The most 'inconvenient truth' of all, according to Michael Northcott's extraordinary book, A Moral Climate, is that climate change is a moral issue. That human beings have a responsibility for climate change is at one level obvious. The common wisdom emerging from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that carbon emissions from human activities are responsible for climate impacts that damage other species and other human beings. Someone has inflicted damage on someone else; culpability, though complex and contestable, might be expected to follow. There is clearly room for a book which explores these issues.
A Moral Climate is a far from conventional exposition of this basic responsibility. In fact, it is really three separate books, I suspect. One of them is a book about climate change science and impacts, drawing heavily on the outputs from the IPCC. The second is a book in the tradition of critical theory, exposing the unjust power relations in industrial capitalism, and their impact on the earth and on others. The third is a book in the hermeneutical tradition lending modern interpretations to ancient biblical texts. Northcott’s achievement is to weave these themes together in an attempt to illuminate the question of moral responsibility for climate change. Broadly speaking, we are urged to believe that climate change represents a judgement, in the biblical sense, on an unjust world, and the way to evade this judgement is to revert to a new ecological localism that eschews the accumulation of power through capital and respects the integrity of God’s creation. It’s entertaining, provocative, and intellectually acrobatic as a thesis, but ultimately, I would argue, flawed.
I feel bad about feeling bad about a book like this. There is much to admire and be inspired by in Northcott’s writing. Anyone familiar with the climate science he seeks to convey can see that it is a good, accessible treatment of the subject. Anyone broadly in agreement with his critical perspective on capitalism can see that he makes a good case for the tragic disconnectedness of human economic interactions from social relations and the environment on which they depend. These two ‘books’ sit relatively comfortably with me. It’s the hermeneutics that I find more than a little worrying. Specifically, I suppose because these are very ‘old testament’ hermeneutics. Climate change is the wrath of Jehovah (or sometimes Gaia masquerading as Jehovah) in response to (alleged) human disobedience.
Global warming witnesses to the ‘same truth that Jeremiah uttered; economic relations that neglect justice and the health of the land ultimately bring ruin to all.’ What worries me of course is that Northcott’s God seems indiscriminate in his punishments. While the old testament God saw fit to save Noah and his family – admittedly more on account of his foresight than his obvious virtue – Northcott’s God punishes indiscriminately at best, and regressively at worst: the ethnic poor of New Orleans (the book kicks off with an account of Hurricane Katrina), the peasant islands of the South Pacific and the untouchables in Bangladesh are held to account for the sins of Western capitalism. To be honest, I’ve never had a lot of sympathy with this kind of God and I don’t fully understand what is to be gained by paying so much homage to Him. At the end of the day, He appears to be feared and respected only because he is powerful and wrathful, not because he is just and kind; and as such He ends up being as steeped in unpleasant hegemonies of power as the capitalist system Northcott sets out to criticise.
Strange for a man to be as blind to the abuse of power in one place as he is alive to it in another.
I have much more sympathy when the arguments take a ‘new testament’ turn. Love of other, self-sacrifice, concern for the poor and the dispossessed: these are surely the virtues that should inspire us to forego the comfort, aspiration, luxury and inequity of modern materialism in search of something more just and more sustainable.
The book is at its hermeneutical best, I think, when it follows this path. Northcott’s discussion of pilgrimage and mobility has some of this subtlety in it. The economy of speed incites injustice because it distances us from our neighbour and renders impossible the Christian ideal. A society in which those with access to material goods are not only distant from but superior to those without, does seem to echo the concerns of Wendell Berry, Aldo Leopold, Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva and others who place justice and connectedness at the heart of sustainability.
The final chapter of the book contains the most extraordinary claim of all. Northcott identifies two kinds of ‘climate denial’ – one is to refute the science, the other is to urge a technological fix. In doing so, he raises an uncomfortable possibility. What if the science is wrong and climate change has nothing to do with human activity after all? For Northcott, astonishingly, it doesn’t matter.
Mitigation responses are good ‘in themselves’. ‘Turning off the lights, turning down the heating, cycling or walking instead of driving, holidaying nearer to home, buying local food, shopping less and conversing more’ – are good because they are ‘intrinsically right’. Such actions ‘correct modern thoughtlessness’, claims Northcott. ‘They sustain the moral claim that it is wrong to live in a civilisation that depends on the systematic enslavement of people and ecosystems to the high resource requirements of a corporately-governed consumer economy.’ I have a lot of sympathy for this position. But I still don’t see that it justifies dishing out indiscriminate punishment – if that’s what climate change really is. In my view, the judgement of the deluge puts God in the same role as the transgressors, visiting punishment on the least deserving, just because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, don’t let my theological squeamishness stop you reading A Moral Climate. Books 1 and 2 are still great stuff and, as the old song says, two out of three ain’t bad.
Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey. He edited The Earthscan Reader on Sustainable Consumption (Earthscan,London 2006).His radio play, based on a late Beethoven piano sonata,was broadcast on Radio 4 in March 2007.