My only meaningful contribution to climate change as public policy was helping produce a report on the human impact of such change in Russia ahead of the COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009. In conjunction with this, I liaised with the Russian government's climate change negotiators; and, because this was not a feat that the hosting Danish minister had been able to achieve (sic), I found myself a leading source of intelligence on what the Russian government's stance would be.
I remember asking one of the negotiators what would help him the most in nudging forward his own government. The response was 'noise' about climate change not from people like me (an international NGO) nor even a Russian NGO but ordinary people in Irkutsk, say, talking about it, being concerned by it. Our task was to seed that if we could.
Reading Alastair McIntosh's 'Rider in the Storm' reminded me that the 'right noise' remains urgently necessary. But to get there, first, we must acquire a colloquial understanding of the science and navigate betwixt the twin distracting camps of denial and alarm.
The first four chapters of Alastair's book helps with the first task, patiently and ably combing the consensus science, mainly and rightly based on the IPCC curation of that science, so 'we' do not have to and cross-illustrating it with homely examples that bring it home to our imaginations. For example, why do apparently such micro numbers cause such major effects - so think of what that third whiskey and its micrograms of alcohol do to your ability to drive (or discuss politics)?
The next two chapters address denial and alarmism unpacking both in terms of their multiple motivations and likely consequences.
Denial, though often simply venial corporate self-interest, also, can be rooted in prior attachment to the (miss) enchantments of our ideologies - say human liberation from bondage to the drudgery of matter or the miracles of post-Enlightenment capitalism or technology, some of which is undoubtedly helped along by being true - think vaccines or me emptying my washing machine rather than bashing my shirts on the rocks at a local stream. But also, by fear - climate change has seeped into our subconsciousness - my aunt's house has had her second 'once in a century' flooding in ten years or I watch the wildfires consume my recent Australian holiday destination by which guilt for my long haul flight is added to my fear. Rather than face fear, we often displace it in denial, bury it or project it, and live with the cognitive dissonance it generates. Of course, I can always find anything I want in my untidy garage unnoticing the time it actually takes as the 'easier' path than actually tidying it.
Alarmism is the flip side of denial if more muted in its consequences. It exceeds the scientific consensus, in offering moveable dates for armageddon potentially undermines its own case, and offers ammunition for deniers. Meanwhile, its principal contribution may be to simply heap on the fear. Fear might create panic but panic is useful only in narrow circumstances - the creativity and energy I discovered to evade a stampeding bullock in a Swiss field on a Sunday ramble come to mind - but not addressing the complexities of climate change. In both chapters, Alastair offers 'amicable and brotherly censure' to both parties asking them both to come back to the consensus of what is known (that is sufficiently alarming), to step out of illusions, and find ways to face our actual reality. They are model chapters of sensitive yet robust engagement.
Running through these chapters, Alastair, as a goodly Quaker, unsurprisingly makes a connection between this process of 'facing reality' with certain spiritual traditions (and transpersonal psychology) when functioning at their best. We are invited to contemplate what those traditions might have to offer in seeing aright, freeing us from our delusions. They can take us out of seeing the climate crisis as a happening out there to be (miss)managed and place it the wider field of our relationship with ourselves, others, and the enfolding world.
At which point, the book shifts gear, whilst acknowledging the blueprints for necessary collective action, sketching what these are, embedded, for example, in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, what most deeply interests Alastair is what qualities of being do we need to explore, what will help us close the gap between what we know of the physics, its alarming challenge, and what we know of the politically possible that, frankly, is not yet up to answer such a challenge.
In short, who are we invited to be? To which the short answer would be recoverers of community. Community both as resilient, sustainable homes that are shaped within their spaces but communities that allow people to resiliently flourish inwardly as well as outwardly, that are shaped by love and its invitation to work on all that disables its full flowering including the dialogue with our shadows. This might sound archly impractical so happily, Alastair takes us home - to the Outer Hebrides - and embeds this in examples that invite conviction but do not exclude the necessary messy humanness. What, for example, does it require of a community to acquire ownership of itself - as Alastair helped the islanders of Eigg to do - not only the practicalities of buy out or affordable housing or new enterprises but even more importantly the inner confidence of desiring it, learning to love it into being that helps address the frustrations on the way.
The 'right kind of noise' that our politics needs, to go back to my Russian negotiators' advice, is not simply that the people of Irkutsk are talking about climate change about which something must be done, important as that is, but that the people of Irkutsk are exploring and making a meaningful, resilient life for themselves and are being enabled to do so. A life that goes all the way down - spiritually, psychologically, and materially fulfilling of needs - that joyfully celebrates life and can lay down consuming wants as unnecessary.
Utopian? Not if seen as a journey, hard-won, nor misaligned with who we are. Presently, Jules Pretty and a team at the University of Essex are surveying people, asking them what ten things constitute for them the Good Life - a completely open-ended question - and interestingly, so far, the results do not correlate with a life of getting and spending, far from it, more like what we would expect: good relationships, savoring a cup of coffee, meaningful work, play. Hopefully, what will emerge will be a much better mirror to ourselves than we seem to allow ourselves in our daily lives, which might just prompt more of us to think differently and act into it.
Finally, what we most need our new narratives that 'protest' who we might be. To protest originally simply meant to bear witness to and that could be positive, what do we witness for but only later did it come to mean exclusively to demonstrate against. I am reminded of the author, J.B. Priestley's wartime broadcasts that painted a picture of the world after the war. They were immensely popular - a third of the UK population tuned in to them. They were not party political (though Conservative elements in the government perceived them as such) but were rooted in Priestley's determination to see a different postwar world than he had inherited after the First World War, in which he had served, a world this time genuinely fit for heroes. I cannot, nor could anyone, prove that they laid the groundwork for the landslide Labor victory in 1945 but that they contributed significantly I do not doubt. Intriguingly, in line with Alastair's interest in Jung, Jung, himself, thought Priestley's grasp of his thought, amongst 'lay people' second to none!
Where then are our storytellers not of dystopian collapse but of joyful arriving?
Meanwhile 'Riders in the Storm' in only 207 pages offers pointers on the way. It gives you the science by which to be appropriately equipped, points you through the dangers of denial and alarmism; and, invites you on a journey to explore what new narratives for living might we want to consider that will help us address the monumental challenges of climate change - which is not 'the End of the World' but just might be the end of worlds that no longer work and an invitation to renewed, better places to inhabit - inwardly as well as outwardly. No mean achievement.
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