“Hopium” and the Long Defeat
The rhetoric of “hopium” is failing as ecological overshoot deepens. “Hopium”, a colloquial term that is a blend of the words “hope” and “opium” (as though it were a drug), represents a faith in technological and market-based solutions to address our multiple reinforcing crises, despite evidence to the contrary. We're living in the long defeat and we must own and confront it with courage. Award-winning essayist, Pamela Swanigan, joins us. Highlights include:
How children's literature is full of reverence for nature but children's literature analysis done in the academy is dominated by the perspective of human exceptionalism;
The role that Judeo-Christianity has played in promoting the worldview of human exceptionalism while destroying the millennia-old biophilic and animistic belief systems;
Why Pamela was astonished that her essay won the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition given the magical thinking of human exceptionalism and techno-solutionism embodied by the summit attendees;
Social reformer and US Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs John Collier’s concept of the 'long hope'- that indigenous cultures and their nature-sacralizing beliefs could help humanity survive after the collapse of techno-industrial civilization;
Why the delusional and pervasive rhetoric of hope among social change advocates (such as Jane Goodall and David Suzuki) defies evidence, and why we must embrace JRR Tolkien's concept of the 'long defeat' in order to courageously fight against ecological destruction and social injustice.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Article: It’s Time to Give Up Hope for a Better Climate and Get Heroic by Pamela Swanigan (Original title: "Let Us Make Such an End: Collier's Long Hope, Tolkien's Long Defeat, and the Rhetoric of End Times")
Academic Paper: The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis by Lynn White Jr.
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Pamela Swanigan (00:00:00):
Which of the evidence before us suggests that the rhetoric of hope has failed? Rounding up slightly, all of it. There is, to begin with, its role in soft-pedaling the facts of the climate and ecological crises, and thereby helping to create an urgency gap of mock-epic proportions between the happening and the known. Those whose job it is to see in 'elf span' - the climate scientist, the historical ecologists - report a war come upon us in medias res, one in which we lost most of our ground before we even knew there was a problem. And our only chance of preventing a 'zero Earth' scenario is to fight a desperate rearguard action. Any faithful rendering of their vision for the near future must perforce be quasi-apocalyptic.
Alan Ware (00:00:45):
That was writer and editor Pamela Swanigan, reading from her award-winning essay, It's Time to Give Up Hope for Better Climate and Get Heroic. In this episode of OVERSHOOT, we talk with Pamela about the need to transcend the rhetoric of hopium and face the challenging future with courage.
Nandita Bajaj (00:01:11):
Welcome to OVERSHOOT, where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware (00:01:36):
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests covering a range of topics, we examine the forces underlying overshoot - the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now on to today's guest.
(00:02:15):
Pamela Swanigan is a Vancouver-based writer and editor and a former university English instructor. Born in Oakland, California to a white mother and a black father, she moved with her family to Canada as a child and has lived most of her life on the West Coast. Pamela's writing has often reflected her deep passion for nature and her interest in modern western people's struggles to understand their place within or without it.
(00:02:42):
Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the way classic children's literature fosters biophilia, endorses non- Abrahamic modes of spirituality such as animism and leads to internal schism when the reader grows older and finds themselves expected to dominate and exploit the natural world that they were previously told they belong to. Pamela won the 2011 children's literature graduate essay prize for her essay, Much the Same on the Other Side, The Boondocks and the Symbolic Frontier. And in 2024, she co-won the inaugural Berggruen Prize Essay Competition with her essay, It’s Time to Give Up Hope for a Better Climate and Get Heroic. She has also won major awards for her magazine, feature writing, and poetry. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj (00:03:29):
Hi Pam, welcome to the show. It is terrific having you on.
Pamela Swanigan (00:03:34):
Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here.
Nandita Bajaj (00:03:36):
And Pam, we were made aware of your work through your provocative, deeply honest award-winning essay, It’s Time to Give Up Hope for a Better Climate and Get Heroic. Congratulations on winning the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition this past October.
Pamela Swanigan (00:03:53):
Thank you very much. It was a nice surprise.
Nandita Bajaj (00:03:55):
You put into eloquent words some of the same thoughts and feelings that we've had about the inadequacy of hope to describe the emotional and intellectual stance that we all need to take to face the dire condition of our ecological overshoot. And we're so looking forward to exploring with you the various meanings and nuances of that essay. And we read some of your other writings in preparation for this interview and we noticed that there's a strong through line from some of that earlier writing to this recent award-winning essay questioning the value of hope. And that's very exciting to delve into because that notion of kind of delusional optimism, hope, and magical thinking is all around us. And as things get more desperate, that type of thinking is becoming more and more prevalent to basically paralyze us into complacency. So we'll start with your PhD dissertation. You wrote that a while back, but the dissertation was within the field of literary eco criticism. And the specific topic of your paper was biophilia and non-Christian belief systems in children's literature. And before we explore some of the ideas in your dissertation, could you start by defining the terms ecocriticism and biophilia?
Pamela Swanigan (00:05:25):
Yes. Ecocriticism is purportedly just sort of an ecological nature-based way of looking at literature. Just as simple as that. The founder of it, Cheryll Glotfelty, sort of promised that it would be a interdisciplinary kind of thing. I took that to mean that those of us who had always felt very aligned toward nature and read a lot of works that are focused around nature would kind of meet with scientists, life scientists who knew. And they would sort of go, here's what I see in this book. And I'd go, oh, I didn't know that about nature or this animal or this ecosystem or whatever. And we would pull literature out of the theoretical bed of nonsense that it has lived in for many decades. But that's not what ecocriticism has turned out to be. It really has gone very theoretical and it's just kind of encapsulated within the academy and it's extremely not interdisciplinary.
