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RE A LI SM A ND
T H E C L I MATE
C R I SIS
HO PE FOR LIFE
JOH N FO STER
REALISM AND THE
CLIMATE CRISIS
Hope for Life
John Foster
First published in Great Britain in 2022 by
Bristol University Press

University of Bristol
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Bristol
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UK
t: +44 (0)117 954 5940
e: bup-info@bristol.ac.uk
Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk
© Bristol University Press 2022
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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ISBN 978-1-5292-2327-9 paperback
ISBN 978-1-5292-2328-6 ePub
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The right of John Foster to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press.
Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If,
however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher.
The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and
not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol
University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any
material published in this publication.
Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age
and sexuality.
Cover design by Clifford Hayes

Front cover image: istock.com – Sjo
Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CMP, Poole
For
Jean Mary Foster
(1923–2019)
and
Oaklan Foster Pickup
(b. 2017)
Contents
A Note on Notes vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Hope, Realism and the Climate Crisis 1

1 The Demands of Realism 14
2 Transformation? 31
3 Creating Possibility 47
4 Responsibility Beyond Morality 63
5 The Bounds of Utopia 84
6 Climate Crisis as Tragedy 102
7 On the Way to Revolution 120
8 The New Revolutionary Dynamic 137
9 The Vanguard of Hope 154
Notes 178
References 189
Index 194
v
A Note on Notes
The text following has been left deliberately undisfigured by a rash of

bracketed references and little superscript numbers. The inclusion of these,
which I have always considered a nuisance in any context, becomes when
one is aiming at a wider-than-academic audience a positive distraction from
the flow of the argument. Wherever an acknowledgement is appropriate
or a citation called for, these can still be found, by those interested, in the
Notes at the end of the book, which are there identified to the chapter,
and within these to the pages and parts of the text, to which they relate.
vi
Acknowledgements
This book tries to improve on my After Sustainability, which in its turn tried
to improve on The Sustainability Mirage. While this is a process which could
in principle run and run, I am luckily now old enough for it to be nearing
its natural end.
After Sustainability started from a challenge to widely prevalent denial of
climate and environmental tragedy, and the hopes with which it concluded
were correspondingly both chastened and limited. I have since come to
see that one must start from more robustly transformative hopes, while still
recognizing that our tragic situation conditions the actions which can flow
from them. This shift of emphasis was prompted partly by the personal
considerations mentioned briefly in the Introduction, but friendly and
constructive criticism of the earlier approach from a good many people also
helped; I must especially thank in this connection Samantha Earle, Margaret
Gearty, Susan Goldsworthy, Steve Gough, Doris Hauser, Stefan Morales
and Rupert Read.
Thanks are due, too, to my Lancaster colleague Matthew Johnson,
general editor of the journal Global Discourse, for inviting me to guest-edit a
special issue (Volume 7, Issue 1, 2017) on the theme ‘After Sustainability –
What?’ –later published in book form as Post-Sustainability: Tragedy and
Transformation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). This project provided a forum
for illuminating engagement with a number of my fellow contributors,
notably Ingolfur Blühdorn, Mike Hannis and Panu Pihkala. I am particularly
grateful to Rupert Read, my exchange with whom extending over the
last 40 pages of this volume was a very powerful stimulus to rethinking.
Similarly, involvement with the think tank Green House, including editing
its most recent book Facing Up to Climate Reality: Honesty, Disaster and Hope
(London: Green House, 2019) and contributing a series of opinion pieces
and book reviews to its website at https://www.greenhousethinktank.org/,
has brought me many valuable insights from colleagues: thanks in particular
to Nadine Andrews, Anne Chapman, Ray Cunningham, Jonathan Essex
and Brian Heatley. (Neither they nor Green House, however, should be
taken to agree with all the views expressed in this book.)
vii
newgenprepdf
REALISM AND THE CLIMATE CRISIS
I have been honoured with opportunities to explore and develop my

thinking on all these matters in seminars and presentations given at venues
including Ashridge Business School, the Vienna University of Economics and
Business and the universities of Anglia Ruskin, Bath, Cumbria, Dundee, East
Anglia, Lancaster and Surrey. I am very grateful for all the ideas, objections,
suggestions and (occasional) plaudits which these discussions have afforded.
I have to thank three publisher’s referees, in two cases for supportively
helpful comments and in the other for stimulating provocation.
Finally and on a different note, thanks once again to my wife Rose for her
loving patience and support. She too will not agree with everything here,
but she knows that one has to speak one’s truth as best one can.
viii
Introduction: Hope, Realism and
the Climate Crisis
to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates
Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
The possibility of hope is now the central question of our time. That is
because it is crucial to the climate crisis, which is our time’s overwhelmingly
urgent challenge.
