2. thoughts
• Crisis of vision for environmental change
• Crumbling environmental visions
• Sustainability as ’impoverished utopia’ (Garforth, 2006)
• Climate change: technocratising intellectual monopoly over environmental future
slowly loosing its momentum
• Vacuum filled by a coming together of disturbing environmental visions
(the apocalypse, Malthus and the climate)
– Longing for the political: post‐political condition begs for politics
– Apocalyptic imaginaries as main vehicle
– Return of anti‐humanism and the staging of a Malthusian moment
– The left incorporates what was once regarded reactionary
3. Apocalyptic aphrodisiac
The apocalypse is part of o
ur ideological baggage. It
is aphrodisiac, nightmare, a
commodity like any
other. You can call it a met
aphor for the collapse of
capitalism, which as we all k
now has been imminent
for more than a century. W
e come up against it in the
most varied shapes and gui
ses: as warning finger and
scientific forecast, collective
fiction and sectarian
rallying cry, as product of t
he leisure industry, as
superstition, as vulgar myt
hology, as a riddle, a kick,
a joke, a projection. It is eve
r present, but never
’actual’: a second reality, a
n image that we construct
for ourselves, an incessant p
roduction of our fantasy,
Chesley Bonestell the catastrophe in mind
HM Enzensberger 1978
r and
Our collective dreams of fea
vy,
desire weigh at least as hea
probably heavier, than our
theories and analyses
4. Making sense
– Fear of ’the end’ is socially constructed and then manipulated by those who seek
to benefit from it (Altheide, 2002)
– ’Nebulous anxiety’ (Bourke, 2005)
– ’Crisis of causality’ (Francois Ewald):
hurricane drought flood heat cold fire tsunami...
– ’Ecology of fear’ (Mike Davis): fear becomes the norm, exceptional risks become
normal risks
– General shift from a fearsome life towards a life with fearsome media (Grupp 2003)
– Dystopia itself, rather than what dystopia is a response to, is the distinct problem
of our times (Furedi 2007)
– Apocalypse as a way of life: mobilising power hollowed out
as a global
crisis has p lagued the world
”Environmental d it haunts
e mid-twe ntieth century an
awareness since th le first became aware of the
eop g,
us today. When p , for example through Silent Sprin
isis ed
enormity of the cr with alarm. Today, we are numb
ded it’s bad but
1961, they respon and people know
essages, f the planet.
by apocalyptic m e deterioration o
to accept th have become pa
rt
they have come
e nv ironmental crisis
Apocalypse and
ryday life”
and parcel of eve
F Buell 2004
5. Historical classics of environmental dystopia
• First written account
John, Book of Revelation
• First English novelist account
D Defoe, A Visitation of the Plague, 1665
• First scientific account
R Malthus, 1798
• First socialist account
F Engels, 1848
• First literary accounts
J Carey, The Intellectual and the Masses, 1992
7. From climate concern to rumbling climate cataclysms
• OPPOSITE OF SCIENCE
Post‐politics includes all in a consensual pluralist
order and excludes radically those who posit
themselves outside the consensus.
Those who disag
ions ree with the
”reducing greenhouse gas emiss l
ateria
existence of glo
bal warming
will contribute to the m are ”intellectua
lly, politically,
from mankind’s
salvation of the planet and morally ban
krupt”
greed and indifference”
Al Gore, 1995
John Houghton, IPCC, 1996
g
“Global warming is to . The global warmin
o serious for the world
longer to split into oppo any “The science is clear
sing factions on it” debate is over”
Tony Blair, 2005 Arnold Schwarzenegger, 2006
8. The existing notion that environmental
problems are scientific conundrums that
can ultimately be resolved through the
application of expert knowledge ignores
the incontrovertible reality that these
issues are situated at the intersection of
inseparable social and technoscientific
systems
Maurie Cohen, 2007
• POLITICS OF THE STATUS QUO
– Forecloses the articulation of divergent, conflicting and alternative
trajectories of future environmental possibilities
– Nature and its problems increasingly appropriated by a techno‐political elite
– End of environmental choices, end of bottom‐up imagination of
environmental futures
– One apocalyptic future, to be avoided, and then everything will be the way it
is. Does not promise change whatsoever
• END OF SOCIAL ANALYSIS
– United humankind versus Apocalypse
9. Today: dystopia reproduces deeply uneven
colonial, sexist, racist relations
– Production of knowledge is firmly (not exclusively) in the hands of a white, western,
male (US‐dominated) scientific community
– The saviours of the earth and humankind:
• The politician, the producer, the prince, and Pete Postlethwaite
• The soldier, the scientist
of
evise a way
ss we can d
– The saved: the poor, women, third world, children
Unle the
e CO2 from
– The return of the ’strong man’ (S Faludi) removing th re, we will lose
e
sph
Earth atmo rth.
