Where the danger grows, there also grows the saving power.
– From ‘Patmos’ (1803) by Friedrich Hölderlin
The fad in recent years for largely virtual ‘communities’ of interest across the world is an artefact of a temporary moment in human history, a moment wherein elevated technological progress coincided with a lack of substantial blowback from the waste products of that ‘progress’. That moment is coming to an end, most obviously through the rapidly rising tide of climate disasters. Incredible and horrendous scenes like we have seen over the past several months, from Valencia to Los Angeles, are set to become normalised. For the foreseeable future, climate impacts will, on average, become worse every year. Among other things, this will affect not just food prices, but food supplies, full stop.
In the future, real communities – people near you who can actually help you reliably access food, water, warmth, electricity, repairs, early warnings against disasters, etc – will again become increasingly important. Our future will be in part ever newer, as we enter deep into a terrifying unknown, and in part ever more ancient, drawing on needs and capacities that we fantasised had been left behind. Our society became individualistic to some extent simply because it was able to, because of a fossil-fuel pulse in the stable conditions of the Holocene. In the rough times that are coming, the fate I term the Chaoscene, that atomisation will be seen clearly as an increasingly unaffordable luxury. Strong ties within community will often make the difference, henceforth, between flourishing and failing and even, gradually but increasingly, between living and dying. As stretched states creak, as commercial insurance withdraws, we will need each other again – not least as first responders, as a safety net, and as mutual meaning-makers.
In short, the climate crisis presents an opportunity to reimagine how we live together, turning away from atomisation and embracing a more interconnected, communal approach to resilience. In times of crisis – and such times are coming in spades – local solidarity will often be the key to both survival and flourishing.
Dangerous anthropogenic climate change is sometimes – and for good reason – called a ‘hyperobject’, or a ‘diffuse object’. Framed in terms of decarbonisation, the challenge it presents is ‘abstract’, invisible, global, gradual and relatively long-term. The threat transforms continually, demanding a genuinely transformative, adaptive response. And while everyone is theoretically incentivised by the global threat to tackle its root causes, that incentive is extremely weak and diffuse, such that, even when folk feel climate-threatened, most prefer to leave the deep ‘solution’ to others. This last is the nub of the unavoidable ‘free-rider’ collective-action more-than-problem at the base of the ‘wicked’ climate challenge.
Indeed, it is that free-rider structure of the climate conundrum that makes it so devastatingly difficult, and that tempts those leaning towards the narrowly selfish and the narrowly short-termist to slough off any responsibility and seek to leave the conundrum for others to deal with. This lands us collectively in a truly terrible predicament. (We should be honest about how slim our chances are of coming through this predicament with any intact civilisation.)
Whatever you do to rebuild community solidarity is an act of climate preparedness
But it is also exactly where we can start to see the potential: instead of an approach centred upon responding to, and reducing the felt force of, climate impacts, an approach that seeks to build our collective resilience, to adapt together to climate damage. Unlike decarbonisation, action centred upon adaptation is visible and concrete, anchoring abstract global threats in regional and local realities – and highlighting connections between increasing local impacts and their complex causes. Its timeframe is short- to medium-term. It does not suffer from free-rider hazard at anything like the same scale as decarbonisation, precisely because, when (say) peatlands are restored, or a ‘sponge city’ effect is created, to absorb water rather than letting it fly forward to flood, the benefits are seen swiftly, and locally. Above all, whereas ‘wholesale’ decarbonisation (aka mitigation) is besieged by complexity, ‘retail’ adaptation is comparatively straightforward in action and effect, shaped by local circumstances and amenable to rapid local, more-or-less communal implementation.
The call to prepare for climate impacts is a call to strengthen households and families. More than this, it’s a call to rebuild geographical community (a unit such as a village of a few hundred people being about the minimum viable survival level of human collectivity in and through what is coming), and in fact to re-find solidarity (both within and beyond communities: for, after all, we are going to need plenty of emergency aid and sharing of capacity across distances in the tough times coming). Everything that we do to co-create community, whether it be helping our local soccer club or church, is part of this picture because it helps us form meaningful connections with one another.
In summary, whatever you do to rebuild community solidarity is ipso facto an act of climate preparedness. For, when the time comes, it may well be that soccer club or rowing club that saves your life. All the evidence shows that communities with strong mutual ‘social capital’ prior to a disaster hitting have a far better record of rising to the challenge of climate disasters.
