Hurricane Irma will happen again so we need the answers to some diffi... http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hurricane-irma-climate-change-rec...

Hurricane Irma will happen again so we

need the answers to some dicult questions
about global politics
What if northern Siberia becomes more inhabitable and appropriate for
agriculture, while large sub-Saharan regions become too dry for a large
population to live there how will the exchange of populations be
organised? And what if anew gigantic volcanic eruption makes the whole
of anisland uninhabitable where will the people of that island move?
Slavoj Zizek | Tuesday 12 September 2017 10:47 BST |

The Sunrise Motel remains ooded after Hurricane Irma hit the area on September 11, 2017 in East Naples,
Florida Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Reading and watching reports on the devastating eect of Hurricane Irma this week,
I was reminded of Trisolaris, a strange planet from The Three-Body Problem, Liu
Cixins sci- masterpiece.

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A scientist is drawn into a virtual reality game called Three Body in which players
nd themselves on the alien planet Trisolaris whose three suns rise and set at strange
and unpredictable intervals: sometimes far too far away and horribly cold, sometimes
far too close and destructively hot, and sometimes not seen for long periods of time.

Life is a constant struggle against apparently unpredictable elements. Despite that,

players slowly nd ways to build civilisations and attempt to predict the strange
cycles of heat and cold.

Do phenomena like Irma not demonstrate that our Earth itself is gradually turning
into Trisolaris? Devastating hurricanes, droughts and oods warming do they all
not indicate that we are witnessing something the only appropriate name for which is
the end of nature? Nature is to be understood here in the traditional sense of a
regular rhythm of seasons, the reliable background of human history, something on
which we can count to always be there.

It is dicult for an outsider to imagine how it feels when a vast domain of densely
populated land disappears underwater, so that millions are deprived of the very basic
coordinates of their life-world: the land with its elds, but also with its cultural
monuments, is no longer there, so that, although in the midst of water, they are in a
way like shes out of water it is as if the environs thousands of generations were
taking as the most obvious foundation of their lives start to crack.

Similar catastrophes were, of course, known for centuries, some even from the very
prehistory of humanity. What is new today is that, since we live in a disenchanted
post-religious era, such catastrophes can no longer be rendered meaningful as part of
a larger natural cycle or as an expression of divine wrath.

This is how, back in 1906, William James described his reaction to an earthquake:
Emotion consisted wholly of glee, and admiration. Glee at the vividness which such
an abstract idea as 'earthquake' could take on when veried concretely and translated
into sensible reality ... and admiration at the way in which the frail little wooden
house could hold itself together in spite of such a shaking. I felt no trace whatever of
fear; it was pure delight and welcome. How far we are here from the shattering of the
very foundations of one's life-world!

Nature is more and more in disorder, not because it overwhelms our cognitive
capacities but primarily because we are not able to master the eects of our own

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interventions into its course who knows what the ultimate consequences of our
biogenetic engineering or of global warming will be?

The surprise comes from ourselves, it concerns the opacity of how we ourselves t
into the picture: the impenetrable stain in the picture is not some cosmic mystery like
a mysterious explosion of a supernova: the stain are we ourselves, our collective
activity. This is what we call Anthropocene: a new epoch in the life of our planet in
which we, humans, cannot any longer rely on the Earth as a reservoir ready to absorb
the consequences of our productive activity.

We have to accept that we live on a Spaceship Earth, responsible and accountable

for its conditions. At the very moment when we become powerful enough to aect
the most basic conditions of our life, we have to accept that we are just another
animal species on a small planet. A new way to relate to our enviroment is necessary
once we realise this: we should become modest agents collaborating with our
environs, permanently negotiating a tolerable level of stability, with no inherent
formula which guarantees our safety.

Does this mean that we should assume a defensive approach and search for a new
limit, a return to (or, rather, the invention of) some new balance? This is what the
predominant ecology proposes us to do, and the same task is pursued by bioethics
with regard to biotechnology: biotechnology pursues new possibilities of scientic
interventions (genetic manipulations, cloning and so on), and bioethics endeavours to
impose moral limitations on what biotechnology enables us to do.

