The Best of Times, The Worst of Times – Review
The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science, by Paul Behrens. September 2020, Indigo Press ,ISBN: 978-1-9116-4809-3, 352 pages. RRP £12.99
What hope is there for the world? Paul Behrens engages with this question by mapping out hopeful aspects in the key areas of population, energy, food, climate and economics. Then he follows each hopeful chapter with one which spells out a more pessimistic look at the same aspect. So I yo-yoed through this book (though first, I admit, taking comfort from sneaking a look to see that the last chapter was one of hope).
His book feels reliably informative. Behrens, Professor in Energy and Environmental Change at Leiden University in the Netherlands, is a serious academic. His research on climate change, energy, and food has appeared in leading scientific journals. The seventy pages of notes at the end show how the many topics he references are rooted in research from across the scientific community. But Behrens is also passionate about communicating the fruits of scientific research. His voice has been heard on BBC radio and he has written for magazines and newspapers in the US and New Zealand. Similarly, here he makes complex matters accessible, often using delightfully apt expressions.
This approach helps in tackling two big issues which Behrens notes in his prologue. The first is that what we face are systems problems. So when we start talking about environmental issues we must not fail to go on and refer to economics, politics and society. The second challenge is that the reality of the crisis is overwhelming. He uses humour to save us from unmitigated dread and frequent appeals to our imagination to stretch our minds. For me that worked well and carried me on, up and then down. So, is it to be pessimism or hope? Behrens offers two epilogues.
The epilogue of pessimism ends with the thought that humanity has chosen wilfully to ignore environmental degradation for so long that it is now too late to avert catastrophe even using new technology. Why did we do this? Behrens refers to our many cognitive biases, like wishfully-thinking that things will eventually turn out okay.
Yet in the epilogue of hope he wonders if even now we may be at the brink of a New Transition drawing on a New Realization. “Philosophers suggest that we can only begin to understand the present system fully at the very moment it fades out of view”. Of course, Behrens has shown that technological fixes will not do it. But how might we read this as Christians? Is there a hope for the future which is to be found in realising our human spiritual potential, as biases are challenged by the crisis of events and transcended? As he says: “Indeed there will have to be big changes in personal philosophies to enable sufficient social licence for these great transitions to continue as deeply as they need to go.” With hints of how that might be, this is a book that can help us keep both hope and pessimism together.
Andrew Norman
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