The Wrong Way to Photograph Climate Change

-Newsmedia covering climate catastrophes: We really shouldn’t be using photos like this after events. Such media clean-up does nothing to take seriously the countless loss of life, suffering, and destroyed lives. The sheer amount of detritus that climate-changed events leave behind is tremendous, incalculable, and un-clean-up-able.

The idea that you can just smoke a cigarette and clean up the plastic by poking around with a little broom minimizes the actual damage done. It trivializes the rearrangement of trash in a soup of trash. Sure, the image is maybe at best a representation of people trying to ‘pick up the pieces’ afterwards. But the ugly truth is people can never rebuild. Rebuilding is a thing of the past.

We no longer have the capacity to rebuild; everything the megamachine is making is worse quality than what came before — there are more middlemen, more tariffs, more extortion from the global vampires/vacuums/hungry ghosts/Goliaths — and we have run out of high quality, easy to access materials. (Just look at the eROI of tarsands and deep sea mining compared to the ‘good old days’.)

So, until we get off the bus entirely, and go the way of biomimicry, agroecology, and low-tech (or TEK — traditional ecological knowledge), we are going to rebuild jankier and jankier – if at all – before the entire edifice becomes as disposable as the rest of our BBQ-ware we’re making of this regenerative planet.

Photographers and news editors: please stop taking pictures showing people lackadaisically pseudo cleaning up. This isn’t cleaning up. There is no clean up. Many of these villages will never recover. Relationships will never be the same. Rivers will flow different courses. Pressures on precarious people wrought by these climate changed events will cause disease, and intergenerational traumas.

What we need to show is the wreckage, and then follow up with the 5- and 10-year after the village never came back together (which happens in the majority of cases, despite all the trauma bonding and altruism in the world). Yes, tragedy can bring out the best in humans, but after a certain point, it becomes increasingly difficult. There are fewer reservoirs of good will. There are fewer reserves of resources, places to source roofs, food, jobs. 

When our ecology gets destroyed, we literally can become a different species. Just look at the history of evolution.

If Hannah Arendt was correct in diagnosing ours as the human condition rather than human nature; and David Graeber and Wendgrove counter Hobbes’ diagnosis of the nasty, brutal, and short lives of human ‘nature’ with a material culture, that is to say, ecological notion of the capacity of human liberty to reign, then our ‘nature’ is a question of how good of gardeners we are. How do we create societies that are regenerative — that make the soil, the air, the water, the temperature more fecund? How do we create abundance so that we can be dialogical, philosophical, have good house manners, and be hospitable?  A healthy environment makes it much, much easier, while a destroyed wasteland makes it much, much harder to be free and empowered, or enslaved by the most psychopathic and organized among us. When there is (artificial) scarcity, it is very easy for society and sociable life to break down. The structures that can be forced through, the policies legitimated, become self-fulfilling prophecies of scarcity, dog-eat-dog worlds, races-to-the-bottom, and other variety of mutually-terminating arms races.

When ecologies are fecund, with more than enough for all, our thoughts and spirit tend to become more hospitable as well. This, at least, the ‘abundance’ wishers of The Secret and other new age scams got right. That xenia, the ancient Greek code of hospitality which underpinned all of archaic society, setting the sacred norms and expectations for how hosts should treat guests and guests should respond to hosts, relies on proper generosity and proper restraint. But what is afforded to be shared, is in the first place, an index of the ability of one to not live razor-close to the live-or-die threshold of bare minimums. Survival alone, or bare life, was not conducive towards hospitality. After all, how can you share when you have nothing to give? 

Of course, what we see routinely in today’s world is precisely the opposite of what one might expect under healthily functioning principles of hospitality. We see around the world, the poorest being the most generous, offering food, water, aid, shelter. I know from my travels in Latin America this to be true. Your taxi break down in the middle of nowhere? A farmer comes up and takes 45 minutes out of their harvest to help you get running again, as I’ve experienced. When I’ve been stuck, I’ve had indigenous people offer me food, shelter, and guidance. Go to a major global north city and see if you’re offered the same.

The law of hospitality — how to treat others and how to treat those who treat you to hospitality — are in our DNA. And yet, the logic of insufficiency and separateness — that I have to take care of me and mine and not care at all about the other people or environments I encounter — have sapped our very gregarious and reciprocal human nature. Instead, we’ve become hopelessly impoverished by loneliness, performance anxiety, competition, and insecurity. We are all waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Instead of each catastrophe thinking “Whoa! I’m glad it wasn’t me this time yet!” perhaps we should start to consider the virtue of solidarity, which is really just hospitality writ large. How can we start changing the structures which create climate collapse and insecurity and insufficiency, way upstream, so that we can plant the seeds for fewer catastrophes?

I call this stochastic altruism, or probabilistic prosociality. This indirect reciprocity gives thanks to our ancestors for creating all that they have for us, and not destroying everything that blooms. To carry this beneficence forward, we must do the same, and to the degree that we can, take even better, more exquisite care of the web of life that sustains us. 

The opposite of stochastic terrorism — where assholes spread hate speech that will end up in someone getting hurt or killed, we just don’t know exactly which mark will get infected with the hate virus, and which victims will be the dupe’s targets — stochastic altruism really is better termed stochastic symbiosis: planting what we wish to harvest. If we want war, we prepare for war. If we want a nuclear-free world, we disarm. This isn’t pollyannish. According to the doctrine and history of nonviolence, it is an extremely powerful weapon against desiccated imaginations, begetting novel actions on the parts of the recipients of integrated stochastic symbiosis. Those parts that haven’t been fed by love and tending, that see any act of it is false or trickery, when successfully navigated, take us on a journey of feeling that can dissolve ossified identifications and attachments keeping the other and the dynamic in a stable but broken equilibrium. Fixing stable but broken Nash Equilibria is what stochastic symbiosis is all about. It is about selecting wider.