’. Rejecting the ‘demonization’ of coal, he went on to say: Coal is good for humanity, coal is good for prosperity, coal is an essential part of our economic future, here in Australia, and right around the world. (Massola et al. 2014) Some journalists were quick to criticize Mr Abbott’s comments, citing falling coal prices and speculation that global demand for coal will also fall (Allard 2014). A different approach, which tries to bring a longer time-scale to journalism, might stress the contingency of coal’s human history. Following Malm and Hornborg, it would propose that, just as there was nothing inevitable about the transition from wood-burning to coal-burning and the invention of the steam engine, there is nothing inevitable about coal’s part in ‘our economic future’. Finally, journalists might give some thought to the role of trauma in their reporting of climate change. Journalism and journalists have a long tradition of bearing witness to traumatic events, from natural disasters to war and genocide. Simon Cottle has argued the need for journalists to engage critically with the ‘politics of pity’ and the ‘entrenched calculus of death’ in such reporting, if it is to rise to the challenge of ‘bearing witness to disasters and distant suffering in a globalizing, cohabited world’ (Cottle 2013: 244). The same could be said about bearing witness to the future. As Linda Connor has written, the ‘flood of information’ in the media about climate change constitutes a ‘massively salient harbinger of mortality’ (Connor 2010). The traumatic prospect of catastrophic climate change, according to Connor, is likely to trigger a range of defensive reactions, from scepticism, denial and apathy, to rejection of some of the possible futures proposed by the environmental movement:

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The no growth prescriptions of many environmental activists and CC policymakers are all too readily experienced as ‘death message’ solutions to an already unpalatable end of world scenario. (Connor 2010) Some may argue that it is unrealistic to expect journalists to engage with such questions in their daily practice, subject as they are to the editorial, economic and political constraints of media organizations with different priorities and timeframes to those I have been discussing. In the past, however, many journalists have confronted political and existential issues such as the threat of nuclear war, poverty, inequality and racism, and brought both deep reflection, and a commitment to social change and social justice to their work. There is no reason why they should not embrace a similar process of reflection and a commitment to climate action as they struggle to find a place in the global public sphere.

Notes 1 2

See http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/ and for synopses of each episode, http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_Living_Dangerously I am grateful to Chris Nash for drawing my attention to this quote and the text from which it comes.

References Adam, G. S. 1993 Notes Toward a Definition of Journalism. Understanding an old craft as an art form. St Petersburg, FL: Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Allard, T. 2014 ‘Why Abbott’s faith in coal could be wrong – very wrong’. Sydney Morning Herald, 18 October 2014. www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/whyabbotts-faith-in-coal-could-be-wrong—very-wrong-20141017–117k1b.html Bacon, W. 2013 Climate Science in Australian Newspapers. A Sceptical Climate part 2. Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. http://sceptical-climate.investigate. org.au/part-2/ Barry, J. 2007 Environment and Social Theory (2nd edn). Abingdon: Routledge. Beck, U. 2010 ‘Climate for Change, or How to Create a Green Modernity?’ Theory, Culture and Society 27: 254–66. Benkler, Y. 2013 ‘Wikileaks and the networked fourth estate’. In B. Brevini, A. Hintz and P. McCurdy, Beyond Wikileaks. Implications for the future of communications, journalism and society. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 11–34. Berglez, P. 2008 ‘What is global journalism?’ Journalism Studies 9(6): 845–858. Blumenberg, H. 2010 Paradigms for a metaphorology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Boykoff, M. and Boykoff, J. 2003 ‘Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press’. Global Environmental Change 14(2): 125–13. Boykoff, M. T. 2011 Who Speaks for the Climate? Making sense of media reporting on climate change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brants, K. 2013 ‘Trust, cynicism and responsiveness: the uneasy situation of journalism in democracy’. In C. Peter and M. J. Broersma (eds) Rethinking Journalism. New York: Routledge, 15–27.

46 Tom Morton Brock, G. 2013 Out of Print: Newspapers, journalism and the business of news in the digital age. London: Kogan Page. Capstick, S. B. and Pidgeon, N. F. 2014 ‘What is climate change scepticism? Examination of the concept using a mixed methods study of the UK public’. Global Environmental Change 24: 389–401. Castells, M. 2008 ‘The new public sphere: global civil society, communication networks, and global governance’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616(1): 78–93. Chakrabarty, D. 2009 ‘The Climate of History: four theses’. Critical Inquiry 35: 197–221 Connor, L. 2010 ‘Climate change and the challenge of immortality: faith, denial and intimations of eternity’. In Sebastian Job and Linda Connor (eds) Online proceedings of the symposium Anthropology and the Ends of Worlds. Sydney Anthropology Symposium Series vol 1. University of Sydney, 25–26 March. http://anthroendsofworlds.word press.com Cottle, S. 2013 ‘Journalists witnessing disaster’. Journalism Studies 14(2): 232–248. Cox, R. 2013 Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (3rd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Crutzen, P. 2002 ‘Geology of mankind’. Nature 415(3): 23. Crutzen, P. J. and Stoermer, E. F. 2000 ‘The “Anthropocene”‘. Global Change Newsletter, The International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP), 41: 17–18. Doyle, J. 2014 ‘The Governator’s got a new foe: climate change’. Globe and Mail, 16 January. www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/the-governators-got-a-new-foe-climatechange/article16373468/ Entman, R. 1989 Democracy Without Citizens: Media and the decay of American politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferry, L. 1995 The New Ecological Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foderaro, L. 2014 ‘Taking a call for climate change to the streets’. New York Times, 21 September. www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/nyregion/new-york-city-climate-changemarch.html Fraser, N. 2007 ‘Transnationalizing the public sphere: on the legitimacy and efficacy of public opinion in a post-Westphalian world’. Theory, Culture and Society 24(4): 7–30. Gaudiosi, J. 2014 ‘Director James Cameron’s “dangerous” message’. Fortune, 10 August. http://fortune.com/2014/08/10/james-cameron/ Hassid, J. 2008 ‘Controlling the Chinese media: an uncertain business’. Asian Survey 48(3): 414–430. Hassid, J. 2011 ‘Four models of the fourth estate: a typology of contemporary Chinese journalists’. The China Quarterly 208: 813–832. Lewis, C. 2014 935 Lies. The future of truth and the decline of America’s moral integrity. New York: Public Affairs Lynch, L. 2013 ‘The leak heard round the world? Cablegate in the evolving global mediascape’. In B. Brevini, A. Hintz and P. Mccurdy, Beyond Wikileaks. Implications for the future of communications, journalism and society. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 56–77. Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. 2014 ‘The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative’. The Anthropocene Review 1(1): 62–69. Marshall, J. 2013 ‘The mess of information and the order of doubt’. Global Media Journal 7(1). www.hca.uws.edu.au/gmjau/?p=308. Massola, J., Ker, P. and Cox, L. 2014 ‘Coal is “good for humanity”, says Tony Abbott at mine opening’. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October. www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/ political-news/coal-is-good-for-humanity-says-tony-abbott-at-mine-opening-2014 1013–115bgs.html

