While writing this manuscript, we experienced – with you – the warmest January ever recorded for planet Earth. The planet’s ten warmest Januaries all happened after 2002. According to the US National Centers for Environmental Information: ‘January 2020 marked the 44th consecutive January and the 421st consecutive month with temperatures, at least nominally, above the twentieth-century average.’ Certain European countries were particularly badly hit; Northern Hemisphere January temperatures made it the warmest on record at 1.5°C above average.1
Vincent, in Europe, sweltered through the hottest of summers in 2019. Between 1 May and 30 August 2019 almost 400 temperature records were broken across 29 European countries. The Berkeley Earth climate institute (California, US) detected 1,200 locations in the Northern Hemisphere where residents experienced the hottest ever conditions in the given month. An all-time-high temperature of 46°C in France was accompanied by new highs in the Netherlands, the UK, Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg.2 Then, seemingly perversely, the winter of storms hit. Following quick on the heels of Storm Ciara (8–9 February 2020) was Storm Dennis (15–16 February 2020), causing heavy rain, strong winds and flooding that impacted most of Britain – prompting ‘a record-breaking number of Environment Agency flood warnings and alerts in England on Sunday’.3
Meanwhile, in the Southern Hemisphere, Anitra experienced the historic bushfires now known as the Black Summer. To backtrack, Australia is renowned for bush-fires. The 2009 Black Saturday fires in the state of Victoria are authoritatively estimated to have ‘released energy equivalent to fifteen hundred times that of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima’. Australian environmental historian Tom Griffiths continues:
Of the 173 people killed on Black Saturday, two-thirds died in their own homes. Of those, a quarter died sheltering in the bath. There were relatively few injuries: the annihilation was total, and the day after brought an awful stillness and silence. The wind change was a killer, but if it had not arrived when it did the Kilmore East fire might have swept into the thickly vegetated suburbs of Melbourne’s north-east.4
Melbourne is the capital of Victoria and in 2015 the Australian Bureau of Statistics counted more than half a million residents living in those suburbs. Around 90 per cent of Black Saturday fatalities occurred in fires started by faulty electric powerlines associated with privatisation of the state’s electricity supply.
But there was worse to come. Fast forward and Black Summer 2019–20 was exceptional. Between July 2019 and February 2020, mainly due to a long period of drought and record temperatures, close on 16 million hectares of land and vegetation were burnt, some in mega-fires creating their own weather systems. A lightning strike late in October north west of the capital city of Sydney started the largest recorded bushfire in Australia. By mid-December, a month in which temperatures were persistently around 3°C above the average, it joined and absorbed independently started fires. The social and ecological impacts are hard to capture and are still playing out.
A few estimates indicate the destruction and likely repercussions. Animal deaths were over 1 billion, insect deaths multiple billions. Of the 33 deaths due to the fire, several were firefighters. Several small communities were all but decimated as 3,500 homes were lost and thousands more partially damaged.5 The smoke and air pollution swathed the continent and moved across the globe. As the fires raged through January, the federal government made its first ever compulsory call out for Reservists, engaging 6,500 Australian Defence Force personnel to support response efforts, which led to a Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements.6 We live in extraordinary times. More significantly, we are in times where that ‘extraordinariness’ is expected to become, to be, normal. Indeed, the fires were followed by record-breaking rain and floods. Mercifully, that water put out fires that were still burning but the floods brought further destruction.7
As we wrote passages on the pedagogy of such catastrophes, we noticed how such unnatural disasters of the Capitalocene were heightening people’s awareness, opening them to new understandings and debates, especially questioning the causes. It is clear that many had expected that climate change and global warming might only affect the disadvantaged, or might only affect themselves in the distant future, or even just impact on future generations. It seems that many had sidelined worrying about challenges that they assumed others, such as governments or industry, would solve.
But, now, with water, winds and flames destroying lives and homes, many feel immediately vulnerable and a sense of urgency has enveloped electorates and communities across the planet. Declaring a climate emergency has been one response from local councils to national governments. But there is a strong appetite, too, for appropriately responding to the multidimensional impacts of growthism. People understand that climate and other environmental changes are happening to us, and, if we don’t manage the transformations necessary, we will be victims.
As if to make that point, as we finalised this manuscript, Europe’s storms and Australia’s fires became ‘yesterday’s news’. In these times of multi-various accelerations in change, we cannot predict anything. Suddenly, the Coronavirus, which started in China, has not only spread right around the world and resulted in more than 2 million cases and around 130,000 deaths by 16 April 2020 – but also the calamity slowed our ‘just-in-time’ global economy. Capitalism is like a spinning top: as it slows, it falls over, its life and function dead. Economists forecast a global crash and drawn-out global depression of an unforeseen magnitude. Governments have moved to shore up the system with trillions of dollars of funds as under-resourced and impoverished national health sectors are overwhelmed by the pandemic.
The world hangs on the announcement of a vaccine or treatment that will turn all this into an easily forgotten nightmare. Similarly, the elites still crave the latest ‘whizz-bang’ technological solutions to cutting carbon emissions and achieving a zero-carbon economy. All such perspectives fail to recognise that climate change, and global heating due to the rise in carbon emissions, are but symptoms and not the cause. In terms of Earth’s regenerative capacity, we are over-producing and over-consuming ‘as if there were no tomorrow’.
As the planet’s ecosystems erode and politicians obsess over growth objectives, what we really need is degrowth, that is, to transform our ways of living, our economies, our polities and our cultures to live within Earth’s limits. This is what our book is about – the degrowth movement.
Vincent Liegey and Anitra Nelson
16 April 2020