Matt Frost’s “After Climate Despair” [Fall 2019] helpfully exposes the rhetorical and practical limitations of climate catastrophism. As he argues, such an approach gives the false impression that there is some discrete point of no return, some cliff over which civilization will fall if we fail to cut carbon dioxide emissions quickly enough. More insidiously, catastrophism’s reliance on terrifyingly large numbers and apocalyptic forecasts induces paralysis and despair. The only solution that seems adequate to our ecological problems is some “political breakthrough” that brings about global cooperation. Once we realize this is nigh impossible, we are left with despair.
Instead of basing his optimism on a political breakthrough, Frost recommends looking for a technological one. Yet his claim that “technological breakthroughs are less far-fetched a solution” than political ones is dubious, and it doesn’t actually avoid the “combination of brooding pessimism and delusional optimism” that he thinks it does. In essence, Frost rightly argues that a transformative political activist like Greta Thunberg is not a viable hero for those worried about climate change, but he leaves us waiting for a tech guru like Elon Musk. Authentic hope will not be found in either of these figures. Rather, hope resides in the good work being done by countless farmers and gardeners, walkers and cyclers, artisans and craftsmen, homemakers and caretakers — normal people choosing to reject the kind of abundance proffered by modern industry and instead gratefully stewarding the abundant life of a given world.
Technological breakthroughs may seem more plausible than global political cooperation, but if we have learned anything from the technological breakthroughs of the past century, it is that they always come with costs. The Green Revolution eroded topsoil, destroyed rural communities, and polluted waters. Nuclear power brought the ever-present danger of nuclear war and devastating accidents. And as much as digital technologies connect us and deliver equitable access to information and opportunity, they also render us lonely and centralize economic capital. Ivan Illich’s 1973 book Tools of Conviviality remains indispensable in tracing this pattern, and Frost utterly fails to recognize it. In places, this essay reads like an Elon Musk sales pitch — short on details, long on rosy pictures of the world that technology will create. Those of us who no longer believe that DuPont and its ilk will deliver “Better Living Through Chemistry” are left with the same paralysis and despair from which Frost promised to rescue us.
Indeed, as people such as Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry have argued, optimism and pessimism are two sides of the same coin. Both postures depend on expectations about the future, and both leave most people with nothing to do in response to massive problems like climate change: Either far-off experts, whether political or technological, will fix the problem or they will not, but regardless we have no responsibility. Hence Berry, in a 2013 talk at Yale, urges us to turn away from both of these stances and take up the practice of hope:
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