Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (3 page)

I needed some emotional response to galvanise me into action. Ask me about what time supermarkets close and who makes that decision and I will give you an emotional response, ask me about the convenience of car parking by my
department, and why we can’t park just outside, and you will be able to read my visceral response from thirty feet, but ask me about the environment in 2050 or test my galvanic skin response to that iconic image of the polar bear stranded on the raft of ice as it floats away from the polar ice cap and I will give you nothing. Perhaps I don’t have the imagination or perhaps I’m too good at thinking up alternative scenarios. Perhaps I have learned to look on the bright side of life. After all I did run a ‘happiness’ course on ‘Richard and Judy’ teaching random members of the public who were a bit miserable to be a bit happier. Perhaps, like these slightly miserable people (after the course, that is), I have learned to prime my positive memories; perhaps like them I have learned to see and remember the best bits in any situation. Perhaps, like them, when confronted with the image of the polar bear on the raft of ice I have taught myself to remember immediately that polar bears are dangerous, unpredictable predators, and perhaps like them I think that a stranded polar bear is a safe polar bear, and that its pristine white coat is filthy close up, its fur matted with blackened seal blood and the grey debris of melted ice and gravel, and that the bear only looks cute from a safe distance, preferably a quarter of a mile or more and that little in this image is how it first appears.

‘Well, what do you think?’ she asked eventually and with more than a hint of expectation. I cleared my throat gently, making time, ready to be vague in my reference, prepared to feign my enthusiasm. I wanted to feel emotional, I wanted to feel fear but I couldn’t. But I did feel something, and that was a curious empty feeling inside, accompanied by this genuine intellectual curiosity about how many other people out there were just like me, sitting at their desks murmuring about the need to save the planet and exclaiming about what a terrible mess we had got ourselves into and really deep down inside feeling virtually nothing. That almost produced just a flicker of anxiety; an anxiety about the fact that I clearly wasn’t getting the message combined with this odd thought as to whether there might actually be something in it. Just that single thought, ‘what if …?’. But, I suspected, many people were not really getting the message. Every politician,
and journalist and good citizen was lining up on the deck to display their green credentials and publicly announce their fears and anxieties and I was just sitting there at the back of the poop deck doing nothing while the ship went down, or jolted and rocked on its normal crossing. The public proclamations were just too on-message for the likes of me: I wanted to know how everyone really felt.

But then I had a strange and unexpected moment. A sort of momentary intense fear of not feeling fear; a fear of something that was absent, like noticing that my clock had stopped ticking; a brief fear of my emotional stillness coupled, I have to say, with this odd desire to know why I was the way I was, and whether I was alone. Was I really this uncaring human being who didn’t give a toss about his children or his environment, including his house overlooking the beautiful moors outside Sheffield – the moors there for hundreds of thousands of years, now with golden brown heather – or his legacy? I had talked to the ex-Formula 1 driver Eddie Irvine the day before for a BBC documentary about Blair Mayne, the co-founder of the SAS with David Stirling, and the living embodiment of the regiment in the Second World War. Eddie Irvine and I had discussed Mayne’s coolness under fire, his emotional detachment, his apparent lack of guilt after the war about his combat missions in which he had become the most decorated soldier in the British army for his close-quarters killing. Eddie Irvine like Blair Mayne hailed from Newtownards, a stone’s throw from Belfast, and he opened up about his own emotional detachment from aspects of life and the way that images of the Troubles in that small part of Ireland never really troubled him, ‘unless there were children involved. Mutilated adults just don’t have any real effect on me. And when it comes to Formula 1 I never really cared if I had to manoeuvre another driver into the wall. It just doesn’t affect me. In my view it’s all about evolution and the survival of the fittest.’ He thought nothing of Mayne’s lack of guilt or remorse or his emotional detachment from the events unfolding around him. So, what if I had that same kind of emotional detachment and it was that something which was missing in me which was leading me to be so uncaring and unthinking
about the environment? What if I should have been doing something, but wasn’t?

I love our planet; I love the quiet, rugged moors near my home outside Sheffield, and my runs of nine or ten miles through them with dusk approaching on cold midwinter afternoons, alone, mud-splattered, icy fingers, but with my heart pounding, looking out on a primitive landscape that seems to take on my noisy pulse, as if I had projected it somewhere else. The moors feel alive and fiercely robust, in fine health, fit and well for millennia, and there is me in the middle of it all, just the visitor, just temporary, just passing through. I am allowed temporarily to view its great rugged beauty. I never doubt where the power lies in all of this: perhaps that’s why I don’t run around trying to save the planet. I love mountain ranges far away; I love snow without footprints, unsullied and pure, and trails that wind to infinity that hint of adventure and maybe spiritual enlightenment at the base of the clouds. I love the feeling of history and permanence. But I have an image in my head of nature more potent than some wild polar bear with filthy legs and blackened paws, and that is an image from Nanda Devi in the Himalayas, a picture taken way above the snow line. White peaks touching the sky above the goddess of joy. And there in the foreground a suntanned face with white goggle marks around the eyes and a fresh growth of beard, a westerner smiling for the camera, like a tourist above the world, pale skin touched by the sun, reddened in parts, an unmistakable joy in his face, touched by the goddess of joy, that unmistakable smile, the eyes crinkled into life, the sign of a human being testing himself in the wilderness, in tune with life, in tune with nature, in tune with himself. This image is my brother and I have another image of him as well, an image of him wrapped in something green and filthy, the kind of thing that climbers would have to hand, that they might dump at the end of the day’s climbing, or at the end of an ill-planned expedition, and I can see the rough contours of his body through the grimy, green tarpaulin, his face and body covered, just lumps and bumps visible on the stretched plastic, as he was laid to rest a day after the photograph, under some filthy stones with his name scratched on a
rock like a warning to fellow travellers in this remote and dangerous region, like Coleridge’s Mongol king.

