Testing yourself on a desert island
Why catastrophism is bad for the environment
“Wilson!” On Tuesday night I sat down with the dogs for an opportune half hour of Tom Hanks’ Cast Away before bed, and ended up finishing the whole damn thing after midnight. It’s a fine film but the only thing relevant here is that Hanks was a castaway for four years on a Pacific Island.
That got me cross. It could have been me! It was a childhood dream and a life-long fantasy to be marooned on just such an island. I could have survived better than he did. I would have constructed a superior campsite, used the lens from his Maglite torch to start a fire. I would have done this and would have done that.
No matter that Hanks ended up almost mad, almost dead, and that I would probably have ended up the same way. I’ve always had this strange little survivalist chunk inside me, probably from my days as a boy scout in New Zealand learning how to make gorse flower tea or building bivouacs in Northumbrian forests. And I’ve always wanted that survivalist chunk to be tested.1
Which brings me back to this Substack. This instinct, this need to be tested, is an important force, and something that I believe plays a large part in the direction of the environmental movement (for the bad, as you ask).
It’s my contention that most people with any life force in them want to be tested, especially as those of us in modern, rich countries live lives that are bafflingly safe by historical standards.
This was certainly the case for me as a journalist. I spent lots of time in places that had been at war or were about to go back to war: knocking around the Balkans, drinking wine in Georgia just before the Russian invasion, hanging around with private military operatives in Sierra Leone. I thought I’d do a rather grand job of reporting from a place where a war was actually happening, but it never happened. Whether by bad timing or BBC managerial idiocy I never got the chance to be tested, which still grates.
But what really supercharges this desire to be tested is when you’ve staked enough on an outcome to really want it to happen, even if that outcome is something that you outwardly say is what you’re trying to resist.
Think of true survivalists, up in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with their stocks of beans and ammunition and beard grooming kits. What starts off as a strategy for surviving in case the federal government exceeds its constitutional power and the balloon goes up, becomes a stake so high and visible that it’s only justifiable when the feds execute an internal coup and the balloon goes up.
Then look at hard core environmentalists. When you’re screaming about sacrifice or doom and worry that the sacrifice isn’t coming, isn’t there a weird itch to see at least some evidence of the doom? If nothing else it’s about justifying yourself and proving that you were right all along. Humans are like that.
In environmental communications terms this is a bad thing as it involves doubling down on the type of doom scenario that is so counterproductive (see my last Substack for details). It results in an almost pornographic appreciation of apocalyptic visions such as those portrayed in The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells or Nomad Century by Gaia Vince (or, god forbid, anything by Naomi Klein).
Remember, it’s not that climate change isn’t bad, or that we aren’t risking destroying large parts of the world if we don’t act quickly. It’s that these visions both overplay on the downside and offer nothing that’s going to galvanise the kind of mass political will – backed by broad public support – that’s going to get us out of the death spiral. (The world gets that climate change is happening; just show us how to deal with it without destroying everything we hold dear.) They can also overrun the science that they’re based on.
In essence this is simply a post about an unfortunate human tendency to want to be tested, that then drives unhelpful dynamics in the environmental action community.
Incidentally, there’s some interplay between what I’m talking about here and interesting analysis of findings that ‘progressive’ political leanings tend to go hand-in-hand with doomy, miserabilist and neurotic outlooks on life. Matt Yglesias wrote an excellent post about it: Why are young liberals so depressed? This is bad news, not just for the mental health of those involved, but for the environmental cause that is so infected by catastrophic narratives.
So what’s the answer?
First – as ever – recognise the problem, and stop the race to the extremes. Second, instead of painting pictures of doom, paint convincing pictures of the alternative. I’m not talking about ignoring the situation, but about recognising the solutions and the good and bad dynamics that are likely.
The Economist article that I mentioned a while ago, about the opportunities of a whole new clean energy economy in the North Sea basin, is a good example of the former. The same imaginations that conjure up visions of hell can instead conjure up visions of what isn’t just likely, but can also galvanise people and politicians into taking effective action and embarking on enormous shifts to clean energy economies.
Recognising the dynamics that are likely means things like looking at what a 1.5 or 2 degree world might mean for migration patterns, rather than the 4 degree world that fires Nomad Century’s apocalyptic vision. What happens to agriculture? To water scarcity? These are proper concerns, but they’re crowded out when the extreme-climate-vision engine gets fired up.
Resist the urge to be tested. Just as I did after watching Tom Hanks in Cast Away. I went to bed after midnight and thanked my lucky stars I was in a proper bed.
I’m Nicholas Walton, a recovering journalist who works in think tank comms (WRI and ECFR) and writes books. I live in Italy and can be reached at nicholaswalton99@gmail.com. Il Guffo Scorbutico is my free Substack and it’s mainly about where communications and journalism fits in to the climate challenge. At some point I’ll also write about things like understanding countries by walking across them, and anything else that takes my fancy. Thanks for reading.
Back in 1999 I did manage to get accidently marooned on an island in Chile. But instead of building a shelter and gnawing on live rabbits I found somebody who could give me a bed for the night and then spent the next morning on a rainy beach until I managed to flag down a passing fishing boat. Hardly survivalism.