Climate Change: The Inner Landscapes

This book looks in a different way at much that is known and familiar. It seems resistance to change is, to a certain extent, determined by the difficulty in imagining a different future, even of that other world which, as many radicals have stated, is also this one.

This is not a manifesto or a manual of instruction. It depends simply upon a shift of focus when we regard much that is taken for granted, or has become so much part of the material and moral landscape, that it is hard to conceive of any replacement of what actually exists.

Indeed, it is the solid and pervasive materiality of the world that gives it an aura of inescapable necessity; a tendency constantly reinforced by the propaganda about the sanctity of ‘our way of life’; even though at the same time that way of life is recognised to be the cause of damage to climate, the resource-base, extinction of species, cultures and languages and the threat to diversity of life on earth.

Fear of loss makes us cleave more strongly to the daily life we know, its rituals, customs and traditions. This commitment has been weakened only at the margins by even the most devastating evidence of the ruin to which ‘normal life’ is condemning the future of the world and those who must try to live in it.

The prospect of an absence of all the things we have become dependent on is considered too terrible a prospect to contemplate, too great a sacrifice to be contemplated.

Dependency is quite the reverse of the freedoms we are supposed to enjoy. And this is only one aspect of the costs of a failure to create an alternative vision to all that surrounds us. ‘Sacrifice’ of inequality, social and economic injustice, violence, racism, insecurity, avoidable mental distress, the fragility of relationships, the breaking of neighbourhood and laying waste of community – would be no sacrifice at all, but a form of liberation.

And it is not a fear of renunciation, but a promise of emancipation that must lie at the heart of new social and economic arrangements; not a vague utopianism, but shared and measured work towards freedoms which, despite the fatigued rhetoric of ‘leaders’ and opinion-formers, we have yet to discover.

These pages are an attempt to picture how human resourcefulness may compensate for lesser reliance on their material equivalent, and how a world might look, if no longer animated by the dominant global ideology, which, far from being governed by economic – or any other – reason, is a cult, a sombre mysticism which cannot wait to discover what lies on the other side of human destructiveness.