We don't like change
Discover more from New Rules for Storytelling
We don't like change
Are we more like crows or more like sparrows? Inventive intelligence vs Facebook nostalgia.
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August 2023. In the northern hemisphere, a summer of staggering heatwaves, wildfires and floods. Ocean surface temperatures that are genuinely startling. As I write this, Beijing is experiencing the worst floods in recorded history, the temperature in Peru hit 40 degrees celcius in winter, and parts of Saudi Arabia recorded heat of 59 degrees celcius at midnight - near the limit of human survivability.
The story of climate science from the last 5-10 years has been one of hitting milestones far faster than we expected. This latest season is a spectacular example. As NASA’s Gavin Schmidt remarked, these new records are, ‘Shocking but not really surprising.’
It’s tempting, as climate impacts escalate with unexpected speed, to think that maybe this is the tipping point, where the situation becomes undeniable. The heatwaves in particular are just so striking. You can dismiss bushfires, floods or storms as freak events, but heatwaves are the canonical result of global warming.
So now the impacts are here, visibly here, are we ready to respond to them? Are we able to adapt? Or to put it another way: can people change?
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In Rob Dunn’s excellent 2021 book A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us About the Destiny of the Human Species (read this review), he asks whether humans are more like crows or more like sparrows.
Crows possess what Dunn calls ‘inventive intelligence’. Inventive intelligence means that you’re creative, you experiment, you test new strategies and you remember them. Crows tend to do well in all sorts of variable environments. They’ll eat human food when they can scavenge it. When they can’t, they might shift to cracking walnuts and eating those. When they can’t get them, they’ll eat mussels. They come up with new strategies, they remember them and they pass them on.
Other birds are more specialised. They have one particular food strategy, and if conditions change and that strategy ceases to work, they tend to just die. Dunn gives the example of dusky sparrows, which lived in the Gulf region of the United States. In the early 1960s, the US government built the headquarters of NASA right on top of the sparrows’ territory. A decade later, Disneyland was built next door. With their habitat fragmented by highways, launchpads and theme parks, and their food source of insects depleted by DDT spraying, the sparrows were unable to adapt. The last dusky sparrow died in 1987, in a display cage in Disneyworld.
Creatures with inventive intelligence do well in highly variable environments. Creatures with specialised environments do badly as soon as environments become more variable - which is what’s happening to our habitat here and now.
So are we more like crows or more like dusky sparrows?
Dunn’s response is interesting. At an individual level, he notes, humans have some things in common with crows - we have big brains, we adapt, we experiment, we learn and we strategise.
However, unlike crows, modern humans don’t tend to scavenge and find our own food. Instead, we rely on institutions which we’ve created. We live in systems that produce and transport food and energy to us. Governments, businesses, corporations, nation states… systems with their own rules and their own kinds of intelligence.
These public and private institutions are well adapted to the conditions which they emerged in, and they often work brilliantly when conditions are stable. But when times change, institutions struggle.
Some organisations are more versatile than others - but honestly, it’s hard to think of many institutions that display a real inventive intelligence. Like the dusky sparrows, our institutions tend to find a strategy that works and stick to it even when conditions change and they die.
To be inventive and adaptive is an additional cost for an organisation - and it’s a waste of resources when times are good. In stable periods, rewards flow to the most efficient and lean organisations. But efficient can mean ‘fragile’ when the shocks start hitting.
Whatever else happens in the coming decades, it’s certain that the world is becoming more variable. So the extra cost of being inventively intelligent will become a necessary baseline response. Only the crow-like institutions will survive.
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But within these institutions, what about humans? Are we crows or sparrows, climate innovators or deniers?
Of course we’re both. We’re capable of change, but we resist it. We’re able to adapt, but we don’t like it.
We are inherently nostalgic creatures. I’m thinking of the Facebook pages that are just photos of old consumer products from the 80s and 90s with the caption, ‘Share if you know what this is,’ and thousands of comments saying, ‘I remember these!’ We hold on to what’s familiar, we cling to it.
The coming decades will be a constant and accelerating recalibration of what life looks like. Each shock will reshape our world and what’s available to us. There are so many things we take for granted today that we’re going to lose.
Those losses will all be hard, but some will be easier to accept than others.
One set of losses will be the direct results of environmental shocks. Covid is a good example of this - a sudden event that abruptly reduces our quality of living.
