It’s been instructive to follow the news which has been all over the media for the last few days in Britain of the high speed rail network which the government has unveiled with a flourish – just in time for the forthcoming election. The idea is that, beginning in 2017, the UK will begin to build itself a number of high speed rail lines, carrying trains travelling up to 250mph, between our major cities. Eventually we’ll be able to get from London to Edinburgh or Glasgow in just three hours. Smart tip, then: buy a flat in the Gorbals now; it’ll be worth a million in a decade or so once the London commuter belt extends across Hadrian’s Wall.
It has been hard to find anyone who doesn’t like this idea, which is always a bad sign. The government, represented by the wonderfully-named transport secretary ‘Lord Adonis’, who if there were any justice would resemble a Marvel superhero rather than a solicitor from Shrewsbury, considers it to be modern and vital and competitive and other such things. Network Rail got to the heart of the matter, talking of our ‘modern, dynamic economy’ and how the new network would ‘drive economic growth and boost jobs’. The Tories like it too, thought they have complaints about the route, which will trash large parts of the rural, beautiful and very Tory Chilterns. Up north, the Scottish National Party are warning that the network had better get up to Scotland sharpish or they’ll be declaring independence even quicker than planned.
Environmentalists, of course, are creaming themselves. There’s nothing a mainstream green likes more than a massive infrastructure project designed to boost economic growth – as long as it’s a low-carbon one, of course. Thrilled by the idea that the new trains might take some people away from internal flights, NGOs have been jumping up and down with excitement.
It’s easy to get frustrated by the increasingly narrow focus of many so-called environmentalists, and I often do. The carbon-uber-alles mentality that permeates everything said to be ‘green’ at present is going, if it is not challenged soon, both to destroy environmentalism as any kind of serious challenge to the status quo, and result in some very serious damage to the environment in its name. I can still remember when the greens got very excited a decade or so ago about the idea of growing fuel crops. Hard to believe now, but it was once seen as a good idea by mainstream greens to turn land over to producing the equivalent of petrol. This was because it was low carbon, supposedly, which was thought then, as it is now, to be the issue to which all other issues must be subsumed. Never mind challenging the supremacy of the car or the society which spawned it: just focus on the stuff that comes out of the exhaust: it’s ‘practical’, after all; it’s ‘realistic’.
Perhaps in ten or twenty years time, when many of our wild landscapes are slathered in turbines and barrages and mirrors, and central Africa is full of vast hydropower projects and the seas and rivers are full of technology and the forests are buried beneath palm oil plantations and global capitalism is still eating its way through our souls and our planet, and they have no words to oppose it because they have forgotten how to do anything but argue about high voltage wires and gigawatt hours and climate models, the greens will realise they were tilting at the wrong windmills. We’ll see.
But this is my personal bugbear. Maybe more interesting is to look at the high speed rail announcement as an example of wishful thinking. Two of the most important books I’ve read in the last year or so have been John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent, which we’ve mentioned here before, and James Lovelock’s The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Both, I would suggest, are essential reading for any Dark Mountaineer. Greer writes with calm erudition about how the world is likely to pan out as fossil fuel supplies decline, while Lovelock writes with a welcome detachment about the possible consequences of climate change. These books complement each other well, and there are characteristics they share: they don’t accept any of the mainstream narratives on offer to us from either the business-as-usual or the sustainability brigades; they take a clear-eyed and sometimes quite hard-to-read look at the worst the future might bring us; and they suggest means of planning for it. Not, please note, preventing it - rather, being prepared for what it might look like.
I don’t necessarily recommend reading these two books in the same week, unless you have a lot of strong drink or sunshine to hand. Their conclusions are dark, but because they are so honest, so lacking in hysteria and so dismissive of the false hope that runs through most books of this type like words through a stick of rock, they are curiously inspiring too. I mention them because to look at things like the high speed rail announcement in the light of peak oil and climate change is to see wishful thinking in full flow.
If Lovelock and Greer, and the many sober analysts like them, are anything like correct, then this thing will probably never even be built. It is a classic example of what can seem a new idea, or a healthy development, resting on assumptions that are withering as we observe them. The idea that by 2027, when the line will be complete, our national priority will still be the kind of fuel-hungry economic growth we set up now as our national god seems staggeringly unlikely. It is unlikely to be even possible. We are going to be living in constricted times, at best. And we haven’t even discussed our astonishing national debt yet.
So why do we make announcements like this as if it were 1960 rather than 2010? Why do we go on as if nothing were changing? Partly because it isn’t, at least in most peoples’ lives, yet, and partly because we don’t want it to, so we act as if it won’t. But there’s something else too, I think, and it didn’t crystallise until I received an email a week or two back from a Dark Mountaineer who had just come across the project and who had read what we had to say with interest.
