Climate

If you have not already read Charles’s article in this issue, then I suggest you do so before continuing with this review. I read it on Substack and immediately ordered the book (I have reviewed his previous books in these pages). Its brilliant analysis and re-framing of the climate debate is even more important now than when the book was published five years ago. We are now subject to a constant barrage of what Charles calls carbon reductionism employing the same scare tactics as during the COVID crisis in an attempt to persuade us to transform our systems. Reading this book makes you realise that we need an altogether different and deeper framing and contextualisation of the issue that goes to the root of our cultural relationship with Nature.

Making carbon into the pivotal cause within a linear system of thinking enables us to ignore what Charles calls the totality of circumstances – the overall story of separation in relation to domination and control, the larger context of how we think and how we frame problems and solutions, the way that science produces knowledge based on metrics and quantification, trust in the institutions of science even when corrupted by politics, the prevalence of dualistic and polarising war metaphors and the need for enemies, instrumental instead of relational values, monocultures rather than biodiversity, prioritising globally centralised rather than local approaches. He therefore argues convincingly that we have to address these deeper systemic issues and the losses that they have entailed – a loss of beauty, of connection, of community, of intimacy and of the sense of place.

Charles provides a thorough shake-up to our impoverished, depleted, heart-numbing and exploitative worldview. This same shallow ideology that brought about our predicament is incapable of extricating us from it. Even more specifically, good-versus-evil narratives used for propaganda purposes simply give rise to further polarised extremes. We the people no longer wish to live in a state of the endless war for the benefit of the military-industrial-intelligence complex. Charles points out that war is the mentality of control in its most extreme form. Instead, he proposes a revolution of love based on ‘our felt understanding of the living intelligence and interconnectedness of all things’, that begins with the restoration of local ecosystems. Love is ‘the expansion of self to include another’ and does not rely on appeals to self-interest. It brings in a story of Interbeing to replace separation, where ‘heart and mind are reunited, and love is what truth feels like.’

The book begins with the crisis of being, then discusses ways beyond climate fundamentalism. The chapter on the climate spectrum discusses the range of positions and objections to these positions, rejecting the polarising option of being on one side or the other. It also questions the geomechanical view of Earth as a complicated machine to be managed and controlled, and the sociology of institutional consensus with its groupthink division between orthodoxy and heresy, concluding that we are having wrong debate since, in his view, climate derangement is caused primarily by the degradation of ecosystems worldwide. This implies that just cutting carbon emissions is a misplaced emphasis, and does not address the relational system dynamics, which he argues in the next chapter should be focused on water: ‘the health of local ecosystems, in turn, depends on the health of the water cycle, and the health of the water cycle depends on the soil and the forests.’ (p. 85) Fundamentally, ‘Life creates the conditions for life’, and we are therefore called into a new relationship with nature in deep partnership and with respect for all life – which is emphatically not the case at the moment.

The next chapter gives an ecosystems view of carbon, relating it to soil and life, criticising the emissions obsession and the assumptions underlying geoengineering that exemplify the domination mindset of endless technological adaptation to an ever-more-degraded ecosystem. The public has not responded to the choice of change or perish, so Charles proposes that we need to choose a different path out of our initiatory ordeal by reorienting civilisation towards beauty rather than quantity, asking ourselves what kind of world we want to live in. Hence, ‘that choice to take the healing path will have to be made on some basis other than compulsion.’ (p. 163) Yet, that is what top-down institutions like the World Economic Forum and the UN are proposing with climate lockdowns and 15-minute cities. Their way of thinking involves digitisation, regulation, standardisation and uniformity – all disguised as inclusion and equity. Charles makes detailed suggestions about the way forward, including an ideological transition between linear control-oriented thinking and nonlinear systems theoretic thinking. (pp. 168 ff.) The paradigms of force, violence, war and imposition as a means to progress needed to be retired.

An important policy direction is one of regeneration, especially regenerative agriculture as promoted by Vandana Shiva and others as a way of healing the soil and water. This sees health as wholeness, and disconnection as disease, promoting harmony and partnership rather than engineered control and domination. Charles applies a similar analysis to energy, population and development, pointing out that we needed to question the whole notion of development in terms of commodification and World Bank funding leading to debt and further environmental degradation, which is then chalked up as economic growth. Most people are simply operating within and conforming to the rules of existing systems, and it is precisely these systems and their corresponding structures of motivation that require a radical overhaul. We need ‘a shift in values towards the local, the participatory, the embodied, the communal, towards wholeness and empathy.’ (p. 207) It is worth remembering that we humans created existing systems, which we are in turn capable of revolutionising based on the kind of radical ideas advanced in this book.

Charles’s book is so inspiringly rich in deep and systemic insights that it is only possible to convey a sliver in such a short space, calling as it does for a new relationship with nature and between ourselves based on a recognition of interbeing within a living world: ‘if we want a living world, we have to act from the place where the world is alive… which requires each one of us to dedicate ourselves, unreasonably and with no guarantee of success, to our unique form of service…trusting our knowing that a healed world, a greened world, a more beautiful world is truly possible.’ (pp. 270, 278) If you only read one environmental book this year, this has to be the one. It is sure to transform your thinking and understanding.