Making molehills out of mountains: Keeping the tempest in the teapot

Troubling times

I published my first article on climate change (then usually referred to with the rather anodyne descriptor “the greenhouse effect” or GHE) nearly four decades ago in the journal Geoforum (Waterstone, 1985). In that piece, I described what I thought to be rather insuperable obstacles to reducing the use of fossil fuels or of curbing deforestation (then, as now, thought to be leading causes of the GHE, along with heightened interest in methane, chlorofluorocarbons, etc.). The impediments I identified were only very partially technological (e.g. finding substitutes for forest products or replacement energy sources), though many of these alternatives were then at early stages of development and rarely competitive economically. Although these difficulties were real enough, they seemed tractable given the right investment and attention.

Rather, the main problems with addressing climate change, from my perspective, were (and remain) political and particularly geographic in nature. My piece concentrated on what I saw as the equity aspects of the problem, which were at least twofold. The principal causal agents were countries (and population segments) in the global North. These were the predominant users of fossil fuels, and were the primary beneficiaries of deforestation, then taking place largely in tropical regions either for the forest products themselves (principally timber for wood or pulp) or for land for agricultural products largely for export (food, fiber, and flesh). The other dimension of concern was the projected distribution of the effects, many of which were (and still are, though less so) quite uncertain. One early conclusion, however, was that more temperature rise stemming from the GHE would likely be concentrated in polar and temperate, rather than in tropical regions. Again, this produced a dramatically uneven global map of cost and risk bearers, as well as potential winners (as just one example, through potentially longer, more productive growing seasons in higher latitude locales, all else equal). The main conclusion I drew from all of this early conjecture was that rather than concentrating on prevention of the GHE, efforts, from scientists to public policy makers, would be better spent on pinning down, with as much precision as possible, the distribution of likely effects and on adaptive preparation.

In a subsequent paper a few years later (Waterstone, 1993), I was even more pessimistic about our chances of preventing the calamitous impacts of the GHE, even though the science had advanced on key aspects of the problem in the relatively short interim. Again, the obstacles, as I saw them then (and still see them today) were not scientific or technological, but political and economic. I argued that much less effort should be made on the scientific/technological side (other than attempts to better understand the geographical distribution of effects) than to finding ways to overcome political resistance to implementing the by-then obvious remedies. One interesting recent validation of this view is that the Nobel Prizes for physics (announced on 5 October 2021), and awarded to three scientists for their “revolutionary contributions” to our understanding of the climate and human impacts on it, recognizes their work from the 1960s (Syukuro Manabe), 1970s (Klauss Hasselmann), and 1980s (Girogio Parisi).

It was, and still is, crystal clear that the status quo is too profitable for those at the top to relinquish, and too comfortable for those seduced by all of the emoluments that arise from “cheap” energy to forgo. It is also beyond dispute that for many people, these matters are not now susceptible to argumentation and evidence. Positions on the climate emergency, as on so many crucial matters, have hardened into ideological, political, and cultural identities. I’ll return to this last point momentarily.

At this writing (October 2021), a new scientific report (UNFCCC, 2021) is once again pointing to the abject failure of political leaders to come to grips with what is now called “the climate emergency” or crisis. We are now less than 2 weeks away from the 26th (the 26th!) Conference of the Parties which will take place in Glasgow from 31 October to 12 November 2021, and the most optimistic hopes are that countries will strengthen the voluntary (and woefully inadequate) commitments of emission reductions they made when signing onto the Paris agreements in 2015. A new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (UNFCCC, 2021) indicates that, at present, only one country (the Gambia) is on track to meet the emissions target that would limit global temperature increases to 1.5°C by 2100. Without drastic and rapid reductions by the other 190 parties to the agreement, the new report indicates a nightmare warming scenario of 2.7°C by the end of the century.

As just one further example of the continuity of the problems, there is now significant speculation that many representatives from the global South (who are still not receiving the necessary $100 billion/year in resource transfers from the North promised in the 2015 Paris agreements) will be unable to attend the meeting in Glasgow as the result of travel restrictions imposed by the drastically uneven impacts of the Covid pandemic. Four decades after my own minimal entry into this debate, it’s clear that we need a radically new approach to changing this state of affairs.