He wrote to me to tell me he was very much in agreement with the need to tell new stories about our predicament; but he also believed we would need time to ‘mourn the old ones first.’ These underlying stories we had identified, the myths our world is built on – ideas of human supremacy and centrality and unstoppable progress – they were, he suggested, enormous and deeply embedded. He was right about that, of course. But the lesson he drew from this was that we couldn’t begin to hope for new narratives to register until the old ones had been openly mourned; accepted as dead. We were – are - in love with them, after all. They have made us all who we are. They can’t be discarded just like that.
This is a good point, and true, and perhaps one that we have not paid quite enough attention to. Sloughing off dangerous self-delusion is a long, hard process. It’s the equivalent of psychotherapy for an entire culture: long, hard, expensive, with no fixed end in sight and no guarantee of success. At present, for many people, the alternative to our failing stories seems to be despair and apathy and the contemplation of apocalypse. It doesn’t have to be, but we probably shouldn’t assume it will be easy, or quick, to move on from them. Not as quick as a high speed train, anyway.
After Katrina moved through my area of south Mississippi in 2005, we were without power for two weeks, and the nearby interstate was blocked by downed trees for miles. But we could see the stars, all of them; and there was no roar of traffic to drown out the sound of the wind in the giant pine trees. I miss that wondrous serenity; I yearn for such a time again; I welcome the end of this madding Age with open arms.
Interesting stuff. I find myself wanting to push back against your tone, though; I’m regularly doing the same thing over on John Michael Greer’s blog, where he says similar things like “sloughing off dangerous self-delusion is a long, hard process.” I read much bigging up of the idea of uncertainty – but here, and at JMGs, there are many things you seem very certain of – certain enough that you don’t feel a need to spare the feelings of “so-called environmentalists.” That certainty is most striking where you claim to clearly diagnose dangerous self-delusion in others.
I don’t have any answers to offer; it was always Dark Mountain’s claim not to offer any either that appealed to me. I’m using maths and modelling to tell stories, but I don’t make any claim that it can see further than any other story. However, I do doubt anyone, in the end, is going to have had a monopoly on certainty or self-delusion. Take 20 predictions about the world in 50 years; if one comes to pass, perhaps that person will be hailed as a prophet, but there was always a 5% chance that one would be closest to reality.
What I didn’t get from the article was what you thought transport policy should consider. Or does that question not interest you / do you think its pointless discussing it?
Dan – thanks. But do you want me to provide answers or not? I am confused…
Certainty, certainty. Too much of it can be dangerous, and too little. I am pretty certain our stories are failing, pretty certain that growth and development are hitting buffers that will not allow them to continue as they have been. Climate change and peak oil look pretty certain to have serious impacts on us over the next century, though we have no idea to what extent or exactly what our responses will be.
The premise of Dark Mountain is that the world as we know it is ending, that things are going to get hard and that we ought to face up to what it likely to be on the way. Likely, not certain. No predictions, but certainly some probabilities. On the other hand, I am pretty certain that the mainstream green movement in this country is headed in precisely the wrong direction, almost by accident. High speed rail looks to me like a good answer to the wrong question.
“do you want me to provide answers or not? I am confused…”
Not answers, no. Ideas, yes. I just came away from this piece with “so-called environmentalists” and “dangerously self-deluded” ringing in my head, drowning out the rest of it. A sense of possible futures, and some simple insights like: do you think people will no longer be travelling between London and other parts of the country? On a scale of horse-drawn cart to individual jet-pack, how do you see us moving from place to place in 50 to a hundred years’ time? What factors might be at work (perhaps beyond the obvious ones / or the obvious ones playing out in ways we might not expect…)
I don’t mean to be confrontational, it’s hard having these conversations in comments sections when there’s disagreement. Well – maybe I do mean to be a little confrontational, but I hope to be civil while doing it! I’m still trying to work out the shape of the problem (and I use that word consciously) and I find myself prodding people who are thinking about the same things, in a probably slightly annoying way.
On high-speed rail; in a future world where economic linkages are likely to radically change, I can see a reason why it will be absolutely vital to maintain as many good links between as many cities as possible; those connections will be disproportionately important. I imagine JMG accusing me of wishful thinking; I prefer to think, well – I can add up the numbers and see.
