This Can’t Be Happening
- Nov 22, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
★★★★★
Book number four in Penguin’s Green Ideas series, George Monbiot’s This Can’t Be Happening gathers up eleven short speeches and essays from 2017–2019, many previously published in The Guardian, and one, “The New Political Story that Could Change Everything,” that was delivered at TEDSummit 2019. As I read elsewhere, it’s hard to argue with anything Monbiot has to say, though, as with much environmental writing, it all just piles on. Essentially, we are fucked, though some (the global poor) will have it worse than others (the global rich) unless we can come together to demand systemic change. We can, and we do, but, at least here in the United States, what is done is undone by the opposing political administration—one step forward; two steps back.
In the foreword, Monbiot tells a story about trying to convince the other parents waiting to pick their children up at school to turn off their car engines. To him (and me) the reasoning was obvious, but it was far from obvious to the other parents. After several months, he gave up, his efforts having no lasting discernable impact. It was yet another reminder of the futility of acting alone. In This Can’t Be Happening, Monbiot argues that, yes, we need to demand practical changes, but, more importantly, we need to do something deeper: overcome the ignorance the billionaire press has manufactured, wake our friends from the stupor of consumption, break through the barrier of disbelief, and provoke a new moral imagination.
If one of those four points is not like the others, it is, to me anyway, the last one: provoke a new moral imagination. While not directly related to what Amitav Ghosh posits in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, it’s as close a sentiment as I’ve heard from another environmentalist. In the present context, it also feels like the overarching necessity that makes the others possible. That is, as a species, we lack the moral compass needed to guide us through this crisis: We need to understand that we can inflict great harm on others, even if we don’t intend to; We need to connect our daily activities on one side of the world to catastrophic effects on the lives of people on the other; and We need to see that the way we live can destroy the chances of those not yet born. Unless and until we can imagine those things and then turn that imagination into belief, we won’t get anywhere. We won’t get anywhere because, without a shift in thinking, everything given up will feel like, in all senses of the word, a loss. It’s the same reason going on a diet rarely works over the long term: The dieter hasn’t changed his mindset, he’s only changed his behavior. Goal reached, he reverts to the old ways, happy to have back what had been temporarily sacrificed.
In the context of environmental collapse, many of our core beliefs—progress, wealth creation, self-improvement—drive us in the wrong direction. How, then, can we make the leap from where we are to where we need to be? For Ghosh, it’s literature—serious literary fiction, not sci-fi or cli-fi that are, rightly or wrongly, genres that aren’t taken seriously—that is uniquely positioned to do this. Maybe so, though in the years since its publication I’ve yet to see it materialize on any scale I’d consider necessary for change. For Monbiot, it’s more urgent. As he concludes in the essay “Deathly Silence”: “Let’s be embarrassing. Let’s break the silence, however uncomfortable it makes us and others feel. Let’s talk about the great unmentionables: not just climate breakdown, but also growth and consumerism. Let’s create the political space in which well-intentioned parties can act. Let us talk a better world into being.” Let us indeed.
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