I’m not sure what ’standard terminology’ is these days, but I’d guess it was much cruder than this!

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.

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.

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.

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

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?