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diff --git a/reading-log.md b/reading-log.md index 95edc55..2cfc6ef 100644 --- a/reading-log.md +++ b/reading-log.md @@ -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 |