(00:06:33):
So that's the definition of ecocriticism as it was promised. And then as it has actually evolved. Biophilia is E.O. Wilson's term for, again something that I think is the most obvious thing in the world, which is that we're animals, we're part of nature and we're a species and therefore we relate to other life. We relate to nature. We relate to other animals. We relate to natural ecosystems because we evolved in them. Our brain is an animal brain that evolved to see threats and find prey and find shelter. So that's what biophilia is. I mean, bio means life and philia means love of. And there were some attendant kind of tenets or items of evidence that he presented. One of them was that we have biases toward picking up certain kinds of information, the complexities of life in the outdoors, in the jungle, in the bush, whatever.
(00:07:42):
There are sort of global phobias, snakes and phobia of spiders. And there's a pretty universal urge to live in conditions that mimic the savanna conditions of our early evolution - being on a slight rise, looking over open terrain that has some amount of cover, has a water source. And to anyone who says, oh, well that's nonsense, I'm like, I'll believe that the day that millionaires and billionaires in Manhattan choose not to live in a place overlooking Central Park. When you start choosing basement suites, outside of condition of nuclear war or something, then I'll believe that this doesn't hold true. But it bears out. We evolved inside nature and we have a brain that works accordingly. And it blows my mind that something like this could have its fact status contested because if we're not animals who evolve, what are we? It's one thing if you're religious, the answer is we were created by God and we were different and we're set to reign over all the rest of nature.
(00:08:55):
But a lot of the people who take issue with this are scientists, supposed to be practicing evidence-based thinking. And yet as I discovered at the summit on the planetary situation that I attended in Venice last fall, there's rampant denialism, rampant human exceptionalism, rampant non-evidence based thinking. So science is not a refuge for those of us who see this as common sense. I thought that they would listen to life scientists, naturalists, biologists and let that body of knowledge in the so-called soft scientists influence how they saw this literature and the literature that they analyze and take them out of the human exceptionalism and what David Ehrenfeld calls the arrogance of humanism simply by presenting them with at least anecdotal evidence and in a lot of cases, scientific evidence, that we are not exceptional. We just do exactly what many other species do. And there are points definitely of departure because we are an exceptional animal in relative terms.
(00:10:15):
None of that happened. There was a whole special issue of interdisciplinary studies in the literature and the environment where they just sort of talked about theory and just this negation of reality that a lot of theory involves, just nonsense. This is why, because we're trying to create a discipline that takes reality as its base and it's not deconstructionist or whatnot, but it just all just went that way very quickly. It went back into what you can find in any corridor of any humanities department at any university, just people spewing gobbledy gook. Timothy Morton for instance, published something called Ecology Without Nature. He's talking about Theodor Adorno and Marx and Derrida and yada, yada, and Lacan and Latour. And it's like, oh yeah, okay, let's explore this idea of ecology without nature. Yeah, no, let's not. Let's just not. And so between the time that I even discovered the term ecocriticism and the time that I finished my dissertation, that was supposed to be an ecocritical look at children's fantasy, at anti-immortalism in children's fantasy, it was no longer a term that, I had to disavow it essentially because it was horrible. It's not a lens for looking at anything.
Alan Ware (00:11:41):
It sounds like a big part of that is the denial of the materiality, materialness of existence, right?
Pamela Swanigan (00:11:48):
And where does that come from, if not from a denial of our status as an animal. And so how can you actually apply that to children's literature that is chock full of animals and nature and trees and prairies and deer and talking hedgehogs. They're actually diametrically opposed as it turns out, which is really sad. But oh, well, I'll just say this is a common sense analysis of children's literature instead of saying it's eco-critical because ecocriticism has very quickly just nullified its own reason for existing.
Nandita Bajaj (00:12:25):
Right, and you mentioned earlier when you were describing it that since humanism comes out of a western, rationalistic, individualistic framework, it then generalizes this model of human nature to the whole world and it overestimates the degree to which people around the world value the kinds of things you were referring to as like American exceptionalism, individualism, self-interest, self-fulfillment, rather than some of the millennia-old connections that people have had with nature, kinship with each other. And those have all been trampled with the exportation of a lot of these values.
Pamela Swanigan (00:13:08):
That's beautifully put, if I may say so, the conflation of American exceptionalism with human exceptionalism, I mean very much bears exploring because I do believe that America has amberized these human exceptionalist ways. They are a religious fundamentalist country, plus they're founded on a philosophy of liberty and an economy of slavery. There is a very deeply foundationally necessary capacity for cognitive dissonance and denial in that country. And the jingoism and the manifest destiny and all these things that have characterized the country is very difficult to have even basic thoughts like what E.O. Wilson thought, we're animals, humans are animals, and therefore we gravitate toward life rather than concrete or Mars. The fact that it makes such simple observations and obviousnesses is impossible, is something worth noting. And the fact that this dispensation is the one that is guiding the intellectual world, the technological world, the scientific world, the economic world, the political world, the military world is quite frightening.