ecies on Ea he
half of all sp an stop t
Then w hether we c mankind,
ction of
virtual extin jury is still
well, wor ryingly, the
too
out on that
10. Today: apocalyptic Malthusianism World faces 'perfect
storm' of problems by
“…in a few decades the Earth could cease to be 2030
the habitat of seven billion humans; it will save
itself as it dispatches all but a few of those who John Beddington, 2009, government’s chief scientific advisor
From James Loveloc
now live in what will become the barren regions.
We in Britain live on one of the safe havens
where life can continue in the heat age.”
“But what if at some time in the next few years There are far too many people
we realise, as we did in 1939, that democracy living in Britain already. Once our
population passed the 20 million
had temporarily to be suspended and we had to level around 1850, it became too
accept a disciplined regime that saw the UK as a numerous. We have long passed the
legitimate but limited safe haven for civilisation. line of sustainability. As for the
Orderly survival requires an unusual degree of planet, its maximum sustainable
human understanding and leadership and may population is no more than 3 billion,
require, as in war, the suspension of democratic I would say.
government for the duration of the survival
emergency.
“I suspect that effective action to sustain this
island community will come from some form of
internal tribal coherence and rare leadership, not Aubrey Manning
from international or European good intentions.”
UK population must fall to
James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 2009
30m
(He nominates Sir Crispin Tickell as the new environmental
authoritarian leader) Jonathon Porritt, chair Sustainable Development Commission
11. OPTIMUM POPULATION TRUST
David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, Paul Ehrlich, Aubrey Manning, Jonathon Porritt, Crispin Tickell, ...
• UK population policy: 30 million people
– zero net migration
– fewer economic migrants
– encourage parents to stop at 2 children
– reduce unplanned pregnancies among teenagers
• UK fertility policy
– new guidelines for the portrayal of sex by broadcasters, aimed at countering the glamorization of sex and
motherhood among vulnerable groups
– teach people not to have sex yet
• UK migration policies
– reintroduction of UK border controls
– tougher penalties for employing illegal labour
– tougher penalties for assisting fraudulent asylum claims
– no amnesty for illegal immigrants, deportation
– universities should raise fees for overseas students
Apocalyptic merger of deeply misanthropic, authoritarian,
reactionary, conservative, post-democratic, xenophobic,
elitist, approach to the environment
12. • “Babies in Dakar, Senegal. The cost‐benefit analysis commissioned by the OPT claims that
family planning is the cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions.” (The Guardian, 3 Dec 09)
13. One apocalyptic future
”Follow me a
nd I will lead
from the aby you away
ss. We will s
everything t ave
he way it is”
– Nature and its problems slowly monopolised by a techno‐political elite
– End of environmental democracy,
– End of environmental imaginaries by the people,
– Foreclosure of environmental futures,
– Appropriation of reactionary, Malthusian, discourses by the Left
– One natural apocalyptic future, to be avoided, and if so, everything will be the way it
is.
– What does environmental engagement mean beyond avoiding the apocalypse?
s it tends to throw
m analytical thought, a
hor promises relief fro idden sign of an
The apocalyptic metap ing is conceived as a h
the same pot... Everyth tion damages
everything together in tend ency to hasty generalisa
strophe in general. The
imaginary totality: cata t that we still have left
that residu al power of clear though
Enzensberger 1978
