Building Lifeboats

The job now is no longer to turn the ship around. We don't have the wheel, and those who do will not listen¹. The task now is to build lifeboats. To build resilient spaces in which fragments of humanity can survive. Yes, it would be better to try to save everyone. But that literally isn't in our power. We can, each of us, only influence the locality in which we live, and the people in that locality who are willing to listen².

This essay is incomplete; it is part of an evolving train of thought and will be revised.

I wrote on Sunday about The Point of No Return; this essay is consciously a followup to that.

The point of the point of no return is that I believe we are beyond the point where a whole earth system can be salvaged. We have too much ecological and climate damage already locked in; we're going to lose, probably, whole continents, to degrees of climate damage that renders them uninhabitable. Furthermore, change continues to accelerate.

Build your lifeboat where you are — if you can.

The problem is that locations in which lifeboats are likely to survive are uncommon³. Lifeboats in the tropics risk being overwhelmed by extreme heat events. The temperature doesn't have to be hot enough to kill people all the time to make a location unlivable. If it gets hot enough to kill everyone in the locality even once, people will be unwilling to move back — and people in neighbouring locations will be eager to move away.

Those population movements will lead to human migration on a scale the world has never seen before. If lifeboats are not willing to accept and integrate incomers, then those migrants will die. But that tidal wave of migrants will overwhelm lifeboats in their path, unless other lifeboats around them also take their share.

Lifeboats on migration paths which try to resist incomers, which try to close their borders, will face conflict — war, fighting, killing — on their borders to a degree which will be at best debilitating and more probably unsustainable.

So, lifeboats in the tropics — or on low-lying land, almost anywhere — are unlikely to survive. Lifeboats on migration paths are unlikely to survive. Lifeboats in urban areas are unlikely to survive, because the ratio of available arable land to population is unsupportable. Lifeboats in the places where most people live are unlikely to survive.

But if people — if you — leave the places where you live now in search of lifeboats more likely to survive, you become part of that tidal wave of migration, destabilising and perhaps overwhelming the communities through which you pass. But in none of those communities will you have the network of connections, of friendships, of stored social capital, that you do where you are now. In none of those communities will you be as effective, as useful, as you can be where you are now. Move only as a last resort — only if life will clearly become impossible where you are.

Could we build a survivable lifeboat here in Galloway? It's sufficiently possible that it's worth trying, but I think it's marginal. We're sufficiently high latitude that we have some protection from extreme heat events, we have low enough population density and good enough soils that feeding ourselves and providing for our material needs is not problematic; and we're not really on a route to anywhere.

But it isn't likely we'd succeed. We're too well connected, too easy to reach; our structures of land and property ownership are too entrenched and too unequal. Those with power locally will work against us, and success would make us a beacon for people from places which will fail.

Even in places where lifeboats are more likely to survive, lifeboats may not survive. It's perfectly possible that we're so poisoning the planet that human life will become impossible everywhere. Even remote lochs in the Highlands and Hebrides are poisoned with PFAS; of thirty two rivers sampled in the UK, only one was clean. We don't really know the long term effects of these on human health. Pollution from oral contraceptives is similarly widespread, and affects our ability to reproduce (although I think the concentration will reduce over time).

More seriously, we're damaging the ability of the ecosystem to photosynthesise oxygen from carbon dioxide, both by dramatically reducing forest cover, including as a result of fires, especially in the tropics where photosynthesis is most effective, and also from pollution and climate change leading to losses in phytoplankton. Global oxygen levels are trending down and have been for some decades. We've evolved to live in an atmosphere of around 20% oxygen; if oxygen levels fall much below this, we die.

In other words, total failure is a possibility.

But it isn't certain. There is hope, for lifeboats. And even if most lifeboats are likely to fail, hope is vital for morale: unless we have hope, it's very hard to do anything useful.

Hope is a possibility, in most places. To build hope where you are, you need to build community. You need to build community cohesion. To build community cohesion, you have to build the common wealth. To build the common wealth, you have to persuade those who have private wealth in your locality that it is in their best interests to voluntarily surrender most of it.

As the situation becomes more desperate, lifeboats which do not have high social solidarity will collapse in conflict.

notes

'I do not know how to convey this urgency even to people who I am close to'

Yes, precisely this.

Hug those close to you. And then start building a lifeboat, for yourself and for them, simply, practically, and without preaching.

Most of these lifeboats will inevitably founder, but without them, everyone will drown.

the lifeboat can only, anywhere, be an inclusive, social thing, I think. Literally, a commune, in the full sense of that word.

Solidarity will be key. Lifeboats which start arguing about who is worthy to be included will not survive. Lifeboats that cannot integrate desperate newcomers are, I think, unlikely to survive. But I think any lifeboat anywhere risks being overwhelmed by the tides of desperate displaced people we are likely to see.

there will be significant climate migration. Asia south of the Himalayas, and Africa north of the Vaal River, the Americas between Panama and Rio de la Plata, are pretty much going to have to empty out, in the lifetime of people now living. Something like half the total land area of the planet is going to be lost — if not permanently, at least for thousands of years.

That's not quite locked in yet; but things which will lock it in are locked in.

It's bleak.

Tags: Anarchism, Climate, Grief, Politics