Much else is pressing: poverty, hunger, war and threats of war, unravelling
international institutions, clashing religious fundamentalisms, cyber-security,
the dark web, deep uncertainties around sexuality and identity … the list
goes on. This is altogether the most existentially exacting juncture in human
history. But the climate crisis is now absolutely primary. On how we respond
to that crisis depends, it is increasingly apparent, the future of our existence
itself. There can no longer be any serious doubt that the present trajectory
of human-induced global heating, unaddressed or even just inadequately
addressed, could within the present century take the Earth’s atmosphere to
temperatures at which civilization certainly, and maybe human life, could
not survive. That claim is so far from being irresponsibly alarmist that it
expresses the current sober consensus among informed scientists. It would
be excessive to say that in such a context, nothing else matters. But the
basic preconditions for anything else to go on mattering all that much for
all that long are now at risk. When your house is on fire, first things first is
a maxim of mere common sense.
With a house on fire, however, acting hopefully on that maxim is likely
to be a fairly simple matter. You will hope for some swiftly available means
of putting the fire out, and often this hope will be a perfectly realistic one
to entertain in your circumstances, and will be duly answered. With the
climate crisis, however, things are a lot less straightforward.
1
Grounds for hope?

In the first place, what we must hope for seems to escape ever further beyond
our reach. Every day the odds against humanity’s getting itself out of its
current mess lengthen –more coal is mined and oil or gas extracted, more
carbon dioxide is poured into the atmosphere, more plastic accumulates in
the oceans, sea levels slowly but inexorably rise, habitat disruption threatens
more species with extinction as registered in each successive scientific report
… and meanwhile, there seems even yet no real appetite among governments,
corporations or the public at large to do more than make large declaratory
statements regretting these processes, at the same time persisting with
something very much like business as usual. Cold-eyed consideration of
these conditions suggests that we shall soon be, if we are not already, on an
unalterable course towards ecological catastrophe. For, secondly, the scale and
scope of even the minimum changes necessary for avoiding such catastrophe
make the difficulties of achieving them seem almost insurmountable. These
changes include, at least: phasing out fossil fuels and moving to completely
carbon-neutral energy generation; ending the apparently irresistible drive
to urbanization, both because cities are energy-intensive and because many
of them are vulnerable to inevitably rising sea levels; reversing globalization
in favour of localized economic resilience (and thus vigorously subverting
presently existing capitalism); and starting to apply the precautionary
principle as a routine default planning strategy across the board –not least,
where increasingly tempting technological quick-fixes for anthropogenic
climate change itself are in question. In other words, we are going to
require massive and epochal shifts in our established patterns of economic,
cultural and political life. And those shifts will have to be worldwide. Even
if the prospects for them were vastly less challenging than they already are
in the democracies of Western Europe and (just about imaginably) the
United States, achieving them there would be effectively useless in terms of
halting or reversing global heating unless the rapidly expanding coal-based
economies of China and India, at least, could be brought to follow suit.
(These economies between them accounted for most of the 70 per cent
increase in global demand for coal between 2000 and 2010, and although
this growth has slowed in more recent years, there are signs that China in
particular may be planning further major expansion in coal-fired capacity.)
Finally, despite our having known about the broad parameters of this peril
for some five decades, the necessary changes now have to be put in place
within no more than the twenty years which we maybe have left before
the trajectory towards an atmospheric temperature increase threatening the
planet’s habitability becomes irresistible.
It is no surprise, then, that Extinction Rebellion starts from the claim that
we are facing an unprecedented global emergency, nor that the school strike
2
Introduction
movement announces its intention ‘to rise up and take direct action where
older generations have failed’. These closely linked recent manifestations,
responding to urgently perceived danger, have energized a wider green
constituency which was becoming stale and exhausted from the sheer effort
of having tried for years to make headway in pushing this enormous boulder
up this steepest of hills. That is by no means to dismiss the established political,
NGO and academic strands of green activity, which remain importantly in
play. But the whole issue has been decisively reinvigorated and has claimed
a new level of public attention through the activities of these newcomers.
They are easily the most hopeful gleams of light across what is nevertheless
a rapidly darkening landscape. But equally, and just as such, they raise what
I have called the question of the possibility of hope most acutely.
That question, put starkly, is: how in these conditions can hope be
kept honest?
Of course, there is hope and hope. When Greta Thunberg says ‘I don’t
want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. …
And then I want you to act’, she is calling out the ‘hopefulness’ paraded
at jamborees like the World Economic Forum, a smart-suited glibness
substituting for serious action and shrugging off real responsibility. That
attitude can’t be kept honest, because it never was. But climate activists,
Ms Thunberg included, have to start from genuinely robust hope, literally
morning by morning. They know that in order to carry on, they must tap
daily into the energy that only comes from hoping –from always-renewed
commitment to the achievability of a sustainably habitable world. And for
anyone seriously worried about these issues, activist or not, such commitment
is a condition of remaining constructively engaged, rather than turning
away to the many much more tractable concerns which life (or at any rate,
life in the short term) still offers. Nor is starting afresh, again and again,
from such hope merely a therapeutic resource, a kind of moral exercise
routine to make activism or constructive engagement easier to maintain. It
is what makes them feasible at all, for anyone even minimally attentive to
the situation as it now stands. And for hope of that order, the question of
honesty does inescapably arise.
