Climate, technology and chaos Blog

There are at least two ways of looking at the planet: one as isolated being, and one as relational being in which the planet exists in the cosmos, in relation to the sun, the solar system, vast emptiness and so on.

With the first view you can imagine manipulating and dominating the planet, because that is all there is. With the second the planet is what keeps you alive in the vast emptiness of space; without it we cannot survive, it is something that needs tending and repairing as best we can. It is our vehicle of life. There is no practical alternative, we cannot all move to Mars.

You cannot do politics the way we normally do politics with the planet because it does not negotiate – it just acts. In particular it has no truck with authoritarian politics, where people tell others what will happen and there is no negotiation or little interest in the way things work, because an ideology is more important than checking if that ideology works. I suspect the less well the ideology works, the stronger this tendency can be when bonded to group loyalty.

One problem with Republicans is not that there are not Republicans who don’t admit climate change, but it seems far more necessary for them to abuse Democrats than to discuss practical solutions. This is probably because they need to demonstrate that they are really Republicans to other Republicans. If we were of a particular brand of irony, we would call this virtue signalling.

Being virtuous in the face of destruction is not particularly useful, especially when that virtue favours destruction, but at least you know you are not betraying your identity group.

However, while it may not be possible to tell the planet anything, we can try to listen to the planet, paying attention to what is happening, and attempting to perceive what the results of our actions are with the planet. This is almost the exact opposite of geoengineering… Listening to the planet and using basic logic, we cannot keep dumping waste which cannot be absorbed and reprocessed by the system – and this involves changing our economic and manufacturing processes to change the waste we produce.

Tags: Anthropocene, climate change, geoengineering, knowledge, politics

This entry was posted on November 4, 2018 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.