By Jelmer Mommers
Scribner; 2020
Scribner; 2020
It's a good thing we all know not to judge books by their covers, or else I would be tempted to judge Dutch journalist Jelmer Mommers' How Are We Going To Explain This? rather harshly. It's not that the image of a baby crawling around in a radiation suit that adorns it is too alarmist—one really can't be too alarmist about an urgent threat to all life on Earth as we know it—but that there's something almost flip about the image, which not even the worst-case scenarios would make a reality. It therefore looks like a joke, and because the climate crisis Mommers writes about is no laughing matter, it seems almost inappropriate, an overcorrection to the alarmism.
It doesn't really fit the tone of the book though, once again proving the value of that cover-judging adage: How Are We Going To Explain This? might have a poor cover, but it's a pretty great book. In fact, Mommers' book is pretty much an ideal one on the subject. It's sharply, succinctly and thoroughly explains the climate crisis, how exactly we as a planet and as species got to this point, how deep the shit we are in actually is*, and what we can do about it in engaging, readable prose. And it's less than 175 pages.
Five years in the making, the book was a bestseller in Mommers' home country of the Netherlands, and is now available to U.S. audiences in a translation by Laura Vroomen and Anna Asbury. It's remarkably up to date, with a lot of discussion of the cornonavirus pandemic, and what that has revealed about our society, things that may be quite relevant to confronting the climate crisis, given the similarity of the two.
Indeed, the question of the appropriate metaphor for our necessary response to the climate crisis might be answered by looking to the covid crisis. The New Deal, the U.S. mobilization during World War II, The Marshall Plan, the moon shot—each of these have been suggested historical analogies for how we should think about what we need to do to save the world, although each has problematic elements, or to fall apart at some point (Something Naomi Klein discussed in her On Fire: The (Burning) Case for the Green New Deal).
But what about coronavirus?
Writes Mommers:
Suddenly governments demonstrated their ability to listen to scientists, free up cash, and take the lead. Even while the scientific facts on COVID-19 were much less robust than those on climate changed, politicians decided to act. The responsible ones among them acted with precisely the "better safe than sorry" mentality that we need so as to stop the habitability of the earth from shrinking further...Budgetary rules were let go of, central banks rushed in to help, and money was made available to the researchers who needed it most. The speed with which testing capacity an intensive care capacity were ramped up reminded many of wartime. But it was peacetime, and we were learning something about our capacity for collective action.
Remember, Mommers was watching the pandemic unfold from the Netherlands, so he perhaps had better examples of responsible governments leaping into action to save their populaces than we saw here in America during much of the past year. Still, for all of those noisy individuals who flout the efficacy of masks and the seriousness of the disease, far more Americans took action to slow the spread of the virus. We can probably expect the same from the same players when it comes to combatting climate change; the important thing is to keep those noisy individuals out of the positions of power like, oh, say, President of the United States of America, going forward.
The book is divided into three parts: What's the Problem?, Where Are We Headed? and What Can We Do? The first part goes all the way back to the emergence of Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago and the advent of agriculture, although Mommers moves fleetly through history, noting how humanity and the climate have interacted to the past, and paying special attention to how humanity thought of nature, which, for too long now, was something we thought of as separate from ourselves, rather than something we were ae part of ("History also shows us that the idea of man as an independent and superior being, elevated above all other creatures, is a relatively recent invention, not an immutable fact," Mommers writes, hopefully).
The second part imagines two separate future scenarios, one in which the world has warmed 2.6-degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution (i.e. "hothouse earth"), and one in which the world's warming has successfully been kept to 1.6-degrees Celsius (Here Mommers' book echoes a conceit explored at some length in Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac's The Future We Choose).
In truth, neither of those exact scenarios is the most likely. Chances are, there will ultimately end up being some amalgamation of the two, and we will end up falling somewhere between them...although there's also a chance we end up in a world far worse than what is usually presented as the bad option, should various feedback loops and cascading crises exacerbate warming more quickly than expected.
The third and final part focuses on what we can do, and though you've likely heard most of what we can do collectively and as individuals before, Mommers presents it rather elegantly, and details some interesting actions some are taking beyond the most often cited, like divestment campaigns and lawyers taking legal actions against fossil fuel companies and governments (with varying degrees of success).
Mommers doesn't diminish the enormity of the undertaking at all—something he refers to as The Great Turn—but also elevates the power of small changes, particularly how one person making a small change can influence others to make that same small change. There is, therefore, a magnifying effect to every little thing we do, whether it's eating less (or no) meat, choosing trains over planes or buying an electric vehicle.
Whether enough people make those small changes, and whether or not governments ever make the big changes, is sometimes a cause for hopefulness...and sometimes a cause for hopelessness, depending on the day. As frank as Mommers can be, however, I like the relatively upbeat note he strikes near the end of the book:
But then I remind myself that we don't know how this story ends. The behavior of CO2 particles is predictable, that of people is not.
Also unpredictable? The advent of the coronavirus as a pandemic that would radically alter daily life almost everywhere in the world. The pandemic taught us, Mommers writes, that the future is unpredictable and that we're all vulnerable. It also gave us a new example of how an urgent and deadly threat that could inspire collective action for the greater good.
*Mommers' actual phrasing was this: "The truth of the matter is, we're in unbelievably deep shit. Mankind has never experienced the warmer climate we're heading for. Local droughts, local flooding, local extreme weather conditions—we're used to all that, but nothing in history has prepared us for worldwide climate disurptiton, with many consequences that are unpleasant in themselves and disastrous when combined.
