Follow Ben '09

Sunday 10th May.

I meet a guy called Jon who's studying energy efficiency at Berkeley. Another California connection of my cousins'. He says people aren't reacting to news about climate change. He says we have a few years to correct our behaviour, but not very long. 'After that we're f***ed.' There are too many unknowns to be taking risks. There are feedback effects, thresholds which, once crossed, set off chain reactions that could make the greenhouse effect accelerate much quicker. He says the problem with international treaties is that governments are using them to create a stand-off situation, stalemate, waiting for someone else to make the first move. We talk about the film Children of Men, in which the London of a few years hence is portrayed as a fortress city, surrounded by detention centres bursting with illegal immigrants. We agree that this is a chilling and convincing portrayal of a future in which large tracts of the equator have become uninhabitable, in which Bangladesh is submerged and Africa a desert. Massive, unprecedented migration, whole populations moving north to escape the rising waters, the tides of sand. I say that, in context of these things, my own work sometimes seems trivial. He says, 'Or you could flip it around and say it's the only thing that counts. At least you're seeing people, really seeing what's going on, instead of pretending it isn't happening.' There is a similar problem at the root of both our fields - climate change and the realities of disability - the tendency people have to ignore problems until (and sometimes even after) they are faced directly with them. We have perfected the art of contracting out our dilemmas, finding ways to absolve ourselves: carbon trading and offsetting are good examples. As are the variously passive attitudes adopted towards the question of social inclusion. People with disabilities struggle to advocate for themselves. The majority of the population are ignorant, view disability as something that does not affect them. We see our own well-being, and that of the elderly, the injured, the impaired, as someone else's responsibility. Only when it comes home to roost, like the fictional hoards in Children of Men, do we suddenly sit upright in alarm, in indignation. I talk about my friend Andy, a photographer, who is currently developing a project about the countryside - the counties north of London where he grew up and the industries and ways of life (hidden and unhidden) they are home to. His particular interest is the nature of food production, the ways we have found to hide the ugly processes involved in the manufacture of what we find on supermarket shelves. He recently visited an intensive pig farm. He told me about it in an email: 

"It was one of the most disturbing things I’ve done.  The suffering of the individual pigs, covered in scratches and scuttling around in tiny indoor pens like fish in a pet shop tank, was obviously unpleasant to see, but I think that even more depressing was what it seemed to represent.  Emotionless efficiency, sentience denied and reduced to units. The farmer was a nice enough guy, trying hard to make a decent living, not some evil fat cat cranking out ever greater profits. How have we have created this system where we mindlessly expect and are given things at ever cheaper prices, scoffing with our eyes closed to what's inside the dark sheds?"

The alarming thing about all of these matters (food, climate, disability) is that we have gone far enough down the road that we no longer even have to try to ignore the processes involved - the transactions involved take place in settings quite hidden from us and generations are born in happy ignorance. Ignorance of climate change is perhaps easier to excuse, given that it's effects are, in many places, as yet unfelt. The cruel joke is that they will be most profoundly destructive in those places that cannot afford defenses, those nations and territories that did the least to provoke them and to whom the Western World has spent so long selling its debts and disadvantages. America is not the Garden of Eden. England is not Jerusalem. The stability and comfort of our birthplaces have been founded on slavery and violence, maintained through artifice and manipulation. We have arranged our worlds carefully to avoid confrontation with ugliness, misery, deformity, lunacy, packaging our mistakes and our waste materials, our unwanted, and keeping them safely at a distance, in another zone, sublimated, submerged. We more than most societies are living on borrowed time. We are the best at living the dream, kidding ourselves that we are the good guys, averting our eyes from the the things we find uncomfortable. Climate change is no different. We have based our economies on the concept of infinite growth (of population, of commodity), failing to see the obvious: that our planet is composed of finite resource. If our attitudes towards food production and disability (ancient undercurrents of our waking worlds) are anything to go by, we will be extremely successful in carrying on the fantasy even when the flood barriers are brimming over.