Importantly, starting from genuine hope means just that, rather than
reaching it as the last hypothesis standing when optimism fails. My own
work in this field was initially, back in the 1990s, probably an exercise in
such optimism: an attempt to defend the then-new sustainability imperative
from perverse economistic modelling, as it started to be taken up into the
mainstream. There appeared, back then, to be at least some prospect that
something better than ‘sustainable development’, with its quantified and
monetized bottom lines, could become the pragmatic governing model.
But thereafter I moved, at first very reluctantly but with (it soon felt) no
responsible alternative, towards pointing out the danger of our being betrayed
3
by this picture as by a mirage. Sustainable development benchmarks and

targets were so readily mainstreamed, it seemed to me, precisely because
they served as constraints from the future which never, when push came to
shove, actually constrained present activities –rather they provided, in their
socially-constructed flexibility, a goal which would always recede before us
as we offered to pursue it. It was no long step from identifying that danger
to recognizing that having been so misled, we had missed the crucial window
of opportunity for preventing climate-driven disaster –we simply had not
done what we needed to have started doing thirty years previously if we
were going to interrupt that trajectory. By that point, hope seemed to be
all you found yourself left with when, refusing any longer to blank out the
grim prospects awaiting us, you still somehow didn’t give up. Hence the
Denial and Hope included in the subtitle of my last book, After Sustainability.
But active hope cannot really work as this kind of fallback option. Actually,
it has to be our first premise, when we confront climate and environmental
crisis threatening life, because it lies at the very roots of the life that is
threatened. I recognized this with a painful jolt when recently becoming a
grandparent for the first time. For that first grandson, born in the autumn
of 2017, will reach my present age in 2088, and on current trends the world
will by then be experiencing all the consequences of a 4ºC rise in global
atmospheric temperature –the Arctic ice cap gone, sea levels risen by a
metre or more, large swathes of the tropics uninhabitable or agriculturally
useless and corresponding geopolitical turmoil beside which our present
difficulties with migration will look like a picnic. ‘Future generations’, in
other words –those whom in earlier phases of green activism we had to
project –are already here. One can hold them in one’s arms, and acute
anxiety about what awaits them becomes direct, chagrined consciousness
of how humanly intolerable is what we are preparing for these innocents
by what we are doing to the world. Only the upwelling hope which comes
naturally and irresistibly along with fresh life itself –life-hope, as one may
call it –will do as a response.
Hope, in other words, is not optional in face of the climate emergency.
But hope has also to be realistic. That is a conceptual requirement, an essential
part of what the very idea of hope contains. Hope is a more complex attitude
to the future than merely wanting something desirable to come about. It
is future-directed desire under the sign of contingency. As pure life-energy
surging up in us, indeed, it need not take an intentional object at all: we can
be, simply, hopeful (this undirected energy often informs great art –think
of Rembrandt’s painting, say, or Beethoven’s music), and thus far, ordinary
contingency has not arisen. But as soon as we bring that disposition to
bear on practical life, we do so in terms of some goal or project which
for the time being expresses it. And then to hope for X is to want X to
happen, acknowledging that it might not but at the same time believing
4
Introduction
that it genuinely might. We may call the latter requirement the condition
of realism –genuine hope must address itself to a real chance, however
slender, of the hoped-for thing’s coming to pass, just as it must also involve
the courage to run the risk that it won’t. But this conceptual requirement
reflects our recognition of a vital practical necessity. Crucially, aspirations
which fail to meet the condition of realism can’t do the hard work of hope –
the work of getting us out of bed each day to go on risking ourselves in
what might be a struggle against the grain –because they always turn out
to be about what someone can or can’t bear to contemplate, rather than
about grappling with the tough and recalcitrant world over against us: and
one way or another, we always know this. Hoping unrealistically is always
either a denial of the full difficulties confronting us, or a way of giving up
while pretending not to.
That is why the question is one of honesty, and we can now formulate it
more sharply. Can hope for escape from humanity’s climate plight any longer
count as realistic? Do the odds –which, as I began by sketching them, are
now stacked so high against us –leave us anything which could legitimately
be claimed as a real chance of averting runaway global overheating? For if
they don’t, then since life-hope seems non-optional, it can only be embraced
as a form of self-delusion. This fear must gnaw at the heart of any climate
activist who allows him-or herself to think dispassionately about the issues.