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McChesney, R. W. and Pickard, V. 2011 Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights. The collapse of journalism and what can be done to fix it. New York: New Press. McKnight, David. 2013 Rupert Murdoch. An investigation of political power. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Peters, C. and Broersma, M. 2013 Rethinking Journalism. Trust and participation in a transformed news landscape. Abingdon: Routledge. Philo, G. and Happer, C. 2013 Communicating Climate Change and Energy Security. New methods in understanding audiences. Abingdon: Routledge. Primo, A. and Zago, G. 2014 ‘Who and what do Journalism?’ Digital Journalism 3(1): 38–52. Ram, N. 2012 ‘Sharing the best and the worst: the Indian news media in a global context’. James Cameron Memorial Lecture. The Hindu, October 7. www.thehindu.com/news/ resources/sharing-the-best-and-the-worst-the-indian-news-media-in-a-global-context/ article3971672.ece Rosen, J. 1993 ‘Beyond objectivity’. Nieman Reports (Winter 1993): 50. Rosewarne, S., Goodman, J. and Pearse, R. 2014 Climate Action Upsurge: The ethnography of climate movement politics. Abingdon: Routledge. Sambrook, R. 2012 ‘Delivering trust: impartiality and objectivity in the digital age’. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/ publication/delivering-trust-impartiality-and-objectivity-digital-age Schulman, D. 2014 Sons of Wichita. How the Koch Brothers became America’s most powerful and private dynasty. New York: Hachette. Weisman, A. 2007 The World Without Us. New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press. Westbrook, L. 2014 ‘Climate change summit: global rallies demand action’. BBC News, Science and Environment, 21 September. www.bbc.com/news/science-environment29301969.

3

Ecological complexity and the ethics of disorder Jonathan Paul Marshall

Introduction In many parts of the world, climate change poses an existential or ontological crisis. If people and organisations recognise the challenge, then they know that they have to change their lives, social priorities and values. Even if people deny climate change, they know that others are working to change the ways everyone should live. In both cases climate change confronts modes of being and cosmological certainties. It brings ethical issues to the fore as it is hard to make choices about the future without engaging with ethics. Ethics expresses our ‘knowledge’, imaginings and myths about others and the world and how they work or should work, as well as our ideal ontological orientation towards those others, the world and the future we are attempting to make. Ethical systems that arise from traditional Western philosophies and religions tend to assume, as their foundational myth, that order and harmony are themselves good and, as such, the true basis of ethics. This chapter argues that human and ecological worlds are ontologically complex, conflicted, unpredictable and continually in flux. Consequently, by focusing on order, traditional ethical myths construct an abstract and ideal world that disrupts the possibility of relationship with the world we belong to. Such ontological alienation from the world is likely to be intensified when people face, and produce, ecological disruption, and may in turn increase the likelihood of our generating unexpected and ecologically harmful consequences in a deteriorating future; consequences which may also be framed as ‘unethical’. While it is impossible in the space available to discuss established ethical systems in detail, I suggest that the ethical philosophy of Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) is particularly apt in the quest to find a mode of ethical thinking that makes complexity and uncertainty ontologically fundamental to an approach to futures. Schweitzer’s ethical thought raises awareness of these issues by: consciously expressing the paradoxes of ethics; challenging the idea of easy boundaries and classifications; insisting that we are part of the world; recognising the inevitable lack of harmony in the world; and appreciating the impossibility of complete ethical resolution. I am not suggesting this is the only possible such ethical system. However, Schweitzer’s thought has (until recently) been ignored

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by professional philosophers and social scientists, and this essay aims to briefly sketch his position while emphasising its recognition of fundamental ethical uncertainty and conflict, and its ecological and mythic basis.

Complexity and order/disorder In general, chaos theory has become a search for the ‘deep simplicity’ (to use the title of John Gribbin’s 2004 book), or hidden order of the world. While this search is completely legitimate, I shall attempt to demonstrate that complexity theory and ecosystems theory also show that the world escapes human order and predictability. Scientists have generally assumed that better data would give better and better approximations towards a limit. This assumption was undermined by Edward Lorenz’s discovery, often known as the ‘butterfly effect’, which shows that in a complex interactive system more accurate data may not move us closer to a predictable limit; it may give us massively divergent results (Lorenz 1993: 130ff.). Furthermore, although it is generally agreed that ‘initial conditions’ are important in determining end results (Eigenauer 1993; Gribbin 2004: 54ff.), in the ongoing flux of reality all conditions depend on innumerably many prior conditions, and so any choice marking some conditions as ‘initial’ is arbitrary and likely to be inadequate. As a result, complex interactive systems (human, ecological and physical) are unpredictable, and possibly indeterminate, in detail, in the long term; ‘the future is no longer determined by the present’ (Prigogene 1997: 6). This unpredictability does not mean we cannot predict likely trends. If a wooden house is attacked by termites and not ‘defended’ then it will likely be eaten, but we cannot predict the exact pattern of destruction. Similarly, if we keep burning coal and oil at our current rates we can expect severe and disruptive climate change, even though exact weather patterns and temperatures cannot be predicted. Indeed the presence of disruptive change further lessens the chances of accurate prediction. However, this potentially catastrophic, human-generated unpredictability does not mean that ecological systems are normally harmonious or stable.

Disorder and order in ecosystems There is a growing body of ecological theory which recognises that ecosystems are not only extremely complex, interactive systems in the sense described above, but that they are also self-modifying. Most functional ecosystems are ‘internally’ variable, with many different individuals and relationships, including many local, or micro, ecosystems. For example, a field is essentially messy and not equally hospitable to all the lifeforms which inhabit it. It has pockets, furrows, damper and dryer parts, with differing populations, and most of the creatures in it are not genetically identical. It likely holds changing billions of small creatures and bacteria (beyond the possibility of enumeration at any particular time), all of which are evolving in various ways in

50 Jonathan Paul Marshall response to the environment and each other. Furthermore the field can be affected by events that appear external to it. Ecosystems are never completely observable, uniform, or internally controlled, and this is part of their makeup (Reice 2003: 6). Furthermore, ecological boundaries are unclear. Environments overlap, spill into each other, are discontinuous, and the higher ‘levels’ can depend upon the ‘lower’ as much as the other way around. This overlapping can include variations in temporal processes ranging from microseconds to millennia, with spatial processes varying in spread from a few micrometres to the entire globe and out into space (Brown et al. 2002: 619; Holling and Meffe 1996: 332). Any ordering is irredeemably complicated, and enmeshed in other complex interactive systems. While Brown et al. point out that fractal and power law regularities can exist in ecological relationships (2002: 623), it is not clear precisely how much specific predictability, stability or patterning these regularities present. To take one example, over eight years Beninca et al. studied a complex microscale food web from the Baltic Sea (bacteria, several phytoplankton species, herbivorous and predatory zooplankton species, and detritivores). While this is an artificial situation, in a laboratory under constant environmental conditions, it is informative. The team concluded: species abundances showed striking fluctuations over several orders of magnitude . . . Predictability was limited to a time horizon of 15–30 days, only slightly longer than the local weather forecast. Hence, our results demonstrate that species interactions in food webs can generate chaos. This implies that stability is not required for the persistence of complex food webs, and that the long-term prediction of species abundances can be fundamentally impossible. (2008: 822) Doak et al. (2008) argue that ‘ecological surprises’, these substantial and unanticipated changes in the abundance of one or more species that result from previously unsuspected processes, are a common outcome of both experiments and observations in ‘the wild’. These surprises occur in the context of people’s knowledge and subsequent expectations. Truly surprising results are common enough to require their consideration in any reasonable effort to characterize nature and manage natural resources . . . the frequency and nature of ecological surprises imply that uncertainty cannot be easily tamed through improved analytical procedures. (2008: 953) The authors emphasise that ecological surprise is under-documented because of ‘the nature of the peer-reviewed literature, which does not encourage the discussion, or even admission, of clearly unanticipated results’ (ibid.: 955). Ninety per cent of ecologists they surveyed reported observing such a surprise. Those

