3
GLOBAL WARMING AND SOCIAL CATASTROPHES

In late August 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit the South-east of the United States, causing $80 billion of damage and flooding most of New Orleans. It was a catastrophe foretold: Scientific American had predicted the flooding back in October 2001.

After a number of levee breaches, 80 per cent of the city lay in water up to 7.60 metres deep; power cuts made it impossible to pump this away, while roads into and out of the city were blocked. The disaster relief effort was completely overstretched, and it was not long before looting began. The Superdrome, officially allocated as an emergency centre for the homeless, was soon crowded to overflowing, while the area around it witnessed outbreaks of violence that led the authorities to consider declaring martial law. The governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, called in the National Guard on 1 September and authorized them to open fire: ‘These troops know how to shoot and kill’, she said, ‘and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.’

At New Orleans railroad station, cages were linked together with chains to form a temporary jail that held 700 prisoners, but for all their efforts the police and the National Guard were at first unable to get a grip on the situation. There were attacks on relief teams, shootings, rapes, shop looting, break-ins, and so on. It eventually took the army, with a force of 65,000 men, to restore law and order. There were also problems in evacuating people from the city.

The flood did not strike equally: while many prosperous residents were able to flee, it was the poor, mainly Afro-American, population who made up the bulk of those remaining. The effects also varied by neighbourhood. John R. Logan, who studied the social impact of Hurricane Katrina, confirmed that damaged areas of New Orleans were 45.8 per cent black, compared with 26.4 per cent for undamaged areas. Similar proportions were apparent in terms of poverty indicators.¹

Altogether the destruction was so severe that some questioned whether the city should be rebuilt. The cataclysmic events saw the coining of the term ‘climate refugee’, to denote someone in flight from a weather-related disaster. It is estimated that 250,000 former residents of New Orleans settled elsewhere in the country; a year after the hurricane, roughly a third of whites and three-quarters of blacks had not returned, with the result that the population structure is today markedly different from before. This is also true of the city’s political geography.²

What is usually known as a natural disaster – for example, flooding as a result of severe weather conditions – proved to be something quite different in the case of New Orleans. From the ignorance of the dangers to the woeful adequacy of the flood defences, from the barely controllable outbreak of anarchy to the extreme reactions of the security forces, from the social inequality in the aftermath of Katrina to the creation of a new category of refugee and a new social demography of the city: the whole concatenation of events would be much more accurately described as a social disaster.

Actually ‘natural disaster’ is a bit of a misnomer, since nature does not experience anything as a disaster. But it can produce events that are disastrous to humans and have unexpected social consequences that exceed people’s capacity to control them. Two points should be made in connection with New Orleans. First, similar extreme weather events, related to global climate change, will affect other coastal cities in the years and decades to come, and the management of them will not everywhere be better than in the spectacular failure we saw in New Orleans. The fact that, early on – when the effects of the hurricane still seemed manageable – the richest country on earth was forced to solicit help from abroad shows that disasters quickly reveal weaknesses, gaps and makeshifts that are invisible in normal times.

This brings us to the second interesting lesson. Social disasters lay bare what goes on behind the scenes in society, revealing its combination of functionality and dysfunctionality; or, to change the metaphor, they open a window on life beneath the surface of society and the assumptions of normality on which it rests. Disasters light up inequalities in life chances that are institutionally cushioned (and sealed off in respective neighbourhoods and sectors of work) in the normal run of events; they uncover administrative shortcomings that exist even when unchallenged; and they demonstrate that violence is always available as a possible course of action. All this becomes visible at a time when the usual forms of social interaction break down. As New Orleans shows, there do not even have to be many dead and injured.³

Close observation of social disasters can thus afford greater insight into the real functioning of society than one would gain from the thesis that its essence is displayed in normal situations. For what we see in disasters is not an exceptional state of society but simply a dimension that remains hidden in everyday life. This being so, we should study not only what holds societies together but also what makes them fall apart.⁴

Climate change will increase the frequency of social disasters, which will bring about temporary or lasting states of society, or social formations, about which nothing is known because too little interest has been taken in the subject up to now. Social and cultural theory is fixated on normality and blind to disasters,⁵ but a glance at the cultural history of nature is enough to convince us that it must bring climate change within its purview.⁶ Present-day social changes – from the climate war in Darfur to the Inuits’ loss of habitat – highlight the startling immateriality of social and cultural theory, and it is high time that it modernized itself and found a way back from the world of discourse and systems to the strategies through which social beings try to control their fate. The fact is that a considerable part of the world’s population will face increasing difficulties in the future, as desertification, soil erosion and salination, oceanic acidification, river contamination, aggradation and overfishing limit their survival chances.

