For the second day of the 2020 digital Hay Festival there was a real focus on the science behind our current crises: coronavirus, climate change and political leadership. Rutger Bregman’s Humankind aims to stabilise our own personal outlooks on a belief in the innate goodness of humans to secure a positive future, while Mark Lynas’ Our Final Warning outlines a step by step, or rather degree by degree guide to the inevitable and destructive impact of global heating and climate change. In a time of such uncertainty, how can both of these outlooks exist simultaneously and how can we amalgamate the two into an imaginable future world?
In his digital lecture, Lynas presented his predictions based on geological and archaeological evidence of what life will be like as the global temperature increases by each degree. The book was originally published in 2007, before we had reached one degree of heating, which we crossed in 2015. This re-published edition is even harder to ignore than the first, especially since Lynas’ predictions for the one-degree world we are currently living in are all too familiar. These include coral bleaching, which we have seen proof of, most devastatingly in the Great Barrier Reef, all-time high continental temperatures, resulting in the unprecedented Australian bushfires of the 2019-2020 season, and the continued loss of Artic ice, of which the UK alone is responsible for twenty square miles every year due to carbon emissions . The following depictions of his predicted reality in the two to six degree worlds are terrifying, made all the more real by the now confirmed predictions of Lynas’ one-degree world, and include temperatures beyond the biological thermal threshold for survival, global famine and displacement, a new category of super-hurricanes that could stretch as far north as the UK, and the worst mass extinction since the dinosaurs. And this progressively more dystopian reality from one degree of warming to six degrees is not the extent of what could happen in the next million years but of the possible outcome by the end of this century. That’s 80 years from right now.
The scariest part of Lynas’ talk was his assumptive and accepting tone when describing the first four degrees of warming, the same difference in degree as from now to the last ice age, which seems from hearing him speak to be inevitable at this point and would take a ‘herculean effort’ to prevent. However, he did give us some hope as to the impact of real, systemic, cultural change, and an intergenerational united front against this common enemy, something that we have proved to be capable of when faced with the urgent threat of the coronavirus pandemic. This brings me to Bregman’s book Humankind.
“Individually we’re not very special, but together we can do extraordinary things.”
Rutger Bregman
Humankind explores through selected case studies how human nature affects power, democracy, economy, and much more, and how we can bring about real change if we first “understand where we have come from.” He tells chair Lily Cole that we as humans have a negativity bias; if we let it, evil can be stronger than good. But by trusting in human kindness and humankind, we can unite against the forces preventing us from bringing about real social change and a better world. In the face of crises like the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, Bregman recognises an opportunity for change, but what kind of change will be determined by the political leaders we chose to trust and whether we can work together. He warns that it is human nature for power to corrupt and that in the past, crises have been manipulated by those in power to present a negative outlook in the interest of creating panic and maintain control. For Bregman, people are naturally good, and if we can trust our ‘intrinsic motivations’ and not allow ourselves to be manipulated by negative news and scaremongering, we can hope for a positive future.
So how can we take both of these perspectives and allow them to inform a realistic, culturally aware yet hopeful outlook? The beauty of Lynas’ book is that he is merely telling us the facts. There’s no scaremongering, or ‘doomsmongering’ as he calls it, as far as I can see, and by reading it one will simply know the scientific truth of our current situation and where we are headed if we don’t change anything. Then it is up to us to follow Bregman’s example and, in the face of current crises, trust in the power of the many to achieve something truly productive. What is comes down to is that “Individually we’re not very special, but together we can do extraordinary things.”
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