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surveyed also agreed that these surprises ‘had not been reported in the scientific write-ups of their research’ (ibid.: 956). Western ontological predilections hide normal uncertainty and surprise. As well as generating surprises, ecologies are always on the edge of crisis and subject to ongoing disruption from external events. Ecologist Joseph Connell was the first to draw attention to crisis as an inherent part of ecologies, writing: the frequency of natural disturbance and the rate of environmental change are often much faster than the rates of recovery from perturbations . . . [F]orces, often abrupt and unpredictable set back, deflect or slow the process of return to equilibrium. If such forces are the norm we may question the usefulness of the application of equilibrium theory to much of community ecology. High species diversity is usually considered the mark of a healthy system and Connell suggests that ‘high diversity is a consequence of continually changing conditions’ (1978: 1302). He argues that the highest diversity is maintained with a moderate degree of calamity, rather than with continual, overwhelming calamity, or absence of calamity. Over periods with no calamities, the ‘fittest’ set of species come to dominate to the exclusion of all others and the system is likely to reach equilibrium. However, this leads to a higher risk of ecological depletion when crisis eventuates, as the number of species declines and genetic similarities lead to vulnerability. Paradoxically, ‘stable’ systems become potentially fragile and unstable. Given these environmental and population fluctuations, long lasting equilibrium states may be uncommon. As evolutionary geophysicist David Jablonski points out, ‘few, if any, modern terrestrial communities existed in their present form 10,000 years ago’ (1991: 756). Reice remarks: ‘We generally expect things to be constant, to continue in the same way, making a tacit assumption that nature is unchanging, constant, forever. W[hile] we may want it to be true . . . that’s not the way nature works’ (2003: 5). In Reice’s view ‘the normal state of the [ecological] community can be thought of as recovering from the last disturbance, with the only constant being change’ (ibid.: 16). Like Connell, he suggests disturbances are ‘vital to maintaining the integrity and health of natural ecosystems, upon which all life depends’ (ibid.: 22–23). However, it appears that these natural variations can ‘flip a system into another regime of behavior – to another stability domain’ (Holling and Meffe 1996: 330). Rather than manifesting constancy, ecosystems do not have single equilibria, with functions controlled to remain near them. Rather, multiple equilibria, destabilizing forces far from equilibria, and absence of equilibria define functionally different stable states, and movement between states maintains an overall structure and diversity. (Ibid.: 332)

52 Jonathan Paul Marshall More recently, Hastings and Wysham suggest that non-linear systems ‘in combination with environmental variability, lead to model descriptions that will not have smooth potentials . . . and thus will not show typical leading indicators of regime shifts’ (2010: 464). In other words, ecosystems are naturally open to abrupt change without showing advance warning. Over millennia, life forms and systems on Earth have faced all kinds of disturbances, from regular seasonal fluctuations to massive extinction events, and the basic ‘building blocks’ of life have developed to deal with these constantly changing conditions, even though most lifeforms become organised and limitedly adaptable, and eventually pass away. Ecological variation, flux, instability and crisis should be expected. In summary, it appears that ecological systems are inherently: in flux, selfmodifying, uneven, rarely having definite boundaries, subject to external events, surprising in their developments and open to abrupt change. Overly stable ecological systems may lose resilience and health.

Human complexity Living systems are unstable and unpredictable, and the more ‘alive’ some creature is, then the more unpredictable it appears or becomes. This is especially true of humans. Although people may have a good idea of how other people will behave, they cannot predict how they will behave on every occasion, and the further into the future their prediction ventures (or the more different the cultural milieu, or the larger the numbers of people involved) the less likely it is to be correct. Very few people predicted the timing of the financial crash of 2008 or the fall of the Soviet Union, however obvious these may seem in hindsight. Experts are routinely wrong in most of their predictions about social and political events (Tetlock 2005). Furthermore, humans live in the intersection of many massively complex interactive and unpredictable ecological systems. It is no wonder that human life is radically uncertain, and that our plans are often disordered. In terms of ecological and social upheaval, contemporary human societies face multiple complicated or ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber 1973) and, as a result, are facing complex and uncertain possible futures. The problems and the data needed to solve these problems are hard to understand or even to agree upon, and it is difficult to know if a solution has been reached before it is tried out. Wicked problems, as occurring in complex interactive systems, inherently imply the likelihood of unforeseen consequences. The wickedness of these problems is further intensified as the problems appear to be brought about by the overextension of previously successful and apparently helpful social processes; they are not just brought about by failures. One such problematic and entrenched solution is the ‘fossil fuel system’. Large-scale social systems throughout the contemporary world depend upon coal, oil and gas. Fossil fuels are the drivers of industrialisation and underpin the productivity and profitability of globalised economies and their abilities to sustain large populations. Without those fuels, it seems possible that contemporary ways of life and population would collapse,

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which makes it hard to curtail their use. Making such decisions for the future proposes ethical dilemmas, and implies there could be value in an ethics which admits ecological complexity, uncertainty and conflict.

The problems of ethics and order Western traditions of thought typically praise order and consider disorder an evil to be eliminated. The prime mythical and ontological act of God in Genesis is to bring order to the creation; separating out the day from the night, the waters of the above from the water of the below and so on. The disobedient and disorderly ‘immorality’ of humans disrupts that divine order, and Western religions aim to regenerate that order; often by providing moral guidelines. Perhaps as a result, it seems natural to postulate that the moral basis of being is orderly and that philosophy, ethics and justice should aim to reflect and reproduce order. Valuing order implies that ethics should be codifiable, systematic and universal. However, if complexity is taken seriously and the world seems to resist any simple order or plan, this reality disrupts these ethical systems. For example, ethics aiming at universal harmony are fraught, as although creatures are collections of largely cooperating cells, they survive at the expense of others, and what is beneficial for one organism is not necessarily beneficial for another. Furthermore, when we conflate ethics with a general social or personal benefit or by its results, then ontological unpredictability opens the ongoing possibility that our actions may have unforeseen and unbeneficial consequences. Similarly, the variety of circumstances and events, the ongoing unpredictable flux, and the contextdependency of meaning, undermines arguments that applying the same behaviour in the same circumstances is either possible or desirable. The Kantian categorical imperative, for example, admits no fundamental difficulty in specifying the similarities between situations or in specifying order in general, and implies that ethical decisions do not conflict or have unexpected, or undermining, consequences. But in a world of flux this is not possible. Situations and contexts do differ and may need to be considered (and known) individually, to diminish the possibility of generating consequences that those acting in them might define as immoral. The same behaviour in different situations (and all situations are different) may have different values and consequences. While it is possible to argue that an act is moral irrespective of its consequences, such consequences would not seem irrelevant to judging that act’s effectiveness. Furthermore, ethics in action almost always involves social events, with people (even with shared ethical positions) arguing about what is good in a particular situation, and how the situation and people involved should be categorised and compared to other situations and other people. Given the variety of the world, the reality that no two situations are absolutely identical, and the unpredictable consequences of actions, this differential and dispute is an essential part of the actuality of ethics. Furthermore, ethics easily becomes contextual, argumentative and embedded in power and status relations. Roger Scruton’s remark that ‘as soon as we set our own interests aside and look on human relations with the eye of an