Tough hope
I want to argue that hope can still meet the condition of realism. But it can
do so only under other conditions which many activists may find almost as
difficult to accept as hope’s abandonment. That is why, within its class –books
about the climate crisis which contend that we might still have a chance to
survive it –this book will be found to take an unconventional line.
For one thing, although it has been substantially revised and brought to
a conclusion during the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, it does not
venture the claim that trying to deal with that grisly outbreak has better
prepared us for confronting the climate emergency. It points neither to
government willingness to upend the economy, public acceptance of
intrusive regulation, nor a new sense of communal solidarity, as potential
COVID-19 bonuses to be carried forward into the climate context. For
reasons about which I say a little more in the final c hapter –essentially, the
difference between an immediate mortal threat and prospective disasters
well over the horizon –I am seriously sceptical of that claim, and would
remain so even were public acceptance of restriction much less patchy than
it has latterly become.
But even more unexpectedly, perhaps, the book also includes no material
on climate justice (except in passing as part of a critique of the Green New
5
Deal), and treats neither of human rights nor of alleged rights of any other
kind. It does not discuss techno-fixes, whether favourably or unfavourably.
It lacks chapters on corporate malfeasance and the sins of late capitalism,
the Millennium Development Goals and the scandal of world poverty, the
role of green business and investment, and even the prospects for China. It
lauds neither the virtues of democracy despite its failures, nor the wisdom of
indigenous peoples despite their regrettable marginalization. And it scarcely
alludes to issues of Western diet.
These omissions do not mean that I think none of the above matter. They
most of them clearly do, very much –our attitudes to technology and to
democracy in particular. But they represent a terrain which has now been
very well worked over in that sort of book during the past decade or so,
from Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth through Naomi Klein’s This
Changes Everything and George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage to Jonathon
Porritt’s recent Hope in Hell. And the working-over has answered to a general
approach: ‘Surely now at last we are reaching a moment when all these
progressive concerns must jump together, and serious action to avert climate
catastrophe must garner widespread popular consent!’ –an approach which
has persisted largely unaltered, it has to be said, while the jumping together,
and the widespread consent, have (broadly) continued not to materialize.
All these authors, that is, want to find or renew hope on liberal-progressivist
terms. They want us to be able to hope, even yet, for a transformation which
will yield conditions of general material sufficiency, structured by justice
and organized by egalitarian-democratic methods. They want to retain,
even in this extremity and however sobered and muted, essentially the
Enlightenment package.
Instead of revisiting this terrain or maintaining this approach, I want to
make an uncomfortably different case –one which I believe we cannot
any longer postpone considering. Given the conceptual relations between
hope, experience, realism and transformation, in the context of our wholly
unprecedented plight, hope can now only be honestly entertained on tragic
terms. What that entails in practice is that we have to try to save the habitability
of the planet at whatever cost. And politically, that in turn involves accepting
that nothing decisive will happen, on any of these fronts, until the minority
who are both intelligent and imaginative enough to know what is coming,
and at the same time honest and brave enough to reject complicity in biocide,
finally takes matters into its own hands –by whatever means offer themselves,
and without waiting for popular consent. Nothing will really happen, that
is, until people forming what I call the life-responsible vanguard creatively
reconstitute themselves as a new kind of revolutionary force, something
markedly different from being a demonstrator or even a ‘rebel’.
That, incidentally, is why the book also does not touch on the recently
popular concept of ‘transformative adaptation’, or at least not as such. I think
6
Introduction
this coinage is a way of saying revolution without quite saying it –something

which it can manage because, plainly enough, any transformation in patterns
of working, habits, expectations and general arrangements likely to be
adequate to climate emergency will necessarily go far enough to effect a
wholesale turnaround (that is, a ‘revolution’) in present living; but whether
it must involve ‘revolutionary’ political methods (including deliberate
subversion of established state institutions by a combative minority) can then
seem to be a further question. For reasons which I canvass most extensively
in Chapter 7, however, I believe that change of the order needed will have
to be revolutionary in both senses, and I prefer to be frank about this from
the outset.
In offering to develop such a case, however, I am painfully aware of the
danger of being driven in that direction too much by sheer impatience.
When, for instance, David Attenborough concludes his impressive and
authoritative recent testimony on these matters with the hope that ‘brilliant
minds’ may now be coming together worldwide to understand our problems
and at last find solutions, might it not be a mistake for someone who has been
aware of the climate and ecological threat for decades to react dismissively?