Nandita Bajaj (00:14:34):
And even when you see the overlap of race and class in America, you also see then, which are the voices that then get privileged in some of these higher level conversations about where we're going. How do we address these ecological and social crises?
Pamela Swanigan (00:14:55):
A hundred percent. I mean we can see this at any level of political organization. Who has the time when they're a server at a restaurant for five days a week and then they work as a cashier the other two days of the week, who has the time to run for council? Who has the time to organize the community to clear up the waterways or sway politicians? So I mean, that exists everywhere and it's a problem. I started out when I was young, when I was 15, I left home, I went to Winnipeg, I had $110 and that's as far as I could get on a $110. And I joined the Revolutionary Workers League because I was in love with Che Guevara. So I joined the Revolutionary Workers League and kind of for odd reasons became immersed in this whole socialist thing, which I then left and now I kind of regard it as a little bit silly. But I think that capitalism is a problem. I think that they're not wrong, that this doesn't work for most people. The Guardian last year ran a series on how do we fix capitalism? And one person said, it's not broken. I'm like, it's not broken. This is exactly how it was meant to function. A small handful of people own the means of production, and the rest of us have only our labor to sell. You get to this point where it's eating its own tail to the ruination of 90% of the people.
Alan Ware (00:16:25):
And it's exploiting the natural world as you've mentioned. And I'm wondering in your paper about Judeo Christianity also you mentioned has been a big part of the exploitation and alienation from nature as well as modern technology. You talk about both of those in the paper. Can you explain that connection?
Pamela Swanigan (00:16:46):
Yeah. So in 1971, Lynn White Jr published an essay called The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, and he just connected those dots, right? Judeo- Christianity is the first and only religious system that says that humans are exceptional and that we are put on this Earth to have dominion over all other life and non-life as well. Their world was made for us and we were made in God's image and therefore trees have no spirit of their own. Rivers have no spirit of their own, et cetera. There was some amount of animism in every other major religious and minor religious belief system. And so as soon as you didn't have to worry about the soul of the bison you were killing or the tree you were cutting down or the land that you were digging into, as soon as you no longer thought, oh, it's screaming because I'm digging a shovel into it or I'm sawing it down, and you no longer had to feel any reverence or any kinship, then you could just rape and pillage.
(00:17:57):
And that's what happened. And Lynn White Jr draws this line between the rapacious technological processes that ensued and says like, well, why did all of this technology not take hold in other places? It's not because there weren't scientists say in the Middle East or in Africa or whatever. It's not because they were ignorant. It's because their belief system did not allow them or encourage them to pave everything over and cut everything down and exploit everything, whereas Judeo-Christianity explicitly says, this is what you were put on this Earth to do and this is what the Earth was put into the universe for you to do. This is what a tree is for, is to cut it down. This is what a river is for, is for you to use it to clean your copper mine tailings or whatever. So as with the concept of biophilia, the connection between Judeo-Christianity's human exceptionalist fundament and just the siege of the planet is very clear.
(00:19:09):
And I think Nandita your point about what is American exceptionalism and what is human exceptionalism is very pertinent to that because with my dissertation of all the children's fantasy authors that I include, Ursula Le Guin and Natalie Babbit are the only Americans. There is almost no American children's fantasy, and that's partly because it's restricted by these beliefs. My American PhD supervisor recommended a southern American publisher that has a really good children series, and I just can't bring myself to do it because I know that everything I say is going to just be wildly misunderstood and challenged. Whereas if I send it to Rutledge or somewhere in the UK, they're just going to be like, oh, really? People are hearing about this? Oh, sorry, what's the question? What, you're saying that children's literature is full of nature, really? We have to write a 250 page dissertation about that.
(00:20:17):
But I did because there were just absurdities. There was nothing but absurdities in children's literature analysis. I thought it was going to be plugging a little hole. No, there was nothing that said children's literature is wall to wall about nature. It was craziness and all of the analysis that there was about that just subordinated it to this Freudian wackiness where in Charlotte's Web when Fern grabs her father's ax to keep him from killing Wilbur the pig, she's really grabbing his phallus. We know what she's grabbing. It's like, and the pig is not a pig, and Charlotte is not a spider, and the ax is not an ax, it's a phallus. And as I say in my dissertation, for me, E.B. White, I have the letters of E.B. White. I love them. He's such a brilliant letter writer. And there's a whole stretch in there where Garth Williams is starting his illustrations for Charlotte's Web and E.B. White says, no, no, no, this is based on a spider that I have above my door in my barn.
(00:21:27):
You've got the species wrong. I'm going to send you pictures of this particular spider so you can get the species right. And he also had written an essay called The Death of a Pig, where he talked about how silly it was that he went to all these lengths to try to save the life of the sick pig that he fully intended on butchering later that year. The pig was a pig. The spider was a spider. But almost nowhere in children's literature analysis coming from the States, can you get acknowledgement of just that simple fact, right? It's all theorized, just absurdity.
Alan Ware (00:22:02):
And that's the humanism that you talk about being so non-material and the progress narrative. When I was thinking of Judeo-Christian inject a linearity to history, we're going to the Messiah, we're going to rapture. Animist religions had a more circular view of life and death or rise and fall of civilizations, the seasonality of life. So it's interesting with Freud and the kind of restless western mind that we needed to progress conceptually, needed to layer on new theory, structuralist, functional, just keep inventing all kinds of different theories and getting that much further removed from, I wouldn't call it necessarily animist, but ecological animist understanding of materiality. That's a great critique in broad strokes.
