On Fragility, or Flying into the Sun

“Civilization could prove a fragile thing.”
Shell Oil Company confidential 1989 internal memo on the threat of global warming.

If you like me, are, or are not, staring at the scroll of climate catastrophe events unfolding around the world with a new level of apprehension or disinterest (delete as applicable) read this from Dr Elizabeth Sawin (Director of @multisolving):

“Years ago (10 maybe?) I was invited to help with system thinking regarding disaster resilience in a US city. They were sketching out a major multi-day power outage across the whole region. Someone asked how the first responders planned to communicate. 

With our cellphones of course, they said. How long does the back up power supply on the cell phone towers last someone asked? No one in the room knew. 

Someone came back and said (as I remember) 24 hours. Maybe, hopefully, it’s longer now. But that sense of fragility and of ignorance of fragility has stuck with me. 

I remember it, at times like this. The earth is big and powerful when activated. And the fossil fuel profiteers have activated it. And our systems are fragile and brittle outside of narrow ranges. 

Just how fragile we keep learning, and just how narrow, and the cost is measured in lives, and health, and homes and disruption and loss. 

End fossil fuels, end them fast.”

Now try taking Sawin’s logic, or line of questioning and applying it to a number of other scenarios. Like ‘food’ or ‘travel’ or ‘buying stuff’.

The extent to which our food system has been outsourced to a handful of companies, placed into a just-in-time supply chain and is part of a global refrigerated system is worth thinking about. It would keel-over within a week. The extent to which everything from purchasing tickets to everyday shopping and ‘every transaction you can think of’ is dependent on your charged phone or your internet access means that a power outage even for a day or so would cause mayhem. This is without thinking, for a moment, of the psychological impact. 

Crowdstrike Liberation

In her latest substack Srah Kenzidor describes such a moment. You can read the full piece (and follow her) here (‘‘The Red, White and Blue Screen of Death’):

“We were in a truck stop in rural Illinois when we got word. There was no gas, the proprietor explained. Or rather, there was, but no way to get it into the car. Their machines ran on credit cards, and credit cards were dead. A long line of people stood at the ATM, looking worried. Others looked vindicated.”

“Others felt vindicated but hid it, so that they didn’t look like an asshole. I know, because I checked my expression in the mirror multiple times. I bought sunglasses to block the knowing gleam in my eye. I paid with the cash I always carried.”

“Earlier that July morning, the largest cyber breakdown in history ground much of the world to a halt. American cybersecurity company Crowdstrike had installed a faulty update that caused over eight million systems using Microsoft to crash.”

“For one day, the dangers of digital dependency were laid plain.

In the US, thousands of flights were grounded, leaving the sky as blue and clear as September 12, 2001. Hospitals canceled surgeries. TV channels vanished mid-air. Companies sent employees home, unable to use their software or open their office doors. Supermarkets closed, as did chain stores relying on apps, until they could remember how to function like it was 1999.

The cyber breakdown was unevenly distributed. In some places — those not relying on the tainted software — life went on as usual. Not so for the regions of our route.

But we were prepared, because most of the Midwest is not part of the cashless world creeping into the coasts.”

Sarah’s rant is in full-flow about the ‘always online’ existence and its consequences:

“They ruined every good innovation of my life. They encouraged us to destroy the analog world, and after we did, they replaced it with bullshit and lies.”

“Humanity has been stripped from the virtual world: deliberately, maliciously. The goal is to make humans less human. Less imaginative and more callous; more desperate and less kind. Less demanding of authority, but ruthlessly demanding of ordinary people who hold neither leverage nor power.”

“Your memories are the tech lords’ enemies. They seek to scramble history, erasing touchstones until you no longer recognize your world. They monitor you as an object but discard you as a person. You attract scrutiny, but not care. So when the machine went down, I felt apprehension — but also, release.”

This isn’t to say technology is bad, or can’t be great, or even liberatory. But there is a connection between impotence and living online, isolation and online silo-culture, and the passivity of it all.

There’s also, in terms of fragility, a weirdly useful insight into the fragile nature of our online dependency culture and the natural ecosystems we’re destroying. The difference is, I suppose, the latter have an almost unimaginable in-built regenerative capacity that we don’t.

Flying into the Sun

Finally, sort of, I get that so many of us (me included) have at times opted out. But I think we’re beyond that now. That option’s sort of been closed down, sorry. Reality is much closer than it used to be. As PerthshireMags said, in a line that has gone viral (sorry Sarah):

“Thinking about how “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it” has hit the nail on the head. 

This also means that it’s no longer possible to talk about climate and ecological breakdown as an abstract future event. Technically this has been true for some time, but it’s unavoidable now. So it’s no longer possible to write about stuff ‘over there’ or ‘future scenarios’ or even to blur the distinction between the personal and the political (cliche klaxon sounding).

