Catastrophism

The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth

Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen, James Davis

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781604868043
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Umwelt- & Energiepolitik

We live in catastrophic times. The world is reeling from the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, with the threat of further meltdowns ever-looming. Global warming and myriad dire ecological disasters worsen—with little if any action to halt them—their effects rippling across the planet in the shape of almost biblical floods, fires, droughts, and hurricanes. Governments warn that there is no alternative to the bitter medicine they prescribe—or risk devastating financial or social collapse. The right, whether religious or secular, views the present as catastrophic and wants to turn the clock back. The left fears for the worst, but hopes some good will emerge from the rubble. Visions of the apocalypse and predictions of impending doom abound. Across the political spectrum, a culture of fear reigns.?

Catastrophism explores the politics of apocalypse—on the left and right, in the environmental movement—and examines why the lens of catastrophe can distort our understanding of the dynamics at the heart of these numerous disasters—and fatally impede our ability to transform the world. Lilley, McNally, Yuen, and Davis probe the reasons why catastrophic thinking is so prevalent, and challenge the belief that it is only out of the ashes that a better society may be born. The authors argue that those who care about social justice and the environment should jettison doomsaying—even as it relates to indisputably apocalyptic climate change. Far from calling people to arms, they suggest, catastrophic fear often results in passivity and paralysis—and, at worst, reactionary politics.?

CHAPTER ONE

The Politics of Failure Have Failed: The Environmental Movement and Catastrophism

Eddie Yuen

THE SPECTRE OF APOCALYPSE HAUNTS THE WORLD TODAY. EVERY POLITical, cultural, and aesthetic field that we look at is replete with talk of catastrophe. This poses a particular challenge for environmentalists and scientists who are tasked with raising awareness about what is unquestionably a genuinely catastrophic moment in human and planetary history. Of all of the forms of catastrophic discourse on offer, the collapse of ecological systems is unique in that it is definitively verified by a consensus within the scientific community. The growing body of evidence is alarming. In addition to the well-known crisis of climate change, leading scientists have listed eight other planetary boundaries that must not be crossed if the earth is to remain habitable for humans and many other species.¹ These interrelated calamities include ocean acidification, the disruption of the nitrogen cycle, and the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, all of which are truly apocalyptic.² It is absolutely urgent to address this by effectively and rapidly changing the direction of human society. Unfortunately, discussion of this crisis and how to tackle it is often dominated by an undifferentiated catastrophist discourse that presumes apocalyptic warnings will lead to political action and hinders rather than helps the efforts of activists, scholars, scientists, and concerned people in general in bringing about the dramatic changes required.

In a world system saturated with instrumental, spurious, and sometimes maniacal versions of catastrophism—including right-wing racial paranoia, religious millenarianism,³ liberal panics over fascism, leftist fetishization of capitalist collapse, capitalist invocation of the “shock doctrine,” and pop culture cliché—what is the best way to articulate the all-too-real evidence for accelerating environmental catastrophe?⁴ Is there, in fact, an inherently liberatory or radical politics that stems from a recognition of ecological catastrophe? If there is not, what effects do catastrophist rhetorics have on radical environmental movement building? As this essay will argue, even when dire environmental prognostications are accurate—and the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that they are—it is often the case that knowledge of “the facts” does not lead to an increase in political engagement. Given how high the stakes are, it is vitally important that environmental and climate movements understand the problems with catastrophism.

The foundational problematic of this book is the question of politicization: what narrative strategies are most likely to generate effective and radical social movements?

This essay will examine the main reasons that environmental catastrophism has not led to more dynamic social movements; these include catastrophe fatigue, the paralyzing effects of fear, the pairing of overwhelmingly bleak analysis with inadequate solutions, and a misunderstanding of the process of politicization. It will also explore capitalism’s relationship to catastrophe and how the effects of environmental crises differ in their impact depending on place, race, gender, and class. The chapter examines how the long history of Malthusianism and previous false prophecies—doomsday predictions that did not come true—have shaped the current discourse. It explores the ways in which catastrophism may serve the interests of corporations. It concludes that unless some differentiation is made between antagonistic human communities, classes, and interests, environmental catastrophism may end up exacerbating the very problems to which it seeks to call attention.

We must start this inquiry by understanding that the veracity of apocalyptic claims about ecological collapse are separate from their effects on social, political, and economic life. One recent study found that, for many Americans, the more that is known about global warming, the less “personal responsibility” people feel for acting upon the crisis.⁵ After surveying nearly 1,100 people, the authors state that “more informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming.” They conclude that, “high levels of confidence in scientists among Americans led to a decreased sense of responsibility for global warming.” Unfortunately, this evidence shows that once convinced of apocalyptic scenarios, many Americans become more apathetic. These studies illuminate basic political problems with the catastrophist rhetoric of the scientific and environmental communities. Why might their doomsday messages not be generating the desired results? This chapter is organized around several responses to this question.