The list of advantages of adaptation-action over decarbonisation-action that I have set out above is striking. It looks like adaptation is a no-brainer, whereas decarbonisation is (too much of) a brainer. So, the following question is a fair one: why isn’t adaptation of this kind already happening at scale, and why hasn’t it been focal to climate discourse to date?
My outline answer is twofold. The first part of it is already implicit in my argument so far. If one is thinking purely rationally about the situation, in terms of the long-term collective interests of all humanity (and of virtually all other beings), then decarbonisation makes more fundamental sense than adaptation. One should prevent a catastrophe, rather than wait for it to happen and then try to cope with it. But human beings don’t manage to think that way very often or systematically, especially when under pressure from relentless propaganda (I am thinking, for instance, of the well-funded propaganda that we call ‘advertising’, that co-creates consumerism). And, in any case, the free-rider issue and the ‘wicked’ structure of the decarbonisation challenge make such thinking hard to act on effectively, even if we are well intentioned. It is simply too late now to prevent much climate breakdown. It is here, and basically locked in.
Once adaptation is taken seriously, we can admit the hard truth that climate policy thus far has largely failed
But too much of the climate policy space and of the ‘climate movement’ has failed to register or announce these points. For too long, it has been assumed that humanity would, at some point, suddenly start acting in a fully rational, long-term, ethical manner on climate, and ‘fix’ the ‘problem’. Either that or, somehow, a radical technological ‘solution’ would emerge. Neither was ever going to happen. So we have lost precious time, and the potential of adaptation to mobilise more effectively has been almost completely missed. Until now: now, we are having to cope with the results of our collective failure to date.
The second reason why adaptation has been the poor relation in climate talk and action thus far is subtler. It is this: when one gets serious about adaptation, one can no longer deny the desperateness and immediacy of our climate predicament. That might sound like an advantage of adaptation-centrism (and indeed it is!), but it feels like a disadvantage as long as one tacitly wants to deny the desperateness and immediacy in question. And such a desire to deny what is happening is by no means confined to the extreme Right. It remains common to most of us, most of the time, and is a well-recognised form of psychological defence. So long as decarbonisation is our focus, we can (falsely) reassure ourselves that perhaps everything is going to work out fine, that we will succeed in smoothly transitioning to a different energy source, and then, well: ‘Job done.’ We are now being forced to let go of that fantasy. But we don’t welcome that act of forcing.
We finally have to admit that everything is not going to be fine. We must turn from a strategy dominated by decarbonisation to one beginning in adaptation… So long as (for instance) one continues to pretend that the 1.5 degrees C maximum target that was internationally agreed remains in play, then adaptation (and loss and damage compensation, especially for those in the Global South on the climate frontlines) can be kept at arm’s length. Once, by contrast, adaptation is taken fully seriously, we can finally admit the hard truth that climate policy thus far has largely failed – letting go of 1.5 – and roll up our sleeves and begin to form the connections that will allow us to act together in mutual aid at scale…
If we turn our energies and endeavours to community adaptation, resilience-building and disaster-preparedness, we can find a way forward on climate that is no longer stymied by the extremely difficult logic and implementation of climate decarbonisation.
The struggle to define adaptation will be the defining struggle of the decade. This might sound like an overblown claim. It is not. What is going to happen soon – it’s already starting – is that policymakers (and many others) are going to painfully come alive, less or more gradually, to the threat facing their populations, and are going to move into the space of adaptation.
In the next few years, there will be increasing demand from more and more citizens for adaptation or protection. Initially, most of this demand will probably take the form of demands for reactive, merely defensive, incremental, high-carbon, fragile adaptation: for instance, higher hard flood defences. The vital task before us is to morph that demand over time, as swiftly as we can, into pressure for deep, transformative and strategic adaptation at the community level. This adaptation should look upstream as well as at the point of impact. We need adaptation that can last, and that can improve our wellbeing and reduce carbon emissions into the bargain. On flooding, we should be making changes in upland land management, recreating wetlands and peatlands, and enabling urban environments to absorb much more water than they currently do.
Adaptation of the right kind is the greatest game changer now available to the climate movement in its broadest sense. If we make ourselves more resilient against impacts, we engender the greatest wake-up call now available – one qualitatively different from the raising of the alarm about the climate crisis that the radical flank successfully undertook in 2019. That is partly because this time it will be – and will be seen to be – about practice, not just theory.