As such, bioethics is not immanent to scientic practice: it intervenes into this

practice from the outside, imposing external morality onto it. One can even say that
bioethics is the betrayal of the aims of scientic endeavour, the aims which say: Do
not compromise your scientic desire; follow inexorably its path. Such attempts at
limitation fail because they ignore the fact that there is no objective limit: we are
discovering that the object itself nature is not stable.

Sceptics like to point out the limitation of our knowledge about what goes on in
nature however, this limitation in no way implies that we should not exaggerate the
ecological threat. On the contrary, we should be even more careful about it, since the
situation is profoundly unpredictable. The recent uncertainties about global warming
do not signal that things are not too serious, but that they are even more chaotic than
we thought, and that natural and social factors are inextricably linked.

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Can we then use capitalism itself against this threat? Although capitalism can easily
turn ecology into a new eld of capitalist investment and competition, the very
nature of the risk involved fundamentally precludes a market solution why?

Capitalism only works in precise social conditions: it implies the trust into the
objectivised mechanism of the markets invisible hand which, as a kind of Cunning
of Reason, guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the
common good. However, we are in the midst of a radical change: what looms on the
horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will trigger
an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-
social catastrophy, and so on. For the rst time in human history, the act of a single
socio-political agent eectively can alter and even interrupt the global historical and
even natural process.

Huge waterspout witnessed following Irma

Jean-Pierre Dupuy refers to the theory of complex systems which accounts for their
two opposite features: their robust stable character and their extreme vulnerability.
These systems can accommodate themselves to great disturbances, integrate them
and nd new balance and stability up to a certain threshold (a tipping point)
above which a small disturbance can cause a total catastrophe and lead to the

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establishment of a totally dierent order.

For long centuries, humanity did not have to worry about the impact on the
enviroment of its productive activities nature was able to accommodate itself to
deforestation, to the use of coal and oil, and so on. However, one cannot be sure if,
today, we are not approaching a tipping point one really cannot be sure, since such
points can be clearly perceived only once it is already too late, in retrospect.

Apropos of the urgency to do something about today's threat of dierent ecological

catastrophes: either we take this threat seriously and decide today to do things which,
if the catastrophe will not occur, will appear ridiculous; or we do nothing and lose
everything in the case of catastrophe. The worst case scenario would be to take a
"middle ground" solution with a limited amount of measures in this case, we will
fail as there is no middle ground in reality. In such a situation, the talk about
anticipation, precaution and risk control tends to become meaningless.

This is why there is something deceptively reassuring in the readiness of the theorists
of anthropocene to blame us, humans, for the threats to our environment: we like to
be guilty since, if we are guilty, then it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the
catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really
dicult for us (at least for us in the West) to accept is that we are also (to some
unknown degree) impotent observers who can only sit and watch what their fate will
be.

To avoid such a situation, we are prone to engage in a frantic obsessive activity,

recycle old paper, buy organic food, whatever, just so that we can be sure that we are
doing something, making our contribution like a soccer fan who supports his team
in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in a
superstitious belief that this will somehow inuence the outcome.

The main lesson to be learned is therefore that humankind should get ready to live in
a more exible or nomadic way: local or global changes in environment may impose
the need for unheard of large scale social tranformations.

Let us say that a new gigantic volcanic eruption makes the whole of an island
uninhabitable where will the people of that island move? Under what conditions?
Should they be given a piece of land or just be dispersed around the world?

What if northern Siberia becomes more inhabitable and appropriate for agriculture,

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while large sub-Saharan regions become too dry for a large population to live there
how will the exchange of populations be organised?

When similar things happened in the past, social changes occurred in a wild and
spontaneous way, with violence and destruction. Such a prospect would be
catastrophic in today's conditions, with arms of mass destruction available to all
nations.

One thing is clear: national sovereignty will have to be radically redened and new
levels of global cooperation invented. And what about the immense changes in
economy and consummation due to new weather patterns or shortages of water and
energy sources? Through what processes of decision will such changes be decided
and executed? Its time to answer these dicult questions

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