Let me now turn briefly to the second chief concern of the Doomsday Clock-keepers: nuclear threat and militarism. In the heady days following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the possible elimination of more than 40 years of Cold War antagonism, several colleagues and I undertook a project that aimed to take advantage of the tantalizing glimpse of a so-called “peace dividend” promised by the 1988–1991 geopolitical events. The outcomes, from my perspective (Waterstone, 1991; Waterstone and Kirby, 1991), sought to build on the long trajectory of work by Seymour Melman on “economic conversion” (see, particularly Melman, 1985, 1988). Given the disappearance of the long-term enemy, the moment seemed at least minimally promising for redirecting thinking away from militarism and war, and toward more socially and economically beneficial endeavors. Hah! Even before the book came out (in 1991), the United States and its “willing” coalition began the (first!) Gulf War with Operation Desert Storm “liberating” Kuwait and punishing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And almost immediately thereafter the United States initiated, at first with economic sanctions, and almost immediately supplemented with aerial bombardment, what eventually morphed into the Global War on Terror. An eminently suitable replacement enemy for the USSR was thus brought into being. In many ways, this enemy has proved more useful, since “terrorism” is an endlessly expansive term, can never be eliminated or decisively defeated (unlike a state), but must constantly be fought.

The fact that the Doomsday clock is now set at its closest point to catastrophe is grim testament to almost 75 years of continuous failure to come to grips with this dimension of our mutual risk. Not only have the original nuclear threats increased in potency and proliferation (more powerful weapons and more holders of such weapons), but even the few meager safeguards put in place over the decades to control this element have now been largely abandoned. And the possibility of escalation of conventional hostilities has become ubiquitous, as heavily (and often nuclear) armed nations are drawn into the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism) and other conflicts in pursuit of their own national, religious, economic, and strategic interests. For a harrowing assessment of just how lucky we’ve been to avoid this cataclysm, see Ellsberg (2017).

It is also crucial to note that the reasons for keeping the clock at 100 seconds to midnight in 2021 (rather than moving it even closer to apocalypse) were based on what have already turned out to be misplaced hopes in the new US administration. Although the new President has articulated a willingness to resume the START Treaty and to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, these rhetorical moves have been inarguably undermined by the demand for an increase in the enormously bloated US military budget, the recommitment to the “modernization” of the nuclear triad arsenal (with the current round begun under the Obama administration), the determination to maintain “over-the-horizon” operations in the recently “ended” 20-year catastrophe in Afghanistan, and most troublingly, the belligerent focus on “near-peer” adversaries, Russia and China. And if these elements were not sufficiently destabilizing, there are the myriad, ongoing “low intensity” (though not for the targets) conflicts, and the perpetual wars by other means, including so-called hybrid wars carried out with deadly effect through the economic sphere under widespread sanction regimes.

There are similarly troubling parallels with mismatched promises and actions in the climate crisis arena as well. Alongside commitments to rejoin the Paris agreement and to lower methane emissions, we see simultaneous pleas from the administration to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to increase production (and thus lower fuel prices for Americans), and proposals to open wide swaths of the Gulf of Mexico to new oil and gas drilling (on the precise date of the most destructive offshore oil spill of the coast of southern California).

Finally, let me engage with the third, and for my purposes here, the most relevant dimension of concern for the clock-keepers: the infodemic. The authors characterize this phenomenon as inhering in recently emerging communication technologies, including alternative “news” and information sources, and amplified and accelerated by social media. The chief result of concern is the destabilization of the evidence-based world, accompanied by a mistrust of, and a more general skepticism about, the legitimacy and reliability of established institutions: politics, education, scientists, and other so-called “experts.” In addition to exacerbating the intractability of the nuclear and climate issues, the authors (using the Covid pandemic as the principal focus) point to myriad other threats whose resolution will be confounded by the epidemic of mis- and disinformation that the infodemic epitomizes. As the report indicates, when referring to the Covid pandemic,

False and misleading information disseminated over the internet—including misrepresentation of COVID-19’s seriousness, promotion of false cures, and politicization of low-cost protective measures such as face masks—created social chaos in many countries and led to unnecessary death. This wanton disregard for science and the large-scale embrace of conspiratorial nonsense —often driven by political figures and partisan media—undermined the ability of responsible national and global leaders to protect the security of their citizens. (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2021)

While all of this attention to the recent spate of information pollution is undoubtedly warranted, it’s simply an add on to the generalized background propaganda that props up so many of the troubling aspects of the quotidian, taken-for-granted, status quo. It’s undeniable that the advent of new social media has accelerated the pace and increased the specificity with which siloed information can be targeted, and that this development has exacerbated and hardened social, political, cultural, and economic divisions. It is also clear that this information environment has facilitated the rise and durability of so-called “populist” and authoritarian political figures around the globe, who are now able to mobilize these technologies to exploit the social schisms that keep population segments divided and mutually antagonistic. All of this, of course, except for the rapidity and targeted reinforcement with which this kind of pollution is spread, is very old news, as elites have long and deep experience at keeping the masses at each other’s throats and diverted from the real sources of their oppression and exploitation.

