The Great Disruption (16 page)

It is not hard to imagine what a serious collapse inducing global crisis would look like if you put together the trends we've been discussing. A global famine that sees a billion people or more starving to death; a series of wars raging in the Middle East and elsewhere over water; armed conflict between China, India, and Pakistan over millions of refugees from political breakdown and food shortages; the drowning of people and nations in low-lying islands in storm surges; the global insurance industry going into insolvency in the face of a series of climate disasters and the run-on effects in the banking industry with uninsured assets being used as debt collateral; the collapse of global share markets when the risks of all these things are priced into share portfolios.

Military planners, whose job is to rationally assess current and future threats to national security, are acutely aware of such risks, including the risk of collapse. In recent years, they have been closely examining how this might all unfold and what it means for the future of conflict and global security.

According to the former commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command, retired Marine Corps general Anthony Zinni, who participated in a high-level Military Advisory Board review on the subject, we either address climate change today or “we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.” The 2007 report concluded that climate change would act as a threat multiplier by exacerbating conflict over resources, especially because of declining food production, border and mass migration tensions, and so on—increasing political instability and creating failed states—if no action was taken to reduce impacts.

The findings of this report agree with those of the confidential assessment of the security implications of climate change by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the coordinating body of America's sixteen intelligence agencies. Former NIC chairman Thomas Fingar told Congress that unchecked, climate change has “wide-ranging implications for national security because it will aggravate existing problems,” especially in already vulnerable areas such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. According to an NIC briefing document, by placing added stress on resources, climate change will “exacerbate internal state pressures, and generate interstate friction through competition for resources or disagreement over responses and responsibility for migration.”

In 2010, the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review acknowledged that climate change will act as “an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.” Frustrated with the lack of political response, thirty-three retired generals and admirals wrote to the Senate majority and minority leaders in April 2010, stating that “climate change is threatening America's security … it exacerbates existing problems by decreasing stability, increasing conflict, and incubating the socioeconomic conditions that foster terrorist recruitment. The State Department, the National Intelligence Council, and the CIA all agree, and all are planning for future climate-based threats.”

Outside of the public eye, defense experts are blunt. “Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life … once again, warfare would define human life,” concluded a secret Pentagon report in 2004 on the impacts of climate change.
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The lesson of all these and other similar studies is clear. While there are many uncertainties in location, scale, and timing, there is now enough evidence that any rational review concludes we face the risk of worldwide collapse and the descent into chaos. The acceptance of this risk will be the tipping point for the Great Awakening.

Remember again, though, this is not about the data. The data clearly show we already face just that risk. The level of the risk can be debated, but even at the lower end it is at a level considerably greater than other risks we already respond to with massive military and security efforts and/or massive injections of public capital. That's why military planners around the world are now so focused on these issues. The evidence is in.

So the thing to look for is the end of denial.

Looking into future scenarios is helpful, but we can also look back to what we've actually done to find relevant comparisons. These comparisons provide lessons about likely tipping points, but also about how dramatically we can mobilize when we choose to act.

I often use the example of World War II as evidence of what we are capable of, both economically and physically and in terms of sudden political shifts. People tend to point out all the ways World War II was quite a different situation. The Allies faced a clear and personified threat in the form of Adolf Hitler. They faced a country they had fought only twenty years before and so were used to seeing it as the enemy. They were fighting something external, something foreign. This is significant—the best enemies have a face and are from somewhere else. In contrast, climate change is hard to personify and is something for which we ultimately have only ourselves to blame. There's no enemy to rally against, even though we try. And then they point to the invasion of Poland—that we haven't had an equivalent event on climate change or sustainability.

But on closer inspection, while there are some real differences, there are not as many as you might think, and there are many lessons and great encouragement in that experience. In fact, our response to Hitler is the classic example of slow, but not stupid; of late, but dramatic.

While everyone talks about the invasion of Poland as the trigger, the reality is that Hitler represented a severe and clear threat to other European powers much earlier. Hitler had launched a massive rearmament effort soon after installing himself as chancellor in 1933. He had violated the hated Versailles Treaty and remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, a clear provocation to the French. He had annexed Austria in 1938 and launched a full-scale invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. All this time, there was great debate and denial about the scale of the threat. It wasn't until the takeover of a third country, with the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, that war was declared. While the year before had seen increasingly serious mobilization efforts by Great Britain, appeasement continued for much longer than a rational response would have allowed.

In short, on the objective facts, Hitler represented a clear and undeniable threat long before action was taken to defeat him. Famously, Churchill and others had long warned of this threat and been largely ignored or even ridiculed. Society remained in denial, preferring not to recognize the threat. This was because denial avoided full acceptance and what that meant—war and a strong change to the status quo. Yet once they did, once denial ended, the response was swift and dramatic. Things changed almost overnight.

Without the benefit of a retrospective view, it would be much harder to predict when exactly the denial of Hitler's threat would end. So it's also hard to predict when the moment will come on climate, even though in hindsight, it will be “obvious.”