Pamela Swanigan (00:22:53):
Yes, absolutely. And in Lynn White's essay, he actually says, Judeo-Christianity is the only religious system that has the concept of the beginning because everything else is circular. And so there is no start. There is no ending. Right? The creation myth only has a start point. It's interesting me, he keeps only mentioning two of the three Abrahamic religions, and I do wonder about Islam. I read a book during the researching of my essay last fall called Sacred Nature by Karen Armstrong, and she talks about the sacredness of nature within every other belief system including Islam, and talks about the concepts, the precepts of Islam that set it apart from Judeo- Christianity. In this regard, I wondered if she was stretching a point a bit because I mean all the Abrahamic religions started under the same tent, Abraham's, and do have the same creation myth at the base.
(00:23:59):
So I would like to do more exploration of where nature is in Islam. Buddhism also can be very, very problematic in its non-materiality and it's extreme forms of it sort what I think of as the puristic nihilistic forms of Buddhism can say, not only are you not animals, but you don't exist and none of this is real and everything is pain and just this whole thing. But even the most biophilically-centered belief system, say Hinduism, can very much be subverted. I don't think that is proving to be any kind of bulwark in India today. There are a lot of conservation efforts that are supported by the sacred view of nature and animals, but capitalism can definitely get in there. It's like water, right? It just comes in and subverts and overwhelms these belief systems.
(00:25:01):
We can see the seeds of destruction in Judeo-cap... I almost said Judeo-capitalism, call it that, right? Christianity in capitalism, in American exceptionalism and militarism, we can see the seeds of destruction, but meanwhile they have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the Earth 400 times over. Do we just wait for them to destroy themselves through their own rakshasa kind of traits or do we step out of our own belief systems to meet them on their own terms where they will overwhelm us anyway, because they are the monster demon. They aren't bound by honor. I think in my prize-winning essay, let's just keep referring to it that way.
(00:25:55):
I've written many essays in my life and many good essays. This is the only one I've gotten paid five figures for. The prize-winning aspect of it is important to me, but I briefly touch on Lord Bowen's witticism, his ditty, about the idea of justice and equity, God causes it to rain upon both the just and the unjust or whatever. I'm sure I'm mangling that quote. And he said 'The rain it raineth on the just and also on the unjust fella, but mostly on the just, because the unjust steals the just's umbrella.' And until we can solve that, until we can solve the moral asymmetry that gives the amoral people power, it will rain on us because they let themselves steal our umbrella, but we don't allow ourselves even to steal it back, never mind steal theirs, right?
Nandita Bajaj (00:26:48):
Yeah. Let's go into your award-winning essay more.
Pamela Swanigan (00:26:54):
And I am astonished now that I know more about the culture at the Berggruen Institute, I'm astonished that I won this essay. I'm the only woman who won. I'm the only writer who won because they had a condition that you had to have at least one peer-reviewed publication. And so that led just academics to enter the contest. And also I noticed when I was at the concomitant summit that went along with the award ceremony last fall, there were no life scientists. I was like, why am I a non-scientist standing here defending evolutionary determinism or human non-exceptionalism or biophilic precepts? Where are all the scientists who actually believe in life, care about life? Where are they all? There were a couple there, Mallory Scholars, and they just were looking like, wow, we missed a memo here. One of them, the first words out of her mouth was like, I feel like an interloper. And that's because everybody else was talking about tech bro stuff in regard to the planet. And she thought that we were here to talk about the planet as like a living thing. And again, coming from Maori belief systems, which hold as you know, nature very sacred, and she and her fellow Maori scholar-presenter were just completely overwhelmed by the culture of this summit.
Nandita Bajaj (00:28:17):
Right, and you've also written that children's literature actually supports this biophilic belief that we both want and need to be connected to a healthy biosphere. And you go on to state that children's literature within the western culture may serve as a crucial keeper of what Native American advocate and Franklin Roosevelt's progressive Bureau of Indian Affairs head, John Collier, called the Long Hope. What did he mean by the phrase, the Long hope?
Pamela Swanigan (00:28:53):
John Collier is amazing. He blows my mind. I wish everybody knew about him. He's one of the most powerful writers I've ever come across. And he turned out to be commissioner of Indian Affairs, and he just single handedly, he was like, assimilation is policy, nope. Going to end it. And he did. Right? Forced land sale, nope. Going to end it. And he did. So in his interactions with indigenous, what we in Canada would call First Nations people, native Americans, many very intimate interactions with many, many different cultures and a deep historical scholarly knowledge of South American indigenous peoples. He went from a position of skepticism about whether their belief systems could really sustain them or do anything for them, resist the behemoth that was American Judeo-Christianity and techno-industrial capitalism. And then he saw that despite all of those things and just the crushing weight and the multi-generational trauma and the dispossession and the forced assimilation, these cultures still did retain their sacred fire.
(00:30:12):
And in a real way, not in an on-paper, it sounds all very romantic, kind of way. The fact that he went from kind of not believing that these systems could provide any resilience to seeing right through his daily interactions that they did makes me more inclined to believe that he was right, that he wasn't just being a romantic about it. So he decided that, given the predations of techno-industrial capitalism that he saw in the westernized world, including America, the only hope that we had of resisting this and kind of going dormant, kind of like going underground with it, with our non-techno-industrial, Judeo-Christian beliefs, with our own sacred flames, kind of like to go underground until the fire had passed. And then when we came back up, we would have these indigenous cultures that would show us how to use and absorb and apply these beliefs, these nature-sacralizing beliefs.