All these disastrous trends are manmade in origin and fraught with social consequences. Conflicts break out between those who put too much pressure on scarce resources and those who have to leave the affected areas and settle elsewhere. There is no future for many devastated industrial regions, such as the area around the Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union, where pollution has sent cancer rates rocketing and life expectancy has fallen since the 1990s from sixty-four to fifty-one.⁷

Such palpable evidence makes it all the more astonishing that nearly all academic studies, models and prognoses regarding the phenomena and consequences of climate change have been in the natural sciences. In the social and cultural sciences, it is exactly as if such things as social breakdown, resource conflict, mass migration, safety threats, widespread fears, radicalization and militarized or violence-governed economies did not belong to their sphere of competence. In the history of science there has probably been no comparable situation in which a scenario of such change in large parts of the world, based on solid scientific evidence, has been regarded with such equanimity by social or cultural theorists. It points to analytical deficiencies as well as a lack of a sense of responsibility.

UNDERCOMPLEXITY

This lack of interest shifts the responsibility onto the shoulders of natural scientists, who have neither the professional competence nor the authority to measure the social dimension or consequences of climate change. They may be familiar with complexity, indeed admirably so, but not with the processes through which human beings construct reality or with the role that the most diverse frameworks, cultural forms and social-historical models play in the perception of problems and solutions. Professionally speaking, natural scientists do not have a clue about such things, nor does anyone expect them to. But, as members of society, they have an ordinary awareness of social problems and solutions, and they regularly bring this to bear in the final chapter of their otherwise profound and enviably helpful books about social collapse, the drying up of rivers, the melting of ice, and so on – where, after presenting all the apocalyptic facts, they consider what can be done about them.

The idea that human beings can produce situations about which nothing can be done is completely alien to scientists and technologists. Moreover, they are usually unable to grasp how different levels of action knit together, how collective reason may combine with individual unreason (or individual reason with collective unreason), how feelings intrude into the rational goals of action, how society may do things that no individual intended, and how these may form part of new realities and generate new problems requiring action.

In the books of such authors as Tim Flannery,⁸ Fred Pearce⁹ or Jill Jäger,¹⁰ one is therefore struck by the disturbing contrast between their sharpness of analysis and the paltriness of their proposed solutions. When Flannery, for instance, at the end of his disheartening study of climate change, recommends buying a smaller car or sticking to a good old hand drill instead of a power-driven device, his advice falls hopelessly short of the complexity of the problems he has been describing. Nor could it be otherwise, since Flannery’s professional competence covers the physical, not the social, aspects of the problem. Climate change – and here Flannery’s study is a perfect case in point – is an object for natural science when the question is how it came about and how it is likely to develop. But its consequences are a question for social and cultural theory, since those consequences are nothing other than social and cultural.

WHO ARE ‘WE’?

Another example may serve to make this clearer. Apart from neuroscientists, no one makes more use of the first person plural than the authors of books on climate change and other topical environmental questions. ‘We’ have caused this or that; ‘we’ must stop doing such and such if ‘our’ world is to be saved. But no one knows who lies behind this ‘we’.

At a very high level of aggregation, the word ‘we’ stands for the whole of humanity, though ‘humanity’ is not an actor but an abstraction. In reality there are billions of subjects from different cultural backgrounds, endowed with highly diverse economic opportunities and political resources, who act within a number of complex life-communities. No socially identifiable ‘we’ links together a landless Chinese farm labourer and the chairman of a multinational energy corporation; they inhabit completely different social worlds, each with its particular demands and, above all, its particular rationality. Does the company chairman share a future in the first person plural with his own grandchildren, not to speak of the Chinese labourer’s? Of course not – any more than he shares the same social reality with a child refugee in Darfur, a mujahideen in Afghanistan or a child prostitute in Tirana.

