The Challenge of Climate Change: Towards human species consciousness
Climate change: big words, narrow minds

The world we live in is one shaped by the presence of humanity; why do we rush to assume this is a bad thing? In this controversial new essay for the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre, Josie Appleton argues that traditional environmentalism is itself a form of denial. It is about a withdrawl from the planet, and a narrowing of human achievement. The anthropocene era we are now in, argues Appleton, requires a "human species consciousness", something the realm of art has already begun imagining.

The writer Philip Pullman has described climate change as a "religious story", addressing fundamental existential questions: "Why are we here? What is here, what does it consist of?" At the root of environmentalism, he says, is the question "What does it mean to us to be conscious of what we are doing in the world?"[1]  The alternative to environmental consciousness is "denial", by which he means not so much the denial of scientific evidence, but the refusal to be aware of one’s actions and their broader consequences. People who are not environmentally consciousness are limited to the "satisfaction of themselves alone".

Others have also claimed that climate change prompts a raised, more universal consciousness. Al Gore waxes lyrical: "The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause…"[2]  While popular culture has shrunk to the immediacy of an iPod download, climate change seems to offer the possibility of universal or future thinking. It is climate change, many argue, that will shock us out of our twenty-first century solipsism, and inaugurate a new era of adult responsibility and purpose.

Yet the opposite has happened. Public discussions about climate change have in fact involved a narrowing of consciousness, not a broadening. Time after time, the substance of the environmentalist discussion directly contradicts its universalist pretensions. This is suggested by Pullman’s proposed environmental remedy: carbon rations. Carbon rations? How does state-imposed rationing make us conscious of what we are doing in the world? Surely a conscious choice must be chosen; it must be the consciousness not of state bureaucrats but of the people?

Environmentalist thought has largely remained trapped within the terms of our consumerist, technical, regulatory times. Indeed, in many respects, green discourse has involved an amplification of the negative features of political culture.

Take the carbon calculator, for example. Its advocates talk about saving the world, but in substance, they are largely concerned with saving themselves. The Observer environment editor tested the UK government’s carbon calculator, and was furious because although she personally took care to take her electricity from wind power, the calculator made her take a share of the UK "energy mix". "What? Isn't the point of signing up to 100 per cent wind power that I am opting out of the 'UK energy mix'?" She could not opt out so easily, came the response from the government, because "green electricity suppliers sell most of their carbon credits to more-polluting companies, so there is little net reduction in total fossil fuel burn". She objected to taking the blame for other people’s actions: "[I] think giving wind power a carbon rating is as unfair as saying because I take the train and somebody else can use my space on the road, that I am partly to blame for the congestion and pollution they cause."[3]  It appears that her concern was not the fate of the planet, or even the UK’s overall carbon contribution, but her personal share of responsibility for it. And the overall aim seemed to be to remove herself from responsibility, remove herself from blame.

The carbon calculator is the embodiment of narrowed, individualistic consciousness. It blocks any universal thinking, thinking about how we collectively organise our resources or energy production. It also abstracts from any question of ends — of why we do things, of what is worth it and what is not. A plane journey could have been motivated by adventure or greed; it could have been to play in a concert, to see a sick relative or to do a drugs deal: in carbon terms, no matter. Every trip is judged indifferently, in terms of the carbon spewed out the engines.

The carbon calculator also inverts the fundamental question of conscious, being-in-the-world, which is how do we add to the world? How can we act productively to leave things of value in the world? With contemporary environmentalism, every action is defined as a negative impact on the world. The carbon calculator recommends not conscious action, but inaction — fewer plane journeys, fewer cups of tea, fewer car trips. The most "conscious" way of life would be to sit still like a cross-legged Buddhist and do nothing at all.

This is no life. So let us try a thought experiment, and discuss climate change from the point of a positive, universal human consciousness. There could be another way of seeing…

Welcome to the anthropocene

The first lesson of climate change is that we are living in the anthropocene. Through our actions we have changed the very operations of the atmosphere; we have changed the chemical composition of the Earth. The situation of climate change is an awesome and weighty reminder of how much human powers have increased. This implies a responsibility to use those powers for good, and not to fritter them away or use them destructively.

How far we have come as a species. Our species spent most of its history as a puny hominid living in small bands, scratching out an existence on the savannah, leaving little more behind than a few chipped stones or broken crockery. This puny hominid has become billions: its mobilisation of Earth’s resources is so thorough that there is no corner of the world unaffected by our presence. And now we are affecting the very composition of the atmosphere.