Adaptation appeals viscerally to ordinary people, including to those neglected thus far by the climate movement
This wake-up call will be the greatest possible aid to reviving the urgent long-term project of greenhouse-gas reduction because it will be a constant, lived wake-up call. Placing adaptation and resilience front and centre will have the powerful effect, over time, of rebooting the case for decarbonisation, because the greatest obstacle to that case has been a sense of a remoteness or abstraction to the scientific climate question.
Adaptation work builds agency. It counters the attitude of ‘There’s nothing I can do’/‘I’m too small to make a difference.’ This is because, unlike decarbonisation work, it is by definition focused, local, concrete and tangible. One then reaches the point of people being able to say to themselves something like this: ‘Our climate concern isn’t just a story, there’s nothing abstract about it; no, preparing for impacts is something we do together, every day.’
Thus, adaptation – resilience-building, collective preparedness (call it ‘presilience’) – appeals straightforwardly and viscerally to ordinary people, including crucially to those neglected thus far by the climate movement. It appeals, that is, to many working-class people, to the marginalised, to the disengaged; it appeals to those battling with bills, with cold/uninsulated/damp/at-risk homes. Furthermore, it appeals to many conservatives, civic pragmatists and ‘elites’ who are waking up to how bad things are: the fact that, for instance, your insurance bill is going to go through the roof (if insurance remains available at all), unless you/we move on adaptation.
A meaningful pivot towards strategic adaptation will galvanise the citizenry. There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has not only come, but that can be seen in action, being acted upon, being made real in real time. A focus on adaptation is a focus on uniting around/against a common visible threat.
We live in an age of scapegoating – a time when, as the French historian René Girard laid out, we find solidarity with others by ‘othering’ those whom we think of as ‘not us’. It cannot be denied that some such risk remains in a refocusing upon adaptation; that risk will be minimised, though, the more our adaptations are strategic and transformative. But, more crucially still, an approach centring on adaptation can fulfil the helpful community-building function that (Girard argued) inheres in the scapegoating mechanism, without scapegoating anyone. For the search for a threat switches, in adaptationism, from looking to blame some other humans to looking to cope together, united against a common though differentiated threat.
The argument I am making here is somewhat similar to the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s alternative to (social) Darwinism: mutual aid. When the environment gets sufficiently hostile, so Kropotkin argued, then creatures look more to help each other than to compete with one another. The sooner we lean into the climate reality and appreciate that the only way we can adequately ‘prep’ for it is by way of solidarity and mutual aid, the sooner such adaptation becomes socially normalised and resourced – and the sooner we start to become safer again.
If we are to survive the coming crisis, we’ll need philosophers/intellectuals/thoughtful people of all stripes who are ready not just to interpret the world, but to change it. To change it precisely by adapting wisely to the changes that are already in play.
Sometimes I find myself thinking about when I’m going to die, adding up the years like an actuary. I’m 58. If things don’t really fall apart fast, I’ll likely live into the second half of this century. I find myself roughly calculating the likelihood that a now-forecast collapse of the Gulf Stream, for instance, won’t come before I die. If it doesn’t, then perhaps we’ll survive without too much disruption for the next few decades.
It’s beyond awful, to find oneself driven to thinking in such ways.
Being an isolated individual is not the norm for human beings; it’s an extraordinary and costly achievement
But what if there is a way to alter where we are heading? Perhaps there finally is a more positive angle on all this. Perhaps the coming climate disasters will be catalysts for the kind of social change that will bring in a new commonality. Perhaps we will find new meaning and value in existence precisely because of our adversity. Perhaps as we move to protect ourselves, turning to climate adaptation, we are also starting to move to save ourselves.
Our society’s individualism, largely driven by technological advances and the illusion of endless progress, will no longer be sustainable – will not be able to last – in a world where anthropogenic climate change is a constant and growing threat.
As David Graeber and David Wengrow showed us in their book The Dawn of Everything (2021), being an isolated individual is not the norm for human beings; it’s an extraordinary and costly achievement, and a phenomenon tied to particular social conditions.
I have argued here that a new historical moment is upon us, one in which that achievement will come to be seen for what it is: both an obstacle and a danger. And that, as we move beyond this obstacle, we will find – in our very togetherness against what is threatening us – a new common ground. Even, a saving power.
Thanks to Caroline Lucas, N H Callister, Rosie Bell, Liam Kavanagh, Nigel Warburton, Mary Penman, the editors, and a number of others for deep dialogue and written comments that have helped produce this essay.