The use of ‘we’ assumes a collective perception of reality that does not actually exist, even in relation to a global problem such as climate change. For global warming affects people very differently: while some have long-term fears for the future of their grandchildren, others watch their own children die here and now. If ‘all of us’ (and therefore the readers of this book) decided overnight to live in a ‘climate-neutral way’, never causing more CO₂ emissions than are strictly necessary, another ‘we’ – let us say, the group of Chinese energy supply officials – would sabotage ‘our’ efforts with each of the 1,000 megawatt coal-burning power plants that are coming into service in China each week, which emit 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per day.¹¹

The political evasiveness of the abstract ‘we’, blithely unconcerned with effects or the influence of power relations, turns into ideology. An account of the world in the first person plural is anyway not possible, since we know how the cultural history of nature has led to radically diverse conditions of life around the globe.¹²

OLD ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

By the seventeenth century, only a few insignificant remains of the erstwhile forests survived in the islands, most of them untended and decaying. The great fires were now lit on the other side of the ocean. It is not for nothing that Brazil owes its name to the French word for charcoal.

W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Climate change not only intensifies existing global asymmetries that may result in wars and outbreaks of violence; it also strengthens environmental trends that originally had nothing to do with climate change. The current debate, vitalized by the Fukushima disaster, focuses on the question of energy production and CO₂ emissions. Other environmental issues that must now be described as ‘classical’ – sea pollution, soil contamination and declining biodiversity, the burning of rainforests, drying up of rivers or disappearance of lakes – have taken a back seat, although the cause of them too is the insatiable hunger for resources in societies fixated on growth. As Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the legendary Limits to Growth, repeatedly stressed, climate change should therefore not be understood only as a symptom of the resource overuse that is leading at ever greater speed to disaster. The difference with the ecological debates of forty years ago is that they referred not only to energy but also to the social practices in which it was employed and had an impact. Theorists such as André Gorz, Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Hans Jonas, Petra Kelly, Carl Amery or Ivan Illich always had the political dimension of ecological issues in mind – a viewpoint which, given the often narrowly technological focus on sufficiency and efficiency, should be reintroduced in today’s world. Efficiency gains alone do not solve any resource problems, and indeed they are often achieved at the cost of a higher input of material. Since they never do more than limit the rate at which natural resources are plundered, even a ‘greener’ growth-oriented economy would systematically destroy the foundations on which it is built. Thus, 2010 was the year with the highest energy consumption in the history of mankind, up 5.6 per cent on 2009 – but such records do not last long and therefore pass unnoticed. Next year will be another one with the highest-ever energy consumption. The same goes for the other side of the use of fossil fuels: emissions that have an impact on the climate also rose again in 2010, by 5.8 per cent.

The targets of the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to be replaced in 2012 with a new emissions regime (though the deadline is likely to be extended), will not have been met by many of the countries that ratified it. But public opinion is less aware of this than of America’s, Australia’s or China’s stubborn refusal to accept supranational regulation in general.

Whichever classical theme of the environmental movement one takes – loss of countryside to motorways or new towns, growth of individual transport, global increase in greenhouse gas emissions, ocean pollution, misshapen infants in specially affected areas such as the Aral Sea – the problem is becoming worse as a result of globalization, yet it appears largely remote from everyday consciousness. This is not the place to dwell on the sometimes hair-raising ecological trends in the former Eastern bloc, as well as in the United States,¹³ but it should be noted that some American states (California, for example) and European countries (e.g., Germany and Austria) have been playing a pioneering role. They have sometimes scored major local successes, although they cannot change the global trend towards greater resource consumption and environmental pollution.

Figure 3.1 Kyoto targets: the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ Evolution of greenhouse gas emissions, % (2005 compared with 1990)

Sources: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung.

What has mainly improved in the past thirty years is not the problem but consciousness of the problem. This raises the question of how the necessary changes in behaviour can be brought about if the ecological problems such as global warming appear so insurmountable; the very limited scope to control these always produces a motivational block, especially as the results of any individual action are negligible. There is also the far from minor point that the world’s population is generally expected to reach 9 billion by the middle of the century¹⁴ – which would mean that increasing numbers of people will be in competition for dwindling resources. There are currently as few solutions to the related problems as there are to those resulting from global inequality and injustice.

