The writer in a time of change
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 26: Stories for Today
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Kate Grenville
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A while ago I went to a lecture on geothermal power. Afterwards I got talking to the man sitting next to me, a retired professor of physics. When I told him I was a writer, his face lit up. A writer? Ah, you're the people the planet needs! You must get the message out – it's simple, just four words – coal is too cheap! Get that into every newspaper and magazine! Oh, well, I mumbled, I'm not that sort of writer. He peered at me. Uh, actually, I blurted out, I'm a fiction writer. His face fell. Fiction? You mean you write...novels?
Coal is too cheap. That was the message that was going to save the planet, and I was not the person who was going to deliver it. My new acquaintance was right: as far as I know, the cheapness of coal has never been the subject of a novel. Stung by his dismissal, I toyed with the idea of writing the great coal-is-too-cheap novel.
Well, someone out there may even now be putting the finishing touches to a great novel of coal and its fatal cheapness. I hope so. Because, frankly, I couldn't see any way to do it. A man and a woman in bed together. Darling, I've been thinking: coal is too cheap. Absolutely, sweetheart, and did you know that in 2007 geothermal power produced 14,885 gigawatt hours of electricity?
Then along came an invitation to present a lecture: ‘Writers in a Time of Change'. As the old professor had made so painfully clear, the value of fiction, of poetry, of drama and memoirs is much less obvious than the value of non-fiction. I pictured him sceptically listening to whatever feeble thoughts I might have, and decided to decline.
Soon after, there was spell of hot, dry, windy weather where I live. It seemed as if it would never rain again. Weeds turned up their toes; even the wretched bamboo was wilting. All over my garden, things died.
It rained eventually. I went for a walk, simply to enjoy the sight of water dropping from the sky. The gutters were streaming with dark water – really just mud. I saw that the topsoil was being scoured away, leaving nothing but a brick-hard clay subsoil. No seed would ever take root in that.
I suddenly understood that within a few years, without anything very remarkable occurring, my leafy suburb could become a landscape of barren dust, like the pictures of Iraq that we see on the news. It could happen. Actually, it had happened. After all, somewhere around Iraq was once the Garden of Eden.
Even someone who can't get her head around what a gigawatt hour is can understand that. I will have to say yes to that lecture, I thought. A catastrophe is going to overwhelm us unless we do something by around about tomorrow, and getting together to talk about our individual helplessness seems a good place to start feeling less helpless. And what you might call the ‘art' writers – memoirists and dramatists, poets and novelists – may have special attributes they can bring to the conversation.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS no longer a technological problem – scientists and engineers have provided us with many ways of producing clean energy. The problem is behavioural, a problem of imagination. We all know the guilty personal reality of those grand abstractions about saving the planet. It's leaving the hall light on because otherwise it's too spooky out there. It's turning the heater up rather than putting on another jumper. On a bigger scale, it's being unable to imagine an Australia that doesn't burn and export massive amounts of coal.
We're paralysed by confusing arguments and counter-arguments, so we let ourselves drift along in complacency and confusion. We know we should be doing something, and we even know what we should be doing. But we don't do it. How many of us have solar panels on our roofs? Or pay the premium for totally green power?
There's an area of psychology devoted to working out why we don't do the things we ought to do: the study of heuristics and biases. There are many ways in which we kid ourselves that everything is going to be okay, and that our judgement about where things are headed can be trusted. When it comes to climate change, as one author memorably put it, ‘People do not become any smarter, just because the survival of humankind is at stake.'
When I first started thinking about this business of behaviour, I thought the reason we can't turn the heater down is because we are hardwired for amelioration. We're always looking for ways to make our lives better: better than they were before, and better than the next guy's. If we weren't, I thought, we'd still be living in caves eating the occasional raw trilobite.
In that case, it's easy to see why so little is being done to deal with climate change. It's hard to turn down the heater if you're hardwired to want to be more comfortable, and hard to turn down your heater when the other guy might not be turning down his. And with every improvement we make, our notion of the tolerable shrinks. The idea of living in an unheated house in Hobart, or an un-airconditioned house in Darwin, is harder to see as a possibility.
Then I remembered a story told to me by a filmmaker friend. She was making a documentary about the Afar people in Africa, who live in the hottest place in the world. Every day at 1.30 the goatherds take the goats out to pasture. The filmmakers were running late, so they asked the people if they would take the goats out at two o'clock. No, that was impossible. The goats go out at 1.30. They'd always been taken out at 1.30. Taking the goats out at 1.30 is an immutable part of Afar culture.
For the Afar, the margin for error is zero. Over generations, taught by who knows what disasters, they worked out that the safest time to take the goats out is 1.30. Innovation – and the attendant risk of failure – is a luxury that their environment doesn't allow them.
What we're hardwired for is not one kind of behaviour over another. We're hardwired for learning from experience, and then setting it firm with the glue of culture. And this is exactly what neuroscience is discovering: there's a mechanism at work in the brain that rewards correct predictions, and another that gets excited when expectations are wrong. Whatever has worked for us in the past – well, that's what we're going to keep doing. Trouble is, learning from experience is a luxury we're not going to have this time. This time, we have to change what we do before the goats die.
Nature, that conscientious engineer, has made sure there are redundancies in our design. We have two kidneys, two eyes; we can store glucose in the muscles as well as the liver. So we might ask: Did nature know there'd be times when learning from experience wouldn't save us? Did she provide us with some other hardwiring as well?
Like many people, I was once a smoker. I knew about lung cancer, but I went on smoking. Information, cognition, intellect: these weren't enough to stop me lighting up. I don't smoke now, and I remember what changed. I rather fancied a young man, a bit of a hippie and health fanatic. We were getting on famously until the day I lit up in front of him. I can still see the look on his face: surprise, puzzlement, disgust. He took a step back, and I saw him recalibrating his idea of me.
What happened in those few seconds was powerful enough to make me do something that no amount of information had enabled me to do: that afternoon I chucked away the packet of Drum and started running instead of smoking. I had seen myself through his eyes. I felt his disgust as my own. That broke through the walls of resistance I'd constructed around the idea of quitting. It gave me a new perspective: not a cognitive one, but an emotional one – one of empathy.
I think this means that nature has given us another mechanism for impelling change; and that mechanism works through emotion. She's also given us a tool for harnessing that emotional response, and the people who are experts at building just that kind of tool. The tool is art, and those people are artists.