54 Jonathan Paul Marshall impartial judge, we find ourselves agreeing over the rights and wrongs in any conflict’ (2000: 69), may express an ethical hope but is surely rare in practice. It is a fantasy about natural order that removes the normal importance of differences of opinion, position and relationship. It also suppresses recognition of partiality or emotion as inherent in conflictual situations. A desire for unchanging principles of codified ethical being effectively creates myths of another world, often timeless and abstract, while the world of our lives becomes thought of as secondary, imperfect or degraded, and to be overcome or transcended (Eisendrath 2003). Perhaps this is best illustrated by Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the things we observe are shadows of a reality that can only be observed in the mind, and we are urged to live with that perfect reality before us, ignoring the messy world of experience (Republic: 514a–520a). If our morality aims at, and is vindicated in, a (fantasised) transcendent world then we are not fully relating to the beings we are trying to be ethical towards, in the situations we are trying to be ethical in. This could, in itself, be considered unethical. Furthermore, quests to impose perfect order may be hostile to the essential unpredictability of life itself, and hence destructive of that life. An ethical system geared at dealing with ecological problems must be able to take complexity and unpredictability as fundamental ontological axioms. While recognising that any understanding is a simplification, it needs to avoid the harmful reductionism (or myths) of isolated atomism and controllability, and situate human action within what is known of the working of social and ‘natural’ ecologies, recognising that humans can only exist well within a particular set of ecological conditions. It also needs to accept that humans are not separate from the world they live within, and that they have obligations towards that world.

Schweitzer and the extension of ethics One of the first Westerners to attempt what might be called an ‘ecological ethic’ was Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer’s primary fame relies upon his work as a missionary doctor, unorthodox theologian (who argued Jesus was mistaken in his prophecies about the end of the World), reformer of organ playing and commentator on Johann Sebastian Bach. A concern with ethics and spirituality was vital to Schweitzer’s own life, leading him to abandon his successful career in Europe and setting up, at his own expense, a hospital in Lambaréné in Gabon, where he spent most of the rest of his life. During his life Schweitzer was both famous and sometimes idolised; however, his writings were largely ignored by professional philosophers, probably because they could not be turned into a traditional ethical system or ‘ordering project’, which is precisely what makes them interesting. By elucidating his work, I am not intending to suggest that Schweitzer was a moral paragon without failings, as the idea that only perfectly virtuous people should have their ethical ideas considered is an example of an over-enthusiastic ordering that diminishes ethics itself. Schweitzer was, after all, human and humans are complex and failing systems.

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Schweitzer’s ecological ethic is generally summarised in the phrase ‘reverence for life’. This phrase immediately opens the kind of problems we have just discussed. Life feeds on other life. Life forms have different interests. There is no apparent harmony in being, nor is there an easy formula which will tell us what to do in any particular situation. If we accept his position, then we have a guide, but we have to decide for ourselves, in the situation/context, according to our knowledge and myths about the world, and expect argument with others. Schweitzer thought that ethics needed to be active and contain an ‘affirmation of the world and of life’ (Schweitzer 1954: 177). Without this affirmation of the world, he thought we would end up psychologically withdrawn, refusing entanglement with the world, or even hoping for the cessation of life (ibid.: 178). Whether this is good or bad is another question. As with all ethical systems, he starts with an ethical position, a statement of what he believes to be ‘good’. There is no position beyond ethics from which ethics can be derived. This is another reason why ethics always involves argument. Schweitzer recognises the split between ‘the ideal’ and ‘the less ideal real’, arguing that while ‘the heart’ speaks to us of the eternal, of care for ourselves and the world, our knowledge of the world shows that human existence is contingent and that we are not nature’s goal or concern. There is not just one purpose but ‘cross currents that interfere with and frustrate one another’ (Bixler 1955: 6). However, Schweitzer suggests that our internal drives for perfection and development need to be manifested in the world, even if they cannot be completed, otherwise we lose aspiration and aliveness, and fail in empathy. With this awareness of bifurcation at its heart, ethics becomes an inherently uneasy project with no guarantee of success. These difficulties, plus recognition of flux and unpredictability, mean that ethical aliveness calls for constant meditation on our ontological positioning; that is, meditation on ourselves and our relation to the world and others (Schweitzer 1954: 263). Ethics requires constant correction. Schweitzer believed that ‘all permanently valuable ideas [must] be continually born again in thought’ (ibid.: 259), and not formulated just once as if stable and caught forever. He wanted people to think continually about the problems of existence and the relation of ethics to life. Schweitzer suggests that when people are pondering such questions of being, then ‘reason’ and ‘feeling’ are not necessarily separated. When reason truly plumbs the depths of questions, it ceases to be cool reason and begins willy-nilly to speak with the melodies of the heart. And the heart, when it seeks to fathom itself, discovers that its realm reaches over into that of reason. (Schweitzer 1988: 7) Therefore, while he recognises that existential problems may not be solvable in neat order, Schweitzer calls for the whole person to be involved in the ethical and exploratory process. He is asking us not to stop with ordered explanations, but to realise and perceive our incomplete understanding and ignorance, and the