All of these trends – from manmade climate change, through non-renewable resource consumption and ongoing habitat destruction, to demographic growth – are social problems. So too are all other ecological problems social, in so far as they affect the conditions for human life and are perceived as problems only by human beings. Shrinking biodiversity in the world’s oceans, rivers and lakes, in rainforest and savannah, is not a problem for nature, which is completely indifferent to whether polar bears and gorillas or jellyfish and green algae are part of it. Plants and animals have no awareness that their habitat is disappearing; they simply die. Human life communities register ecological problems, however, because humans are unique in being conscious not only of the past but also of the future. This alone creates a faint hope that their insight into what has gone before will lead them to think about what they will no longer be able to do.

Notes

1. John R. Logan, ‘The Impact of Katrina: Race and Class in Storm-Damaged Neighborhoods’, Brown University 2006, at www.s4.brown.edu/katrina/report.pdf.

2. John R. Logan, ‘Unnatural Disaster: Social Impacts and Policy Choices after Katrina’, in Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (ed.), Die Natur der Gesellschaft: Verhandlungen des 33. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Kassel 2006, Frankfurt am Main, 2007.

3. Naomi Klein has pointed out a hitherto unnoticed aspect of social disasters: namely, that they may be seen as opportunities for structural measures that would not be taken under normal conditions. The devastation in New Orleans, for instance, triggered a large-scale privatization of the educational system: only four public schools survived, instead of the 131 that had existed before the floods; and there were thirty-one so-called charter schools instead of seven (Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London, 2007, pp. 5–6). John R. Logan, however, reports that fifty-four public schools had been reopened by the autumn of 2006 (Logan, ‘Unnatural Disaster’, p. 40).

During the Second World War, the planners around Albert Speer did not feel only displeasure as the Allied bombers destroyed German cities; they also ruminated that the preliminary work for postwar reconstruction was being done for them. Disasters, then, can have a positive side for those who know how to use it. Of course, the example of Speer also shows that – contrary to Naomi Klein’s claims – what is involved today is not a new strategy of global capitalism.

4. Elke M. Geenen, ‘Kollektive Krisen: Katastrophe, Terror, Revolution – Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede’, in Lars Clausen et al. (eds), Entsetzliche soziale Prozesse, Münster, 2003, pp. 5–24. Societies become more vulnerable, for example, as their networking becomes more complex. As Clausen shows, the fact that individuals, groups, businesses and politicians have different planning horizons may give rise not only to conflicts but also to widespread feelings of insecurity, alienation, and so on (Lars Clausen, ‘Reale Gefahren und katastrophensoziologische Theorie’, ibid., pp. 51–76).

5. This is clear from the amazingly small number of studies of life behind the façade of social normality – hence of the picture behind the picture that society has of itself. Prostitution, the shadow economy, violent subcultures, and so on, are the ‘poor cousins’ of sociological research.

6. Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, Cambridge, 2008; Josef H. Reichholf, Eine kurze Naturgeschichte des letzten Jahrtausends, Frankfurt am Main, 2007; Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, London, 1997.

7. Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry: What Happens When our Water Runs Out?, Boston, 2006, p. 237.

8. Tim Flannery, We Are the Weather Makers: The Story of Global Warming, London, 1997.

9. Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry.

10. Jill Jäger et al., Our Planet: How Much More Can Earth Take?, London, 2009.

11. Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger, ‘Chinas Hunger nach Energie’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 March 2007, p. 12.

12. Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel.

13. Each year 150 to 170 billion cubic metres of natural gas are burned or simply released into the atmosphere by the petroleum industry – as much as two large industrial nations, Germany and Italy, consume together. Anselm Waldermann, ‘Profitdenken schlägt Umweltschutz’, Spiegel-online, 6 September 2007, at www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,504278,00.html.

14. Rainer Münz, ‘Weltbevölkerung und weltweite Migration’, in Ernst Peter Fischer and Klaus Wiegand (eds), Die Zukunft der Erde, Frankfurt am Main, 2006, p. 111. A population of 10 to 11 billion is predicted for the end of the century, after which the total will start to fall (ibid., p. 112).