People going about their business this week. And from this moment forth that is pretty much all I am going to be showing to you. Why? Because future generations will want to see what we were doing when we should have been all hands on deck fixing the climate crisis. They will be asking..why didn’t they stop it? Why did they ignore it? Why did they carry on as normal when they knew it would spell catastrophe for the rest of humanity to come? It will be as unfathomable to them as it is indeed to me. I am living through this era and I keep asking myself the same question..why?
Why can’t we act on it? Why can’t we take it on board? Why are we so utterly paralysed when we know what is ahead? Why do we continue to shunt it? It’s clearly only going to get worse so why delay? Why not deal with it? We know the window of opportunity is rapidly closing and still we act as if it isn’t happening. But why?
i thought that when the climate deniers were proven 100% wrong we would surge into action. We didn’t
I thought when we started to see extreme weather on a regular basis we would do everything we could to prevent the situation worsening. We didn’t
I thought when we saw that every year was the hottest on record we would realise we had to prioritise the environment above and beyond everything else. We didn’t.
I thought that when they declared a climate emergency they would then act like there was one. They didn’t.
And so I keep just asking why? What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with us? I have been asking these same questions for years but I never find a good enough answer. We have the information. We have the solutions. We know the consequences if we don’t. And so does everyone in charge. So what the friggin fuck?
The only conclusion I have come to is that we have collective ADHD which prevents us from being able to focus on the matter in hand. Dumbphones and the never ending scroll have reduced our attentions to absolute zero. We just can’t stick with anything long enough to solve it before we just wanna flick onto the next thing. And so when anything comes along which demands our attention (eg global pandemic, WW III) we leap on it cos it means we don’t have to think about climate armageddon for a bit . The other problem is that there is just too much noise. It can’t penetrate through all the other shit . There are just too many other things hovering around our brains to distract us. We are being utterly overfed by the feed and it has rendered us useless. Here is a diagram to illustrate the point.
And it the same on the news. Irreversible climate breakdown is just one of a load of different stories all vying for your attention. Last week I saw two articles sandwiched in amongst everything else. Just a couple of little squares in a sea of squares, and some much larger with titles with infinitely bigger fonts. The two stories were that the Antartica was around 70 degrees hotter than it should be for this time of year (!) and the other was that the Amazon is at the tipping point of transforming from an oxygen producer (the biggest in the world) to an emitter of Carbon dioxide (!!) These are both catastrophic developments that should have dominated the headlines and caused widespread alarm but they barely registered.
And ultimately the problem is all these other things need to be dealt with as well and it’s just one of them. As people and as a society, both domestic and global, we are already up to our ear balls in problems and this particular problem must go to the top of the pile but it never quite gets there. Because it never has a chance to. Something always gets in the way.
Like real life. And as we can all agree, that is hard enough to get through as it is and so it looks like we are gonna wait until things become so catastrophic we won’t have a choice but to deal with it. When it is right up in our faces our survival instinct will finally kick in but by that point we will be well and truly fucked.
We are the lobster in the pot.
I have probably said all this before and it is probably nothing you don’t know. I follow the climate scientist Peter Kalmus on Twitter who has been trying to get the message across, along with the rest of the scientific community for decades and he recently exclaimed in defeat “I just don’t know how else to say this”.
The film ‘Don’t look up’ shows the frustration of the scientists who cannot convince the world of their findings so matter what evidence they put in front of them and the film perfectly captured the insanity of these times as a giant metaphor in the shape of a giant meteor hurtles towards them . It also accurately demonstrates the division in our society driven by the polarisation of opinion and shows that our inability to act is also due to the fact that the days of consensus are over. We need unified collective action which in a post truth world is virtually and depressingly impossible.
The other main problem with ‘telling it like it is’ is that you are accused of being a doom monger. No-one wants to hear bad news. I always think back to hunter gatherer societies and they would be traipsing around looking for food and water and there would be a guy up front leading the way, being all confident like and inspiring hope in the community which, in trun, spurs them onwards even when things are desperate because they believe he knows what he’s doing. And then you got some guy at the back saying..”there’s nothing this way. We’re all going to die”. No-one ever wants to hear from that guy. Not until it’s too late.
And our inability to receive this information and act upon it will ultimately be humanity’s greatest failure.
So now what? What to do in the meantime? We just carry on as normal? I am finding that increasingly difficult these days. I just can’t pretend anymore that our nonsense jobs and our nonsense concerns matter. We fret about the small shit and ignore the colossal catastrophe we are sleep walking towards. I know it’s too much to take on board everyday and we would literally sink if we did but pretending everything is fine when it just isn’t doesn’t make sense anymore. I know we need hope to function but if it blinds us to the reality of the situation and leaves us with an utterly hopeless situation then it’s pretty fucking useless. So what to do?
We certainly can’t look to our leaders to lead us out of this. They need to usher in an entire new way of living but they either can’t or they won’t . Are they short-sighted, dumb as a brush or just plain corrupt? It doesn’t really matter. Based on an entire era of inaction it is pretty clear they are just gonna let the clock run down. That much is clear. But why?
Well, largely because they are essentially dicatated to by the fossil fuel industry who have a sociopathic pursuit of profit. They are diseased by greed and so for decades, to protect their interests, they have blocked any attempt to move to a more sustainable and renewable future. In that time they have acquired so much wealth they used it to ‘buy’ everyone who is actually in power which makes them the defacto rulers of Earth and they are now seemingly too powerful to be overthrown.
And we have, in turn, become too passive, too stupid, too distracted and too selfish to stop them.
And so it looks like despite all of this we are all just going to attempt to maintain business as usual. Even though it isn’t. Even though it spells disaster. Even though it’s utter insanity. And so, in turn, I will carry on and continue to document this blinkered approach to living and post them here so there is evidence of what was actually happening during this period or rather not happening. So from now on when you look at my shots of Londoners doing their thing, please know that all of this is locked away in a bubble of denial hovering around their brains but if you look closely you can see it lingering just on the other side of their eyeballs trying to emerge…
And yes, you guessed it..I am that guy at the back of the group. And yes, no-one probably does want to hear from me…I’ve said me bit..pictures only from this point onwards..