4 - Shaping the future: a world after firepower

Summary

“The goal is not self-purification but structural change.”

Leah Stokes, “A field guide for transformation”

The discussion of fire and the matter of living in the Anthropocene keeps circling back to the question of what we make and how what we make shapes our landscapes and the planet as a whole. While environmental campaigns have frequently been about protecting landscapes and ecosystems from damage due to industrial activities, and these remain important, the bigger questions raised by the Anthropocene focus on production. It's all about what we make, and crucially what what we make does to the Earth system, to invoke Foucault's phrase once again.

Fire has allowed us to change our habitats dramatically. But while fossil fuels have made some parts of humanity wealthy it is clear that we cannot go on using them the way we have done for the last couple of centuries. The Green New Deal idea, some of the policies which were partially incorporated into the US 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, suggests making very different things for a society that is fairer and one that can survive in the long term.

Humanity cannot go on using firepower without constraint both because of the dangers of climate change, and because of pollution from plastics and all the destruction that the current combustive mode of economy entails. Lobbying and attempts to change public policy have only worked up to a point. Other strategies are clearly needed as the activists in climate strikes, tyre extinguishers and many other campaigns are reminding us daily.

Clearly, humanity is making far too much carbon dioxide. Which in turn raises the question who decides what gets made? Investment is central here as divestment activists have figured out; money spent on pipelines and oil wells isn't money spent on solar panels. Money invested in making internal combustion engines isn't going to make batteries or electric motors. Funding, as provided for in the Inflation Reduction Act, to make and install heat pumps in American homes has the potential to speed up the electrification of heating and in the process use energy much more efficiently. Comfortable houses, reduced electricity bills and less climate disruption all go together.