I would build that dome in air
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Beware, beware, that’s what that pile of stones said, about someone who never had any illusions, those bright, flashing eyes closed for ever, and that was my emotional legacy. A legacy of loss, a legacy of recognising that everything human is temporary and transient, and it is only kings and politicians, for quite different reasons, who seem to think otherwise; and a realisation that everything you hold dear will pass, no matter how much you want it to stay for ever. Perhaps there is the danger that I am emotionally blunted by life, and the small unpredictable events that have shaped me, and perhaps I am emotionally disempowered by this whole cumulative experience. And perhaps I have a feeling, deep down and buried inside, that nature is a dangerous and unpredictable force and much stronger than we can imagine, and that, when it comes down to it, it can bloody well look after itself without the help of you and me.

I have another radiant image of my brother in mountains, but it is a curious image because he is not physically present in the scene; rather it is an image of an object glistening by a river, like a totem, something that represented him. Once he invited my girlfriend and me to Chamonix for a summer of climbing in the Alps but when we got there eventually, after many mishaps, he had gone. He was too easily bored to wait for us. He had gone somewhere else to climb; his fellow climbers said that they knew he had gone but they just didn’t know where he had gone to. We had no tent and no money and I spent the first day wandering aimlessly around the
town and the surrounding fields for somewhere dry to sleep with a seventeen-year-old who was terrified of any spider that scuttled, any daddy-long-legs that flapped, or anything with or without legs that could crawl up her body at night. It was never going to be easy to find sanctuary there. But I tried and eventually I found a beautiful bubbling Alpine stream that jostled its way under an ancient moss-covered bridge. The view of the still snow-covered Alps in the background was spectacular, the water was pure, a bridge afforded shelter from the wind and any rain. I was ecstatic. My girlfriend had big doleful grey eyes that looked out from under a black fringe. She sat on the dry grass in her flimsy summer dress and started to sob gently into her hands. She said that she never wanted to go anywhere with me, ever again. She made me promise to start sweeping the river bank for spiders (like the bomb squad from our native Belfast, I had to secure the area inch by inch). Every time I found a spider, like a magician, I made it disappear. She was sobbing so much, with the tears blinding her eyes, she was easily fooled by my sleight of hand, as the small black spider balls were flipped to the floor. I worked my way from where we sat to right under the bridge and there it was on its own as if it had been arranged deliberately and carefully, like an iconic work of art in an exhibition, full of symbolic significance. It was a tin of Heinz baked beans, the metal at the top still shiny, with a ragged top, hastily and hungrily opened. This was the sign that I had been looking for. Others had slept there, English climbers (you just knew that they would be climbers): it would be a safe place to stay.

Some might try to criticise climbers, who are allowed to get so close to the mesmerizing beauty of nature, for soiling the environment in this way. But I had no such feeling of revulsion. I needed a sign and that was it. We slept there that night and the grey-eyed girl felt secure because others had been there before. The next morning there was no sign of the tin can: the stream had probably pulled it into its journey. Months later when my brother and I finally met I discovered, by accident, that it was he who had enjoyed the beans on his first night in Chamonix and rather than pitch a tent he had decided to rough it for one night. He loved the mountains
but, like many climbers, he left debris behind: he knew that the mountains could take care of themselves, that nature always triumphs. The debris of human life is always swallowed up.

But what if I have too egocentric a view on our world? What if I am too analytic about my own limited experiences? What if my inaction was my own fault, all down to one or two moments that I had experienced in my life etched on my unconscious mind? It was maybe that feeling plus a certain intellectual curiosity, in which I clearly needed to reassure myself that I was conventionally normal, that galvanised me to do something, to test who believed what and whether or not this would ever line up with their actions. Laura might have been the emotional believer, maybe a catalyst (maybe not); I just wanted to understand why people like me, and there must be many, were doing nothing. It was as simple and as complex as that. But I knew that this was going to be a journey. Like any psychologist I spend the vastly greater part of my time in very familiar terrain, but for this journey I was going to have to travel through some very unfamiliar territory. If psychology was going to offer anything here, by way of explanation, I was going to have to rethink many old assumptions, to retrace steps that I had already taken to get to where I now stood, to look again at many old issues afresh, to climb many new mountains, some unpredictable and treacherous.

‘So,’ I said, with a good deal more enthusiasm, to Laura still standing there, waiting for my response, ‘I’ll start at the most basic level, with the individual and his or her basic thinking. Hey, I’m a psychologist, where else would I start?’ And we both laughed in the way that people do when they think that they’re communicating openly, but know in reality that they have a great deal that they’re not yet ready to share.

In 2008, in a book entitled
The Hot Topic
, Gabrielle Walker and David King expressed the following important sentiment:

It’s easy to believe that global warming is somebody else’s problem – other people will suffer and other people will come up with the solution. However, this is far from the truth. There’s a clue in the name: ‘global warming’ is a truly global problem. None of us is safe from its effects (although some of us have a better chance of adapting to them). We are all part of the problem, and each of us will need to be part of the solution … Thinking this way presents the human race as one massive blob. But in fact it’s as individuals that we live our lives and make our choices. Every time each of us switches on a light, reaches for something in a supermarket, gets into a car or bus, chooses what clothes to buy or which movie to see, we have all made a difference to the way the economy works. Choices like these have driven the world’s economies ever upwards in the twentieth century. They have also led to spiralling greenhouse gas emissions. Now we will all have to adapt our choices to the new realities of the twenty-first century. (2008:238)