BIOS: Ecological reconstruction

Climate change and environmental crises have various effects on human experience, culture and worldviews. Individuals need to re-evaluate their values and habits, and adjust their identities, beliefs and perspectives according to the societal and environmental changes taking place. Communicating emerging experiences, feelings and meanings is crucial even if there is no readily available discourse (such as it exists, e.g., within the natural sciences) for sharing these new sentiments and ideas. Environmental research and discussions describe cultural change as a process where people become aware of the environmental impacts and boundaries of their actions, beliefs and habits and start to seek out and create more sustainable alternatives as future foundations.

One example of cultural change is the increasing phenomenon of climate anxiety. The Youth Barometer published in March 2019 showed that young people are increasingly worried about climate change. In Sitra’s Future Barometer 2019, Finnish citizens portrayed familiarity with the facts of climate change and overconsumption of natural resources and experienced these as the most threatening aspects of the future.

Climate anxiety is being expressed increasingly in public discourse and on social media. A large portion of the population has also taken part in the Sitoumus 2050 (Commitment 2050) project, initiated by the working group for sustainable development at the Prime Minister’s Office. Most of the pledges by individuals concern reducing their carbon footprint.

In popular culture, anxiety and worry over climate change, destruction of the environment, loss of biodiversity and resource scarcity are often channelled into a pessimistic view of the future. In television series and movies, visions of environments destroyed by humans and narratives of survival are becoming increasingly grim.

Simultaneously, the entertainment industry is portraying technological utopias and promises of symbiosis between technological and human evolution. The representations of the future in popular culture are deeply contradictory and display the incommensurability between different routine projections and visions of the future.

Cultural change also includes consumer choices. Plant-based diets are becoming popular and more and more people are trying to avoid air travel. Choices are increasingly influenced by the environmental and climate effects of goods and services as well as by the social sustainability of their production. It is also important to note the connection between consumption and identity, and thus between consumption and the polarisation of identities: many Finns feel, for instance, that private cars and eating meat are inalienable aspects of individual freedom and rights.

The construction of a carbon neutral society demands manifold adaptations and negotiations at many levels. However, these adaptations and negotiations need their space and time. Environmental awareness and anxiety about the future are aspects of cultural change. However, cultural change can also be actively endorsed. The tools include political work, education, communication, art and other cultural work.

The necessity of cultural change can be demonstrated by thinking about the size of the transition. If the goals and foundations of one’s life are based on material consumption, and one is faced with the fact that material consumption needs to decrease by 70–80 per cent, it is clear that this fact sounds depressing, if not impossible. However, the goal is not that after ecological reconstruction one would live like before (with the same goals, values, desires and fears), only with fewer things and choices.

Rather, the goal is to live differently, such that the amount of consumption of material resources does not determine feelings of satisfaction, happiness and meaningfulness. It is possible to live ‘more’, but not in the sense of using more material resources. Creating this different life demands a cultural change, which in its most general sense implies changes in all areas of life.

The importance of this cultural change for facing the environmental crises can be illustrated by the following train of thought. Energy production causes over half of all emissions. Energy is used to satisfy human needs and wants. Only a small fraction of the produced energy goes towards satisfying basic needs. Most of it goes to satisfying consumer societies and their consumerist citizens. Consumerism is not the satisfaction of basic needs but a culturally determined habit and identity, where buying, using and discarding goods has a value in itself. A lower level of energy production causes fewer emissions and facilitates transitioning towards low-emission technologies. Currently, the growth of energy production makes substantial emission cuts practically impossible. Consequently, a crucial tool for cutting emissions is to reduce energy consumption and production. In the dominant technological and economic framework, the task of cutting emissions in the energy sector has been handed to engineers and researchers. They should make the impossible possible: to find a way of producing ever more energy while eliminating emissions. Facing this impasse, it is good to ask, ‘What is energy for?’

If the answer is that more and more energy is needed to uphold cultural ideals of (over)consumption, then the obvious next question is, ‘Is it rational to ask the engineers for help in achieving unsustainable ideals or would it be better to direct attention to cultural change towards ideals of a good life within planetary boundaries?’

Societies, technologies and ways of using energy and natural resources have developed historically, and are fundamentally socially and culturally contingent. Therefore, a change in the fundamental logic of how society operates or how technology is used requires work aimed at renewing cultural beliefs and habits. Culture is often taken for granted as something immutable or as something that changes very slowly. Questioning fundamental cultural values, such as consumerism and economic growth, can feel threatening. However, history shows that culture is not a thing but a process. Prevalent cultural values have, at times, disappeared and been replaced by other values, sometimes even very fast, in a matter of a few years or even months.

In the end, achieving climate goals may be much more effective and flexible through cultural change towards ideals based on sustainable livelihoods than through desperate research and development into engineering solutions for fulfilling ever higher levels of consumption on a finite planet.