Attenborough insists that ‘we can yet make amends, manage our impact,
change the direction of our development …’ –all we require, he claims, is
the will to go on urging our politicians and to keep faith with ‘the labours
of countless committees and conferences, and the signing of innumerable
international treaties’. Shouldn’t we perhaps see this, not as a reiteration
of failed conventionalities for which it is now far too late, but as a sign
that a powerful Establishment is finally seeing the light? Sir David, with all
his grounded wisdom, is a quintessentially Establishment figure, and that
someone in that position should be canvassing radical proposals which fringe
Greens were advocating thirty years ago could perhaps be welcomed as the
long-delayed cutting-through of that advocacy –and maybe still, after all,
just in time? Would it not be a betrayal to turn aside, either in frustration or
in a too-ready contempt for human folly, from that trodden route through
our existing politics and institutions, at the very moment when it begins to
have a chance of taking us somewhere?
That question puts one, quite rightly, on the spot. I am led to the answer
which this book offers, and to some confidence in that answer as arising
from more than simply impatience, by thinking through what it must now
take for us to earn our hopes in this arena.
Attenborough rests his, it would seem, on our being the only creatures with
foresight: on our having ‘an ability, perhaps unique among the living creatures
on the planet, to imagine a future and work towards achieving it’. But then
it need not come down just to a sardonic as against a cheerful temperament,
if one points out that we are also the only creatures capable of carrying
wishful thinking as far as embedded self-deception, and of deliberately
7
blinding ourselves to a future which we find too ugly to contemplate. Given

the conceptual connection between hope and realism, one can get a more
objective handle here by pressing the question which of these emphases more
realistically reflects the context for hope in our present situation. And that
leads on to deeper questioning of the criterion of realism itself.
That is the main line of argument which I pursue here. Very concisely, it
runs thus: we have left things so late that honest hope of avoiding climate
catastrophe cannot any longer be embraced on anything like Attenborough’s
terms, but can now only take the form of hope against hope –that is, hope
deliberately and explicitly embraced in the face of all the stacked-up odds.
Such hope can still be realistic, but only with a realism which is not based
on appeals to precedent –it must instead reflect a deep-seated faith in the
human capacity to create genuinely new possibilities. That faith, however,
can only be held onto responsibly, rather than tending to run away into
mere utopianism, within a tragic vision of our general condition and current
plight. In such a vision, our goods are inexorably conflicted, we cannot tell
in advance what values conflict will leave standing, and conflict is in any
case bound to be grievous –a matter of severely painful experience as well
as of painful choices. And that vision, taken seriously, is also what mandates
pursuing urgently necessary transformation at all costs. The demands made
by the kind of hope which we can now honestly retain are as tough as that.
I fully expect many people to find this conclusion so unwelcome that
they will be tempted to dismiss out of hand the argument leading to it.
Naturally, I think that would be mistaken. Of course, the argument –like
any argument –may be flawed; but from where we are, it surely has to
deserve at least grappling with. Equally, successful revolution in defence of a
habitable human future is certainly a very long shot, especially in the kind of
society (such as ours in Britain) where it needs first to happen. But I cannot
(after much trying) see it as a longer shot than this civilization’s reforming
itself, at this terribly late stage, by any less-than-revolutionary process. We
delude ourselves, surely, if we believe that the speed with which the easy
Green agenda has moved from the fringes to the political mainstream over
the past forty years tells us anything very much about what will happen now
that the really hard agenda has been reached. For all the evidence is that the
mainstream just isn’t up to embracing it. A recent climate demonstrator’s
placard in the US urged the official Democratic Party to ‘step up or step
aside’, and that is a neat phrase; but fossil-fuel state politicians, it should
now be clear, will never voluntarily do either –that is, if stepping up means
acting anything like adequately to address the real dangers. (And this is a
criterion by which even the very welcome moves in the right direction by
the new Biden administration simply don’t qualify.) Those variously invested
in the fossil-fuel system will not move more than minimally until the only
alternative to action is to be swept aside –and many of them not even then.
8
Introduction
But that truth, of course, also requires the vanguard itself to step up. From
its comfortably accustomed standpoint of informed critique, personal or
institutional campaigning or, most adventurously, law-abiding protest (and
even getting yourself carefully arrested by a generally well-behaved police
force, while of course it calls for courage and determination, is essentially still
that), this vanguard must move to becoming capable of doing the sweeping
aside, and fully ready to do it vigorously.
We need, that is, at last and above all, a Green-political movement
adequate to the demands of seeing us through oncoming tragedy –able to
interpret inevitable disaster convincingly enough to be widely accepted as
a guide, ready to confront painful choices and to cut its losses, remorselessly
proactive (since remorse must be tragically forgone, or at any rate suspended),
and unflinchingly cold-eyed about its deeper-than-democratic mandate.
Accordingly, this book concentrates as fiercely as I can on what I take to be
the need and the reasons for that uncompromisingly revolutionary stance.
At the worst, therefore, it may have put forward a case to be seriously
argued with.