Oo, I could waffle on, I should stop. So p.s. did you see:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rkm3y/Requiem_for_Detroit/
Thanks for this post. The theme of mourning and lament is a very important one in handling ecological crises. I don’t think it has received enough attention or that many models have been put forward. Suppressed grief (as well as the more commonly identified fear and guilt) is often behind denial – and behind confrontational anger too. Our culture has largely forgotten how to grieve well, even at a personal level.
Everyone keeps pointing me towards this Detroit documentary! I’m going to have to go and watch it tonight.
I think it’s good that we prod each other, Dan, even if slightly annoyingly sometimes. I was obviously being confrontational myself; perhaps the language was unhelpful. On the other hand, perhaps it is good to shake things up. I tend to think that the time for tiptoeing around has long past.
I think we are all trying to work out the scale of the problem. And who can say where we will be in 100 years time? From here, jetpacks looks like a fantasy, and so does the kind of mass travel we see today largely for leisure purposes. As much as anything, I think, my bugbear is with the assumptions we are making. When greens support this kind of development reasonably unquestioningly, they support the assumptions behind it, which are clear and stated: this is about boosting growth, competing with other nations and providing ‘consumer choice’. If all of these assumptions rest on a film of oil, they are potentially worthless. And that’s quite apart from another argument: that they ought to change anyway because, regardless of any possible future crises, they create a worse country to live in.
I prefer rail to cars and to flights. In theory, at least, I like trains. People will still be travelling as long as there are people, and trains, if they can still run, are probably a good way to get between cities. But I would question [a] whether this kind of mega-project is even going to be workable in a likely depleted world and [b] whether it is desirable if you remove those assumptions. Why do we need to move so fast? What are the implications? All we hear about is the supposedly good ones. I don’t hear greens, or anyone, for example, expressing concern about what the ability to commute from Scotland to London in three hours might do to local cultural diversity, already inflated house prices and other such things. All I hear is a great ‘raa raa’ about our potential ability to keep expanding without the carbon.
Finally – and I am waffling now – I think a fast-changing world based on crumbling assumptions is likely to be served better by reasonably bottom-up, specific and sensitive solutions to problems, rather than mega-projects which take decades and are designed fairly inflexibly for a particular purpose. What would be the impact of, say, considerably higher oil prices on a high speed rail network? Has anyone considered this?
Your bugbear is very much my own, it saddens me that we’re all rushing around trying to find low carbon solutions to allow us to continue to pursue unsustainable lifestyles, while these same low carbon solutions trash the environment. I think we need to build a new localism but that will take a long time given that people ‘need’ their long haul holidays and think that recycling their newspapers is all they need to do to mitigate the damage their lifestyle has on the environment. I’m looking forward to the Detroit documentary
I too worry that by turning so much land into a massive windfarm, we will disfigure large parts of the beauty that inspires us to be environmentalists in the first place.
Much contemporary green thinking can be traced back to the mid-20th century or before. My copy of Frank Fraser Darling’s back-to-the-land classic, Island Farm, is dated 1943 – bang in the middle of WW2. Ideas about simple living that might have stacked up under WW2 rationing don’t add up given the consumer drive that followed. The green idyll was concieved on something not that far removed from a human scale, but is now being expected to deliver on a mass consumer industrial scale. No-can-do – thus the shrieks of green torture at every turn.
The problem is that nearly all the debate in the mainstream, including the green mainstream, seeks (to borrow from Reaganomics) what we might call supply-side solutions to the carbon problem. How can we achieve a painless transition with sustained growth? The problem, as David MacKay’s “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air” points out, is that the sums don’t add up. No-can-do. But nobody wants to mention consumerism, or its product when multiplied by population. No-can-do (politically). In other words, nobody wants to look at demand-side solutions – how do we cut demand. How do we change our very basis as a carbon/energy driven society. Why not … because that demands examination of the inner life, and inner growth. Not a vote-catcher in a hedonistic world.
Your example of the high-speed railway line is an excellent one. The Booz Allen Hamilton report for the DfT made public in the middle of last August concluded that if the line ran only from London-Manchester, the embodied carbon cost would never repaid in its lifetime, even if it stimulated a 100% shift from air to rail. Extending it to Scotland would repay carbon footprint in 60 years only if it shifted the rail:air market share from the current 15% to 62%. And then there’s the economic cost: the BBC website (26-8-09) pitched it at £34 billion extending to Scotland. That is the same as the entire UK budget for Scotland in 2009, or entire UK defence budget.
As a nation we chose to spend post-war prosperity on consumer trash and Trident submarines. Other nations did likewise. Now, like spoiled children who cannot believe they’ve been caught, we refuse to face the music. Short of a massive technological break-through in fusion, or mainstream climate science being proved wrong, we’re pretty stuffed, if you ask me. Probably not as fast as Lovelock or Hansen make out, more likely at the speed the Met Office scientists are seeing things unfolding at in their current measurements.
