No Collision - In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What
happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies?
BONNIE HONIG at the Boston Review
https://bostonreview.net/science-nature-politics/bonnie-honig-no-collision
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Sparring with the sun may well be the next stage of the slow violence of climate change. “It’s going to be a slow, gradual burn, if you will,” said Vivek Shandas, founder of the Sustaining Urban Places Research Lab, to the Times. New technologies may buy us more time, as the solar radiation managers promise. But the very idea of “buying time” evokes the Plan B logic of opt-outs and buy-ins that betray the democratic idea of public things. The Democrats’ current proposal of a Green New Deal, by contrast, invites us to think and act like a public invested in a public thing—climate health, yes, but also equality and American ingenuity. “This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil-rights movement of our generation,” said incoming congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a recent town hall event. The Green New Deal invites us to move away from transactional calculation and zero sum games. It dares to dream, and dream big. Writing in the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer says that the Green New Deal is a slogan “like ‘Medicare for All’ or ‘Free Community College’ or ‘Abolish ICE,’” but, like the best slogans, it is also “a worldview, a promise, and a vision of how life would be different after their passage.”
In Melancholia, the end of the world comes out of nowhere. The disaster imagined by the film is not one we have anticipated—nuclear war, climate catastrophe—but the seemingly random end of everything. It is a perversely fitting end: a rogue planet bucking the (solar) system destroys a world of rogue individuals who take pride in doing the same. We may not get the emergency we expect, the film suggests, but rather the emergency we deserve.
For those north-bound millennials who would opt out of collectivity seeking isolation and control, Bruce Riordan of the Climate Readiness Institute has some advice: “Sure, you can grow your own vegetables, but what about wheat and grains? And what happens when you need medical attention?” Shandas, too, underlines the importance of mutual dependence: “Pulling away and isolating yourself is one of the most dangerous things you can do.” Joining up with others provides the power that opt-out individualism promises but can not deliver. Old democratic ideas about equality, mutuality, the power of public things, and a shared mission are sometimes dismissed as cumbersome by climate experts who say we need change fast, but they may be the kind of old ideas that—combined with courage—will light the way.
Melancholia ends with John’s wife, son, and sister-in-law sitting inside a bare tepee, through which the impending catastrophe sounds. In his absence, the three hold hands. That may not be consolation. But it may be instruction.
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