Climate debate requires more intellectual honesty
“We’ll make our island a little America! We’ll build cities, we’ll construct a railway, we’ll lay telegraph lines, and one fine day, when the island has been completely transformed, completely developed, completely civilized, we’ll go and offer it to the Union!,” so boasts the breezily optimistic castaway sailor, Pencroff, as he surveys the island he has been marooned on, in Jules Verne’s 1875 novel The Mysterious Island. An original take on the Robinson Crusoe story, Verne portrays the trials, tribulations and triumphs of five castaways, an engineer, a journalist, a sailor, and an eager young boy interested in the natural sciences, and their faithful dog.
Partisans for the Union cause in the American civil war, they end up imprisoned by the Southern side. They escape in a balloon, find themselves caught up in a storm, and blown thousands of miles into the Pacific. Eventually, they make land on a “mysterious island” hitherto unknown to their fellow man. In remarkable adversity, the “colonists” thrive – using all the natural resources available to them to build a kind of “civilisation” in their new domain. They build a brick oven and make clay, a windmill, ford rivers with streams, cultivate the land, farm the local animals. They even build a working boat capable of traversing hundreds of miles of the rough ocean.
A nice counterpoint to the relative success of the castaways is Ayrton, abandoned on an islet a hundred miles or so from “Lincoln Island,” as our intrepid colonists call it. After his resources are exhausted and during years of solitude, he descends into bestial savagery, eats his meat raw and abandons his house for the trees: “Isolation had clearly made him … a veritable wild man… He must have lost his memory long before, and with it the knowledge required to use his tools.”
Verne believed, in an optimistic mode typical of the Victorian era, that the costs that the hazards of nature produce can be offset by man’s infinite adaptability. Through the combined efforts of science and the arts, it might really be possible to build a “little America” in the most far-flung zones of the world given the right circumstances. Ayrton’s mean and meagre existence is the counterpoint to the civilising of Lincoln Island; sometimes, nature, and the climate, poses questions man cannot answer so successfully.
The zesty enthusiasm with which Verne describes the colonisers’ technological innovations is telling: To build an elevator up a cliff to their abode, the engineer, Cyrus Smith, de facto spiritual leader of the group, installs “a bladed cylinder at the bottom of the cascade [from a waterfall] and this connected to a wheel outside… a stout cable was coiled around this wheel attached to a small wooden cabin… the elevator made its first run on March 17th to the great satisfaction of all.”
When asked what will happen if man exhausts the world with coal, Smith responds confidently: “Great discoveries always arise together… We’ve no need to worry. As long as this earth is inhabited it will fulfil its inhabitants’ every need… Water is the coal of the future.” Verne believes that resource scarcity isn’t a problem because he believes, ultimately, that humanity will innovate its way out of trouble.
Debates about climate, the weather and their interaction with human security and politics are as old as the sun. Hippocrates believed in rudimentary environmental determinism. In Airs, Waters, Places, he wrote: “For wherever the changes of the seasons are most frequent and differ very much from each other, there you will find the most diversity of looks, characters, and natures.”
In the Victorian era, debates over humanity’s role in shaping environmental hazards gained greater urgency – with the onset of unprecedented industrial change, some authors, like Verne, championed the potential of new technologies. More sceptical voices, like Mary Shelley, sounded the alarm.
Michael Hulme, a climate scientist and professor of Human Geography at Cambridge University, tells me that historical debates over climate tend to “take on the hues of the moment.” Humanity is always engaged in a “dance between hazards and our ingenuity. Human societies have been threatened by disaster, but they can also rise to the challenge.”
Verne’s optimistic outlook about resource depletion and natural disaster is shaped by his essential optimism about the power of technology, when used wisely, to enhance humanity’s capabilities. In this sense, we are all a little bit like Jules Verne in the climate debate.
If you’re an eco-doomist, like Extinction Rebellion (XR), which believes an apocalyptic scenario is essentially unavoidable, then you’re unlikely to believe that human innovation matters or that states can successfully coordinate to bring down emissions. If you believe that powwows between world leaders at annual summits really do change the world, then you’re likely to believe that COP26 will speed up our transition from fossil fuels.
If you’re an eco-modernist, like the Danish author Bjorn Lomborg, you’re not just likely to believe that breakthrough technologies can outcompete fossil fuels on their own terms, you’re also going to believe that tech-led development reduces global poverty, that in synergy, the market and the state can find solutions to all kinds of problems.
In the climate debate, we find that we are all weighed down by a great deal of intellectual “baggage”. In the run-up to another global summit and amid another shutdown of central London by XR, it often feels like we have been offered a choice between world leaders or yuppies as our potential rescuers from climate-inspired carnage. But the reality is far more interesting and far more complex – all of us citizens and our governments have a choice whether we will be like the brave castaways of “Lincoln Island” or like Ayrton, who fails to rise to the challenge. How will we choose?