A quick preview
Being realistic about the climate crisis requires us to ask whether, starting
from hope as we must, we can keep it both honest and still true to itself,
still springing unquenchably from the life which we are called on to defend.
Chapter 1 outlines the empirical realism according to which the odds against
us appear to be insurmountable. Politics is pre-eminently an arena in which
we are liable to ideological bias and groupthink, and correspondingly to
self-deception and wishful thinking –with green politics no exception. If,
to guard against this tendency, we cultivate a disillusioned realism based on
human experience, we must conclude it to be overwhelmingly likely that
we are out of time to avoid climate catastrophe. This is demonstrated from
consideration of the carbon budget within which we must keep if we are
to have any chance of avoiding runaway global heating; of the breakneck
rate at which we are still currently overspending that budget; of how
precipitously the emissions curve must consequently fall from hereon in; of
how inadequate the Paris Agreement has been in this connection; and of how
vigorously capitalism and the fossil-fuel state are bound to resist the necessary
measures. On all these dimensions, change of the order required is utterly
unprecedented, and the utterly unprecedented is the empirically unrealistic.
In Chapter 2, I go on to show how this need not, however, be the
final word. The heaviest adverse odds have not always been proof against
transformative human action driven by hope ‘against hope’. Though history
and biography prompt us with this realism of transformation, however, it
cannot be grounded empirically. Our ability to defy all the odds cannot be
9
warranted by appeal to experience, which only warrants anything through

what it shows to be (odds-on) probable. This general point is dramatized
especially clearly by our present situation. If we try to believe that we can
still save ourselves from climate catastrophe by invoking past occasions (the
Blitz, the ending of apartheid …) when hoping against hope has turned out
justified, we find all the analogies failing for the same reason that empirical
realism left us disillusioned: the utterly unprecedented nature of our present
plight and the sheer scale and rapidity of the change which it calls for. Belief
in the power of hope against hope to overcome even that plight must instead
be warranted counter-empirically, by intuitive recognition of human creativity
itself as a fundamental feature of reality.
Knowledge of that creativity goes as deep in us as language, as Chapter 3
tries to make clear. But it has long been overlaid by the resigned empiricist
view of human reality which an alienating technologico-utilitarian society
fosters. What is involved in recognizing this fundamental creativity as
real, and thus in enabling appeal to it to support a kind of realism, can be
better understood by exploring the phenomenon of ‘hoping against hope’.
Whether manifested at the individual or collective level, this involves an
acceptance of our first-order hopes as empirically unrealistic, but then, in
a deliberate decision to ‘hope anyway’, weaponizing this acceptance in a
way which actually serves to reduce the odds against us. But this process is
misrepresented if it is taken to be one of triggering possibilities previously
inherent in the given situation. We cannot say that something is already
‘on the cards’ when, uniquely among the antecedents of natural events, our
conscious attention and reaction to the cards has itself to be included among
those cards. By making counter-empirical hope practically indispensable,
our climate plight thus prompts a new pragmatically-driven approach to the
ancient philosophical conundrum of free will.
Chapter 4 urges, controversially, that recovering the creation of possibility
in active practice means freeing ourselves from the routine assumption of a
moral template for our responsibility in this area. Overcoming the collective
action dilemma as it relates to climate action cannot be a matter of setting
moral obligations against the claims of prudential self-interest, despite the
overwhelming prevalence of an ethical framing for climate concern in the
literature. This is because the dynamics of the global atmosphere rob all carbon
emissions much short of the global total of the causal efficacy required for
anything resembling moral constraints to have proper application. That truth
has been obscured by the careless metaphor of the ‘carbon footprint’, the
misleading nature of which is here exposed –as far as I am aware, for the first
time. The wrong we do by complicity in the fossil-fuel economy and lifestyle
must instead be conceived as the betrayal of life-responsibility. Self-reinvention as
a centre of such responsibility is where our capacity to create new possibilities,
and thus to release literally immeasurable forces, must now be exercised.
10
Introduction
And such responsibility comes at a price. Unless we are to slide into a

magical utopianism (where all hope is indefeasible because failure to attain
our objects is just failure to have attained them yet), our genuine creativity
has to be recognized within the context of an anti-utopian, which means a
tragic, view of the human condition. Chapters 5 and 6 make this essential
connection. The tragic view understands our values as always liable to deep
conflict, and those goods which we realize in action as very often involving
the sacrifice of other goods with equal claims on us. This long-established
intuitive insight into the inherent limitations of our condition has similarly
been occluded by Enlightenment progressivism and its misrepresentation
of every difficulty as a problem to be solved. But trust in human creativity
needs to be kept honest by understanding its nature and scope within the
framing of such a tragic vision. Thus activist hopes invested in unpredictable
transformation must retain the defeasibility which is the necessary corollary of
realism, the edge which goes with the real chance of failure. For transformative
aspirations, although they can inspire, can also easily betray us if they are
not ongoingly adjusted by experience –but counter-empirical hope cannot
of its nature be subject to that kind of check. Recognition of the human
condition as tragic, it is now argued, must serve as the necessary general
constraint on counter-empirical aspiration. That condition is shown to be
deeply rooted in our dual nature as rationally evaluative social primates, and
arguably indeed in the conditions of life itself.