(00:31:21):
He saw it as the only way that we could survive, but because it would have to happen on the other side of the cataclysm, he termed it the long hope. It was a very long-term hope. It depended on these cultures not being forced to assimilate and not being forced to give back their land. So to me, the fact that he came to this conclusion, and he went, okay, we need to stop making them assimilate and stop making them sell their land and that he had the power to do that. If we want these cultures to be around to help us rekindle the sacredness of Earth within our own cultures and our own selves, we have to preserve them. So that's what he meant by the long hope. And he said, it's our only hope, and it's a very long hope. I think he was pretty clear-eyed about it being very much a long shot, but he did what he could to at least create the conditions of Native American cultures still being around in their semi-intact form when the rest of us did pop our heads out of the ashes.
Nandita Bajaj (00:32:32):
That's very helpful. And then in your essay, you go on to say that this long hope that Collier has, that industrialized populations can someday adopt these indigenous life ways, is very unlikely. Could you unpack why you think that's unlikely?
Pamela Swanigan (00:32:52):
Well, because there's just no evidence whatsoever that it's going to work or it's going to happen. However, having just recounted an expanded version of what he meant by the long hope, it somewhat depends on how long you think long is. It sounds very, very romantic and very improbable. However, if you look at post- apocalyptic time, if the whole world is not destroyed physically, if there are still people around, it's possible that that is what's going to happen, but on the way far end of what we're going through now. So as an immediate likelihood, I mean obviously that's not going to happen. People have not moved toward that in any way, sort of taking long hope to be anything shorter than a point in the future that we really can't even see or imagine, right? Applying that kind of hope to our current situation is fallacious and cowardly and it's folly and there's a lot of folly to go around.
(00:34:01):
I mean, I've been in contact with some of the bright lights of this world, theoretically, since I won that essay. It's put me in a contact with a different sphere. And when I was supposed to give my two minute speech accepting my award for which they had flown me nine time zones from home and back, anyway, I gave a little riff on 'though we speak with the tongue of men and of angels, but have not charity'. I said, you know, 'though we may speak in the tongues of the learned and have not wisdom, we are but a tinkling brass or sounding symbol' because there was very little wisdom in that room. There was very little wisdom represented in any of the thinking that I could see. There was no valuation of wisdom. There was no recognition that wisdom is even a thing.
Alan Ware (00:34:55):
You also talk about magical thinking, which is quite related to hope thinking. And I like the quote that you have, 'the core syllogism of magical thinking: we should, therefore we must; we must, therefore we can; we can, therefore we will', which is the kind of rhetoric you hear so much of on the hopeful, extreme hopeful end of all kinds of scientific cultural issues we have. So what are some areas of modern life or who are some of the purveyors of this kind of magical thinking that you're most annoyed with these days?
Pamela Swanigan (00:35:30):
Well, I hate to say this because I theoretically adore her, but Jane Goodall, she's just got to stop. Everything she writes in the Book of Hope, and her co-author, Doug Abrams writes, is just ludicrous. She is supposed to be representing evidence-based thinking, is she not? Reality-based thinking, is she not? And yet she's not. David Suzuki here in Canada, he does a lot of good work, as does the Jane Goodall Foundation, boots on the ground work for preserving and protesting and educating. But as soon as he starts talking about this stuff, just how we have to have hope, and he does embrace the kind of long hope ideas, and there is this sort of First Nations, neo-native, indigenous wannabe kind of thing that goes on too. I think it makes more sense to say our culture, our own culture can revere the same things that First Nations and did revere and we do as individuals revere. We are brought as children to revere nature and animals and trees and the planet, and then it was shamed out of us and suppressed within us.
(00:36:44):
David Suzuki is very much into let's look at the First Nations' ways of living and emulate those. It's like, okay, David. Well, a) First Nations' way of living for the most part is like 30 to a house with no drinkable water. So is that what you mean? There's definitely with him, unlike I believe with John Collier, very much a romanticized, noble savage kind of overlay to that line of thinking. But just even if you strip that away, this whole idea that we can just hope our way out of this situation, it's just absurd and it's dismaying that so many of the old guard environmental writers and icons are indulging in this because it's incommensurable, the issues they we're taking on. I mean, ultimately we're part of the systemic stuff that we're dealing with now, but within that systemic problem, they were much more encapsulated, much more manageable. There was a lot of getting clear-cutting stopped or preserving primate habitat or seeing the public be widely educated through Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and saw the advent of Earth Day and sort of a diminishment of the threat of nuclear war. And so I'm not trying to say that they didn't do anything. I'm just saying that almost none of that applies. The scale is very different and it is a difference in degree that constitutes a difference in kind, and we just can't keep applying these relatively dinky little approaches to something that's this massive.
