reading log: kvandal 2025

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@@ -6,6 +6,50 @@ author: Joe Carstairs
 
 ## 2026-04-21
 
+### @{kvandal-2025}
+
+Big idea: pessimistic climate activists who believe in unavoidable mass
+extinction, use a Green Apocalypse narrative to simulate the adverse potential
+reality of human extinction, and as a result, carry out symbolic, ritualistic
+acts to restore a virtual sense of agency in place of the real agency they
+believe they have lost.
+
+The authors believe there is a cross-cultural end-time narrative, though this
+isn't really important. What matters is the particular instance of the Green
+Apocalypse: the world is imminently coming to an end because of climate change,
+and there's nothing anyone can do. The evil fossil fuel lobby is the cause of
+it. We may be able to 'save' ourselves, if only in a moral sense, if we act now.
+
+Environmentalists are on an optimism-pessimism spectrum. The optimists believe
+we can do something about it, and have hope that existing institutions:
+governments, COPs, the UN, science, technology, can avert the worst catastrophe
+if we act now. Pessimists sometimes explicitly abjure hope: perhaps hope is
+perceived as a sign that you're still buying the optimist's progress narrative.
+Pessimists like XR, Greta Thunberg express feelings of betrayal with respect to
+the establishment.
+
+The Green Apocalypse does not inspire hope, it inspires horror, fear etc.
+
+Narratives may evoke horror, fear, in order to simulate situations you can't
+practice for real. Human extinction an extreme example of this.
+
+When people feel they have no real agency, they may use ritual to give them a
+feeling of virtual agency. This may be what pessimistic climate activists are up
+to when they engage in activism, sail across the Atlantic in a zero-carbon
+sailing vessel to COP19, etc.
+
+Their argument feels like it stops short to me. They seem to portray their
+subjects as if they're trying to deceive themselves into feeling OK when their
+beliefs only give them rational reasons to despair. If this is true, it is
+deplorable, it is a condemnation of these people, it describes them as irrational, deliberately dishonest.
+
+It is striking that some people think that action begins when hope dies. This
+goes against my assumptions.
+
+Their Green Apocalypse seems to be just the target of the criticisms raised by
+@{flannery-2024}. I felt they should have addressed the dangers of such
+narratives raised in that article, but they didn't.
+
 ### @{flannery-2024}
 
 Flannery offers five big reasons why 'climate apocalypse' is unhelpful and