Normalization of Catastrophe

Western discourses regarding the relation to nature have frequently swung on a pendulum between cornucopian optimism and triumphalism on one pole and unrelieved pessimism not only of our powers to escape from the clutches of naturally imposed limits but even to be autonomous beings outside of nature-driven necessities at the other pole…. There is … nothing more ideologically powerful for capitalist interests to have at hand than unconstrained technological optimism and doctrines of progress ineluctably coupled to a doom-saying Malthusianism that can conveniently be blamed when, as inevitably they do, things go wrong.

—David Harvey⁶

A common starting point for environmental catastrophism is that capitalist modernity is the best of all possible worlds, but is currently facing some exceptional problems. In this view, once these potentially disastrous problems are recognized, a combination of scientific innovation and popular belt-tightening should make possible a new period of growth without any fundamental changes.⁷ Rather than seeing the various ecological crises converging now as exceptional, we must understand them as part of an inherently catastrophic mode of producing and reproducing social life. We must not take for granted the grinding, quotidian catastrophe of capitalism during the times when we are faced with exceptional calamities. This is especially true in our understanding of ecology, which has been profoundly shaped by the last five centuries of enclosure and commodification, a process that has accelerated in recent years.

Another pole of environmental catastrophism is that the current crisis is endemic to “civilization,” or human nature itself. In some iterations, this also means that there is no differentiation between types of civilization, modes of production, culture, or technology. In some of these perspectives, all human activity is equally destructive, whether the mass extinctions caused to the “new lands” of Oceania and the Americas by Polynesians and Paleo-Indian or the current corporate ransacking of the planet by Chevron, Freeport-McMoRan, and RTZ.⁸ This deeply pessimistic “primitivist” catastrophism places the problem too far upstream to speak meaningfully to the current crisis. The paradox of today’s environmental crisis is that it is so tragically preventable: the great majority of capitalist production and consumption is patently unnecessary.

In the absence of a critique of the specific political and economic system in which the current ecological crisis is situated, the only solutions on offer will be moralistic and technocratic.⁹ Worse still, there is a real danger that right-wing and nationalist solutions to the environmental crisis will become increasingly appealing. For these reasons, the stakes of accurately understanding the relationship between ecological and capitalist crisis could not be higher.

In her classic 1993 polemic against “apocalyptic environmentalism,” geographer Cindi Katz argued that a politics of fear is rooted in the basic dichotomy of devastation or salvation, and ultimately breeds hopelessness. Overly generalized discussions of ecological collapse, for all their ostensible good intentions, tend to foreclose agency by functioning as a “totalizing narrative to end all totalizing narratives.”¹⁰ Historicizing the crisis does not diminish it. As Katz argues “contemporary problems are so serious that rendering them apocalyptic obscures their political ecology—their sources, their political, economic and social dimensions.” Again, the issue is not the veracity of the science, but rather the larger politics within which the science is couched.

When we analyze the prevailing discourses on ecological collapse from an anticapitalist perspective, we better understand why many attempts at mass organizing have heretofore fallen flat. By pairing catastrophic information with glaringly inadequate solutions, the (majority of) scientific and environmental communities have offered little to inspire mobilization. Popular environmental films such as An Inconvenient Truth follow compelling evidence for ecological collapse with woefully inadequate injunctions to green consumption or lobbying of political representatives. The underlying message is that the only available form of political agency lies in being an individual consumer within the marketplace. For the same reason that a near plurality of Americans does not vote, ordinary people don’t see “consuming virtuously” as a plausible solution. After all, why buy more expensive toilet paper or spend hours of unpaid labor separating trash when BP went back to making profits with oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico not long after the Deep Water Horizon disaster? At best, such individualized response to the environmental crisis leads to existential, expressive, and voluntarist politics. A more common outcome, however, seems to be acute disempowerment and disengagement with environmental politics altogether. It is no wonder that the fear-based appeals to catastrophism favored by many environmentalists and scientists have not had the desired effects.

None of this critique is meant to disparage the remarkable work done by many environmental organizations, networks, and activists over the last few decades on issues ranging from anti-mining and anti-dam campaigns, conservation biology and biodiversity, protection of old growth and contiguous eco-systems, struggles to regulate and ultimately abolish toxic, nuclear and fossil fuel production, and many other issues. Were it not for this work, there would truly be no hope, and it is worth mentioning that environmental and climate justice perspectives are steadily gaining traction in internal environmental debates.

