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Climate change is not the basic issue: Geoff Sharp argues that the technoscience--capitalism convergence has supercharged climate change. We need a movement to tackle that.

Article Excerpt
No, it's not really just about climate change. Nor is it just about the way climate change can affect the viability of all living things. At least in the short term, the public inability to focus on the underlying sources of climate change is equally important. It runs along with the inability to focus on other changes that could undermine our present mode of life. The massive growth of world population is one other obvious example. The basic issue is to identify the common source of a whole complex of such problems. This is a necessary first step towards building a movement that can work towards their resolution.

That paragraph is in the manner of a knee-jerk reaction. It is an amended opening to this essay and its purpose is to highlight the reason why contributors to discussion about climate change often talk past one another. Later in this essay I will try to illustrate this in referring to David McKnight's and, more incidentally, Ted Trainer's contributions in Arena Magazine 92.

In a recent issue of The Age Peter Christoff wrote under the heading 'The End of the World As We Know It'. He compared the effects of extreme global warming to the aftermath of a nuclear war:

Excess atmospheric gases linger, global temperatures continue to increase, the oceans expand and rise, and ecosystems alter and decline, for decades--even centuries--after the initiating actions have ceased.

The vast majority within the relevant branches of the scientific community support that conclusion. Why then doesn't the message get through to the powers that be, so that resolute action, on a scale beyond even that of preparing to meet an invasion, follows?

In this essay I will suggest that at its roots this pervasive insomnia is nourished by the assumptions on which our limited democracy is now founded. We are living in a dream world in which assumptions about the continuity of economic growth, and especially of the institutional framework which now supports consumerism and individualism, have become ingrained. Indeed, so much so that attention is often diverted from the very conditions of our own mortality. Like any faith that has become absolute for those subscribing to its tenets, the open-ended prospects that, especially in the developed world, are held out to individuals, also tend to become absolute. At least in the short term they divert attention from any serious consideration that things might be otherwise.

Not long ago that failure was illustrated by the widespread denial of climate change. Yet as that stance becomes disreputable, the framework of entrenched attitudes supporting open-ended growth remains in place. They lend support to the more comprehensive denial, or at least failure to understand, that we are now in the midst of a multi-faceted transformation.

To state the issue in these terms carries with it the need to recognise that our whole institutional framework is in accelerated movement. Its overall relation to the natural world is changing. In the aftermath of centuries following what we speak of as an Enlightenment, which essayed the conquest of nature, we have moved on from conquest to reconstitution: nuclear power, nanotechnology, the genome project. All of these are expressions of a technoscientific process in which conquest is subsumed within a reconstitution of the given world. They signify a break with preceding civilizations: one which includes the prospect of constituting and reconstituting life as such.

A deep-seated sense of malaise--which for the present is most articulate in relation to climate Change--is abroad and affecting many people. If they are not simply rendered inert within the way of life compatible with their 'faith', most people still experience a profound ambiguity. They have settled into a way of life in which the 'advantages' of open-ended growth have become habitual. They actually cannot seriously conceive, and therefore cannot actively wish, to live in a different way. To a large extent these mainstream attitudes even tend to render invisible the actual increase of poverty and despair in the wider world, and locally as well. The overall consequence is that governments, which have direct access to scientific assessments of the impact of open-ended growth upon the basic conditions of life, are taking no resolute action on the scale required.

How can we evoke a more active awareness of the underlying...