Alan Ware (00:38:33):
Yeah, I like your comment about the weight of history, that 'the consequences of our actions from the irretrievable past, like a bad newsletter to ourselves left long unsent that I think sometimes our humanistic hubris'. Especially in America, it's about the now, it's innovation, it's disruption, we can do it, we're amazingly powerful individuals, neglects the huge weight of thousands of years of ancestors' decisions and the weight of all the destruction, the staggering level of destruction that they did in a place like Canada, in America, in an amazingly fast time. The destruction was rapid and nearly complete of prairies, forest, you name any ecosystem in this entire North American continent virtually. But that level of hubris about what we can do now and not recognizing the weight of all those past decisions made by many people long before we were born.
Pamela Swanigan (00:39:35):
And that leads me to two kind of branching thoughts. One is that if we take ourselves to be animals and animal species and take our brains to have evolved within a certain context, we were kind of never meant to understand that kind of history, that far back into the past in such an abstract way. So I think the cognitive limitations that come from us being a specific animal species that has just specific traits, I think that is part of that. There are many, many hundreds of cognitive biases, as I say in my essay, that keep us from being able to understand this in any kind of real way. And at the same time, if you look at something like First Nations' oral traditions and Nordic oral traditions for the pre- literate days of bards and so on, you see that there has traditionally been a way of capturing history and keeping it real.
(00:40:44):
Because one thing that happened when we evolved was we evolved with really specific wiring in regard to stories. We neurologically respond to stories in ways that completely circumvent everything that's happened for the last 250,000 years. And when you're trying to fight the myths of American glory and human glory with data, it's not ever going to work. So the fact that we don't have those, right, I mean, the only story that western techno-industrial, Judeo-Christianity has is the story of human domination. Right, like why this is all grand. We don't have access to that history as a destructive history because that's not that belief system. That belief system is self-enforcing and self-aggrandizing. So yeah, I mean, it doesn't surprise me that people aren't walking around going, oh, look at what we've done over the years. A lot of people are, I mean a lot of ecologists and people like you and me and you, we understand it doesn't actually take a huge amount of education or common sense to understand. But as we've been saying, the capacity for denialism and delusion and self-indulgence, tendentious readings of human progress, they just kind of overwhelm. But I mean, I talk about like, oh, it's the defeat of everything is getting hard to deny. But people don't deny things according to whether they're hard or easy to deny. They deny things according to how good they are at denialism. I think social media has shown us that when conspiracy theories crop up or magical thinking happens or non-thinking happens or whatever, there's almost nothing you can do about it.
Alan Ware (00:42:40):
And of course, how we value and know about history is altered. We all pretty much have to make money. How we make money keeps changing as technology disrupts things. And so what our grandparents can teach us feels pretty worthless to most young people. They don't know the technologies and the skills by which people get the money by which they get their food and their housing. And so the past becomes increasingly irrelevant to so many people. But there it sits. There are all the decisions in the physical environment and what we've done to nature continue to, well, increasingly constrain choices. While we imagine that this technological innovation disruption can just continue ad nauseum into the future, which is a magical thinking that we've talked about on this podcast with different people.
Pamela Swanigan (00:43:29):
I think that the underrepresentation, the extreme and egregious underrepresentation of the views of people like the three of us is a big part of the problem. And I do think that the number of people who believe what you just said, that this is all great and glorious, are far fewer. And one of the things that I can say speaking to that is when Ronald Wright, who is a Canadian author, wrote a book called A Short History of Progress, and he just very methodically exposed this idea of linear progress as fallacious and talked about progress traps and the downfall of civilization after civilization after civilization. And it was a huge bestseller. And when you see something like A Short History of Progress just turn into a runaway bestseller, well, speaking for myself, I sort of go, okay, I'm not alone. There is sort of receptivity to these ideas.
Nandita Bajaj (00:44:34):
And you say appropriately that still a lot of activists continue to apply this kind of messaging because as you say in the essay, it's the best form of messaging for western audiences with a nodalized view of history as you and Alan were just talking about, and an aversion of systemic change. Because if we can just tinker a little bit with capitalism and make it a little bit more conscious, then we can continue to hail the glory of modernity and just apply kind of a mechanistic mindset to how we control nature and have a little bit of it here, enough so that we can sustain our ways of being. But I mean, it's also bound to fail because it doesn't abide by natural limits, ecological limits.
Pamela Swanigan (00:45:25):
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. When I was talking to William Rees, I had no idea that he was struggling to get his simple message of 'we are a species and the planet is a finite resource and there's too many of us', right? Something that obvious would lead him to be called a eugenicist and all this sort of thing. Just the fact of it is I would've thought completely incontrovertible. I learned about carrying capacity when I was 16. I had started university at the University of Manitoba. We learned that there are populations of species, animal, plant, whatnot within a certain ecosystem area. And that when there was a certain number of that population that that area could sustain and that once they had reached that capacity, various things would happen. Either they would starve themselves to death because they'd eaten all their food and then the population would drop back down or they would do what's known, I think biologically as escape and find a different place.
(00:46:39):
And some of the stuff I read for the essay talked about how humans' superior capacity to escape through technological means like planes and trains and automobiles had furthered the illusion that carrying capacity kind of doesn't apply. But of course, I mean that's only very temporary, right? Like, oh, we've run ourselves out of food here, or we've polluted this water system there. Let's go live in Peru. Let's go live in Spain. There is, but how long can you keep shuffling those population around the board? Most of the people can't shuffle around the board. I mean, Syrians are trying to shuffle around the board. Gazans are trying to shuffle around the board. They can't, a lot of people can't escape, and there's not really all that many places to escape to anymore. So all the shell game thinking that sort of goes into denying that, It just baffles me.
