Review — At Work In The Ruins by Dougald Hine
Every civilization comes to an end. Like a holiday in the sun or a birthday party, one day you are having the time of your life and the next it’s all over. The Romans no longer control Europe and North Africa. The Maya’s great cities have disappeared into the jungle. Our current industrial growth society will go the same way, a descent into ruins. Anyone who says otherwise is being dishonest.
Whilst the arc of rise and fall will be the same for the industrial growth society, the repercussions will be far greater. The Maya occupied a distinct area of Guatemala, the Romans the countries around the Mediterranean. The civilisation we are all embedded in is global and the most likely cause of our demise will be global: the effects of climate change.
It’s hardly surprising that people have risen up to protest the inadequate response to climate change. Part of our upbringing is to help in an emergency. If someone falls down, you help them up. If there is a fire, you call fire and rescue and help with the evacuation. Facing up to the reality of climate change is much more complex. Where is the hose to extinguish a world catching fire? Some people choose to ignore it (in an attempt to protect their own sanity perhaps). Others worry but don’t know what to do. Another group will organise, agitate, protest and try to achieve change.
At Work In The Ruins is aimed at the latter group, the people who recognise the calamity and are trying to save something from it. The book is very much about going beyond the slogans and developing a deeper understanding of climate change and how it came about..
The one line explanation for climate change is that human activity is putting excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that is causing sea level rise and disrupting the climate. That’s true, it’s what science tells us, but the true picture is much bigger. Hine is very interested in the upstream causes, what is happening to cause the physical events that science can explain. Why are we engaging in activities we know are destructive? Why don’t we stop? What attitudes say that this disruption of the Earth’s systems is acceptable? Who benefits? Why aren’t the needs of people who are suffering here important?
Many writers, Hine included, explain this paradox by reference to modernity. This is a slippery concept that means different things to different people. Here Hine is using it to describe a state of separation, a state of mind for humanity in which human achievements, economic activity, the pursuit of wealth and power are all vastly more important than the natural world from which we evolved and upon which we depend.
It rapidly becomes clear that climate change is not simply caused by burning stuff. It is caused by humans being embedded in a modern mindset, failing to realise the consequences of their behaviour. Modernity, as expressed through the industrial growth society, demands cheap energy to allow humans to continue in the behaviour that characterises our way of life: building, transporting, manufacturing, mining. Fossil fuels are the perfect answer to this need. Campaigners have, rightly, moved from calls to burn less, to calls to change the economic system, to reduce the demand for burning. Because of the enormity of the change needed, campaigners have called on governments to act and legislate for system change.
At this point, Hine reminds us of the last major example of large scale government intervention; the handling of the Covid 19 crisis.
When Spanish Flu swept across the world in 1918, there was no pausing of the economy as with the Covid 19 lockdowns. Millions of people died but the inherent resilience of small communities ensured that life went on. When people became sick in those communities, they were cared for at home. If a farmer became sick, his children would step up and run the farm. If children became orphans, the community would take them in.
In 2020, the industrialised nations had moved on from that model. Care is provided in technologically advanced hospitals, children are the responsibility of social services departments. When governments acted in 2020, it was not primarily to save lives but to protect health services. The slogan in the UK was “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”. This was not a call to return to the centuries-old model of community. It was a call to isolate yourself and not over-burden the government-run health service. Whether or not lives were saved is debatable. What became clear almost immediately is that many, many people suffered horrible lonely deaths, surrounded by plastic and beeping machines. Their relatives could only look on tearfully, watching their loved ones expire over a Facebook livestream.
Hine’s point is clear. When the government is asked to act in an emergency, it acts to protect itself and its sponsors. So when we demand government action on climate change, do not be surprised if we see action that is misplaced, autocratic and self-serving. Indeed we are already seeing this. Governments are acting to protect the donors who put them in power. Not the voters, but rather the billionaires and large corporations. Joe Biden’s election campaign for US president clearly stated no new oil and gas. His presidency has seen new oil and gas fields open up in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly, in the UK the government remains publicly committed to net zero whilst at the same time approving new oil and gas in the North Sea and even approving new coal mines.
In the industrial growth society, Hine warns, the government is on the side of industry and growth. It is not on the side of people, planet and ecology. This is the reality, deal with your disappointment.
Okay, if governments are not on our side, maybe science will help us. Hine is cautious here. Science is an aspect of modernity and is subject to boundaries. Science is very good at telling us how the world is, but not capable of telling us how the world should be. Covid is a case in point. All governments claimed to be “following the science” but their policies and precautions varied dramatically. Hine is careful not to criticise science, merely to point out what it can and cannot do. Specifically he says “to ask science to carry the whole weight of knowing a thing like climate change is to ask too much”. We need ethicists, priests, rabbis, philosophers, commentators, business-people, politicians and scientists to gather together and address climate change. We need society to come together and address it.
This could be a deeply depressing book, but it isn’t. It is well written, full of analysis and intuition. For anyone seeking to move beyond anger and slogans, it is a wonderful resource. But it is not hopeful. Hine is quite clear, modernity, the paradigm that underpins the current civilisation is terminally ill. We need to be thinking about how it leaves this world, not about a cure.
In this respect, Hine draws heavily on Hospicing Modernity, the outstanding book by Vanessa Machado de Olivera. How do we offer modernity a respectful death, she asks. What do we save as a legacy, what do we allow to become compost, a medium to grow the new world? These are not vague, academic questions. They are the difference between a fiery violent transition to the new world and a transition based on peace and cooperation.
In At Work In The Ruins, Hine offers us something very valuable. Without false optimism, he offers his readers a powerful analysis of where we are now and the kind of work we will need to do to create a desirable future. Because the future is very much up for grabs. Will it be a tired rehash of the thinking that got us to the edge of destruction (which is unlikely to be a future at all)? Or will we learn the lessons from what we have done and build something new and better? We can only start to make these choices when we realise that modernity and the civilisation it built have come to the end of the road. Hine leaves us in no doubt about this.
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