Plan C

Let’s talk about failure

David Key and Osbert Lancaster

with PatThomas

"I tell clients we can beat climate change, I don't say we might fail",  says a leading sustainability adviser. "It's like coaching a football team going up against strong competition, you tell them they can win. You don't tell them the opposition's tough and they're likely to be thrashed."

Variations on this analogy dominate discussion of climate change – especially communications to build public support for a strong and binding deal in Cancún in Mexico in November: “We've got to win, if we all try hard enough we will win...”; “Don't mention failure, no one will be inspired and we'll fail...”

As Football World Cup fever grows, flags are waiving and the chants of “win, win, win” are getting louder. But lose at football and you can play again. Lose at the climate challenge and climate related disasters affect hundreds of millions of people;  economic impacts could be hundreds of billions of dollars and sea level rises could affect 1 in 10 of the world's population.  And there’s no rematch.

'Got-to-win' is simply the wrong approach to communicate about situations where the possibility of failure is real, the impact of doing so significant and the opportunity for recovery limited.

We need honesty about the possibility of failure. Unless failure is an option, you can't make contingency plans. Without realistic contingency plans in development we lose valuable time if things do go wrong.

This notion of failure raised its head recently in the lengthy debate between George Monbiot of the Guardian newspaper, Paul Kingsnorth of the newly established Dark Mountain Project and a multitude of readers. The debate itself began with Monbiot’s question of whether Dark Mountain Project’s call to withdraw from the fight against climate change and instead concentrate on building a culture that was strong enough to withstand the inevitable changes was an effective way to go. Monbiot thought not and suggested that a ‘sit back and wait’ approach simply conspired in “the destruction of everything greens are supposed to value”. Readers’ comments became more aggressive and focused on ‘got-to-win’ as confusion between a political movement and a cultural one became more entrenched.

Plan C’s Pat Thomas weighed-in briefly with a question about ‘failure’. She wrote: “Although superficially positioned as a response to the world out there, Dark Mountain seems to me to be more of a projection of an inner struggle that a many of us are currently facing. If what we have devoted our lives to, and what we know, has no real influence, if what we try to do isn’t working, or not working fast enough, if we have failed to communicate effectively, have we failed and, more significantly, are we failures?”

The question was ignored in a show-down between George and Paul that was just so... male. Even more of the same intellectual, techno-scientific, oppositional thinking that has created the mess in the first place.

At Footprint, our feeling is that the Dark Mountain Project challenges something fundamental and shadowy in environmentalism and in the wider world: the myth of control – and by association, of doing, of winning at all costs. It’s fascinating to see the environmental movement struggle with this myth – when control is a feature of the very system most of them are trying to oppose!

The challenge is to integrate into our lives our increasing clarity about not being in control. But this needs to be done in a healthy way rather than a nihilistic one.

The qualities of relationship that are healthy are always the same, whether they refer to our relationships with ourselves, other people or the rest of nature. Trust, empathy, compassion, humility, acceptance of a power greater than the individual – apply these to any relationship and healing will emerge.

In this respect, the idea of palliative care for our species is powerful and helpful. The obvious conclusions about death are easy to draw. But the truth is that palliative care – because of the emphasis on Being (the relational qualities) rather than doing – can lead, counter-intuitively perhaps, to healing. This is not uncommon. This healing arises from authentic acknowledgement and acceptance of death itself. 

Acceptance is the starting point to healing, not the point of resignation to the apparently inevitable.

It’s not that we should 'do nothing', nor should we enter some manic cycle of eco-anorexia where we all starve our souls in the process of trying to save all that we perceive as external (the planet). Like the Dark Mountain Project, we need to be honest about the likely outcomes of our current path (which we show no signs of stepping off) and start the hard work of accepting and then integrating this realism into our lives. 

The delightful irony is that this integration is likely to be congruent with living more lightly. It is not congruent with 'doing nothing' which requires the same type of denial as 'doing until you drop'.

In the mean time the debate around the Dark Mountain Project will either continue to polarise until it ossifies and gets totally stuck, or acceptance will dawn and, after a period of anger, sorrow and despair – a process of grieving – the healing can begin.

Perhaps this grieving is what we are witnessing now. Let’s hope so.

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David Key and Osbert Lancaster are directrors of Footprint Consulting, the mission of which is to promote ecological sustainability and social justice through personal and organisational development.

When Words Fail Us

David Key

On Banks Island, in the Canadian Arctic, environmental shifts are happening so fast that the Inuvialut inhabitants do not have the words to describe what they now see around them.

So often words are the first and most obvious companion for a journey to the edge of Being, but sometimes they fail us.

To run out of words is to stand at the edge of the unknown, at the cusp of The Mystery. There is something both frightening and exhilarating about this: The excitement of an impending adventure, the fear of formlessness.