What is a bit new, however, is the degree to which positions on many crucial issues have become embedded in peoples’ political (and other) identities (e.g. see Klein, 2011), and go quite far in defining who a person is or thinks she or he is. In the United States in 2021, for example, to be a stereotypical (and stereotyped) Republican is to be a climate warming denier, anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-mask and anti-vaccine, and a “firm” believer that the 2020 election was stolen. To be a stereotypical Democrat is to take pretty much the opposite position on any or all of these matters. One serious implication of this is that such positions, then, are not readily susceptible to argumentation or evidence, at least as these emerge from the institutions of the “other” side. From the perspective of the Bulletin’s clock-keepers, this has resulted in a widespread dismissal of science by large segments of the population, along with a general decline in, or elimination of, trust in other pillars of the evidence-based universe, all of which makes addressing the concerns of the clock-keepers (along with the numerous other, unmentioned existential threats) even more intractable than has been the case over the past decades.

Late lessons from early warnings

This somewhat circuitous journey then brings me to the central matters at hand at the launch of this new journal, which I will address through an exploration of the following questions:

Given the urgency of the foregoing multiple, and linked, crises, what is an (the?) appropriate and productive role for scholarly endeavor, including research, writing, and publication, as well as pedagogy and other forms of praxis? In the face of these exigent circumstances, what should our work consist of, and what should it be for? Clearly, answers will vary depending on one’s view of the circumstances themselves, as well as one’s sense of the role of scholarship in elucidating the nature of the problems (if they are viewed as problems at all) and/or in proposing remedies or avenues to solutions. In my attempt to answer these questions, I intend to reprise a number of positions that I elaborated in sister publications almost 20 years ago (Waterstone, 2002, 2004).

I know (given my age and privileged position as a middle-class, White male in the global North) that for most of the issues that I’ve referred to above (with the exception of possible nuclear catastrophe), I will not be personally adversely affected in any serious way. But right now (late 2021), I have six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and I am keenly aware that their future will be significantly conditioned by actions or inaction in the face of these problems. My sense of what scholarly work should be about, then, is highly influenced by my concern for their (and their generations’) future welfare (for particularly timely and poignant articulations of this generational perspective, see the recent comments from youth climate activists Vanessa Nakate and Greta Thunberg in Milan, Italy; available here: https://www.democracynow.org/2021/10/4/youth_climate_summit_milan_italy).

Our efforts, in my view, should therefore be directed at applying our current understanding of the nature of the problems to overcoming the obstacles to resolution as expeditiously as possible. An underlying premise, here, is that our understanding of the major problems is already sufficient. In the cases I articulated above, this assumption is manifestly clear. My own nearly four decade engagement with the climate crisis and nearly 30-year engagement with militarism have not changed my initial views or observations. And while it is clear that through diligent work by many scholars, our understanding of the specifics of both issues (as well as others on the global stage) has expanded greatly in the intervening time, this increased understanding has not prevented these problems from metastasizing enormously. In fact, as recent statements by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres have indicated, by most measures, we are in worse shape now on the climate, nuclear, pandemic, infodemic, and other crises than ever before; a fact further amplified by the current setting of the Doomsday Clock (for Guterres’ remarks, see: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202109/22/WS614a8b15a310cdd39bc6a9f9.html).

How much more understanding, then, do we need? I want to argue, here (and as I asserted earlier), that on virtually all of the major existential (and less dire, but nonetheless consequential) threats facing humanity and the planet, “we (the surplus army of intellectual social-theoretic laborers) have sufficiently precise diagnostics of how the world works and why, and have had them (with some crucial refinements) since Marx” (Waterstone, 2004: 484). The fact is that the present financialized, globalized system of late-stage industrial state capitalism is a manifest failure for so many, and yet persists. This reality (i.e. the persistence of this system for organizing society in the face of its catastrophic trajectory) is, I would like to assert, what we should be bending all of our efforts toward understanding and dismantling.

