This quarter in Granta, a literary magazine which unfortunately makes little of its content available on-line, is a tremendous memoir chapter by Jeremy Seabrook. It’s about his Aunt Em, a kind and vivacious woman whose ability to make friends and have fun was quashed by his cold mother. This might sound like a small matter–one woman’s unhappiness–but Seabrook shows his Aunt Em to be part of a society of women who devoted themselves to caring for others, and for their trouble, were mercilessly used and then forgotten.
But in my unsuccessful search for this memoir on-line, I came across another first-rate work by Seabrook, an essay on the concept of sustainability, published five years ago in the Guardian. Exactly as he says, the concept of sustainable development, once a hopeful phrase for environmentalists, but now been hijacked by financiers, leaving the idea a ruined mirror of its former self.
When George Bush the Younger refused to sign the Kyoto convention on
global warming on the grounds that nothing must be allowed to interfere
with US economic interests, he was echoing the wisdom of George Bush
the Elder, who spoke his famous words before the Rio summit that "the
American way of life is not up for negotiation". Their commitment to a
fundamentalist economic salvation simply writes the ecological
imperative out of the scenario.
Yet it was believed that the
solution to the great clash between ecology and economy had been
discovered in the 1980s: this was the idea of "sustainable
development", triumphantly enshrined in the Rio declaration.
Intra-generational equity would be balanced with inter-generational
justice to ensure that we do not take more from the Earth than we give
back to it. The excitement generated by this formula concealed the
possibility that it might be a contradiction in terms: when unlimited
desire is unleashed in a world of limited resources, something has to
yield. The "fruits" of industrialism turn out to be strange hybrids –
perhaps, ultimately, inedible.
Like all the brave concepts
offered up by environmentalists, sustainable development was doomed to
go the way of the rest of the treacherous lexicon of developmentalism –
empowerment, participation, poverty-abatement, inclusiveness, and so
on: ideas absorbed and redefined in terms amenable to privilege.
Sustainable now means what the market, not the earth, can bear; what
originally meant adjusting the industrial technosphere so that it
should not destroy the planet has now come to indicate the regenerative
power of the economy, no matter how it may degrade the "environment".
Sustainable is what the rich and powerful can get away with.
Seabrook puts it in a sharp little nutshell: "Things can’t go on like this, but they must."
It’s as if we’re all just slightly misquoting Sam Beckett.
Kit Stolz 
Jeremy Rifkin is a brilliant oped in the LA Times last week puts it nicely:
“Katey Walter of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks (UAF)wrote in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in May 2007 that the melting of the permafrost and subsequent release of methane is a “ticking time bomb.”
Walter and her researchers warned of a tipping point sometime within this century, when the release of methane could create an uncontrollable feedback effect, dramatically warming the atmosphere. This would, in turn, warm the land, lakes and seabed, further melting the permafrost and releasing more methane. Once that threshold is reached, there will be nothing humans can do to stop this process. Scientists suspect that similar events have occurred in the ancient past, between glacial periods.
Scientists are particularly concerned that the thawing permafrost is also creating shadow lakes across the Siberian sub-Arctic landscape. The lake waters have a higher ambient temperature than the surrounding permafrost.
As a result, the permafrost near the lakes thaws more quickly, forcing the ground surfaces to collapse into the lakes. The stored organic carbon then decomposes into the lake bottoms. Methane from that decomposition bubbles to the surface and escapes into the atmosphere. Scientists calculate that thousands of tons of methane will be released from Arctic lakes as the permafrost thaws.
A global tragedy of monumental proportions is unfolding at the top of the world, and the human race is all but oblivious to what’s happening.
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THE QUOTE: “A global tragedy of monumental proportions is unfolding at the top of the world, and the human race is all but oblivious to what’s happening.”
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Dear danny bee: Not that the message can’t be widely enough disseminated and who really cares who was first, but just for the record Margaret Atwood was writing about this last year, and Mr. Kit was quoting it right here on this very blog, and that was when I really knew we were frankly quite doomed as a species.
Still, we do what we must.
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