The Apocalypse Has Already Been Televised

It is a paradox of the twenty-first century that just as the contours of multipronged environmental crisis are coming into sharp focus, the world, and especially the United States, may be suffering from “catastrophe fatigue.” Apocalyptic imagery has saturated popular culture for decades, but came to a boil with the “rapture” of 2011, the apocryphal “Mayan” prophecy of 2012, racist anxiety over the erosion of white majorities in the Global North, theocratic panic over the changing gender order, the ongoing financial meltdown, and the endless stream of “end-times” movies and video games.¹¹ The ubiquity of apocalypse in recent decades has led to a banalization of the concept—it is seen as normal, expected, in a sense comfortable. When a crisis does occur, people immediately reference it to movies, and there are now CGI images that serve as reference points for any conceivable disaster. Environmentalists and scientists must compete in this marketplace of catastrophe, and find themselves struggling to be heard above the din.

In this crowded field, increased awareness of environmental crisis will not likely translate into a more ecological lifestyle, let alone an activist orientation against the root causes of environmental degradation. In fact, right-wing and nationalist environmental politics have much more to gain from an embrace of catastrophism. This is especially true if the invocation of fear is the primary rhetorical device. Fear, as Rainer Werner Fassbinder pointed out, can “eat the soul.” Fear is not a stable place to organize a radical politics, but it can be a very effective platform from which to launch a campaign of populist xenophobia or authoritarian technocracy under the sign of scarcity. Needless to say, fear is a logical and probably inevitable response to any person fully realizing the dire condition of the planet and its eco-systems right now. Emerging social movements will have to address this fear through a range of creative, directly democratic, and collective projects. This project is urgent, as environmental fears can be easily manipulated by capital and the state. Naomi Klein has famously described how the threat of economic disaster is a prerequisite for the “Shock Doctrine,” and it is not hard to envision environmental correlates of this. An undifferentiated narrative of environmental doom is disempowering and encourages feelings of helplessness.

One useful model for comparison is the “scared straight” programs designed to steer teenagers away from drugs, gangs, and crime. Despite their fearsome reputation, these programs have been about as effective in intimidating working class youth from “high-risk” activity as abstinence only education has been in preventing teenage sex or DARE programs have been in curtailing drug use.¹² Such fear-based approaches fail in part because they are focused on changing individual behavior in the absence of structural critiques of the root causes of the problem (environmental crisis, addiction, crime, poverty, alienation, etc.). What good are moralistic and therapeutic proscriptions to social problems in the absence of more substantive, structural approaches to the dangers facing working class youth? By analogy, even if Americans were “scared straight” by Al Gore on the issue of climate change, what solutions does An Inconvenient Truth offer? The injunction to consume less or better (like the appeals to youth to refrain from sex, drugs, and gangs) is fundamentally at odds with the logic of post-Fordist capitalist culture that celebrates hedonistic accumulation unmoored from any “work ethic.” For the earnest green consumer calculating his or her carbon footprint or the inner city youth wearing their chastity bracelets and “Just Say No” T-shirts, the prospects of “relapse” are quite high.

Why do most fear-mongering and doomsday scenarios have little to no politicizing effect at all? According to the aforementioned surveys, once convinced of catastrophic climate change, many Americans become more apathetic. To understand this, we must look to the conditions of atomization, depoliticization, powerlessness, and alienation that afflict the U.S. body politic generally. In these climate opinion studies, the only mentioned prescriptions center on individual consumption. To their credit, many people know better. They realize that individual consumer choice is largely irrelevant. For the same reason that people don’t vote, Americans don’t see “consuming virtuously” as a plausible solution.¹³ This is a “glass half full” observation of sorts, as it shows that Americans can see through the façade of electoral politics, green consumerism, and blind faith in technocratic elites. It will remain a “glass half empty” situation, however, unless effective, participatory alternatives are realized. As it stands, undifferentiated environmental catastrophism leads to what Eric Swyngedouw calls a “post-politics” of administration by experts, and this will remain so until new forms of mass movements emerge. For many people, “waking up” in the context of alienation is profoundly disempowering, for the truth alone does not set one free.¹⁴

This outcome is but one aspect of a general confusion concerning the process of politicization in the last forty years. An unfortunate consequence of the extraordinary social eruptions of the 1960s was the template of politicization it established. The process by which millions of people “woke up” in ...