So, for example, my friend’s dog got washed away in a flooding river, never to be seen again. My wooden boat just cracked open lying out in the Hebridean June sun two years ago, the result of the latest abnormal heatwave. My friend in North Carolina is okay but all of the roads around his house are blocked by fallen trees after the hurricane. He can’t go anywhere. My ex-partner likes to fly-out to southern Europe each summer but is choosing sites a little further north because of – ‘you know the wildfires’.

This is what advertisers used to call ‘getting away from it all’ or ‘Flying into the Sun’, both of which now have rather darker connotations.

There is maybe the opposite response of what you’d think. Rather than panic, organise or protest, the instinct is to double-down, in what some have called ‘collective numbness’. The American commentator Jeet Heer has noticed: “This is purely impressionistic and I’d like to see if anyone has data to check it, by my sense is that as extreme weather events become more common, they get less and less media coverage, particularly national American news coverage.” Climate catastrophe has been normalised.

Mainstreaming Doomerism, or How to Be Cautiously Pessimistic

Chris Sharpe, a firefighter, captured these videos of elk from a high-fenced ranch frantically running for safety.

It’s not just humans that suffer because of the crises fossil fuels companies have created.

No time to wait. #ActOnClimate pic.twitter.com/TvJO2yF45m

— Mike Hudema (@MikeHudema) September 30, 2024

In a sense all of these responses are understandable. Having been trained to be pliant or cowed, or learnt reflexive impotence, or just trying to get by in a society we can’t afford to be part of is enough. Or as Ewen Morrison writes “J. G. Ballard’s big idea in his last decade of writing fiction was that humans will become so bored of living within managerial consumerism that they rebel through excess & debauchery.” This seems not just plausible but omnipresent. To point this out is to be a ‘straw-shirt’ or worse, a Doomer.

But there has been a reverse in very recent years in how the ‘doomer’ outlook is perceived, versus the more mainstream environmentalist. It maybe started with the ‘you know Paper Straws’ meme, but the roles have been reversed. The doomer outlook has been vindicated the environmentalist is now ridiculed.

So much so that the term ‘toxic positivity’ has a higher profile and understanding. The excellent ‘Drilled’ outlines the phenomenon in last weeks New York Climate Week. Amy Westervelt writes:

“…yes there were the expected corporate greenwashing showcases, but even the more legit climate events left me with the same feeling I’ve been having at most climate conferences in the past year or two, an unsettling disconnect between people noshing on passed hors d’oeuvres and sipping craft cocktails while talking about the need to “stay positive!” “tell the positive stories!” “give people hope!” and the reality crashing in all around us, which this week included Hurricane Helene, a deadly storm and landslides in Nepal, a climate activist being sentenced to 2 years in prison in the UK for throwing soup on a painting, and, as always, more news of expanding fossil fuel development.”

“Don’t get me wrong, there are good news stories and I know how important it is to share and savor them, but the focus on positivity to the exclusion of anything else felt completely surreal and, if I’m being honest, a little scary. It reminded me of something I’ve heard climate psychologist Renee Lertzman say repeatedly over the years, that the climate crisis is a trauma that needs to be processed, and of what trauma specialist Thomas Hübl calls “collective numbness,” that thing that happens when people tacitly agree to leave the trauma lingering, unprocessed, below the surface. I’m not trying to tone police or dictate any one particular emotional reaction to the climate crisis—I’ve had three very different reactions myself just today! Everyone deals with the communal anguish of watching the world be destroyed in slow motion differently, but seeing so many climate leaders demand positivity, and only positivity, during a week that demanded action in its slogan (“It’s Time”) was more than a little unnerving.”

This is not to say there are big flaws in some doomer analysis, there really is. It’s a big field. The science is bleak enough without any need for further embellishment, nor are there no alternatives, the truly disgusting or dispiriting thing is that there are.

Our over-reliance on technologies we don’t control has created a single point of failure with few or no back-us when systems fail, and systems are failing everywhere. Nor is any of this disconnected – indeed its intimately connected with the stochastic violence of the US election, the degeneracy of the British Conservatives, the outbreak of fascist mobs in England or the public  witnessing of genocidal acts in Palestine.

As the Portuguese writer Araci Almeida has put it:

“The world will not end tomorrow. But the world as we knew it is ending every day, every hour, and a little more. 2050 seemed far away and still is, but 2050 has arrived now. Or, as they say, all the catastrophic predictions of irreversible temperature increases, extreme droughts, and everything else we have become accustomed to living with are happening as I write these words. Simultaneously, as a result of all this tragedy, the winds of fascism everywhere are spreading like poisonous dust.”

Notes.
For more from Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, Amy Westervelt & Sarah Kendzior here:
Home | Drilled
Home – Multisolving Institute
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter | Substack