Before describing what these efforts might entail, I just want to speak briefly to one major structural impediment to this kind of engagement that we face as scholars, and which is particularly acute for those of us in academia. By that latter qualification, I do not mean to imply that all scholarship occurs within the bounds and binds of the academy, though, of course, those precincts comprise society’s most authorized space for intellectual work (a division of labor that I would also argue is quite useful for maintaining and legitimating the status quo). To some extent, this is an impediment of our own making, though it is thoroughly and consciously enmeshed with the reward systems of academia, and to a large (and largely unacknowledged) degree, we have internalized it as a principal criterion of academic worth: the constant quest for “new knowledge.”

It is obvious that, up to a point, additional knowledge is both necessary and desirable for understanding the nature of particular problems, and pointing the way to possible solutions. But it should also be clear that beyond a certain point, the benefits of further, nuanced understanding become too costly in the trade-off with needed action. And the trade-offs are quite real. For example, some of this calculation falls to simple logistical practicalities: how much time and energy does any scholar/activist actually have? But the more pernicious aspect of the trade-off lies in our tacit or explicit acceptance of the “new knowledge” element of the equation as outweighing and keeping separate the application of “existing knowledge” to urgent problems.

This point is quite relevant to my sense of what this new journal should be for. Referring to the quote from Noel Castree with which I began this reflection, if the operative value-criteria are to change (rather than simply interpret) the devastating states of affairs enumerated above, then it is imperative that we shift the predominant current balance between knowledge development and application, between theory and action. If a key intention of elites is to keep academics (and most especially, critical or radical academics) occupied with tasks that have virtually no chance of touching upon real issues in potent, transformative, and material ways, what better (or more alluring) inducement than the continual search for the holy grail of “new” knowledge? After all, what signals the marginalization and trivialization of issues more than the phrase “it’s merely academic?” Keeping the tempest in the teapot! Mountains made into molehills!

This contained activity, furthermore, allows elites to continue to benefit (and without undue threat) from the existence of our seeming bastions of free inquiry and thought. As I posited earlier,

As long as the arguments of [scholars] remain “on track” (that is, within the academy), their potential to disturb the status quo remains effectively contained and constrained. Then, as Marcuse pointed out so trenchantly years ago, the university can be pointed to by elites (often with a melodramatic and exaggerated sense of outrage) as a site for radical and critical activities [think “cancel culture” and the dismal loss of control over the discourse of “political correctness”], essential underpinnings of the rhetoric of democratic freedom. The utility of these contained activities (and others’ representations and appropriations of them for their own purposes) for maintaining the current hegemony is difficult to overstate. To breach the unspoken (unspeakable?) contract of these containments, however, risks bringing down the wrath and power of the state, as Marcuse and many other academics discovered in the 1950s and 1960s (see, for example, Chomsky, 1997). Malign hegemony quickly turns to malign coercion and suppression. (Waterstone, 2004: 486)

Combined with other elements of speed-up in the “knowledge factory” (Aronowitz, 2000), the last point speaks directly to some of the risks facing those who challenge the definitions of proper behavior within the corporatized, neoliberal university. This, of course, is an especially pertinent consideration as the academic workforce becomes increasingly casualized and precarious (see, for example, Worthen, 2021).

But what does this mean for us as scholars, practitioners, and activists, and what role might additional teaching, research, and writing (including in this new journal) play? Our efforts in this regard should be twofold. On one hand, we should provide as thorough-going a negative critique of the present arrangements as possible. This part of the work must begin with opening up a space in public discourse for oppositional critique itself.

Almost 60 years ago, Herbert Marcuse (1964) described this problem (also, see Berlant (2011), on these points) as inhering in the apparent flattening (into one dimension) of the difference between what is and what is thought to be desired by society, or as

The contrast (or conflict) between the given and the possible, between the satisfied and the unsatisfied needs . . . If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population. (p. 8)

In addition,

When this point is reached, domination in the guise of affluence and liberty extends to all spheres of private and public existence, integrates all authentic opposition, absorbs all alternatives. (Marcuse, 1964: 18)