Nandita Bajaj (00:47:38):
Totally. And for us, the most frustrating aspect of this is not the far right, not the techno-fundamentalists, not the Judeo- Christians, it's the so-called progressives who are completely unable to understand the reality, and carryiing capacity has now become a bad phrase to use as being applied to human beings. So that human exceptionalism has penetrated all aspects of the political spectrum.
Pamela Swanigan (00:48:11):
Totally, a hundred percent.
Alan Ware (00:48:13):
Yeah. And as you mentioned, we shouldn't take inspiration from that kind of magical thinking hope, but from a colder truth, we may not be able to prevent the end, but if we're willing to fight the long defeat, perhaps we can make a better one. So we're wondering what do you mean, in your mind what is the long defeat? How does that play out in general terms, and how do you think we make that defeat better?
Pamela Swanigan (00:48:36):
Well, the long defeat is a term that JRR Tolkien came up with. What he creates is a long history, many thousands of years from before the Earth, you know Middle Earth, is created to sort of close to its ending, and he sees it as a downward-bending arc. And so that is the long defeat that his immortal beings, the elves, some of his immortal beings, because they're immortal, they get to see the whole trajectory. They're there for long enough to take what we would consider an ecological view or even an evolutionary view. And he just sees it as a downward-bending arc. And he sees that as inevitable, and I think as applied to the real world that he was looking at, his treed place of childhood, all the trees cut down to make way for factories. I mean, he was part of that generation that saw industrialism really destroy all the things he loved the most, trees mainly.
(00:49:42):
So I mean, he had no real reason to think that this was going to get better. He was just like, we have to keep fighting, recognizing that we ultimately will be defeated just based on the evidence, right? It's not an excuse to abrogate our responsibility to delay it, to act as if we think we can prevent it, even if we know we can't. So this is how he kept this concept of the long defeat from actually being defeatism and in his history of his created world, many thousands of beings die fighting the long defeat. There are only three or four even of the immortal elves who are present at the start who have not been killed by the time the War of the Ring happens. And the long defeat is just what we're looking at, the defeat part of it is making itself very clear and the fact that the long defeat is maybe shorter than a lot of people thought it would be cause it's here. We are living in it in its very active form. There are quite a few sentences that I wrote about that, if I may say so got mangled in the edit, but I do think that it's getting pretty hard to deny.
Nandita Bajaj (00:50:55):
Right. And I also love what you wrote in the essay, one aspect of accepting the long defeat. It is liberating, but it's also the first step toward the spiritual and ontological reformation needed to fulfill Collier's long hope and species humility, as you said. It does bring us closer to our more ancestral values, that we are one of the many other species, that there is evolutionary determinism as you said, and we don't need the indomitable human spirit kind of notions of Jane Goodall to be convinced of this. We don't need some kind of a prop to hold onto when you can actually recognize the reality as it is, because holding onto that magical thinking requires a lot of effort. It requires a lot of denial. It requires pushing aside a lot of scientific evidence and experiential evidence that is telling us that something is wrong. So to hold all of that at bay, you have to do a lot of gymnastics in your mind to keep convincing yourself that there's something better coming and it's all going to be worth it. And it also is a parallel to what so many of our ancestors have done where they've built things or created value for the next seven generations that you'll never get to meet. And that kind of thinking has really gotten lost, is doing something now, the rewards of which you'll never actually get to see that has been very much lost in the instant gratification culture of today.
Pamela Swanigan (00:52:38):
Totally. I think one of the harms that this does also, I mean not only do we have to suppress our vision basically of what's happening on our street, right? All the dead trees that now line False Creek here in Vancouver, all the dying shrubs, the extreme weather events, et cetera. But getting back to my dissertation, this kind of thinking requires us also to suppress all the good stuff, the affinity for life, the affinity for animals and the sky and our love for the trees. This is what I believe is this split that happens within Western culture, because for the first 12 years or so when we read books like Bambi and Black Beauty and the Dog Who Wouldn't Be, and Charlotte's Web, and the Borrowers, there almost is not a children's back list classic that is not completely centered on other animals on the prairie, on forests, whatnot.
(00:53:47):
And we get to this point in the literature and it's accepted. There's this very subversive aspect to children's literature where someone like Diana Wynne Jones can write about an animistic version of Britain, where Natalie Babbitt can write an overt treatise against human immortalism. It's accepted. It's all fine and well. And then you get to sort of adolescent YA fiction and it's just gone and you get adult fiction and suddenly you're the bad guy. You're the bad guy in the children's book. You're the one cutting down the trees and paving over the ground, and there's this kind of transitional indoctrination period in this society that forces you to deny these extremely strong bonds that have been actively cultivated and encouraged and allowed by all the books you're reading up to them. Go, Dog, Go. Those were dogs. Oh, look how cute the dogs are in Go, Dog, Go right?
(00:54:51):
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. Those were fish. Who knows what Dr. Seuss's other beings are, right? They're all animals. And suddenly we're expected to feel good about the paving over and the exploitation of the things that we have been taught to love. My thesis is that this creates a level of anomie, which my glorious, glorious dictionary that I love so much describes as, 'anomie, an anxious awareness that the prevailing values of society have little or no personal relevance to one's condition'. And I really think that this weird break between what we are allowed and encouraged to feel as children and what we are obliged to believe as adults, it's almost like the history of industrialism within our lifespans. It's like, oh, you started out being aligned and involved with the natural world and then you have to break. And it fascinates me to see how the writers of children's literature conceive of these children as adults, because they know that the options are very limited for what they can have these children do when they get older that will not make them part of the villain pool.
