A few weeks after I took up my first teaching and research academic position, I had a conversation which rang many alarm bells in my mind. It is one of the things that eventually led me to moving to Canada from the UK. For my doctorate I had been doing research into high-performance computing – back in the days 25 years ago when a chip running at 30MHz with a million transistors was considered to be on the bleeding edge of technology.

That conversation was, predictably for the ‘dork’ I was, about fast computing. Getting many chips to co-operate closely to solve problems fast was in its infancy. I spoke with a post-doc about the work he had done with similar hardware to that I was familiar with. When he told me about how small the circuit boards he had been working with were, I was surprised as I knew these chips had a reputation for running hot – and without good cooling they would stop working quite quickly. I asked him about this. ‘Not a problem in this application’ he told me; ‘It only has to run for 8 minutes’. I quickly realized that the high-performance computing system he was talking about was to be in the nose-cone of a missile.

Two realizations followed. The first is that the work I was involved in, whilst ‘neutral’ had a lot of value to those with a different moral/ethical compass over the use of technology to that I maintained, and that perhaps I was an outlier. In the UK I concluded that where the money was for the work I was interested in came too close to the arms industry for comfort.

Roll-on 25 years and here I am, sitting at my laptop and wondering what the hell is happening to the world. Mildly terrified and holding that with all the tenderness that I can muster so that I keep functioning and can put the wild emotional energy available to productive use. I went to the Emergency Room last night to have my heart checked out. Looks like I am fine – but there is something powerful moving in the heartspace. It needs out.

Last Saturday I was with Extinction Rebellion and David Suzuki in an action in Victoria we called ‘Funeral for the Future’. The intention was to bring people together and focus clearly on where we are and the task ahead. One reporter turned up at the start of the event. I was busy talking to others whilst David’s now infamous line was put on camera. Then I had my turn with a combative reporter. I appreciated the jabs of his questions. I think I gave solid answers. It did not get published. What did was the prediction from David’s interview; ‘The next stage after this is that there will be pipelines blown up if our leaders do not pay attention to what is going on.'[1] Predictably – this is the line from the event that got reported and became weaponized. David has made clear he is not advocating violence. Extinction Rebellion is explicitly committed to Non-violent Direct Action (NVDA). He was talking about the impact with those less committed to non-violence and more desperate for action as the climate crisis unfolds.

I want to therefore talk about where we are, what this event was about and where we go from here. As individuals, as a culture, as a species. Because I firmly believe, as do many others [2] that what we do next is going to dictate whether all that is left is a thin band in the fossil record for a presumed (human?) geologist to uncover a few tens of millions of years from now.

We do not live in ordinary times. Southern British Columbia just got the shit kicked out of it by extreme weather. The most deadly weather event in Canadian History may just be followed by the most expensive. An industry is winning the legal battle to destroy the last intact old-growth ecosystems in BC, the RCMP is flouting accountability and using violent tactics to suppress peaceful opposition to both that and the ongoing struggle for Indigenous Sovereignty – established by precedent in the Supreme Court of Canada – that opposes the Coastal Gas Link pipeline through unceeded Wet’suwet’en Territory in Northern BC. And as I finish this – records were again broken across BC as the weather continues to buck historical trends and display the urgent truth that our climate is becoming dangerously unstable [6].

I suggest it is time to take out the Moral and Ethical compasses of our lives, dust them down, and use them as an aid to navigation. Philosophy 101 is coming to where you live – whether you like it or not.

An Ethical Dilemma

I have never been a Philosophy major – I just have a strong interest. I have heard many times the ‘trolley problems’ presented as examples (unsolved/unsolvable) of ethical dilemmas. Roughly speaking they fall into the categories of – if you could do something to prevent deaths, but would cause fewer deaths by acting – would you do it? This is a tough one.

How about this variation. If there was a machine that was causing many deaths, and by acting you could stop it by destroying the machine – would you do it?

How about by disabling the machine?

How about by demanding that the machine be switched off?

How about – doing nothing and seeing how it plays out?

Recent research (for example [3]) have pointed to the direct link between fossil fuels and mortality. In the case of the article cited – this is just due to particulate air pollution – that 1 million deaths in 2017 are directly attributable to the continued use of fossil fuels. This is just one modality. How about the damage due to extreme weather and heat events? The 600 premature deaths in BC in last summers’ heatwave for example?