56 Jonathan Paul Marshall resulting mystery as mystery and be awed. ‘The highest knowledge is to know that we are surrounded by mystery’ (Schweitzer 1923: 80). Humans cannot pretend they know how ecologies work, or how their actions will turn out in advance; consequently we should embrace humility. This process of recognising ignorance renders any division between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ complicated: ethical ‘thought’ includes the emotional responses that are also part of the observations, knowledge and experience in that situation. His form of ethics is never closed. Questions about life affirmation and ethics preoccupied Schweitzer during his first journey to Africa, after the start of the First World War. Famously, one day, during a journey upriver to make a medical call, when he was pondering the problem of how to join ethics, life affirmation and worldview, he encountered a herd of hippos. At that moment the phrase ‘reverence for life’ (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben, where Ehrfurcht has overtones of ‘awe’) came into his head, and he felt that this phrase automatically unified world and life affirmation with ethics (Schweitzer 1954: 185). Schweitzer claims it brings about a spiritual relation to life and world which is in tune with both an inward life and an active ethic (ibid.: 265). ‘Ethics consist, therefore, in my experiencing the compulsion to show to all will-to-live the same reverence as I do to my own’ (Schweitzer 1946: 242). Without the one there is no fullness in the other. Schweitzer’s leap into reverence for life arises out of an imaginative extension of empathy and awe, without insisting on previously defined boundaries. To Schweitzer, while this experience is primary, it is not inevitable. Usually, when Western philosophers reflect on their consciousness, they tend to become abstract, wanting consciousness to be unchanging and ordered (or good) and so ignore the fact that consciousness changes from childhood to old age and always ‘has some content. To think means to think something’. Similarly, we are always situated in a context, and are not alone in our thinking; we interpret the spoken, written or imagistic thoughts of others. A still more ecological reflection shows that we are living in the midst of life, with a will to live, and experiencing the rest of life as equally having a will to live (Schweitzer 1954: 186). We are in relationship to other lives. Furthermore this experience displays a mystery ‘so inexplicable that it renders the difference between knowledge and ignorance relative’ (Schweitzer 1988: 9). The deeper the realisation, the more it becomes a form of astonishment. [I]f you see with perceptive eyes into this enormous animated chaos of creation, it suddenly seizes you with vertigo. In everything you recognise yourself again. The beetle that lies dead in your path – it was something that lived, that struggled for its existence like you, that rejoiced in the sun like you, that knew anxiety and pain like you. And now it is nothing more than decomposing material – as you, too, shall be sooner or later. (Schweitzer 1988: 10) Of course the beetle is also very different from humans, but the relationship immediately expresses ethics, however it is formulated, even if relationship is

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denied. This ‘experiencing’ is not of an unchanging order; it expresses the complex flux of life and the entangled experience of mystery, awe and reverence, of identity or placement in the world (despite or because of its chaos), of our relatedness and estrangement; of surrender, conflict, and uncertainty. It is embedded in beings and events, not in an abstract Being (or oneness) which has no specific relational content. Langfeldt suggests that Schweitzer claims we cannot relate to idealised ‘being’, or God, as such, only to beings (1960: 46ff., 83–6). It is the experience of beings (as only partially understood) that opens us to others. The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow-men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help . . . The ethic of the relation of man to man is not something apart by itself: it is only a particular relation which results from the universal one. (Schweitzer 1954: 188) In these passages Schweitzer is suggesting both that a person’s ethical orientation to the world they find themselves within shapes the world they perceive, and that ethical orientation is fundamental to their sense of being in the world. Schweitzer suggests that in modern Western societies there is a primary repression of this empathy and the involving chaos it generates. Most people have this empathy as children, and suppress it to be like others, to get on with social life, to make an island of manageable order or simplicity, or to take out their frustrations (Schweitzer 1988: 14–15, 19). However, recognising, and accepting, both awe and the pain of interconnectedness is, he thinks, the only way to live with psychological balance and resilience. Schweitzer also argued that the distinction between higher and lower life forms is purely subjective. We do not know the significance of other life forms in the world or the cosmos (Schweitzer 1954: 270–271). Humans may assume they are important, but we do not actually know. He further suggests that life blurs into non-life so there is no sharp duality between the two. ‘Is not every life process, right down to the uniting of two elements, bound up with something like feeling and sensitivity?’ (Schweitzer 1988: 25). He can consider crystals and snowflakes as examples of will-to-life (Schweitzer 1946: 213; 1988: 10). Life depends on nonlife and this generates complicated relationships. Although this extended compassion may be beneficial to its holders, it is not simple and has costs. This lack of definite boundaries and constant interactions reinforces the unavoidable problem mentioned earlier: will-to-life is divided against itself. ‘One existence holds its own at the cost of another: one destroys another’ (1954: 188). We cannot bring about complete harmony, or make a unified ethics in all situations, as we live at the cost of other life. For some this realisation may lead to suicidal feelings as nature seems eternally cruel, but Schweitzer argues that

58 Jonathan Paul Marshall these depressed feelings can be overcome by reverence for the life within us, as it is. We can attempt to minimise harm and release others as much as possible from their suffering, even if we fail (Schweitzer 1988: 189). Sometimes it may be more empathetic to kill a creature quickly than to watch it die slowly. Saving one creature may mean killing others to keep it alive. At all times humans are faced with ethical dilemmas and this is central. Ease is not possible, and realisation of this releases people from the idea that they are already ‘civilised’ or superior, and helps the realisation that with technological and other progress changing the boundaries of what is possible, ethical civilisation becomes even harder (Schweitzer 1954: 189–90). ‘We are living in truth, when we experience these conflicts more profoundly. The good conscience is an invention of the devil’ (Schweitzer 1946: 252). In Schweitzer’s terms there is no orderly, pure, or perfect way in which we can be specially ‘good’, and someone else, or something else, can be ‘all bad’. It is easily possible to do evil and good at the same time. Such a realisation may mitigate those projective processes whereby we see others as evil to make ourselves good by comparison; what psychoanalyst Carl Jung calls ‘shadow projection’. Jung argues that dealing with shadow projection makes the highest demands on an individual’s morality, for the acceptance of our own necessary ‘evil’ ‘means nothing less than that [our] whole moral existence is put into question’ (Jung 1977: §1414). Schweitzer may go further than Jung by implying that projection can exist in our relations to everything that lives; that is, in the whole uncertainties of the ecological and social system, which challenge cultural and personal ordering. There is always more work to be done in self-awareness and more to learn about the internal and external effects of our actions and their unintended consequences as they spread through complex systems. What might be as correct as we can get at one time, may not be at another. We need to be constantly open to the possibilities of change and modification, and thus guard against social, and other, institutions which hide the harmful consequences of acting within their ‘ethical’ understandings. As implied, Schweitzer’s ethics removes humanity from the absolute centre of ethical life as ‘humanity may not conceive of itself as the purpose of the infinite world’ (Schweitzer 1988: 39). In Africa this ‘decentering’ was even further borne out by his experience: Whether we will or no, all of us here live under the influence of the daily repeated experience that nature is everything and man is nothing. This brings into our general view of life . . . something which makes us conscious of the feverishness and vanity of the life of Europe; it seems almost something abnormal that over a portion of the Earth’s surface nature should be nothing and man everything! (Schweitzer 1948: 101) With this ethic, we aim to relate to life not just in terms of its purpose for us, but as a participant within it, being affected and affecting. By his focus on

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ultimate irresolvability, Schweitzer changes the contrast between virtue and benefit. An ideal virtuous act may indeed be beneficial, but in practice there will often be conflict, and this is the nature of morals. While holders of classical ethical systems seem to recognise that there will occasionally, or artificially, be ethical dilemmas but hope that these dilemmas can be solved by proper application of their formula or an imagined complete knowledge, Schweitzer suggests that such dilemmas are normal and fundamental, part of ethical being, and cannot be escaped. Disorder, conflict and unpredictability are inherent in ethics and in life.

