Eco-grief isn't giving up

When it comes to the climate and ecological crisis, at what point do you give up? With warming crashing past 1.5°C, emissions at all-time highs, the roll back of net zero policies, and a US President intent doubling down on fossil fuels, when do you simply throw in the towel and admit defeat. We lost.

There have been some quite heated answers to such question in response to David Suzuki’s interview with Politico. He did not say he was giving up, but he was clearly admitting defeat when it comes to our efforts to avoid dangerous climate change. This has produced numerous takes. Of those, I would recommend Ketan Joshi’s who can be relied upon to make sense. He offers a compelling argument that giving up is the last thing we should be doing because we are not surrendering ourselves to some inanimate force of nature, but a highly unjust fossil fuelled political system.

Here I want to dig a little deeper into despair because of a conversation I had with Jonathon Porritt last week. I managed to catch Jonathan after his attendance at Exeter’s Global Tipping Points Conference (it was in turn a manic, terrifying, and inspirational event). Earlier in the day Jonathan had been in a ‘fireside’ chat with Paul Polman. Jonathan is one of the elders of the environmental movement putting in a half century of activism: Co-Chair of the Green Party (1980-83), Director of Friends of the Earth (1984-90) and in 1996, co-founded Forum for the Future. Paul is the ex-CEO of Unilever and the two spent a decade working together as Jonathan headed up the sustainability advisory board for Unilever.

The fireside chat itself ended up being a sort of performative art. Jonathan was increasingly animated and passionate about the need for deep, systemic change to capitalism, while Paul’s subdued metronomic responses centred around the need for CEO’s to improve business performance and environmental action. At the end, in a state of some exasperation, Jonathan stated that our current economic and political systems had failed, and what we were facing was some sort of revolution, probably driven by the global youth.

Much later that day I sat down next to Jonathan and asked him about this (I have not asked Jonathan to provide any input into this article, nor have I checked this copy with him - any errors and omissions are mine).

There were two things I wanted to ask him about. The first was what I took as a clear admission of defeat with respect to getting capitalism to behave a little less like a monstrous sociopath. I asked him how did he manage to nurture the feeble tendrils of hope over all those decades. His response rocked me. Because he said that there was a time when these were not tendrils but deep roots. The Earth Summit, the formation of the UNFCC, the IPCC, politicians across the world indicating that they wanted to ramp up ambition. For a while, he dared to dream that things could change for the better.

Ecogrief is a psychological condition in which a person experiences profound sadness in response to the destruction of the natural world. The way Jonathan spoke made me think of the grief that comes from seeing hope die. The annihilation of coral reefs, the destruction of rain forests, the mass extinctions, the climate-induced extreme weather and all the attendant suffering and death - this was avoidable. Not all of it - the devastation of the natural world began with the advent of civilisation thousands of years ago - but we have swung a wrecking ball through biosphere and climate since the 1990s. We could have taken a different path - a path of fairness, justice, compassion. We didn’t. We fucked it up.

These were the vibes I got from the Suzuki interview. He has been politically engaged for decades. He has watched time and time again right wing fossil fuelled political forces win. And now Trump has just passed his Big Beautiful Bill which guts renewable energy systems, along with climate and weather science. It’s not just unhinged - it’s profoundly morally wrong. It is evil. I’m in no position to lecture David or Jonathan on how to feel about any of this. It seems clear to me that Jonathan despairs about our industrialised societies. But he still turns up. He still does these events, still goes to the workshops, still cajoles and lobbies and uses whatever influence he has.

The second question I asked Jonathan was about his prognosis of revolution. It’s easy to agree that’s spiralling inequality and increasing destruction and suffering from climate change cannot continue indefinitely. Something is going to break. Jonathan centred the role of the youth. I take his reasoning to be that given they are the ones at the sharp end, they have the most to invest in doing the work to change current systems. It’s also the case that most social movements have been driven by the youth. Such talk can make me nervous. Because if we are not careful, we dump two injustices on young people. First, we ruin the Earth system with profligate consumption, and then we assume they will clean up not just the pollution but the political mess we have left behind. I must stress that I do not attribute any such views to Jonathan.

Some of my students have been arrested and imprisoned because of peaceful non-violent direct action. This is the result of the criminalisation of protest in the UK which is utterly shameful. I appreciate that we all have different roles to play in trying to get politicians to act, and that not everyone can put their liberty on the line. But I am profoundly uncomfortable extolling young people to lead a revolution when there is very little wider support for their actions and they face imprisonment for years. If that sounds patronising, then guilty as charged! I feel deeply responsible for my students, and I would rather err on the side of being a overbearing square than urging people to act in ways that are harmful to them.

Young people should be the last on the barricades. It’s my and older generations that set the house on fire. Unfortunately, too many of us are more concerned about the comfort of our own surroundings - new conservatories, loft extensions, and kitchen refurbs - than providing a liveable future for our children. Lurking underneath the statement ‘people do not want to do things differently like fly less or eat less meat or…’ you can find the sentiment that they do not want to do things differently. Well I’m sorry but you are going to have to. That includes getting involved in the mess of politics.

Perhaps if we had listen to Jonathan and David et al thirty years ago then we could have incrementally phased out fossil fuels and gradually reformed our food systems. Perhaps my Marxist friends are right and efforts to reform capitalism were doomed. In any event we failed and now we - not just young people, not just abstract future generation - but me, you and everyone else need to deal with the consequences and start taking effective action.

If we need to recognise failure to do that, then bring it on.