If you are paying attention – you have four choices I can see; ignore it, deny it, resign to it or act. What cannot be avoided is responsibility. Provided that you accept the science (a stretch perhaps in these times of post-truth doublespeak) then which of the above do you choose?

Ignore it: ‘They’ will fix it or ‘they’ wont. Power lies elsewhere. A disempowered and disempowering choice.

Deny it: Honestly I really do not get this one – perhaps the true horror of staring in the face of the terrible truth means that clinging to the flimsy liferaft of ‘this cannot be happening’ is the last recourse? In my experience, full-on denial is almost impossible to address. Too much identity gets tied up in being right…

Resign to it: Nothing I can do matters – straight disempowering self-fulfilling prophecy.

Act: Now – we are talking.

I think my audience is probably all but the ‘deny’ crowd. There is little point spending energy in a battle of agree/disagree.

Back to those ethical dilemmas; and lets put some meat on the bones.

We know that the Climate Emergency is real, is accelerating, is world-wide and is clearly of potentially catastrophic nature. More heating is baked-in to the system and our best science says we have to halve emissions by 2030 to stand a chance of staying anywhere close to a livable future for much of humanity. This is coming down the pipes fast. Sir David King, former chief Science Adviser to the UK government has put it bluntly:

“We have 4-5 years to put in place everything that is required to manage civilisation for the next millennium.”

Sir David King [5]

In the face of this the fossil fuel industry sent more lobbyists to COP-26 in Glasgow than there were delegates from any sovereign nation[4]. The industry knows it has to do everything it can to stay alive in its current form – and it is spending prolifically from its vast wealth and resources on doing just that.

So – what is there to do? More to the point what will YOU do? After all, in a democracy the theory is that you have just loaned the politicians their power to govern. If they are not solving an issue that threatens everyone – and are making every appearance of having been largely captured by the fossil fuel industry (as has the majority of the press) – what would an ethical human being who loves their children and wants to see humanity thrive do? Extinction Rebellion asserts that your duty as a citizen is to rebel. You are a participant – you are responsible. Your choice is whether you wish to be complicit.

Perhaps you would hold a ‘Funeral for the Future’ and attempt to wake people up? Maybe you would put your body in front of an industry poised to snuff-out the last old-growth ecosystems in British Columbia? Maybe you would disrupt traffic, cities, infrastructure and force the issue into public consciousness in a way that the billionaire-funded press never will on their own? Maybe you would risk arrest and prison for your actions? Whilst we have the time and luxury of a society functioning on the bedrock of a climate and biosphere that is still fairly predictable…

Because – if we wait – then life for many will become untenable. And desperate people do desperate things. Maybe like blowing up pipelines.

However – peaceful non-violent direct action has been shown to be the most effective means of causing societal change to occur[7]. I hope that enough of us take the hint and get involved in peaceful, collective action to demand change. Just perhaps if we do then ancient forests and the biodiversity they hold can be secured for the future, so that fossil-fuel pipelines get peacefully retired (rather than blown up) and become a thing of the past before they and the colonial/exploitative system they represent destroy any chance for a prosperous and safe future. There is not much time.

Dr. Don Goodeve – first draft November 25th 2021, finished 10th January 2022.

---

[1] CHEK TV News – 20th November 2021 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT5ASo-nvPY

[2] World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021 – https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/71/9/894/6325731

[3] Nature Communications – 14th June 2021 – Source sector and fuel contributions to ambient PM_2.5 and attributable mortality across multiple spatial scales – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23853-y

[4] BBC News – 8th November 2021 – https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59199484

[5] Sir David King – Business and Finance – 8th June 2021 – https://businessandfinance.com/news/we-now-have-no-time-on-our-hands-in-conversation-with-professor-sir-david-king/

[6] CTV News – 28th December 2021 – https://bc.ctvnews.ca/21-more-minimum-temperature-records-broken-across-b-c-amid-weather-warnings-1.5721141

[7] Erica Chenoweth – Why Civil Resistance Works – 2011. https://www.jsomonline.org/BookReviews/20144139Farr.pdf