The turn-on of turning stuff off
Holidays, and joy, without the carbon.
You are probably way ahead of me in cutting your complicity with carbon. Organizing. Growing regeneratively. Restoring nature. Fighting extractive industries and the madmen that insure them. Insulating your homes to the hilt. Having every conceivable conversation. Listening out, as am I, for the sound of a million pennies dropping.
Rebecca Solnit dubs all of this collective, hushed, hidden pushing and growth, The Slow Road to Sudden Change. She compares the arrival of revolutions of the sort we now so urgently need to the ways mushrooms emerge after the rain — the sudden fruit of a long-nurtured deep network of mycelium. Let’s all be that mycelium to fruit the change.
For our part, since it is that time of year, I realised this is the third year that we’ve been on holiday without going away. We’ve probably done this for longer but Covid solidified the choice. I haven’t taken a vow never to fly again, and yes I know it’s not the biggest emitting sector. But it feels pretty cool and natural not to jump on planes: an easy no, even if I yearn for Greek island swims, paella on the playa, to see family in Kathmandu.
How hard would it be, given the knife-edge Earth’s habitability is now on, for us to pause our holidays for a cotton-picking minute? How hard to ration our flying, to maintain skeletal services for when aviation is truly unavoidable and wait for Earth’s systems to replenish while we figure out the next iteration of transport? Surely it is not beyond us, collectively, to exercise this restraint?
And what could the next iteration of transport look like? It could be so much more beautiful than Luton is. We could solve this design challenge with such élan. Likely we all need to travel more slowly and less. I think we can handle that: Covid taught us so much about staying put and relishing in the natural world, and humanity, within our immediate orbit.
And on the upside, how possible might it be for our wildly ingenious species to build the super-fast clipper ships that Kim Stanley Robinson talks of in The Ministry for the Future, to speed us over oceans using wind and solar, marvelling at stars, skies, marine-life and feeling the strength of seas under our keels? How amazing could a next-generation transcontinental train network be? How cool the caravans that might connect to its railheads? Could we design the world around us to usher in a new age of exploration, to replace the expediency of mass transit?
Economics is often called the dismal science. And, unsurprisingly, with economics as our civilization’s chief organizing principle, much of what we’ve made of late has been pretty joyless.
Where are the leaders that will talk boldly about the stuff we need to turn off? Ground the silliness that is domestic flying, as France has started to do. Whole big swathes of our economies are not just far from essential to joyful life, but actively hostile to our hopes of having a habitable Earth.
Wouldn’t it be fun to turn our collective brains away from the defence of such joyless status quos and salaries, chiefly, of far-off CEOs, towards the invention of a whole new, spine-tingling paradigm?
