“Do we save this one?”
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
There is always plenty to write about on degrowth, climate change, and overshoot. I currently have a list of about two months of articles to get to. Sometimes, inspiration strikes in an instant and you realize you have to write about a topic.
I was invited to be on Steve Zwick’s Bionic Planet Podcast about a month ago. One of the other guests on that podcast was Ecological Economist, Jim Pittman. On the podcast, Jim said something that I knew would become an essay the moment I heard it. What Jim said was:
“We are in a global triage now, where, I hate to say it, but our luxury lifestyles are not going to be savable. We need to look at how we are going to get by as human beings on this planet rather than some of us having extreme luxury due to economic inefficiency and market failures.”
Steve is talking about some of the luxuries of our current lifestyles falling away as we get deeper into climate change and ecological overshoot. That is true. I can imagine luxuries like some forms of travel and large gas-guzzling cars, either going out of fashion or being regulated out of fashion.
Winter sports may slowly die off as winter falls away in some places and it becomes economically unviable to maintain winter getaways that offer skiing, snowboarding, skating, and other winter getaways.
A seasonal food movement may lessen the availability of some out-of-season fruits and vegetables at your grocery store. This would lessen the CO2 footprint of food, as produce wouldn’t need to travel around the world to get to a grocery store.
Those are just a few of the things that may be triaged and will make life less “convenient” (grapes from Chile in February are convenient, but not needed) but more sustainable. We can live without jet-set lifestyles, hitting the slopes in winter and out-of-season foods.
But we will also get to more personal and unpleasant examples of triage. More communities will be abandoned if saving them becomes impractical.
Will we triage luxuries or people?
The triage we have begun won’t look like medical triage, with people crowded in an emergency room. It has the potential to be much worse.
I wrote about this a few months ago talking about sacrifice zones. One form of triage will be to sacrifice people and communities that come to be seen as the “unfortunate costs” of climate change and overshoot.
In such a scenario, talking heads on your television and computer screens will frown and make sad faces when reporting on the “inevitable” devastation of future environmental disasters. Most of those sacrificed will be in the Global South. The people in the Global South shoulder much less blame for the accumulated environmental damage we face, and losing them would have little impact on future damages as their carbon footprint and materials use is vastly lower than the developed world.
To triage people with no voice, no power, and little ways to resist such triaging is the likely outcome. And the most ineffective one.
A mas die off from populations who will have little responsibility for further environmental degradation makes little sense, but it is the path that will ask the least of those with the power and the money – so it is the most likely.
Let’s do a very quick and easy thought experiment.
Given that the Global North is responsible for 92% of excess CO2 emissions:
If everyone in the Global South was triaged (sacrificed), would the climate crisis end?
The answer is no.
If everyone in the Global North was triaged (sacrificed), would the climate crisis end?
The answer is yes.
End of thought experiment.
No one here advocates human sacrifice, but that is what we will likely get, just a slow steady sacrifice of the Global South stretched out over decades.
If we triaged our luxuries, as Jim Pittman alluded to, that would be a different story. Degrowth is the answer if this is the path we take. Triaging our wants that we can do without, the luxuries that we don’t need, can get us on the path to a steady state economy where well-being is valued over.
If we triage by getting rid of fossil fuel subsidies, getting rid of harmful agriculture subsidies, eating healthier diets that are primarily plant-based, traveling less and when we do make it green, working less, investing in our communities, and focusing on meeting basic human needs … then triaging can be effective.
What we lose. Who gets to choose?
As is the case in a hospital, the triage that is going to happen as the environmental systems collapse is happening largely without our input.
Insurance companies are going to not ensure certain places anymoe, and people will leave.
The wet bulb temperatures in some places will make life untenable. And people will leave.
The oceans and rivers will consistently overrun their banks and slowly take back the land. And people will leave.
Local, state, and national governments will be confronted with ever-increasing disasters due to environmental collapse. They will have fewer resources to deal with those disasters as time goes on and the price tag for those disasters add up. Decisions will be made about what places are sacrificed, what ways of life are sacrificed, and who is sacrificed.
Which triage we get can depend on us.
The first medical application of triage was on the French battlefield where medical personnel would sort through the victims and determine who would be left behind.
That is the triage we are headed for – the sacrificing people kind – unless we decide as a society that we want the other kind. Getting to that point will take a lot of work and making a lot of “good trouble” so that those in power can only keep that power unless they triage away wants masquerading as needs.
We have entered into triage.
Will your luxuries be left behind, or will you be left behind?
Well said, but it's far from just a divide between the global north and south. In my experience, the triage is far more brutal, slicing away anyone deemed expendable—even those in the global north.
Communities are ravaged by disaster, over and over—fire, flood, then fire again. The media pounces on the chaos, milks the trauma for a day or two, and then the victims are discarded, forgotten. They’re abandoned by a system designed to chew them up and spit them out, left to rebuild shattered lives in isolation—if they even survive the so-called 'recovery.' A lucky few scrape together the means to escape to safer ground. Most are trapped, condemned to face it all again.
Meanwhile, the privileged are too cocooned in their comfort to care. The machine that fattens the wallets of a filthy few works non-stop, numbing those inside to the catastrophe waiting just beyond their doorstep.
Properly implemented, triage is intentional- its a careful consideration of what to focus on and what to give up. Triage is what we should be doing in terms of relinquishing our desires for things we dont need that destroy the planet. But we not applying triage - we are ignoring the damages done to other people and species, hoping it wont affect us, and denying the fact that it will. Not very adaptive.