Challenge of ethical complexity The main problems with this philosophy, from the traditional point of view, are clear. It represents an ethical attitude rather than an ethical code. It gives no practical guide as to what to do, and claims there can be no such guide. There is little reduction to order, or orderly virtue; while it foregrounds connection, the philosophy is sceptical of harmony in connection. Yet, at the same time, if we look at the patterns of life, the interconnections of life, and the mutual dependencies of life, then it seems clear we must strive to maintain those working patterns, connections and balances we know of to protect life, while being careful not to add unexpected changes. Schweitzer objects not to microbes as such but to an imbalance of microbes, he objects not to locusts but to plagues of locusts, he objects to action which disrupts the patterns of survival and adaptation of other creatures. He objects to that which threatens the complex of life itself. Some may think Schweitzer asks too much. Ethicist Mary Warnock, although not mentioning him by name in her review of ethical thought, argues against extension of moral responsibility to all life on the grounds that a bias towards making humans superior is the basis of morality. Only humans have morality and should consequently value humans over animals (1988: 68–69). However, even if other life forms cannot make moral decisions, it is not unimaginable that, as moral creatures, humans have responsibilities to them, and that we might want to ‘harm’ a human (by preventing the fulfilment of their desires) when their actions generate suffering in another creature. We might, at that instance, value the nonhuman more than the human, even if this decision is difficult. Indeed, if we recognise our interdependence, and that the actions of humans are likely to destroy the environment in which humans and ‘others’ live, then we might well regard it as moral to prevent these actions, so that ‘we’ can all live. There is no certain, or guiltless, place from which to act. Warnock is simply closing ethics off by erecting boundaries to make decisions easier. This may not always be considered ethical either. Correctly, Warnock alleges that ‘generalised benevolence’ might lead to people changing their minds and being unreliable (ibid.: 88–89). This latter point can only become an objection if someone refuses to accept that current certainties may be disordered by further experience and considerations. It is not necessarily moral to keep a promise once we discover that the promise will lead to unexpected harm or immorality, or that greater good may arise if we act differently. We might

60 Jonathan Paul Marshall prevent people from harming the ecosystem as best we can, but if our actions have unexpected consequences, then we should perhaps change them. We may, indeed, despite Warnock, wish to acquit someone from a crime if we can understand and excuse their motives (ibid.: 88) because that could change our perception of the nature of the ‘crime’. However, the weaknesses of Schweitzer’s position are also its strengths. While providing a unified guide (of the kind we might need), it recognises chaos, flux, difficulty and the ongoing complexity of ethics. It recognises that an ethical decision may not be beneficial towards all; that every decision carries a possible burden; that the repercussions of a decision may not be what we expect and that we may need to be open to the world to change our mind. Although we are more likely to regard our friends and family above other humans, other humans above animals, animals above plants and possibly plants above rocks, there is no inevitability about this in all situations. Sometimes we might act differently and ethically. Schweitzer’s position implies that that we should try and learn about situations and the beings within them, about complex ecological systems (even if such learning is always provisional), so that we can discover what acts are likely to be beneficial towards others and ourselves, and to realise that ethics is exploratory, and not finalised. We can easily disrupt processes by our virtue as much as our evil. With different myths and knowledges we might behave differently. Schweitzer’s view accepts mystery and flux as fundamental features of ontology, rather than positing a myth of unchanging ideality. It embraces thinking, imagining, feeling and empathy and encourages attempts to overcome the repression of empathy and consciousness. Such ‘ethical reason’ is not transcendent or purely intellectual but involves all bodily faculties. As such, this ethics seems able to posit a ‘mode of being’ in complexity, of immersion within unpredictable interacting fields without desiring to control them completely. It is not based in a special mystical insight, but it is based in a set of thoughts which can occur to anyone who pursues them, and those thoughts accept the being of the world as we find it; in order, conflict, uncertainty and chaos. It accepts that ethics, at best, is a pool of order-making which can never be complete, and may indeed be contradictory.

Conclusions In taking decisions that lead to our future we are fundamentally influenced by ethical concerns. If ecological relationships are complex, unpredictable and in constant upheaval, then many traditional ethical approaches to the future will not work. If we attempt to enforce ideas of harmony and stability they will fail. If we think we can control events, easily recognise similarities, or not suffer from unintended consequences, then we are also likely to fail. By challenging ethical myths about the ordered nature of being, Schweitzer allows us to recognise the complexity, uncertainty and mystery of ecological processes and allows us to attend gently to what may appear as disorder. We may then see that what we perceive as disorder does not always require suppression, or more of the order that we are

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already attempting. Perhaps we can attend to life and learn from it and perhaps revise our ethics, so that it becomes more attentive of the complex and confusing nature of reality and of the others we share the world with. This view allows the world to be, rather than demanding we sacrifice it to an ideal of order. If the world was ordered and determined, then there could be no ethical life. It is the disorder, the complexity and the uncertainty that makes ethics possible, even as it undermines any particular ethical rules we develop. Facing the future ethically involves a process of constant attention, learning, debate, adjustment and expectation that our actions will have unintended consequences, and that we live in an uncontrollable system.

Acknowledgement Research towards producing this paper was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0880853 ‘Chaos, Information Technology, Global Administration and Daily Life’.

References Beninca, E., Huisman, J., Heerkloss, R., Jöhnk, K. D., Branco, P., Van Nes, E. H., Scheffer, M. and Ellner, S.P. 2008 ‘Chaos in a long-term experiment with a plankton community’. Nature 451 (14 February): 822–825. Bixler, J. S. 1955 ‘Dr. Schweitzer’s one answer to the problem of the many’. In H. A. Jack (ed.) To Dr. Albert Schweitzer, a Festschrift Commemorating His 80th Birthday, from a Few of His Friends, pp. 3–10. Evanston, IL: Profile. Brown, J. H., Gupta, V. K., Li1, B., Milne, B. T., Restrepo, C. and West, G. B. 2002 ‘The fractal nature of nature: power laws, ecological complexity and biodiversity’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 357: 619–626. Connell, J. 1978 ‘Diversity in tropical rain forests and coral reefs’. Science 199(4335): 1302–1310. Doak, D. F. et al. (14 authors) 2008 ‘Understanding and predicting ecological dynamics: are major surprises inevitable?’ Ecology 89(4): 952–961. Eigenauer, J. D. 1993 ‘The humanities and chaos theory: a response to Steenburg’s “Chaos at the Marriage of Heaven and Hell”‘. Harvard Theological Review 86: 455–469. Eisendrath, C. 2003 At War with Time. New York: Helios. Gribbin, J. 2004 Deep Simplicity: Chaos, complexity and the emergence of life. London: Allen Lane. Hastings, A. and Wysham, D. B. 2010 ‘Regime shifts in ecological systems can occur with no warning’. Ecology Letters 13: 464–472. Holling, C. S. and. Meffe, G. K. 1996 ‘Command and control and the pathology of natural resource management’. Conservation Biology 10(2): 328–337. Jablonski, D. 1991 ‘Extinction: a paleontological perspective’. Science 253: 754–757. Jung, C. G. 1977 Collected Works vol. 18: The Symbolic Life. London: Routledge. Langfeldt, G. 1960 Albert Schweitzer: A Study of his philosophy of life. London: George Allen and Unwin. Lorenz, E. N. 1993 The Essence of Chaos. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

