The latest from Ronald Rovers is a provocation – deliberately so, of course.
He begins:
"There are actually only two options (‘scenarios’): Either we go into CO2 lockdown, or we party on until the whole thing collapses…. The latest IPCC report makes that perfectly clear again."
"What we are doing now is a case of “soft nurses make bad wounds”, with our decades-long unbridled optimism that we will innovate our way out of it with 10 billion people, without having to give up anything. Andreas Malm, the Swedish activist, expressed it even more concisely: fossils out or humans out. In other words: the earth or us. The earth will survive without us. And ‘us’ can only exist if we as a submissive species adapt to the earth and its potential.
"At this moment, based on the experience of the last 30-40 years, I almost tend to say: let’s party, instead of drowning ourselves into decades of stress, frustration and burn-out, for a even then still unbelievable optimism. The other option is a Lockdown. How? ... ."
Rovers favours lockdown with each of us having a de jure low carbon budget – taking us back to the early 1960s when he says, de facto that was so. It certainly was for me.
He says: "Stop all production that is not immediately necessary. The whole agriculture will be focused on land recovery: basic food package for residents via food forests and in between some organic strip-farming, Nothing more to eat out of season, no more (active managed ) greenhouses."
If he visited an English schools to argue this, he'd likely be seen as an extremist by the DfE. This "submissive species" adapting to the Earth and its potential is Wordsworthian in its stance (well, the younger Wordsworth):
"... Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness. ..."
[From: Expostulation and Reply]
Perhaps if these thoughts get discussed in English Literature lessons, they'd be seen as less of an extreme view; which is an argument for having a fully cross-curricular approach.
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