That actually gives me hope (no kidding!). It makes it slow enough to reflect deeply on the human condition. To do so at this juncture in human evolutionary history, indeed, at this point in the evolution of life on Earth where we can actually communicate globally as the overall human condition. We can either despair at what is unfolding, or we can see this as an opportunity for painful consciousness transformation on a multi-generational timescale. Despair or awakening? You decide….
Alastair
“To do so at this juncture in human evolutionary history, indeed, at this point in the evolution of life on Earth where we can actually communicate globally as the overall human condition.”
In darker moments, I imagine a God that created a nature where animals have to survive often by catching the babies of other animals and feeding them to their young. If they *don’t* do that, their own young starve. If one were to buy the concept of a conscious, deliberative deity, that would be an especially twisted world to choose to create.
Equally, I wonder if we’ve been set up – just at the moment where global communication might allow us to sees ourselves in enough clarity to realise our connection to each other, everything collapses and that vision disappears, leaving us all as isolated as ever. It kind of makes sense, if there is in fact a God that likes playing with things for a cheap laugh like a child pulling the legs off a crane fly.
*slap!* S’alright, I’ve pulled myself together now.
[...] was particularly struck by the discussions following from Paul’s post about high-speed rail – and by the picture painted in Dan’s most recent comment: I wonder if we’ve been set [...]
Thanks all for a very interesting, unfolding discussion.
Alistair: do we have to choose between despair and awakening, or can we be doing both? The respondent Paul mentions, who flags up the need to mourn our old myths properly, has a point: just pushing them aside won’t stop their forms, assumptions and underlying psychic props popping up to hold us to ransom. At the same time, I’m personally frustrated by a generalising excess of despair, which doesn’t give any credit to all the good work folks are doing right now to create change.
Dan: you write: ‘just at the moment where global communication might allow us to sees ourselves in enough clarity to realise our connection to each other, everything collapses and that vision disappears, leaving us all as isolated as ever.’ Depends whether civilisational collapse will be like an earthquake – total destruction accomplished in seconds – or whether the duration of this change is slower, less immediately perceptible, and – crucially – uneven in its impact for different communities in different regions of the world. Linked to this, I’d question the polarity you create between a sudden awareness of global interconnection and its total loss, forcing us into isolation. It’s a seductive image, but will the reality be so tidy? Based on my admittedly limited knowledge of first nation tribal communities around the world, many of them seem able to combine a relatively more localised existence with a strong sense of connection, through knowing that locality, to a wider world, nature and the cosmos. Something we could re-learn from there, perhaps. Similarly, as Paul observes: humans have travelled for pretty much as far back as we have evidence of humans, and this is likely to continue, even if our options for resource-heavy, tech-assisted transport become restricted.
As Alistair and Paul observe, a key issue is questioning the kinds of demands that drive dinosaur imperatives like the high speed rail link. Next to ‘why do we need to travel so far, and so quickly’, we could ask how far we actually need global interconnectedness, of the kind that relies upon complex, resource-heavy, high-tech systems to produce and sustain it. At the moment we’re connected whether we like it or not, enjoying the benefits as well as taxed by the problems, and regarding awareness of this connection as an ethical duty – keeping abreast of global events. Yet, assuming that one facet of civilisational collapse will be the gradual breakdown of the systems that sustain global interconnection, and that we may be compelled – whether we want to or not – to sustain ourselves more locally (at least in terms of food, clothing and shelter), one consequence might be having to learn to let go of our demands for, and dependence upon, global interconnection in the highly tech-mediated forms in which we currently experience it. Maybe it boils down to reflecting on demands we can let go of, and entitlements we are bound to feel are being snatched away from us.
The Green Movement’s support of such projects could herald a much darker meaning. I point you towards Johann Hari’s recent article “The Wrong Kind Of Green”:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hari
Be a real shame if British green is going the way so many of America’s supposed protectors have done in seeking the other green, Money.
Excuse me if I sound prissy, Paul, but using the term “creaming themselves/their pants” smacks of some of the nastier commentators, in particularly it reminds me of the egregious Sunny Hundal. Or is it standard terminology now, and I’m just an old fuddy-duddy?
Tendryakov – well, I certainly don’t want this website to sound anything like Liberal Conspiracy. Perish the thought. Possibly an unfortunate turn of phrase. Though I didn’t mention pants…
I’m not sure what ’standard terminology’ is these days, but I’d guess it was much cruder than this!