Where the words finish and the white page is left, where the blizzard-filled sky meets the pure white of a snowy horizon: at this edge we can choose either to enter a dead end of desolation and nihilism, or a space filled with infinite possibility – the ‘potential space’ for creating a new form of consciousness altogether.

Language has it’s limits, just like the human beings that use it. When we reach these limits, the words run out. Now that we are experiencing the unsettling symptoms of global climate change and of the Earth’s finite capacity to support us, should it be any surprise to find ourselves speechless?

It’s not just the Inavialut culture that is lost for words.

While we have been busy evolving our post-modern languages to communicate the onslaught of technology and the giddy ecstasy of our own apparent cleverness, we have missed the fact that the world we have learned to describe – the world we have apparently evolved to live so well in – is increasingly a virtual world created by seductive marketing and the haphazard structural violence of our post-industrial culture.

A language unhitched from the simple ecological realities of life.

English has been abused, it has been moulded to fit an arrogant, abstract, disconnected, technocratic, dominating and violent culture. It is less now a language from the land, more a trade-marked and branded servant of industrialism: from text to txt.

We are left unable to articulate the complex ecological danger we are in – a bewildering experience for our seemingly sophisticated species. Our intellectual separation of mind from matter and of body from spirit, has led to a chasm between our contemporary description of selfhood and the blood and soil of our own Earthy existence.

Language emerges through humans from land, an expression of our connection to place.

To be lost for words is a call to reconnect with home.

The Inavialut language’s short comings in describing a rapidly changing human ecology point not to its inability to evolve, but to the way it connects a specific place with a specific language. When the exotic curiosities of another land suddenly arrive, the language cannot cope.

Lightning, Barn Owl, Hornet, Robin, Elk, Salmon, Wasp, Thunderstorm

These are words in English that the Inuvialut have no equivalent for in their own language; English words that describe things that have been displaced by climate change – change that is exceeding the speed of industrial evolution.

Some languages are still connected, still embedded. ‘The Okanagan word for ‘our place’ and ‘our language’ ‘, writes Jeanette Armstrong, ‘is the same. The Okanagan language is thought of as the ‘language of the land.”

In Siberia, it’s a shift in emphasis that reveals the ecological change:

‘In Chukotka, where the natives speak Siberian Yupik, they use new words such as misullijuq — rainy snow — and are less likely to use words like umughagek — ice that is safe to walk on.’

There is less ‘umughagek’ , less safe ground: We’re all on thin ice.

Many contemporary indigenous languages connect to concepts in ways that are geophysical. In modern European languages, Kenneth White calls this ‘geopoetics’ and suggests that poetry is the path to re-engage with land.

‘More than ‘poetry concerned with the environment’, more than literature with some sort of geographical content… Geopoetics is concerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a world.’

This is the way home: Opening through poetry to a new consciousness. A new language of the Earth, born of the Earth.

Poetry sits at the periphery of language, the last linguistic outpost before silence, before blank white space.

William James wrote in 1902 that one of the four characteristics of a mystic experience is, “Ineffability – its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.”

Poetry is the metaphysical edge of human language, a conduit to the mystic, a place along the continuum of expression just before the point where experience becomes ineffable.

A loss of words indicates the presence of powers beyond human control, powers that contain human Being, along with the collective unconscious of the whole Universe. When we meet these forces in the physical realm, we are humbled – in any language.

Our wordlessness is testament to this threshold and at this point the balance of power in the socially constructed dualism between humans and Nature is dissolved. We go, as indigenous Australians say, “back in”.

In poetry, it is not so much the words themselves, but the whiteness around them, the spaces between them, where the possibility of a new language lies. It’s there in The Void, in the linguistic wilderness, that form can start to take shape around the nuclei of a new ecological consciousness.

It’s in the physical wilderness too that the same ecological consciousness can take root.

It’s fascinating that in the vast white snowscape of the arctic, where the language of the Inavialut embeds them in their oikos, their home, there lies a similar parallel ontology of white space.

Nothingness, no-thing-ness.

To transcend the numbing complexities of human existence, the philosopher Martin Heidegger would take his students skiing. The ski tip breaking track in the snow, he proposed, was the closest he could get to a description of human Being. He called the space created as the ski tip broke the snow, ‘the clearing’.

Poetry signs the way into the clearing. Entering the whiteness of the page parallels a journey into wilderness, deep into the choice between nihilism and infinite possibility.

Is the poetry of the wild then, the clearing into which the new languages of the Earth can manifest? Is our loss of words not a loss at all, but the opening of a window into a new Earth consciousness?

David Key is a founding director of Footprint Consulting.  A longer version of this post, inc references first appeared at EcoSelf.Net

David thanks Mary-Jayne Rust in creating this post.