62 Jonathan Paul Marshall Plato 1961 Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Prigogene, I. 1997 The End of Certainty: Time, chaos and the new laws of nature. New York: Free Press. Reice, S. R. 2003 The Silver Lining: The benefits of natural disasters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rittel, H. and Webber, M. 1973 ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning’. Policy Sciences 4: 155–169. Schweitzer, A. 1923 Christianity and the Religions of the World. London: George Allen and Unwin. Schweitzer, A. 1946 Civilization and Ethics (3rd edn). London: Adam and Charles Black. Schweitzer, A. 1948 On the Edge of the Primal Forest and More from the Primal Forest. London: Adam and Charles Black. Schweitzer, A. 1954 My Life and Thought. London: George Allen and Unwin. Schweitzer, A. 1988 A Place for Revelation: Sermons on reverence for life. London: Collier Macmillan. Scruton, R. 2000 Animal Rights and Wrongs. London: Metro. Tetlock, P. 2005 Expert Political Judgment: How good is it? How can we know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Warnock, M. 1998 An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics. London: Duckworth.

PART II

The politics of engagement

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Futures of governance Ecological challenges and policy myths in tuna fisheries Kate Barclay

Human-wrought changes to ocean ecologies present challenging futures. Scientists predict that ocean acidification, ocean warming and changes in the global system of currents that stabilize ocean temperatures and push nutrients to the surface will devastate ocean life for the next few millennia (Roberts 2012). Pollution, especially from the massive amounts of plastic suspended in the water column, and over-fishing are also significant problems. The damage from human-wrought changes to ocean ecologies may be irreparable or too complex to adequately comprehend and manage sustainably (McGoodwin 2007; Holm 2013). This paper examines efforts to make fishing sustainable, focusing on the policy myths part of processes of change. Change in governance (broadly defined as systems of authority aimed at influencing or regulating people to behave in particular ways) is not unusual. Periodically, policymakers initiate change to address perceived shortcomings in current governance, to respond to new situations and to build on emerging knowledge. Widespread acceptance of the need for change is only the first step. The conceptual frameworks of the problems to be addressed, and the appropriate ways to address them, are based on mythic themes that draw on tradition and taken-for-granted knowledge. These mythic themes form well-worn grooves of thought and practice and so, for new modes of governance to replace old ones, these myths must be transformed. Shifting the myths has to occur not only in the ideational sphere but also in the practical structures of governance: the patterns of power and privilege, the educational systems in which employees are trained, the data collection systems used to guide planning, and so on. All these changes in turn transform practices of management. Governance here means all of the systems of authority that influence fishing behaviour, government and nongovernment, and including intentional attempts to change behaviour as well as non-intentional effects on behaviour, for example through markets creating incentives causing fishers to overfish. Fisheries management is the subset of those systems that is intentionally aimed at influencing fisher behaviour as part of government. Roland Barthes’ (1972) work in the mid-twentieth century demonstrated that modern society deploys myths that reproduce ideologies and underpin existing power structures. This conceptualization has been developed by de Neufville and

66 Kate Barclay Barton (1987) who found that myths structure ‘problem definition’ in policymaking. Myths help with communicating and mobilizing, because audiences are already primed, and myths represent an established orientation towards ontology and being in the world. But myths also have drawbacks as, being based on established problem definitions, they conceal alternative realities, and inhibit the imagination of new, more effective perspectives on problems. Myth is a particularly appropriate concept for understanding the resistance to change in environmental governance because it foregrounds the unscientific, imaginary and taken for granted aspects of knowledge that combine with science and governance. It also points to the broader social frameworks and cultural values that encompass governance. Harries’ study of institutional resistance against implementing adaptation measures for climate change found new policies were ‘hampered by institutional cultures’ formed when different approaches were the norm (Harries and Penning-Rowsell 2011: 188). Consequently, changing modes of governance requires not only convincing stakeholders that new principles of governance are needed, it also requires changing (1) the taken-for-granted knowledge shaping stakeholder predispositions toward governance, and (2) the institutions that conduct governance, including the tasks bureaucracies undertake, and the patterns of power, wealth and prestige vested in the existing system. This chapter derives from my ongoing research into the governance of tuna fisheries globally, and specifically in the Western Pacific region, since the late 1990s. The projects making up this body of work were based on interviews with people from stakeholder groups, observation of international meetings, reviews of technical documents for fisheries policy, and reviews of academic literature on fisheries management. In the first part of the chapter, I argue that the consideration of several mythic themes is particularly important to understand international fishing governance. First, I explore the mythic theme of plenty or inexhaustibility and its challenge in new myths of ocean degradation and the need for salvation through conservation, which in turn is part of a broader conservation salvation myth. Second, there is the mythic theme that I gloss as ‘atomism’, expressing ideas that ocean creatures and governance bodies exist and act at an individual level. This second theme implies fisheries management science, which considers species in themselves, and a theory of governance in which nation states have to look after their own interests competitively. I argue that approaches to governance are not simply dropped and replaced when their founding principles are discredited. Much of the old systems remain, becoming the foundations for new approaches, resulting in hybrid, sometimes confused and conflicted systems of governance. Understanding governance as operating through mythic themes helps us understand attempts to change governance through changing ideas. Gaining widespread acceptance of new principles is only the first step in achieving effective change. The myths of governance, and the institutions and actions founded on them, must also be shifted, and this process of change is messy and piecemeal.

Futures of tuna governance 67

Myths of fisheries management 1: from single-species to ecosystem-based Myths about fishing contain ideas about ocean ecologies. One of the key myths about fishing during the European colonial period was of endless abundance. Thomas Huxley famously asserted in his address to the 1883 International Fisheries Exhibition in London that ‘all the great sea fisheries are inexhaustible’. Within a few decades, however, this myth was less widely accepted, even in resource-guzzling, industrializing Western countries, but it still has effects. Even before the application of industrial technologies to fishing, people had damaged stocks and altered ecologies through their fishing activities. Oyster stocks around population centres on the Australian coast were depleted within decades of White settlement (Wallace-Carter 1987). Once industrial technologies were applied to fishing from the late 1800s, quantities of fish being taken increased dramatically. The northwest Atlantic cod fishery is a famous example of collapse from overfishing (Kurlansky 1999), but it happened in many other fisheries too. From the 1880s the Japanese and Korean coasts were stripped of abalone through use of underwater breathing apparatus (Koh and Barclay 2007). During the twentieth century some of the key technological changes included the move from wooden to steel hulls, use of radio communication, development of diesel engines, refrigeration for preserving fish and increasing the length of voyages, mechanical devices for reeling lines and winching nets, replacing cotton and other plantbased fibres with synthetic materials for nets and lines, and use of radar, sonar and other telecommunications for navigation and finding fish. In 1640 the Dutch herring fishing fleet involved around 800 ships and 11–12,000 fishers, with an annual catch of around 50,000 tonnes of herring. In 2007 a single Dutch fishing vessel would catch that much herring in a year, employing eight people (Holm 2013). Increased capacity for fishing, together with increasing demand from growing human populations led to global overfishing. The secretary-general of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, Nitin Desai, noted that overfishing had become a major threat to the food supply (United Nations n.d.). The move to limit fisheries for the common good began to take root in institutions in the early twentieth century, as part of the application of science, policy and regulation to the management of ecology as ‘resources’ emerging in North America and Europe at that time (Epstein 2006). By the late 1930s, in North America, the conservation movement was in full cry . . . In dozens of states and provinces, fish and game regulations were proliferated, commercial fisheries were increasingly documented, and there was a growing awareness of the necessary scientific base for management . . . too much fishing effort was at the heart of the halibut problem . . . and the first steps were being taken to restore the Fraser River sockeye from the effects of overfishing and the Hell’s Gate block. (Larkin 1977: 1)

