There are moments where everything shifts, when suddenly what you’ve learned about the world and how you see it collide. One of these moments for me was five years ago, in the Norwegian Arctic, while I was researching for my book. I stood – as I usually do in December – watching the River Alta running through a wooded valley.
Usually when I visit, though, the river is frozen solid with ice so thick you could drive an articulated truck on it. And historically, at least for the last 10,000 years, the indigenous Sami people have herded reindeer across the tundra that is now a nascent birch forest. Huge earth systems changes are underway. The planet we think we live on, I realised, no longer exists.. We’ve all heard of climate change, global warming and the environmental problems we are encountering.
Our current moment is not a climate crisis but a human one. The way we look at the world and our place in it needs to undergo a radical transformation if we are to have a chance at any kind of sustainable future. Climate change is therefore not a subject or an issue to be studied or campaigned on, but an evolving new reality.
This does not mean we have no agency and should give up trying to slow it down. Far from it. But treating climate breakdown as an unavoidable future event is a category error that allows politicians to avoid grappling with it and leads the wider public and media to approach it through the lens of activism.