ENTANGLED IN NUMBERS / RAKAMLARA DOLANIK
The ongoing climate crisis and the sixth extinction are overwhelmingly emphasized through statistics and numbers. Each time the extremes (of temperatures, the area of forests burned, the number of fires and the like) are recorded higher in comparison to the extremes past, we feel being inched closer to an expected doom. In short, we are entangled in numbers in a dream state, more likely in a nightmare.
Numbers and units come in across a great variety: square kilometers and acres and hectares (ie. of forest loss); football fields, entire countries, the state of Texas or the island of Manhattan (for comparison in areas); cubic kilometers (for ice loss); centigrades and fahrenheits (for extreme heat and cold); parts per million (of particles in the atmosphere that trap heat); simple number counts (ie. for the extinction of species and the remaining members of individual large mammals); metric tons (for fish catches); and on and on.
The more intriguing data come in the form of statistics of animals killed and plants harvested, especially since 1492. To call the records as statistics is possibly a misnomer. The numbers are derived from bookkeeping for almost every commercially viable fauna and flora, from whales to beavers to the fishstock and to trees felled, carefully written down in most ports and hubs of the New World and Europe. For the historians of material culture, capital accumulation and colonialism, this is an excellent source in deciphering complex relations of power and hegemony. For the writers on natural habitats and biodiversity loss, they are also excellent in laying out foundations of current extinction(1). But for the former indigenous populations and peoples of the colonized world for several centuries, the quantitative data is surpassed by what is experienced in the immediate environment and livelihood. The transferred knowledge and memory throughout generations topples statistics in a qualitative way.
To remind everyone that the current crisis has already come to peoples’ backyard is possibly logical, ie. just by observing the decreasing number of smashed insects on the windshield. But to expect that the knowledge of pure data in extreme destruction of natural habitats will radically alter the behaviour of urban populations is still naïve. We may assume that bookkeeping involves the record of exchange as well as the record of the inventory. We for a long time know that the inventory in the form of ‘externalities’ is negated and is almost impossible to quantify in the usual cycle of production and consumption, except for the ways that they impact lives, human and non-human, which are related to an immediate and local threat. In this sense, to tell people that a 1,5 degrees celsius rise in average global temperatures is close to catastrophic appear to have a minimal effect. For the masses, climate and weather are very similar. Meanwhile the majority can sense that something is going awfully wrong regardless of data, a shift of patterns in one’s lifetime, even for the relatively young.
The signs of waning ‘nature’ are augmented by the numbers in waxing ‘cultures’, mostly comparing the global north with the still developing part of the world. These are mostly given in per capita production and consumption: of beef, of birds (broilers), of garbage, of energy (in whatever form), of calorie intake and of almost everything else. One does not have to excel in understanding the laws of thermodynamics to realize that in each transformation, there has to be an equilibrium in a closed system at the end. This also goes together with accounting regarding the inequalities over the entire world, north and south. When, for example, we are told that one percent of (a) population owns fifty percent of the wealth, our entire notion of ‘wealth’ is corrupted.
Another form of comparative data through numbers come in percentages and multipliers: ascending or descending quantities or manifold increase or decrease in certain entities, in regard to a specific past date (usually after 18th century). These include the Population Bomb (2), the frequency of doubling of the world population in a logarithmically decreasing number of years, especially in the past 200 years. The J curve that this kind of data yield dominates the representation of many other phenomena, also regarding the current crisis. In Deep History (3) the fascination with the ‘take-off’ is counter balanced with the analysis of the left and flat side of the J curve, going back many millennia, and even million years. Before the advent of modernity in all its indications, where humanity is supposed to leave behind the forces of nature, there appear to be numerous nuances along the flatlining history. The problem is a matter of scale, where the graphic representations are totally inefficient to account for the fractal nature of immense periods of time as opposed to last 200 years. Just by visiting Çatalhöyük, the Neolithic settlement on the Anatolian plateau from 7000 BC, one can sense the human effort and organization required for more than five thousand people to live together in an egalitarian society, at a time when hunters and gatherers were roaming the most of the inhabited earth in groups of around one hundred. It is a huge jump in a specific context and scale. On the other hand, for some authors of the current ecological crisis, agricultural revolution and settled life lie at the heart of our ills today.
Meanwhile, in a geological timescale, the anthropocene indicates other giant leaps to be represented on similar graphs. But now we realize that the curves that represent Gaia in million years come in a U shape. The latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report (4) indicates that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are higher than at any time in at least 2 million years; that the temperatures during the most recent decade (2011–2020) exceed those of the most recent multi-century warm period, around 6500 years ago, and prior to that, the next most recent warm period was about 125,000 years ago; that global mean sea level has risen faster since 1900 than over any preceding century in at least the last 3000 years; and that the global ocean has warmed faster over the past century than since the end of the last deglacial transition (around 11,000 years ago) and surface open ocean pH as low as recent decades is unusual in the last 2 million years; and on… This sounds like a journey to the primeval earth, the stuff of science fiction, like we are landing on the planet in time travel.
Now, for quite some time, natural sciences are mostly involved in measuring the impacts of the anthropocene. 234 scientists contributed to the IPCC report, producing thousands of pages with incredible amount of data. The data collected suggests a death spiral, each measurement in relation to others indicating a positive feed-back loop towards annihilation. Probing, counting, calculating and coming up with statistics are also the creeds of the corporate world and some members of the scientific community are accoupled with the corporations. Governments are the arbiters, usually bad ones, in using and disseminating data as they see ‘politically fit’. But for climate crisis, the corporations, especially the fossil fuel giants have been producing their alternative data and results with the help of a number of scientists in a more organized way for the past forty plus years, as revealed recently in news outlets (5). As usual, measurements and statistics were always prone to be manipulated in many ways in order to continue business as usual.
The authors of IPCC report claim that they do not propose a road map, but simply assess the situation. Journalism either ignores the data produced, or else it blasts numbers to a shock effect. To mediate between data and possible events in near future is not in the best capacity of mass media. Few independent outlets invite climate scientists and others to talk of sensible outcome and information. So, should we dispense with feeding of data in a bid to convince masses that the situation is dire? If the numbers refer to the effects, should it be expected of everyone, in a clear mind, to relate them to the causes? As Timothy Morton asks: How to bridge the gap between data and things?(6) How can we create concepts, not necessarily to educate the public, but to sensitize the issues of co-existence in this dire situation? How to relate all this to the idea of social justice, this time the social to include the biosphere? How does one tap into the collective unconscious where any other body were granted a magical kinship like in, for example, childhood? How to channel the possibilities of ‘agency’ (ie. human) to stall the growth forward? And if worse comes to worst, how do we facilitate a dignified exit, like one settles scores before death, in a civilized way?
There ought to be more questions than answers…
September 2021
(1) see A Green History of the World by Clive Ponting, Penguin Books, 1992; and The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts, Island Press, 2007.
(2) Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, Ballantine Books, NY 1968
(3) Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, eds. Deep History, Un. Of California Press, 2011
(4) https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf
(6) Timothy Morton. Dark Ecology, Columbia Un. Press, NY 2016