It's the right comparison. We've had a rational and clear threat for a long time. We've had the Churchills arguing that case for twenty or more years and ignored them. We've had the false progress comparable to Neville Chamberlain's agreements for peace, such as the Kyoto and Copenhagen agreements. We have preferred to stay in denial. While this has been distressing for people in full acceptance, if we looked at history, it was predictable it would be this way. Looking at history, we can also conclude this, though: It will change. The dam will break, and then look out for the flood.

But a word of caution. Just as denial and pessimism can prevent action, ironically so can unstrategic optimism. If we sit back and passively wait for the dam to break, it will at the very least delay that day. Instead we have to choose active, engaged, and strategic hope.

I suspect that right about now you are looking forward to getting past this point in the book. You'd like to leave behind the endlessly detailed descriptions of the mess we are in and how much worse it's going to get. You don't want to read any more about the risk of collapse and the descent into chaos, and you'd like to take your mind off what all this means for you and your family.

Well, I have some very good news for you. You have just reached, right here in this sentence, the emotional low point of our story! From here on we shift into hope. Hope that is logical, uplifting, and a far superior place in which to live than that town called despair.

Hope is not a question of personal philosophy. In the face of uncertainty, operating from a stance of hope is a strategic and practical response. It is a way of approaching the world. As environmental writer Professor David Orr said of it, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”

This could actually be one of the most important and strategic shifts the millions of advocates for action on sustainability now need to make. It could itself be the tipping point that brings on the Great Awakening.

This is a serious political strategy issue. Leaders and movements that painted a picture of hope, even in the face of deeply challenging circumstances, have driven all the great positive changes in history. Gandhi, Mandela, King, and Churchill all told a story of hope for the future despite the desperate conditions around them. Each held different levels of personal spiritual alignment with this position of hope, but they were all united in their strategic pragmatism. Hope works.

Martin Luther King's famous speech was not “I have a nightmare based on the evidence of racism all around me every day and the inability of people to change,” it was “I have a dream.” Nelson Mandela faced a country that was on the verge of collapse and chaos, with devastating violence between blacks and a ruthless white government that had been fighting change with military force for decades with the support of the white population. Despite having been imprisoned for decades, he drew on the best of humanity in himself and called on all the people of South Africa to aspire to a united country. By doing so, he achieved one of the most extraordinary transformations in history. With the slogan “Freedom in our lifetime,” the African National Congress also projected this hope as practical, relevant, and worth fighting for.

I visit South Africa frequently, closing the circle on some of my earliest activism, and am always surprised how that country has changed since the end of apartheid. Whereas many argued change was impossible, the reality is that for all its challenges, a multiracial society is now the new normal—no one can imagine the world that was.

Perhaps an even more powerful example is Winston Churchill. A so-called realistic assessment of Great Britain's position at various stages during the war was that their position was hopeless and occupation by Germany inevitable. Churchill is of course famous for having suffered dreadful personal depression—indeed, some even argue that the practical situation he faced was so obviously hopeless that only a slightly unhinged man would hold out hope! In one analysis, psychiatrist Anthony Storr argued about Churchill:

Had he been a stable and equable man, he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished.
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Despite the situation he faced and his personal challenges, Churchill led his country with a rallying cry of hope and certain victory while bombs fell around him. Of course, he is now seen as one of the great leaders of history.

On a practical, strategic level, navigating the crisis ahead while driving the economic and social transformation we need is going to require a great deal of such leadership. No one is likely to follow leaders or movements whose message is “the situation is hopeless and all is lost, but we may as well make a bit of effort on the way down”! Of course, not many campaigners are actually saying that, but if they feel it, even subconsciously, they risk projecting this into their work.

And let us remember that this is
not
like the situation Churchill faced, which was “realistically” hopeless. As we have outlined earlier and will return to in some detail, there is a rational argument that the future we wish for can be achieved—if we decide to pursue it. We know what we need to do, and we know how to do it. So we are completely capable of success.

So before we conclude this issue, I'd like to go back to my sadness at the state we are in and to the personal psychology of despair. It is very sad that we are going to wipe out 50 percent of global biodiversity that took billions of years to evolve. It is very sad that the changes that will now unfold in the global ecosystem means that billions of people will face painful, widespread, and long-lasting personal suffering. It is tragic that this will all occur without good reason and that we could have easily prevented it all.

I have even at various times felt a huge sense of personal failure as an environmental campaigner. Failure that my movement and my life's work has been unable to prevent this from occurring, despite the fact that millions of us could see it coming. I have felt anger in response and wanted to go back to campaigning so I could beat up on the companies like ExxonMobil that I think have done the most to derail efforts to address these issues. But in the end, I realize this is all just a projection of my sadness.

It is all very sad, and that was why I cried when presenting to that audience in New York. It was why Michelle and I cried when I recounted the story. However, it is what it is. Grieving is an appropriate response, but sustained despair is not.

One thing I have learned since understanding all this is that hope is self-reinforcing. If I focus on the Crash, I feel sad; if I focus on the opportunity, I feel good. If I live my days in hope, I am a happier person, and my wife tells me I'm a whole lot easier to live with! So it's a quality-of-life question as well as a good political strategy. And as I've argued, it's also a rational conclusion—the dam is about to break.