I have written and taught a bunch about how the act of remembering is increasingly subversive in our present age. When the contemporary cultural left become fans of punitive consumption taxes that disproportionately target the poor, free trade and investor rights deals, the mass importation of rightless non-citizen workers to depress working class wages, censorship, state surveillance, racially segregating the justice and education systems, sterilizing mentally ill children and a host of other trendy evils, our best defense is to awaken people’s memories. We try to make people remember what they believed, what they once believed in.
When I wrote in defense of the old warhorses of the far left who led socialist projects in the late 2010s, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean Swanson (of Vancouver’s Coalition of Progressive Electors) and Gary Burrill (of the Nova Scotia NDP), I distinguished the latter three from Sanders. While Sanders was a true operative and visionary who had been getting his ducks in a row for the 2016 presidential bid since, at the earliest, 1970 and, at the absolute latest, since his time as Jesse Jackson’s main surrogate in Vermon in his 1984 and ’88 presidential bids, the other three had the impact they did more by happenstance.
Swanson, Corbyn and Burrill were not brilliant organizers, nor did they represent unproblematic political agendas. Corbyn’s promiscuous and undiscriminating associations with Middle Eastern authoritarians and fanatics, Swanson’s association with bullies and ghouls, Burrill’s cartoonish naivete: I do not dismiss those things. But they spoke powerfully at that historical moment primarily simply by being old and daring to say “I remember.”
I always cry when I listen to Burrill’s closing speech of the 2017 Nova Scotia leaders debate, most of which I present here:
“When I was a kid, my grandfather in Yarmouth used to like to marvel with me at how much better everything had become for everyone in his lifetime, pensions, and the baby bonus, and Medicare, and he would often then say, “Imagine how much easier it will be for everybody by the time you get to be my age,” which I more or less am now.
And grandparents don’t talk this way to their grandchildren anymore. We find ourselves in a place where the idea that things are going to be better in the future has been lost and compromised and squashed. And by what? By the mistaken belief that our hands are tied… But our hands aren’t tied.”
Burrill, the bumbling remnant of the once great Social Gospel movement stood on the stage and remembered. It was a powerful if, ultimately, insufficient moment.
Normally, my attention is drawn to the importance and power of memory when I write about the rise of authoritarianism and censorship, the sudden capitulations and reversals of the left on free trade, investor rights, regressive taxes, racial segregation and women’s rights. But today I am writing about the importance of memory in eco-politics and how it can overcome historic divides and offer us a place to begin.
Canadian landscape painter, Corey Hardeman speaks and writes about “shifting baseline syndrome,” the primary obstacle to mobilizing people to raising ecological consciousness through memory. Best represented in the metaphor of the boiling frog, popularized by Paul Ehrlich, the idea is that as frogs adapt to each increase in temperature in a slowly heating environment and normalize it, they can literally be boiled alive as the rising temperature sneaks up on them.
Next to reaction formation, shifting baseline is the most powerful explicator of people’s adaptation to ever-worsening wildfire seasons and a larger and larger portion of their forests being charred remnants every year. “You could never see properly in the summer,” they will say. “It’s always been like this,” they will say as they point out the window to an opaque cloud of smoke that hides the scenery around them more months more years every decade.
And a dozen other changes are greeted the same way. Hurricane season has always been this long. The river always runs dry in the summer. You could never catch a lobster here.
There is one striking exception, though, of which I was reminded on my trip to Kilwa Kisiwani this May. As my friend Ross and I trudged from one set of medieval ruins to another on a now-obscure island that used to be the capital of a Sultanate that ruled the coast from the Zambezi River to the Horn of Africa, as the birds, butterflies, dragonflies and other insects swirled around us, I said, “do you remember when we were young and the whole world was this alive?” It was an emotional moment for both of us.
My neighbour here in Dar is a lovely, generous man who makes videos for the Trump movement full-time and has “MAGA” right in his Twitter handle, a person thoroughly convinced that climate change is a hoax, along with pretty much every environmental problem. In a recent conversation with him, I said, “and 70% of the insect life has died since 1970;” as anticipated, he sighed and rolled his eyes. “I don’t believe any of that,” he replied. I countered:
“Think back and remember what the windshield of your car looked like when your family would go on a road trip in the summer.”—Suddenly it was real for him. He could not push the knowledge away anymore.
This was not the first time I made that conversational intervention with a committed, Trump-supporting conservative. It was a pivotal moment in the development of my political relationship with my comrade Nathan. “Isn’t the forest too quiet?” I asked, “Isn’t your windshield too clean?”
Why is it that the insect life of one’s youth is less subject to shifting baseline syndrome, and how can this knowledge help us to create moments of opportunity to defend the created world against the omnicide?
Our relationship to small life as a child is fundamentally different than as adults. Our gag reflex has not yet become oriented in the way and adult’s has when it comes to the small creatures of the world. They look fascinating, not disgusting to a child. As children, we handle them, play with them, etc. And because killing vermin, mice, rats, etc. is not really part of our life, the small things of the world are also the only things children can kill with impunity, without presenting themselves as incipient sociopaths.
In other words, our experience with insects as children is trapped in a developmental phase and sealed therein, not subject to an incrementally shifting baseline, kind of like early pubescent homosexuality among a significant group of future heterosexuals: remembering killing crane flies, playing with worms, fondling another boy’s genitals involves stepping outside one’s adult consciousness into a consciousness in which one lacked the tastes and the aversions of one’s adult self.
So while shifting baseline syndrome does not enable us to see how the insects on the windshield of our car have steadily diminished over the course of our adult lives, it does allow us to conjure the image of our fathers stopping at the local Husky station on Highway 95, not because we were out of gas but because he needed to stop and use the squeegee to get all the insect corpses off the windshield that the wipers weren’t managing to remove, so he could see the road properly.
As you may have noticed in my writing over the past year, I believe that our understanding of and relationship to children and childhood is the linchpin of any strategy to arrest or reverse the omnicide.
Since my days as a child eco-star in the late 80s and early 90s, the cultural left has responded to this need by trying to organize a children’s crusade, an upwelling of child-led, child-driven activism, the most recent iteration of which we saw with Greta Thunberg. But I have become convinced that this is the exactly wrong approach. Because, as with pediatric Genderwang, it is based on a misunderstanding of what a child is and the role a child is supposed to play in our moral universe. Our desire to protect them is supposed to be able to raise armies, armies of adults, not armies of children.
The children we need to reconnect with are our children; we need to reconnect with our sense of responsibility to them. We should not be demanding that they lead. We should ashamed that we are not leading, that we are falling down in our duty to them. One of my favourite child protection organizations today is called Our Duty. And duty must be the basis of the politics of youth and the omnicide, not fetishizing oracle figures like Thunberg.
But before we get there, we must connect to the child within ourselves and urge others to do so because it is that child who can most clearly see the omnicide. If we really want to convince people of the urgency and possibility of radical action to save the planet, we need to start with what we share, with common knowledge and common experience, of childhood, not with contested claims. The kind of collective democratic action that is required means that we need to reach far beyond those already supportive of the environmental movement and find a way of speaking with which everyone can connect.
In a future piece, I will offer some additional experience-based advice about how to undo the polarization that is stymying our society’s response to the ecological crisis. But I recommend we start with the bugs of our childhood.
