Slowness
The core narrative of climate change is one of urgency: “we need to act fast because it’s almost too late.” This urgent time frame is unquestionable. Indeed, climate change could and should have been solved decades ago. It may seem heretical, then, for an environmentalist to question this narrative of “acting fast”—but this is exactly what I’d like to do.
I want to question our society’s default process when confronted with urgency: fast action. The narrative of speed embodies a subtle dissonance—because the Western, capitalist, and especially North American drive for speed and efficiency is itself an underlying cause of climate change.
We have optimized everything in the modern world for speed and efficiency: our farms, our forests, our companies, our postal systems. We produce incredible amounts of food each year, gross national product has continued to increase, and packages are delivered faster than ever. It’s bled over into every aspect of our lives: the news (24/7), dinner (10 meals you can cook in 30 mins or less!), sex (swipe left, swipe right). A 2007 study even found that in major cities across the world, people were walking 10% faster than in 1997. When we lean into an industrial, homogenized, and consumerist vision of humanity, we contribute to cycles of anxiety, a generalized lack of meaning, and conspicuous consumption.
In emergency situations, the Western mind defaults to what’s familiar: decisive action yielding efficient, quantifiable results. We tend to limit ourselves to the parameters of the system that is already established, because it’s the quickest way to act decisively. Rather than questioning the overall design of our society, we’re saying, “Don’t worry. We can keep the machine going—we’ll just make some adjustments.”
There are lots of graphs and charts to show how adjustments to the machine will reduce carbon emissions. However, there are no charts that show the complexities of climate change those simple adjustments might overlook. We don’t often consider that many proposed climate actions actually serve to reinforce values and habits that cause environmental damage. Electric vehicles encourage further construction of road infrastructure, convincing us that personal cars could eventually become sustainable. We’re optimistic about renewable electricity sources, so we continue to build inefficient buildings that require excess heating or air conditioning.
The narrative of urgency needs to become more complex. Rather than just optimizing for speed and efficiency within our industrial framework, we need to create more space for ideas that come from outside that framework. We need something to awaken a deeper cultural imagination. Otherwise, we’re just diving deeper into the systems that brought us factory farms, clearcuts, and suburbia, while trying to squeeze every drop of efficiency and productivity from a system that’s already destructive to individual people and to the Earth. As Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek famously observe, “it’s easier to imagine an end of the world than it is to imagine an end to capitalism.” It’s time we strengthen our imaginations.
How can we build our capacity to imagine? Let’s look to something that has been excluded from and even feared within our current system—something that disrupts single-mindedness and makes space for the many layers that contribute to large problems like climate change. The opposite of efficiency is slowness.
As a society, slowness means more than just slowing down busy schedules or flying less. Slowness on a deeper level means embracing things that are inherently inefficient, knowing that they will produce different answers than our typical thought processes would. Where there is slowness in the world, we often see adaptability, diversity of thought, and a willingness to consider disparate ideas and viewpoints. Slower ways of thinking and being are inherently less goal-oriented, so they cut through a drive towards productivity and output. They redefine success.
In language, slowness is embodied as poetry. A poem does not say exactly what it means, and each person won’t read it the same. Climate change is too large a problem to reduce to policy, technology, economics, culture, consumerism, or disconnect from the natural world. It’s deep and complex, like a poem, where each part contributes to a strange and amorphous whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Our solutions to climate change need to match that poesy, addressing at once all those interconnected pieces. If we move towards hasty, efficient, and quantifiable progress, we won’t get poetry. We’ll get something that could help a bit, but will fall short of a complete and lasting solution to climate change.
The COVID pandemic has taught us that in the United States, we had almost no idea what it means to live slowly. Even our appropriated practices of slowness like yoga and mindfulness are tightly scheduled and made competitive. Corporations now offer these to excuse themselves as they push employees to the brink of breaking down under stress. Just a few months without our usual sources of entertainment and consumption led some people to threaten violence if they could not return to their normal pace of life, defined by efficiency and control.
I dearly hope that during such challenging times, we can lean in to a contradiction: the urgent need to slow down and cast a wider and more imaginative net for solutions to our problems. It might teach us to listen for solutions that are subtle and deep like poetry, asking us to listen more closely and to see the interconnected pieces of something like climate change.
The best way to start listening for those solutions is to slow down and practice observing the real world—the one outside of this screen, the sound of the wind and the birds. The pandemic has quieted some of the traffic, so now is our chance.
In This Issue
The Polarized Dance
Slowing down for a day is easy. Slowing down for months on end requires that we begin to shift the way we think and move through the world. Anna G. Stevens reflects on slowing down from work that frequently sent her across the world to a place-based lifestyle on her family’s farm in Vermont.
Dandelions
“I remind myself that I am here walking slowly with my father because there is a deficit in our society. In the United States many of our systems treat our elders as disposable. They are very often ignored or belittled, and the vast majority of the “care” facilities and systems we have in place are isolating—they are designed for profit, not compassion. They are not pretty places. I am walking slowly now because I want to treat my father, a living being, with respect—despite his deficits, despite his frail bones and brain damage.”
Imagination in Chalk
Imagination in Chalk is one of our reflection activities, part of the series “Digging In.” In order to address climate change, we’ll need to be able to imagine a different future. But first, we need to remember how to use our imaginations. This activity is meant to cultivate the use of this “muscle”—one that we were so skilled at using as children—through the use of sidewalk chalk, helping us form new and unencumbered ideas of things that are not immediately present to our current senses.
Read past issues
Issue #1: Liminal Space
It’s tempting to see emissions reductions as a silver lining in this bleak time, but past economic slowdowns have caused only temporary reductions in emissions. A few months of reduced emissions will mean nothing if we return to business as usual once the pandemic is over. How can we learn from this moment and move forward in a new way?