A fungal infection destroys fruit plantations, and we have to get used to living without bananas. Heatwaves and bushfires make the summer too dangerous for travel, and we have to get used to holidaying in winter instead. Droughts knock out massive ranges of pasturing land, and we have to get used to meat becoming an expensive luxury.
These are losses where the cause is clearly visible and directly connected to the impact. These are sad, but hard to argue with.
The other kind of loss are the restrictions we’ll face because the damage they cause will become undeniable. Long distance flights for recreation, big cars, water-intensive front lawns…
These will need to be restricted top down, by governments and institutions. And because the link between cause and effect is less clear, the pushback will be bitter and intense. In the western world at least, people grew up taking these privileges for granted. It’s hard to accept that the lifestyle of your childhood causes real harm. It’s easier to cling to the belief that the threat is understated, that the science is unsettled.
Climate denial isn’t close to being finished. In fact, the real backlash to climate action hasn’t yet begun. And it will be hard, hard and it will last the rest of our lives.
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Of course, it’s easy to focus on the barriers to change. The reality is that we are changing, far faster than we realise. Each of us has already changed so much in the course of reckoning with climate change, we’ve learned and adapted, we gather strength as we go along. And lumbering though our institutions are, they’re not completely static. The energy transition to renewables (as a percentage of global energy consumption) is faster than coal or oil taking off in the previous two centuries.
As individuals and as a society, we are adapting. We’re crows. It’s just that the speed of adaptation is not commensurate with the rate of the changes that we’re facing. We’re changing, but we need to change faster. Not even crows can out-think a heatwave.
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NEWS AND PROJECTS
Scenes from the Climate Era
So in June, Belvoir Theatre in Sydney presented the first production of Scenes from the Climate Era. And it went… really well? Some amazing responses from audiences and reviewers. It was an incredible privilege having a show on the mainstage of that theatre, I’m still blown away that it happened. Director Carissa Licciardello and the whole cast and creative team did an extraordinary job - I was absolutely buzzed seeing how they shaped the work.
Some review quotes, if you’ll indulge me.
‘Finnigan’s play…manages to reach into the minds of its audience and create an emotional, practical and shudderingly wide-ranging awareness’
★★★★ Timeout
‘The world’s biggest story, told in 50 plays over 80 minutes.’
★★★★, The Guardian
‘Finnigan dissects the hyperobject of climate change into discrete moments in the epic of everyday life, slicing it into its smallest parts and conducting aesthetic surgery until his audience can make sense of it.’
The Saturday Paper
‘This is theatre doing what it was made to do. An invigoratingly honest portrayal of what it’s like to engage with climate change conversations (and be alive!) right this second.’
★★★★★, Limelight Magazine
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The Future for Beginners
While Climate Era was happening in Sydney, myself, Melanie Frances and Becky-Dee Trevenen were presenting a brand new game as part of the London Design Biennale in Somerset House. Created in collaboration with Chatham House, the Future for Beginners is a tactile climate simulation in which a group of towns attempt to present a major cultural festival in the face of escalating climate shocks.
This was an absolute delight to get to present, and something we’re really proud of. Please appreciate Becky-Dee’s gorgeous design - and if you’re interested in hosting a session of the game, drop me a line.
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RECOMMENDATIONS
This month I’m deep in the research for the next episode of the You’re Safe series, grinding away through various history texts on the evolution of climate modelling. A few albums have been keeping me alive through the process:
Skee Mask - Pool
I start every day with this record. One hour and 43 minutes of constantly shifting breakbeat landscapes, so many different textures and moods, I feel like it’s rewired my brain over the last year or two.
Thomas Brinkmann - Seduction EP
Gleefully bouncy and weirdly funky rhythms, this is my pick-me-up EP when I need to begin writing again after lunch.
Tom VR & Louf - Harmonix EP
Just the most mellow and lovely beats, with a flickering sound of chopped up voices like sunlight through leaves. I put this on when I’ve got 25 minutes left of writing to go, and let it ease me back into the real world.
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Film recommendation - the How To Blow Up A Pipeline film is as good as everyone says it is.
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Book recommendation - Amia Srinivasan followed up her incredible Right to Sex essay with a book of the same name. It took me ages to get around to it, but I’m glad I did - it’s so sharp, so thoughtful, so worth it.
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As ever, you can get more background on my practice in my New Rules for Modelling series, or you can check out my website. And if you have any questions or offers that might make my life more interesting, feel free to get in touch.
Peace!