Chapters 7, 8 and 9 then explore how recovering a tragic world view must
make a difference to the way we understand the demands of our immediate
situation. The coming years will be hugely and unpredictably turbulent, as
people in greater numbers at last begin to register what climate breakdown
will involve for themselves and their families, the illegitimacy of shirking
governments becomes more and more obvious, and transformative change
becomes correspondingly urgent. In the near term only a minority will
feel driven to pursue such change, but that minority must come to power
within a couple of decades if catastrophe is to be averted. How can that be
realistic? Can it be compatible with exclusively democratic methods, given
what democracy has latterly come to? If not, is that a tragic necessity with
which we must live –and how might we do that? What does hope invested
in human creativity and kept honest by tragic vision really mean for social
and political action in a period for which nothing in history has prepared us?
It is still too early to answer those questions fully with any assurance –the
answers which I offer are meant to be exploratory and to provoke debate –
but it is by no means too early to ask them. These later chapters therefore try
to bring the hope and vision for which the book has argued to bear on key
ideas, proposals and campaigns now being canvassed –‘Deep Adaptation’,
the Green New Deal, Extinction Rebellion –and to consider what form a
serious green political movement (which as yet we lack) might take. Thus
11
they may help shape the new kind of revolution to which we must find our
way –for nothing less than revolution is what life-hope can now be seen
to demand of us.
***
I must add a brief note on methodology. It will probably be already

evident from the foregoing preview that I write as a philosopher, although
I am certainly not offering what would ordinarily be called a work of
philosophy. In particular, this is not ‘environmental philosophy’ as usually
understood: apart from some brief references in passing, there is nothing here
about ethical obligations to future generations, other species, wildernesses or
whatever. And if it is ‘political philosophy’, it is so very much in the sense of
conceptual work undertaken as a specific intervention in a real and pressing
political situation. If I had to classify the book, it would be as a thinking
tool for potentially revolutionary climate activists.
The generic kit which philosophers are now widely supposed to bring
to the table for this kind of practical purpose is that of conceptual analysis,
and the account offered here of our contemporary plight and our room for
hope does indeed arise from an exploration of necessary relations between
hope, realism and transformative possibility. But at the same time, the role
claimed for radical human agency within these conceptual relations calls
forth considerations which can’t avoid being metaphysical. They can’t, that
is, avoid seeking directly to identify and engage with the relevant structures
of reality –quite appropriately, of course, since the aim is to help us think
realistically about the climate crisis, and what we take to be realistic thinking
must turn finally on what we take to be real.
These ‘metaphysical’ considerations, however, are not intended to ground
the rest of the book. Rather, they and the practical concern driving the overall
argument should be seen as mutually supportive. The long-standing central
‘philosophical problems’, I take it, represent the outcropping in different life-
arenas –morality, knowledge, personhood, meaning, power –of permanent
complexities in our fundamental self-understanding as reflexively conscious,
language-using animals. The sense which we make of ourselves in any of
these areas both responds to and in turn broadly shapes the operative world-
conception of any given historical period and the actions in which it issues.
Thus, the picturing of what is really real as from an imagined standpoint of
objective observation (Thomas Nagel’s ‘view from nowhere’) has long held
sway in conjunction with the dominance of physical science and a basically
empiricist conception of human nature. This twin dominance, however, with
its upshot in the mechanized pursuit of individual material well-being, has
now brought us into such deadly ecological danger that it is impossible any
longer to avoid confronting it urgently in practice. If our understanding of
12
Introduction
the real at this epochal crux of action therefore shifts to embrace once more
the radical creativity through which human beings can shape possibility, it
does so under intense, indeed potentially shattering, life-pressure. But radical
creativity is quite unrecognizable unless we take the subjective view –the
view from the perspective of the human agent –with ultimate seriousness.
And (though at this point I would expect many professionally philosophical
colleagues to baulk) one of the fundamental reasons why that subjective view
now has to be taken fully seriously is that unless we can do so, the unfolding
climate emergency will rob us of genuine hope.