As I posited in my earlier intervention,

In such a world, where the existing order seems to be providing such benefits (and progressively more so) for all (again, the essence of the Gramscian notion of hegemony), oppositional critique looks absurd. Destabilizing this notion [that the present capitalist system is desirable, inevitable and irreplaceable] will entail a thoroughgoing examination of its construction and ongoing maintenance, an ardent search for its internal contradictions and counterarguments, great ingenuity and energy in finding mechanisms and pathways to bring these to peoples’ attention (in the face of an almost totally closed off media system [and the severe distrust of such critiques embodied by the evolving infodemic]), and, finally, ways to make people care. But, until such work is begun, the need for, let alone the acceptance of, radical critique will continue to appear ludicrous. (Waterstone, 2004: 487)

Following on our efforts to open a space for oppositional critique, we must work to make clear the connections among the myriad pressing issues, and trace those connections to their common root causes in the capital-centric structures that underlie them (on these points, see, for example, Chomsky and Waterstone, 2021). In this part of the endeavor, it will be necessary to recognize and destabilize the elements that presently command the allegiance or aspiration (often tacit and superficial) of so many to this palpably unjust and destructive arrangement.

The destabilization of foundational authorities is much more enabling than constraining in these necessary endeavors. By first pointing to the constructedness of all discourses (including the taken-for-granted and dominant discourses that govern everyday life, both in and out of the academy), such critiques then immediately enable the possibility of discourses being constructed otherwise. Thus a progressive political practice is opened rather than forever foreclosed. (Waterstone, 2004: 486)

As a second set of tasks, this critique of the taken-for-granted, common sense status quo, necessary as it is, must be supplemented by strenuous efforts to produce, collect, and disseminate compelling visions of alternative social, political, economic, and cultural arrangements. In this regard, let me return once more to Marcuse (also on these matters, see Freire, 2007, on “fear of freedom” and also Shaw and Waterstone, 2020):

To liberate the imagination so that it can be given all its means of expression presupposes the repression of much that is now free and that perpetuates a repressive society. And such reversal is not a matter of psychology or ethics but of politics, in the sense in which this term has here been used throughout: the practice in which the basic societal institutions are developed, defined, sustained, and changed. It is the practice of individuals, no matter how organized they may be. Thus the question once again [and again] must be faced; how can the administered individuals who have made their mutilation into their own liberties and satisfactions, and thus reproduce it on an enlarged scale, liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious circle be broken? (Marcuse, 1964: 250–251)

A way forward

A great deal of the kind of work I have described is already underway, both within geography and in a number of cognate disciplines. Certainly, there is no lack of critiques of the present circumstances. And an enormous compendium describing alternative imaginaries (and their concrete manifestations) already exists. The challenge is to find ways to break through the mind-sets that consign critical assessments of the status quo and proposals for new arrangements to the realms of the impossible, the unthinkable, and quite literally, the non-sensical. This set of tasks has been made considerably more difficult in the context of the infodemic, and the associated ascendancy of social media platforms with their focus on controversy, fear, and division. The constant onslaught of misinformation, and the algorithmic siloing of viewpoints into hardened personal identities makes challenging the taken-for-granted that much more arduous. People clearly have a very substantial stake in believing that they know how their world operates, even in the face of what might be seen by others as contrary evidence. Breaking down this common sense and offering an alternative is a necessary (though not sufficient) prerequisite to change.

My hope is that much of the work included in Environment and Planning F can contribute significantly to this set of critical endeavors. One practical suggestion, which could be carried out under the “practice” dimension of the new journal’s remit, would be to devote a specific section of each issue to matters of praxis—to translations of theory into action. This section of the journal could become a proactive clearinghouse to solicit, publish, and valorize demonstrations of these kinds of activities, and the lessons and insights they contain. The section should canvas efforts produced through undergraduate and graduate pedagogy, through scholarly research and writing, and through the work of activists and practitioners on the ground. Highlighting this kind of translational work, including documentation and elucidation of moments when “common sense” was altered for progressive purposes (on this, see, for example, Waterstone, 2010), could produce new and unanticipated synergies and collaborations. Importantly, dedicated attention could also help to raise the status of such activity relative to the production of “new” knowledge. In this latter regard, the Environment and Planning F (EPF) imprimatur might be quite helpful in recalibrating a number of the current sanctified and rigidified metrics of merit that condition academic work, and that channel our efforts into personally and professionally rewarding avenues, but avenues of limited relevance to helping to resolve our myriad, existential crises. It is impossible to predict what such a reconsideration of academic value and worth might produce, but tantalizing to consider. Much work has been done to deepen our understanding and interpretation of the world. Much more needs to be done to change it. Given the urgency and pressure of the problems we face, we must use all of our ingenuity to make it easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world.