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Western myths about ocean ecologies retained the notion that they were there for humans to use, but became tempered with an understanding that overfishing could occur. Fisheries management, using scientific understandings of the impacts of fishing, may thus be seen as part of the application of governmentality to food production within modernity (Barclay and Epstein 2013). The notion that fisheries should be managed for sustainability attained the status of a societal myth, but policies and their implementation have not lived up to the myth. Competing interests around profit and national food security, and the open accessibility of fisheries meant that governments were easily persuaded to allow their fleets to fish more than scientists advised, and much fishing occured in areas outside of government control. Given this failure to effectively manage fisheries, ideas about the damage humans do to ocean ecologies became more pessimistic. The guiding institutional myth that ‘fisheries can be damaged by overfishing and this should be managed through government application of science’ remained, but alongside it a related myth of ecological devastation emerged. Understandings of human destruction of ocean ecologies may be seen as part of a wider mythic theme about planetary decline due to human activities. This became a central social issue visible in the high profiles achieved by books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, social movements around anti-whaling in the 1970s, intergovernmental reports such as Brundtland’s Our Common Future in 1987, and the Rio Earth Summit (United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development) of 1992. Marine biologists helped generate understanding of sustainability problems, in particular Daniel Pauly, with his concepts of ‘shifting baselines’ (1995) and ‘fishing down the food web’ (Pauly et al. 1998). Writing about Agenda 21, the policy blueprint that arose from the Rio Earth Summit, Alicia Barcena (1992: 109) wrote: ‘[s]ociety is gradually appreciating that the impact of intensified human activities no longer permits a casual approach to oceans as an unlimited receptacle for wastes and an endless supply of free and open-access resources’. In the last decade the profile of overfishing has been raised through the media, for example, in the 2009 film The End of The Line. This higher media profile is partly due to the campaigns of conservation organizations such as Greenpeace. UK celebrity chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver have also put their name to sustainable seafood campaigns (Silver and Hawkins 2015). However, this characterization relates mainly to Western societies, or even just the anglophone world. The myth of plenty is global, but not homogeneous, and varies across different cultural boundaries. See, for example, Epstein and Barclay (2013) and Barclay and Epstein (2013) for discussion of differences between Australian and Japanese perceptions of fisheries impacts and appropriate approaches to management. Sitting under the broad myth that fisheries should be managed by government using science is a related myth about what kind of science is relevant. One branch of science called limnology studied fish as part of complex life communities, but this was sidelined by the simpler approach of studying only the target species of fish and analysing fishing impact in terms of Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY)

Futures of tuna governance 69 (Larkin 1977). Fishing to MSY means taking the maximum amount of fish possible without theoretically causing those particular stocks to decline; it is atomistic. MSY became policy orthodoxy and underpins the fisheries management of most governments around the world, as well as intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). For some decades MSY has been widely discredited as an appropriate indicator for sustainable fisheries management. Errors in biological knowledge can result in setting the limit too high. Economists have also rejected it as failing to optimize value, and have proposed an alternative indicator of Maximum Economic Yield (MEY). Limnologists continued developing their understanding of marine ecosystems, and eventually showed that single-species MSY science was inadequate for working out sustainable levels of fishing (Larkin 1977: 6); ecosystem-based fisheries management became more widely accepted (Kolding and van Zwieten 2014: 132). While the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Declaration 31a notes: ‘Stocks should be kept at biomass levels that can produce MSY’, by the early 2000s ‘political commitment to the transition from single species to ecosystem-based fisheries management [had become] ubiquitous and consistent with commitments to sustainable development’ (Jennings 2006: 25). In 2001 the FAO adopted the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries (EAF).

From single species to ecosystem-based management in tuna fisheries Solomon blue You reap a harvest you did not plant You drain my resources in the name of development You fish in my waters for bonito You pay me a little for permission You process your catch compressed into cans You pour back your waste into our seas Pollution! Then you sell back to me, at a profit Solomon Blue Jully Sipolo, Praying Parents (Sipolo 1986) The poem above expresses prevalent residents’ perceptions of the downsides of industrial tuna fishing and processing in the Solomon Islands, playing on the

70 Kate Barclay name of a popular local canned tuna brand. The Solomon Islands are a small island nation in the southwestern Pacific where tuna fisheries and a cannery involving foreign investment have been a prominent part of the economy since the early 1970s. The waters of the Pacific island states around the equator make up the world’s largest tuna fishing ground, supplying around a third of the world’s tuna (Williams and Terawasi 2013). Tuna fisheries started industrializing in the late 1800s (Doulman 1987), but really developed in the 1950s (see Figure 4.1; Barclay 2014). The bluefin tunas, prized for sashimi, are very large and relatively slow growing so their stocks are not resilient to fishing. Southern bluefin tuna Thunnus maccoyii stocks declined precipitously from the 1950s (Australian Government 2012: 366), while northern bluefin tuna Thunnus thynnus stocks reached catastrophically low levels in the 1980s (Hurry et al. 2007: 44). At the other end of the spectrum is skipjack (sometimes called bonito), Katsuwonus pelamis, used mostly for canning. It is a much smaller fish that matures in a couple of years. Despite being fished very intensively, skipjack stocks in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean are not yet showing signs of overfishing. In between, are a range of other species fished in significant amounts, such as yellowfin Thunnus albacares, albacore Thunnus alalunga, and bigeye Thunnus obesus (see Table 4.1). As well as the nature of the fish themselves affecting the ecological outcomes of fishing (through fast or slow growth rates, etc.), the type of fishing also plays a role. While skipjack stocks appear resilient to fishing, fishing them with purse 2,500,000

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Figure 4.1 Catches (mt) of yellowfin, skipjack, bigeye, albacore and other species in the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission Convention Area, 1950–2005 Source: Graph created by the author using public domain data from Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), available: https://www.wcpfc.int/node/4648.

Futures of tuna governance 71 Table 4.1 Contemporary stock abundance as a percentage of estimated stock abundance before industrial tuna fishing accelerated after 1950 % Atlantic bluefin tuna Bigeye tuna Pacific bluefin tuna Southern bluefin tuna Yellowfin tuna