Natasha Walter: We’ve gone from climate denial to something worse – climate fatalism

Last Saturday, I went to a warm party in a warm house that spilled out into a warmer garden. As guests sweated into linen shirts, drank white wine and ate farmed salmon, of course we talked about the weather – British parties always major on the weather. Given what these heatwaves are now foretelling, I couldn’t help but be struck by the tone of those conversations. Almost everyone who spoke about the rising temperatures was smiling as they did so. “I actually love it, nothing on California, best summer, reminds me of Athens, will be gone before we know it.” 

There were very few – maybe one or two – who confessed that they were feeling more dread than pleasure as the summer sweltered on. I’m not asking people to bring their knowledge of the climate emergency to every party and every conversation, but I can’t help but fear where this insouciance is taking us.

Once upon a time, the key issue that those concerned about the climate had to deal with was denial. Just a few years ago you could scroll through outlets like the Times or the Mail, and regularly read airy nonsense such as “Claims that the heatwave is down to climate change are just hot air”, or “There is no evidence that anything is happening to the world’s climate that lies outside historic fluctuations.” 

Denial of the evidence still exists, and spawns in comments all over murkier parts of the internet, fuelled by Russian bots and some extreme eccentrics. But with the physical effects of the changes in the world’s climate now so obvious, and the accuracy of scientific predictions so clear, outright denial is now becoming pretty elusive in the mainstream. 

Last week, I was struck to read an article in the Telegraph that actually seemed to recognise the existential threat that climate change presents to ecosystems and people in Europe. In an article about heatwaves and holidays, the journalist avoided the paper’s usual platitudes and quoted an expert stating: “Scientists have spent decades preparing the public for a hotter future, but that future is arriving even faster than forecast.” The article explored the terrible health effects of these heatwaves – that “the human body stops functioning optimally when outside temperatures exceed 40C” – and the effects on precious European ecosystems, which could “shift to a desert-like climate”. 

At first I felt a kind of relief as I read this, just as I have when reading similar articles that have been appearing throughout every section of the media recently. I would really like to see this growing understanding, even in the rightwing media, as a source of hope. Because I’ve spent a lot of time and energy in recent years taking part in campaigning that has been aimed at precisely this – at ensuring that everyone is informed about the reality of where we are heading. The effects on forests, on waterways, on food systems. The effects on people, on communities, on everyday life. The deaths, the fires, the losses, that are now coming ever closer. Extinction Rebellion’s first demand back in 2018 was, simply, “Tell the Truth”, and more and more people are now doing so.

So I’d like to feel heartened that we are now at a point where climate denial is finally fading away. But as I look more deeply into what is happening, my sense of relief is being replaced by greater alarm. Because this new understanding of what’s at stake doesn’t seem to be taking us into a place where action is any more likely. 

That’s because, while outright denial is out, something else, in practice just as inimical to action, is in. Fatalism. 

Even as we approach the edge of the cliff, in too many places there is a continued and steadfast refusal to see change as possible or even desirable. That article in the Telegraph ended not with a plea for collective action, but a suggestion that readers might fly to cooler places for their holidays in the future. Similarly, a recent column by Hugo Rifkind in the Times makes a clear summary of the problem: that the world is getting hotter because of our embrace of lifestyles that consume so much energy. But what will happen? Nothing will happen. “The big fight is already lost.” Temperatures are doomed to rise. “On goes our sweaty apocalypse,” he says.

Across opinion surveys, we now see that this kind of attitude is becoming normalised. More people than ever accept that climate change is caused by fossil fuel production, but the numbers saying that makes them feel deep concern is levelling off. And that reduction of urgency is being echoed in the political response to the climate crisis. Even as understanding of the scale and impact of the crisis grows, the actions that are contemplated become smaller. Planting some more trees in cities might get more support, but shifting away from meat eating is out. Air conditioning may be in, but net zero is very much out.

Everywhere we are seeing a kind of “keep calm and carry on” spirit rising. Just use a fan! Keep the schools open! “It’s not the Sahara!” as another Telegraph columnist said about the radical idea that the government should mandate maximum working temperatures. That kind of blitz spirit is fine and good if allied to action, but imagine if Londoners in the second world war were not just sweeping up the glass and going to work after each bombing, but also encouraging the government to take down the air defences and disarm the military. That’s where our current blitz spirit is heading: away from courage towards wilful obtuseness.

It’s telling that Andy Burnham mentioned ‘power’ 15 times in his first speech as Labour leader on Friday, but did not mention climate once. Yes, Burnham is inheriting a crisis of democracy, but the other crisis, that ‘sweaty apocalypse’, demands attention. If he does, as rumoured, approve new oil and gas drilling licences, it will be a terrible capitulation to the success of this fatalism.

The right wing press, the Conservatives and their allies have been working relentlessly to encourage the idea that renewed exploration is the only realistic option, because any radical changes to create a low carbon world would be seen as something between Soviet Russia and Neverland – extreme and unrealistic.

AN Wilson wrote an essay in the first heatwave of this hot summer in which he  wondered if we hadn’t come to the point of no return, and would soon be like the ex-inhabitants of Terra in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, forced off our uninhabitable planet. It could have been a page from the old Extinction Rebellion handbook This is Not a Drill, except that the lesson he took from our impending doom was far from urgency. It was acceptance. “We seem to be looking not merely towards catastrophe,” he stated, “but deserved punishment”.

There is something deeply shocking to me in seeing western writers encouraging such fatalism in the face of this catastrophe. 

While writing my new book, Feminism for a World on Fire, I talked to women living at the harshest end of climate catastrophe. Women whose crops were failing, whose water sources were gone, caught up in conflict over scarce resources, survivors of climate disasters from floods to storms to drought; women grieving broken ecosystems and lost ways of life. These were often women living in formerly colonised countries, countries where the west had taken resources at will and given back climate catastrophe. When AN Wilson speaks of “deserved punishment” we have to recognise that the punishment is falling fastest and hardest on those who have done least to deserve it. As one farmer in Malawi that I spoke to, Chikondi Chabvuta, said: “Every year women work so hard on their land, and then every year we have droughts so the crops fail, and the cyclones come and the floods wash away the soil … This is not a problem we made, that we can fix … The women say: can we go on?’”

None of these women were actually giving up, of course. They are determined to keep going and to care for one another, for their soil and their forests and their rivers, even in the face of catastrophe, even in the face of unimaginable loss. So when I hear people in the west preaching fatalism from our more comfortable position, I feel it is a terrible betrayal of those women who are desperately trying still to heal and rebuild our world.

We need to learn from women like those that there is still so much to be saved from the encroaching fires. Even those of us in more comfortable places in the world have to take our resilience, and our desire for continued normality, and ally it to urgency – yes, to net zero, yes, to ecosystem restoration, and yes, to protecting the most vulnerable among us from the shocks that are here and those yet to come. No more denial, but no more fatalism either.

Natasha Walter is an author and founder of Women for Refugee Women. Her most recent book Feminism for a World on Fire is published by Virago. You can buy it at the Nerve Bookshop at a discounted price