(00:56:11):
And so a lot of them just don't mention it. It's just like you're going to stay in this beautiful idyll forever. Other ones, a lot of them make their protagonists be writers or dancers or other creatives who are not actively destroying the nature that they love. W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind I think takes this on the most directly. That whole thing is set during a prairie drought, and this is not a prairie drought that gets solved. It's part of an ongoing problem of the monoculture practices of the time, and it's a very deeply nature-reverent book. In the end, the protagonist decides that he's going to be a soil scientist, and it's one of the only ones that sort of talks about what happens to this person on the other side of that breach. How do they find their way in the adult world that is the world that is destroying their childhood world? How do they find a way to not participate in that or participate minimally in it or have a job that pushes against it? Some of the most deeply biophilic books that I know of are the Melendy series by Elizabeth Enright, and every page is just like an ode to trees and the smell of the air in the fall and wading in the creek and finding caddis houses and so on.
Nandita Bajaj (00:57:45):
That's incredible. And just given how beautiful your essay is, I'd love to hear what your favorite passage from that is.
Pamela Swanigan (00:57:56):
Oh, I mean start with the headline, just talks about climate change. I mean, it's totally misleading. This is my title, Let Us Make Such An End: the Long Hope, the Long Defeat, and the Rhetoric of the End Times. So much better because it doesn't say that it's all just about climate change because it's not because biodiversity is a huge thing or population overshoot, but I just keep thinking, I mean, I know it was a good essay, but how within that culture that I now know to exist...
Nandita Bajaj (00:58:25):
Yeah, how did it happen?
Pamela Swanigan (00:58:27):
They must've just plucked their jurors out of a totally different pool or, as the only representative of anything life-like in the entire scenario, maybe biophilia made these jurors go, oh, this is doing something to me. I am baffled. I know I'm a good writer, and there are 350 other entrants in the English language from 45 different countries. I mean, I've won essay contests before and I got my first poem published when I was eight, and I've been writing professionally since I was 18. I know I'm a good writer, and this is a cool premise, right? I mean, just the long defeat, but how did they actually come to value it?
Nandita Bajaj (00:59:11):
Yeah, totally. That's why we were kind of shocked that a value like that that we espouse has been recognized in a pretty big way.
Pamela Swanigan (00:59:21):
This is just like a 7,000 word 'duh' with a couple cool and coincidentally opposing concepts attached to it, but in some places, a well-written 'duh', but it's a big long 'duh'. But oh my God. And there are climate scientists going, thank you, thank God. What? Somebody managed us get this by the gatekeepers. There's so many people who are just like, thank you for saying this. Thank you for saying this. I'm like, why aren't you saying this? And they're like, we are. We are, but nobody will let us.
(00:59:55):
So it's just the relief and why am I surprised at that when my essay is saying that the scribes who are carrying the tale are deluded, right? I guess I just didn't realize that the actual scientists are feeling it so much. Like why is our message getting turned into this rose-colored piece of BS? Because the relief that I'm getting from that community and the play that this has gotten with no aid for me. It's just gone on and on. I've got people from South Africa and from Australia and from Vienna, the Northwest territories and California, just all over, and they're just like, thank you, thank you, thank you. It's like, what's going on here? Anyway, I wrote this because I thought I could be the only person on the planet who knows that a man named John Collier was developing a concept that he called the Long Hope as an answer to ecological devastation at exactly the same time that a man named JRR Tolkien was developing a concept that he called the Long Defeat about the same thing. But John Collier, I mean, I cry when I read him. He is the most incredible writer, but it quickly became apparent that he was just wrong.
(01:01:13):
If it was going to be the Long Hope versus the Long Defeat, the Long Hope just wasn't going to do it. Okay. I shall read this with my granny glasses on. 'Which of the evidence before us suggests that the rhetoric of hope has failed? Rounding up slightly, all of it. There is, to begin with, its role in soft-pedaling the facts of the climate and ecological crises, and thereby helping to create an urgency gap of mock-epic proportions between the happening and the known. Those whose job it is to see in 'elf span' - the climate scientist, the historical ecologists - report, a war come upon us in medias res, one in which we lost most of our ground before we even knew there was a problem. And our only chance of preventing a zero Earth scenario is to fight a desperate rear guard action. Any faithful rendering of their vision for the near future must per force be quasi-apocalyptic. The outcomes of a two degree post-industrialism rise in temperature, now considered the best case scenario, include as Davis Wallace Wells put it, flooded cities, crippling droughts and heatwaves, a planet battered daily by hurricanes and monsoons.
Nandita Bajaj (01:02:21):
That seems like a beautiful place to wrap up this incredible conversation. Those are really wonderful words. Pam, this was such a fantastic chat. Thank you so much for shedding a light on an incredibly underrepresented topic, and we are so grateful for the time.
Pamela Swanigan (01:02:40):
Well, thank you very, very much for having me. This was a delight. I really am honored to have been a guest on your podcast.
Nandita Bajaj (01:02:48):
Thank you so much.
Alan Ware (01:02:49):
That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit population balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj (01:03:17):
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.