Still: The Day After Tomorrow 20th Century Fox. Nature as moral vengenance.
Environmentalists see the anthropocene as an undesirable state of affairs. They say we should find a way to reverse, and go back to a more moderate level of impact on the planet. They say that we should rein in our carbon dioxide production to return the climate to its natural state, its "stablisation point" or "climactic balance". We should "tread more lightly" on the planet, withdraw our hands from the corners of nature. This is the scenario explored in eco-disaster movies. At the end of The Day After Tomorrow, mankind learns its lesson and withdraws from dominating nature, and the clouds part and the earth returns to its former state of peace. At the end of The Day the Earth Stood Still, mankind’s salvation comes in standing still: lights blink out, cars stop, everybody freezes. The answer apparently lies in stopping, standing still.

This is pure childishness. The anthropocene is here, and there is no way back. To wish that we could retreat is the mythical fantasy of wishing that we never ate the apple or stole the fire. It is to wish that we were children again, back in a former stage of history. We cannot reverse out of the anthropocene but only go forward; we can only raise ourselves to a level of consciousness to match our powers. This would not mean a withdrawal from nature, but a more intelligent and planned use of our powers.

It has been clear for a long time that we live in the anthropocene. The geologist A.P. Pavlov (1854-1929) wrote about the anthropogenic era: an era in which human actions are capable of remoulding the very structure of nature, becoming a geological force. The Russian geochemist Vladimir I. Vernadsky called this the noösphere, a biosphere organised around man. He wrote: "In the twentieth century, man, for the first time in the history of the earth, knew and embraced the whole biosphere, completed the geographic map of the planet Earth, and colonized its whole surface. Mankind became a single totality in the life of the earth. There is no spot on earth where man can not live if he so desires…. The noösphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet. In it for the first time man becomes a large-scale geological force."

Vernadsky was writing in the midst of the Second World War — with men hurriedly extracting the earth’s resources in order to kill one another — yet he was hopeful about the anthropocene. This stage was necessary: "we cannot afford not to realize that, in the great historical tragedy through which we live, we have elementally chosen the right path leading into the noösphere. I say elementally, as the whole history of mankind is proceeding in this direction." In his period of extreme national rivalries, he nonetheless saw the possibility of the reorganisation of the planet around universal human ends: "[Mankind] can and must rebuild the province of his life by his work and thought, rebuild it radically in comparison with the past. Wider and wider creative possibilities open before him. It may be that the generation of our grandchildren will approach their blossoming."[4]

This perhaps sounds like a programme for stamping on or destroying nature. Yet it is quite the opposite: Vernadsky’s humanist utopia would mean a far more vibrant and varied nature than we have at present. The "wider creative possibilities" of reorganising nature around human desires could in fact mean a munificence of animals, plants and ecosystems. Crucially, man is a producer and not just a consumer of nature; part of his productive activity is to make nature, by planting trees, breeding animals, setting up wildlife reserves.

There is no pristine nature. Areas that we think of as "natural" are managed and constructed, and all the more beautiful for it. Were the Lake District not grazed, it would be solid forest: you would not see the elegant shapes of the fells and there would be no views when you walked them. Almost every aspect of nature now is one we have chosen. We cannot scurry back to Eden: but we can be a wise geological force and use our powers for good.

Human species consciousness

The challenge of climate change is to develop human species consciousness. Our goal should not be to limit resource use, but to use resources in the most productive way, in order to satisfy the needs and desires of humanity as a whole. The goal should be not to cut back on energy, but to go beyond the clapped-out nineteenth century technology of burning fossil fuels, and develop cheap and abundant energy that can be distributed to people across the world. The goal should be to use resources according to conscious human choice, rather than just the blind and unconscious mechanisms of individual market choice.

Yet we are woefully ill-prepared for this challenge. In the first instance, we need more public discussion and exploration of social and economic priorities. How do we want to use resources? What kind of energy systems do we want? What kind of nature do we want? For all the press coverage of climate change, there is almost no discussion of different options for producing and consuming resources. In fact, environmentalists often shut down public discussion, saying there is "no time for talk" and "we must act now" (although they are rarely clear what they mean by "action"). Yet a more universal consciousness of the situation can only come from open, sustained, deep public discussion. The climate moves slowly; we have time.

