It's a Monster World: Thoughts on Klein’s This Changes Everything Part II

According to French sociologist Bruno Latour, the real lesson of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein “is not, as is commonly understood, ‘don’t mess with mother nature.’  Rather it is, don’t run away from your technological mess-ups, as young Dr. Frankenstein did when he abandoned the monster to which he had given life.  Instead, Latour says we must stick around and continue to care for our ‘monsters’ like the deities that we have become.” –Naomi Klein, The Changes Everything (page 278)

Climate change has been on societies’ radar for decades, although I do not remember when it entered my ecological consciousness. Not high school (in the late 80s), when I first became concerned about risks of biodiversity. Nor college (in the early 90s) when I first became aware of amphibian population declines.  Maybe it was graduate school (in the rest of the 90s) or maybe it was always there in the background—a threat that seemed far off and something to start planning ahead for so that our grandchildren didn’t face a world vastly different from the one we were living in. But I do remember the moment when it first occurred to me that the scientists closest to the climate change data didn’t believe society was going to make the changes necessary.  I was a regional SETAC meeting at Miami University (sometime post 2004) when the keynote speaker was talking about the predicted climate  changes, which were familiar by that point, as well as the potential solutions of weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels (also familiar) and geoengineering solutions, which were not familiar and shocking.  It was at that moment when it occurred to me, they don’t think we can fix this. 

In Part II (Magical Thinking) of This Changes Everything, Klein's chapter on “Dimming the Sun” lays out the various ways people are considering avoiding climate change, aside from reducing greenhouse gas emissions:  fertilizing the oceans, reflecting light back into space by covering deserts or by putting tiny mirrors in the atmosphere with mirrors (and idea that was surely thought up by a clever kindergarten class and not actual scientists), or by pumping sulfate aerosols (like sulfur dioxide, the stuff of volcanos) into the stratosphere. She lays out the risks of these ideas and the risks of not having a catastrophic Plan B.  She presents it in a way that the risks are great enough that only a fool would move forward with one of these Plan Bs.  They are certainly plans that focus solely on human impacts and do not consider risks to the rest of the biota we share this planet with—and given that climate change poses great immediate threats to the most vulnerable humans, such approaches are understandable.

If you have any members of your family, you have probably watched one (or more!) of them make decisions for herself or himself (or for his/her immediately family) that cause problems and heartache.  Not just for themselves, but for the entire family who is often powerless to truly resolve the problem. Sometimes it unfolds for years with the same story repeated over and over again; time or the details change, but the story racked with crisis is more or less the same. The solution is often clear, but it is often too hard or too painful of an option, so the loved one and family members treat the symptoms and things will be better for a while.  And then, go to the repeat sign and play the tune again—perhaps the tune will change. In facing our personal and societal crises, we often fail to address the root of the predicament. Geoengineering solutions seem to be treating the symptom and not the disease. I am with Latour, you have to take care of your monsters, once they are created—Dr. Frankenstein was a completely irritating protagonist for this reason—but for heaven’s sakes, could we just stop creating monsters??