11 February 2025 | by Guy Gladstone
This was how Tommy Jennings, an upright old man with weather-beaten features, would greet me whenever we passed each other. That was 30 years ago on a bog road in County Mayo, the West of Ireland.
He would give me a piercing look, as he was reaching out to be informed.
I knew that day by day very little changed in his lonely bachelor life but for sure he was alert to the slightest changes in the weather and what that meant for his land and the animals thereon.
Had I then known about the significance of the climate crisis for patterns of weather and remarked the need for citizens and their governments to act, he would assuredly have chatted on for half an hour. And best of all, he would have regularly interjected, in supportive astonishment:
So when will the storms and floods that cause the well-loved tree to fall, when will these changes, strange because year on year there will be more of them, become a central preoccupation of daily life and it’s conversations between both strangers and familiars?
Fast forward 30 years, as our grandchildren struggle in the planetary ruins of life on earth, will they not ask us:
Today, unless the person you are speaking with happens to be an activist or perhaps a nature lover, a sustained conversation about the Climate and Ecological Emergency (CEE) will more than likely be most unwelcome and cut short by a change of subject.
As one of two you can object and be insistent. But with three or more in conversation the switch of topic and your exclusion becomes an instance of socially constructed silence, an unspoken shared silencing, the reinforcement of a social no-go area.
(Note, this is exactly how power and business as usual wants it to be.)
Of course it’s hard to be a party pooper when you put that flight in question, evoking lurking flight shame in the holiday anecdotalist. But that’s just a moment on the surface. The CEE is becoming such a profound existential threat that the anxieties it evokes are extremely unsettling.
Because the continuance of our whole way of life in the North can no longer be taken for granted.
Greening the shopping list, avoiding plastic and taking the bus or train rather than getting into the car (even the electric one) simply doesn’t cut the mustard, even as we reassure ourselves we are doing our bit. Alternatively we might blame others or project the problem into the distant future.
Actually the CEE, as Dougald Hine points out in “At Work in the Ruins”, is a predicament, not a problem. A problem can be fixed and then it no longer exists. A predicament is something you have to live with.
In a growth fixated world, financialised, debt driven and in the grip of capital, the representatives of governments and the scientists bringing the facts for them to consider are paralysed by lobbyists from Big Oil and Big Ag. The outcome of the Cops is ‘symbolic policy making’, i.e. a set of practices designed to make it look as if the political elite are doing something while yet again doing next to nothing.
The 29th edition of COP has just gone by, the 1.5 Celsius limit is now dead in the water, and scientists are acknowledging that the Ship of Fools is now on course to sail past the critical 2 degrees threshold from Paris 2015.
Our predicament of which the weather is the harbinger.
The minimisation, the greed, the narcissistic individualism; our ambivalence, our complicity, our endless distractedness. Surely a space is needed to talk about these trends.
Here I am homing in on a collective evasion within everyday life. As people around you scurry to and fro, propelled by business as usual, in siloed communion with their hand-held screens, maybe you live your good self as an outsider.
Or perhaps as someone bearing the burden of CEE concern, you might more aptly consider yourself an insider. The main contemporary defence against the CEE is known as disavowal. The term refers to a split between knowing and feeling what that knowledge means.
With a merely intellectual knowledge there is little motivation to act. Motivation requires emotional connection. Where the CEE is concerned this is likely to involve fear, grief or anger. To bring thinking and feeling together a secure container is needed.
The CEE is a double crisis, both an objective crisis and a crisis of subjectivity. The Climate Café addresses the latter.
XR’s first demand of politicians and the media is Tell the Truth. What about us in our own backyard, isn’t this equally imperative?
Can we not speak our truth with each other?
Guy Gladstone, December 2024
Feeling worried about the climate crisis? Join a friendly and free talking and listening circle, to support you with your thoughts and feelings about the climate and ecological crisis. Hosted by a skilled facilitator, with free cake. Last Wednesday of every month, 7-8.30pm at the SEA Climate Hub, 4 Clinton Place, Seaford, BN25 1NL.