On the last page of Robert Manne's comprehensive analysis of what he understands to be Kevin Rudd's agenda (November) is a plaintive appeal for humanity to avert the likely looming catastrophe caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions. Manne writes:
Climate change demands more of politics and international relations than I think they can deliver: the end of politics as the art of the possible and of compromise between interest groups; the negotiation of an international agreement of an unprecedentedly altruistic kind; the creation of an atmosphere of wartime emergency in the absence of an enemy.
Read this in conjunction with Tim Flannery's Quarterly Essay 31, ‘Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?', and it seriously challenges our species' taxonomic description as Homo sapiens. We deserve not even Homo intelligensis; but rather, Homo expediensis. Flannery's essay appears to me to be a middle section that outlines the "known" science (due to the climate sceptics, I have to put it in inverted commas), bookended by introductory and concluding sections that raise serious philosophical and moral questions about our species' occupation of - so far - a minute proportion of the planet's history. He, along with others, asserts that we have very little time before we pass a point of no return in our despoliation of our ecosystem, upon whose physico-chemical settings our species' survival depends.
Clive Hamilton's depressingly titled review in the previous issue of The Monthly ("Six Degrees of Apocalypse", October) refers to Flannery's essay among several other books on climate change, and he concludes more despairingly even than Flannery. I am spurred by Manne's plea to pick up what is largely missing from Flannery's essay (he can't cover everything!), yet is highlighted in Hamilton's, which is the psychological contribution of our species' response to its threatened extinction: denial! Manne despairs of the likelihood of our species being able adequately to address our dire predicament. Can we risk being confident that the so-called alarmists are completely wrong? The last time, as I recall, that the "few minutes to midnight" metaphor, poignantly reprised on the QE31 cover, was utilised was during the Cold War, when it threatened to break into a global nuclear war and engulf us all.
Hamilton refers to denial as an important psychological defence against overwhelming threat. He cites Stanley Cohen's three types of denial: literal denial, interpretive denial and implicatory denial. Each of these is evident in the so-called debate about climate change and its implications. This all-too-human response is evident on a somewhat smaller scale, and has its own well-documented recent history, in the case of smoking and cancer. We have progressed through collective denial to a measure of preventive action, albeit accompanied by expedient obfuscations by the vested interests involved. The links between smoking and various cancers (let alone other manifestations of ill health) were disputed in scientific and popular literature for a long time before the now-undeniable links became accepted, and government regulatory action ensued against the pressures of the large tax revenue derived from the very self-destructive behaviour in which so many indulged.
The comparison to an individual polluting their own internal environment by smoking cigarettes - threatening their own life in the face of overwhelming evidence - is not too long a bow to draw with the present large-scale crisis, and reminds us of our propensities to resort to denial.
Flannery early on invokes James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis to make two points: that the climate of the Earth is exquisitely balanced to sustain life on the planet, and that an "intelligence" operates in some manner to achieve this. On page six, he writes: "Is it right to say that we are Gaia's self-awareness? Gaia's brain?" I consider our human minds (not Gaia's) to be central to the solution of our problems. Our intelligence may well provide us with the scientific data we need to jointly assess the scale of the problem we together face - it is our thinking minds which will determine whether we can arrive at a solution. It is our feeling minds which employ the internal defence mechanisms, such as denial, which prevent rational responses to external threats when they are felt to be just too large.
At the beginning and end of his essay, Flannery refers to the Eighth Commandment. He asserts that in our current excesses we are stealing from future generations. He also asserts - and I agree - that the First World has an obligation to acknowledge its own disproportionate contribution to the creation of the greenhouse-gas crisis by financially assisting China, India and others to address their contribution.
Robert Manne hopes that individual nations can initiate a "benign domino effect" by acknowledging their own need to address these issues. It takes little intelligence to recognise these issues. But it takes a great deal of mental conceptual capacity and a great deal of moral capacity (and courage) to acknowledge the responsibility of the First World for having - perhaps inadvertently, yet nevertheless drastically - helped create the crisis, and to lead the way to solutions without saying "you first" to the Second and Third worlds. These are emotional issues: we need to feel responsible for our own welfare and that of future generations, and we need examine our own inner worlds to discern what inhibits us from taking sensible steps to avert the looming disaster. We also need to think about the emotions which drive others to thwart the efforts of those developing solutions.
Flannery claims that Australia has a unique opportunity to lead the way. He says that as a nation so reliant upon mining the Earth's crust, we have an obligation to do so; and he hints that in Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, we may also have the leaders with the requisite vision and courage. Robert Manne holds out hope in Rudd, too. The clock was turned back from the threatened nuclear holocaust of the Cold War era. We have to do more than hope it can happen again. We need to heed Flannery's, Manne's, Hamilton's and others' call to urgent thoughtful and rational collective action.