Climate change points towards a consciousness of our existence as a species on this planet. A glimmer of species consciousness came in the 1960s, with the photograph of the Earth from the moon. Here we saw our planet for the first time; we looked back at ourselves from the blackness of the universe. It was as if a man saw himself in the mirror for the first time. People became conscious that they inhabited a planet, that they were all a species on a planet. Before they had thought that they inhabited a town, a country, at most a continent: now they saw the whole world as if from the eye of God.

Yet we have never yet acted as a species on a planet; we have never acted with this level of consciousness. The possibility of human species consciousness is absent from political discussion. However, it has been explored in the imaginative realm of art.

In the film Sunshine, the Sun is ailing and the Earth stuck in an Ice Age. A crew is sent with a vast nuclear bomb — the last of the Earth’s uranium — to bomb the Sun back into action. These individuals are not representatives of national interest: instead, they become representatives of the human species. Their mission is to bring back warmth and light to the planet, which they do by creating a new sun. One by one the characters meet their deaths, but they do so without regret. In the final scene, the hero stands on the deck as the spacecraft plummets into the solar fire, and he opens his arms and receives his annihilation. Through his own death, the earth and the human species are given back their life.


Still: Sunshine DNA Films. The universe reengineered by humanity.
There is massive gap between this imaginative scenario — viewers can empathise with and applaud the hero – and the contemporary discussion about climate change. In contemporary discussion, any kind of climate modification is dismissed as out of hand — largely on the basis that we could make mistakes, or because climate modification technologies could be used by particular political interests. Nicholas Stern, government climate change adviser, writes off geoengineering on the basis that it carries 'major uncertainties" — and after all, "Who would take the decision to use [these technologies]?"[5]  Clearly, if he objects so much to the engineering of clouds, he would not think too highly of engineering the sun.

Yet we know that at some point in the far-distant future, our sun will die. This will be at least a billion years, which is "forever" for practical purposes, but we cannot escape the fact that the universe is a temporal creation and so are we. At this point if not before, humans would become extinct. If we are the only conscious life in the universe then that would be that: mind would be gone. So it may be that at some point in the far-distant future, we will have to act as a species to create or recreate a star. Whether or not this actually happens, it’s good to imagine it. These explorations loosen up the rigidity of the contemporary imagination; they could help to us take our blinkers off.

If humans could act together to save our world, equally, we could mess up and destroy the world. In Eternity, Michael Hanlon writes that "For the first time in history it is becoming clear that just about anything is possible": we could destroy ourselves, we could prosper, or we could muddle through.

Contemporary sci-fi film and fiction frequently explores the possibility of human destruction. What happens if our world falls apart, and (as a character puts it in the film 28 Days), there is "no government, no police, no army, no radio, no TV, no electricity"? 28 Days and I am Legend feature characters living in the deserted ruins of London and New York, these eerily familiar landscapes now empty, save for scraps of paper blowing around the pavements. Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road tells of a father and son travelling through the ruins of American civilisation, scavenging from the scraps of another world.

These works are full of nostalgia for our world: their haunting sense of loss is also a warning. We could mess up; we could lose all this; our world could be past. Such gravity is missing from political discussion. It is perhaps only in art that the gravity of future possibilities has been explored, both the euphoria and grandeur of acting consciously as a species, and the awesome sadness of messing up and losing.

Art provides an imaginative sphere in which future possibilities can be explored: it fuels the desire for the future, and stirs us to believe that the future could feel very different. "Would NASA have gone to Mars without The War of the Worlds?", asks Hanlon.[6] As the gap between rhetoric and content in the climate change discussion grows ever larger, this role for art is more crucial than ever. Imaginative possibilities could lay a path for technological and political possibilities, and the slow evolution of a human species consciousness.

Josie Appleton is convenor of the Manifesto Club. She wrote the Manifesto Club reports, The Case Against Vetting, How the Child Protection Industry Stole Christmas, and Hobby Clubs. She is a journalist and writer based in London. She writes regularly for, and has contributed to a number of publications, including The Spectator, The Times, Times Literary Supplement and Daily Express.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also like to read RETHINK : a new improbable form of life, which discusses similar themes, by Emma Ridgway, Curator at the RSA Arts and Ecology Centre 

1. Philip Pullman interview, in Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth? Andrew Simms and Joe Smith, Constable 2008
2. An Inconvenient Truth: The planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it, Al Gore, Bloomsbury, 2006, p11
3. August 12, 2007, Observer
4. American Scientist, January 1945: republished http://larouchepub.com/other/2005/site_packages/vernadsky/3207bios_and_noos.html
5. Nicholas Stern, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet, p40
6. Eternity: Our next Billion Years, Michael Hanlon, Macmillan 2009