‘An Inconvenient Apocalypse’, by sustainable agriculture pioneer Wes Jackson and journalist and academic Robert Jensen, is a manifesto for acceptance of society’s imminent collapse based on ancient ideas about the fixity of human nature. We’re told we’re on a road to nowhere, having made a wrong turn 10,000 years ago with the adoption of agriculture, and there’s little we can do but brace ourselves.
Ever since humans learned to domesticate plants and animals and take up a sedentary existence, so the argument goes, we have been addicted to dense energy in the form of rich sources of carbon. Adoption of agriculture led to food surpluses, the division of labour, social hierarchies and inequality, and the only cure for this affliction is a radical reduction in the size of the human population. The book’s motto fewer and less – fewer people, less stuff – is underlined by the flaming match on the cover. A soft landing is out of the question; we are about to be cooked.
How cooked? “Hard times are coming for everyone…there are no workable solutions to the most pressing problems of our historical moment. The best we can do is minimize the suffering and destruction” (p 10). “…the human future, even if today’s progressive social movements were to be as successful as possible, will be gritty and grim” (p 11). “We assume that coming decades will present new challenges that require people to move quickly to adapt to the fraying and eventual breakdown of existing social and biophysical systems” (p 58). “…the bad ending will not be contained to specific societies but will be global” (p 63).
How soon? “I work on the assumption that if not in my lifetime, it’s likely coming within the lifetime of my child” says Jensen(p 75) making it within the next twenty to fifty years, with the qualifier “…it is folly to offer precise predictions” (p 68).
Justification for the extent, severity and timing of the coming collapse relies on the claim that “…people who pay attention to the ecological data – whether or not they acknowledge it to others – are thinking apocalyptically” (p 76).
What follows? The authors’ vision of a sustainable post-apocalyptic future is humanity reorganised into communities of no more than 150 people collectively managing their birth and death rates such that the aggregate global population remains under two billion. A tough ask, to which this warning is added: “Finding a humane and democratic path to that dramatically lower number will not be easy. It may not be possible” (p 54).
If that after-thought triggers memories of the brutal ideological experiments of the twentieth century, we are encouraged to stay strong as failure to grapple with the hard question of population is “…an indication of moral and intellectual weakness” (p 48).
What makes them so sure? In two words, environmental determinism. The view that the physical environment shapes human culture, in this case that agriculture was the beginning of the end. This ancient idea, recently revived in the popular culture, is not as the authors suggest an inescapable aspect of human culture but a contested concept within history, geography, anthropology and philosophy. An alternative view, that human culture is jointly shaped by free will, biology and the physical environment, is not contradictory as the authors claim (p132) but entirely compatible, one held by the majority of 7,600 philosophers surveyed in 2020.
The version of environmental determinism present here demonises dense energy as the metaphorical apple in the garden of Eden, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with dense energy. The problem is that we are consuming it faster than it is being produced, in ways that liberate more greenhouse gases (GHGs) than are sequestered during its formation. With only 14% of global energy derived from renewables, half of which are biofuels that are typically net contributors to GHGs, we have a mountain to climb. But as the authors acknowledge at the outset, that task is political; “If we can’t align our living arrangements with the laws of physics and chemistry, we are in trouble” (p 3). By chapter two the ‘if’ has gone and trouble is inevitable.
What environmental determinism tends to overlook is that evolution is evolving. Complementing Darwinian natural selection where the environment acts as selector, animals have learned to participate in their own selection. By learning from each other, by predicting the consequences of their actions, by using tools. All of which blurs the distinction between human nature and human culture.
What will ultimately determine our fate is not an argument from first principles that we are slaves to our environment but the difference between the rate of growth in the human population (which has been in decline for forty years) and the rate of increase in the use of carbon neutral energy (which is accelerating). And while humanity may not change behaviour rapidly enough to avoid multiple crises for decades to come, the ‘…breakdown of existing social and biophysical systems’ is neither predetermined nor inevitable.
At one point the authors make the perfectly reasonable proposition that our ignorance of the world will always vastly outweigh our knowledge (p 67). Despite this they confidently predict our fate on the basis of a narrative about events occurring 10,000 years ago that are in dispute and constantly being reinterpreted with new discoveries. In the last 30 years evidence has emerged that hierarchical hunter gatherers predated agriculture and egalitarian farming communities predated the great civilisations of antiquity, implying that the means of subsistence does not adequately explain the origin of social hierarchies, greed and inequality.
A clue to the authors’ conviction comes in chapter three ‘We Are All Apocalyptic Now’ based on a previous book of Jensen’s. It suggests a secular reading of the Hebrew prophets, the apocalyptic literature and the Christian concept of grace helps us comes to terms with our fate. Strip these texts of their supernatural content and we are left with sin and retribution without the prospect of salvation or redemption. ‘Ecospheric grace’, gratitude for the gift of life, is offered In their place.
For those who believe humanity is shaped by the interplay between genes, environment and free will, a more helpful guide to the future would be a secular reading of Luke 3:23 “Physician heal thyself” for as they say, ‘…a predisposition does not condemn us to act out our instincts’ (p 122). The dominant culture might be incapable of change due to the power of vested interests, but that is in our hands. Not the gods, the landscape or the laws of physics.
‘An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity’ by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen, University of Notre Dame Press 2022, ISBN 978-0-268-20366-5 £17.47
