Lev Lafayette's journal

It is grimly ironic that as trimester two of my Master's in Climate Change Science and Policy begins that the hottest day on record for the globe is recorded. This trimester will be "Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation", "Climate Change: Lessons from the Past", "Climate Change Mitigation", and "International Climate Change Policy". After that, it's the research dissertation, which will be on the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of climate change issues in the Pacific, my use of medical terminology not an accident. There is a mental and social illness with the malaise, the mass indifference, and inaction even among those who are vaguely aware of the climatic issues confronting us. It's over four years ago that a certain young woman, Greta Thunberg, spoke the words: "I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is." Mere weeks later her celebrated speech the world did react appropriately to a crisis with the onset of COVID-19. As many would intuit from the effects of habitat destruction, there is indeed a link between climate change and COVID-19.

Whilst typically driven by despair, albeit with a smiling and enthusiastic countenance, I do not always act in the spirit of crisis myself, and this weekend was an example. The combination of various study and work stresses has taken its toll, and whilst I have some degree of elation through successes in both those areas, the health of my body, mind, and spirit has suffered. Fortunately, I was invited out to attend a birthday party of a certain Joelle on Friday evening at Heroes Bar. The top bar was pretty awful, but when we gathered in the private karaoke bar in the dungeon of the establishment, it was far more relaxed and amusing. Several drinks later I was singing in French to a crowd of strangers ("La Festin", the theme to Ratatouille). Perhaps this is the sort of circuit-breaker that one needs on occasion, a temporary respite from the weariness of the weight of the world. I do not understand, however, those for whom socialisation, the endless hedonistic quest for "having fun", means to be actually disengaged from both the cosmos and the polis.

"Well, should I try to be a straight-A student? If you are then you think too much"
-- Billy Joel, 1980

It's a quiet admission, as someone whose preference is gothic rock, punk, industrial, and electronic body music, that I don't actually mind listening to Billy Joel sometimes; "Glass Houses" and "The Nylon Curtain" especially. The above line has particular pertinence at the moment as I enjoy a few days leave from work and to finish off some final assignments etc for the first trimester of the Master in Climate Change Science and Policy degree. Based on current assessment in all four units ("papers" in the New Zealand parlance) I am currently a "straight-A student". I will be surprised if this will be retained as the inevitably more difficult final exams and essays are completed but my progress thus far has been pleasing, even if the content is often emotionally unsettling.

One such subject that has been emotionally unsettling is the final essay for political ecology on what I'm calling "The Atrocity Exhibition", the contemporary Anthropocene extinction event. This refers to the extraordinary and very rapid loss of biodiversity populations and species diversity over the last few hundred years which is entirely due to human activity, consumption, and resulting changes to biogeography (especially loss of "semi-natural" land). Even with recognition of imprecision and difficulties of calculation, current "extinction rates are a thousand times higher than the background rate of 0.1 E/MSY [extinctions per million species-years]" and rising logarithmically. Don't even pretend to tell me that you care about life on this planet, or that you think animals are adorable, unless you can tell me in the same breath what you're doing for conservation efforts.

Perhaps I do think too much; perhaps I am overly sensitive to the seriousness of the situation, the massive loss of life on the only place in the universe where we know that life exists (even if I do consider that extraterrestrial life is almost certain). I am not too sure which is a greater cause for pessimism; whether it is that so few people are interested, let alone active on these issues, or that we continue to have a political economy that does not recognise that human beings are part of, and depend on, the natural environment. A very recent paper that we're "in the danger zone" of in seven out of eight key indicators of planetary health and human welfare; another notes (following previous research) that deep sea ocean circulation continues to slow down which reduces the deep ocean of oxygen, reduces the return of nutrients to the surface ocean, and increases the probabilty of further coastal ice melt.

I have now read through about half of my textbooks for Financial Management and Management Perspectives and I have to conclude with something that I always suspected; management (at least the theory side) is easy or, more to the point, as a academic discipline it is rather lightweight (to this day, Peter Drucker is the only figure I can think of being worthy of note). Of course, I do come to this with decades of prior experience in the social sciences including a fair serve of economics, so perhaps it's just relatively easy given that background. Within the mindset however, I've also been reading Stephan Covey's popular self-help book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I am usually extremely cynical of the entire genre of such texts, but to give Cobey his due, he did a great deal of research on the characteristics of 'great leaders' and came to the conclusion is that it was their constant orientation towards universal moral principles that was their defining quality. A critic of "personality ethics" over "principle ethics", Covey quotes from the Marxist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, radicals like Thomas Paine and Henry David Thoreau and existentialists like Victor Frankl.

Attended a Labor Party branch meeting on Wednesday; speaker was from the Alternative Technology Association explaining the Federal governments subsidy and loans schemes for those who wish to put in solar hot water, insulation, energy efficient globes etc into their home (whether owned or rented). I consider such plans to good examples of interventionist, socialist economics; directed towards reducing the negative externalities and where the long-term savings far exceed the short-term costs. It strikes me that this has come through a reformist programme, despite the extra-parliamentary advocacy of environmentalist causes; and it makes me wonder how many of the far left have ever taken seriously Trotsky's theory of the united front - and what can be done about this. Of course, the key problem it is a united front of worker's organisations against the bourgeoisie; neglecting, yet again, the important possibility of the proletariat and bourgeoisie united against the landlord monarchs.