The case which I develop through the book aspires to contribute to this
kind of shift in understanding. So while it does not mount a metaphysical
argument as such, it seeks to keep what I may call the issue of the real
sufficiently alive that the resonance for this issue of the practical argument
which it does mount remains clear –and also vice versa. That implies a
balancing act which I cannot claim to have performed faultlessly, or even
very well, but my attempts to perform it explain some of the apparently
awkward shifts in register which the reader may encounter. Overall, the
book asks: what might it mean to do the politics of the crucial next twenty
years in the spirit of a tragically informed realism? Some of the answers
which I offer will certainly be found as uncomfortable as the question is
exigent. The full force of those answers requires, I believe, that we appreciate
something as fundamental as the nature of the real to be always also at stake.
***
Introductions to books about hope and the climate crisis standardly end in
upbeat vein: we can crack this, if only … (followed by the author’s particular
hopeful pitch). But prefacing a critique of the possibilities of hope in that
way would evidently beg the question. Instead, I will invoke the book’s
dedication: jointly to my mother who died while it was being written, and
to my first grandchild whose birth spurred me into writing it. That life-
continuity can perhaps stand in hope’s place until hope is vindicated –or,
while one at least attempts its vindication.
Hallbankgate, Cumbria
May 2021
13
1
The Demands of Realism

The condition of realism, as I stated it in the Introduction, was that hope
must address itself to a real chance of the hoped-for event’s coming to pass.
But what counts as a real chance? Here, already, we need to embark on
some conceptual clarification.
The odds are apparently about a million to one, for instance, against your
being struck by lightning in any given year. Is there, nevertheless, a real
chance that this will happen to you? There is a sense in which that assertion
of the odds itself constitutes an affirmative answer: yes, indeed, there really
is such a chance, although it is a very, very slim one because misfortunes
of this nature occur extremely rarely –only about one time in a million
when you are out and about, to be more precise. But then, in that sense,
the condition of realism would be met by any case where what one was
hoping for wasn’t something literally impossible, such as travelling back in
time, however overwhelming one judged the odds against its happening to
be –and that is plainly not what we intend when we recognize that hope
has to be realistic to do its proper work.
Instead, we mean ‘realistic’ here in the sense in which it would be unrealistic
to frame one’s New Year resolutions, holiday arrangements and so forth on
the basis that one might on any day in the coming twelve months be taken out
by lightning –just as it would be still less realistic to erect such life-plans on
the firm assumption that one will this year win millions on the Lottery. The
chances are such in either case that it would be wildly impractical to spend
any time worrying about or joyously anticipating the events in question,
or even (except perhaps idly and momentarily) contemplating them at all.
The condition of realism in relation to both our fears and our hopes, that
is, carries an essential reference to the common-sense distinction between
attention to the way the world objectively is, and fearful or wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking, which this opposition distinguishes specifically from
hope, we could define for the moment as the process of letting one’s desires
play a larger role in generating one’s expectations about what will happen
than the facts relevant to what is likely to happen actually warrant. That is
14
perhaps a possibility for any creature which has both cognitions and desires
and is at least minimally aware of both. Any such creature seems susceptible
in principle to finding itself misled by its own wishfulness. But human
beings are unique in having at their disposal very sophisticated powers of
misrepresenting the world –of seeing what they want to see and believing
what it comforts them to believe. The experimental chimp can expect a
banana and get an electric shock, the dog can bounce around in anticipation
of a walk and find himself left behind when his owner is merely going
shopping, but it takes human intelligence and conceptual resource to weave
a dreamland of protected quasi-beliefs and gratifyingly false assumptions
which can be inhabited for weeks, months or even years together. And by the
same token, it would seem to be principally the human ability to recognize
the patterns, rules and norms (including laws of nature) derived from
remembered experience, which provides us with any reliable benchmark
for our attempts to resist losing touch in this way with the real world.
Avoiding illusion
We misrepresent things wishfully to ourselves across many diverse fields
of activity and for many reasons. Standard cases are to be found in our
personal relations, where we regularly promote muddle and grief by
assigning fantasy roles to real others, and in our attitudes to our own
achievements, professional and other, where the fantasy role is typically
filled by oneself. (Familiarly, one of the toughest things about growing
older is that it becomes ever harder to find examples of successful people
who didn’t amount to much at your age.) But because it deals in power
(ours over others and theirs over us), politics is a pre-eminent terrain of
systematic self-delusion –of vision through deliberately assumed ideological
spectacles, of beliefs and drives channelled by class or clan interests and
of the group-conditioned reflex generally. George Orwell’s classic insight
remains sharply relevant here. In an article written just after the Second
World War, when he was already exploring the ideas that were to inform
the chilling satirical account of ‘doublethink’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he
observed drily that
In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making
out one’s weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics,
on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world
where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for
two objects to be in the same place simultaneously.
Politics, that is, characteristically constitutes an arena where one is at risk of

understanding only what one wants or allows oneself to understand, even
15
where this conflicts with what one already, in some other part of one’s mind,
does tacitly see and understand.
As a direct consequence of this, history insofar as it is a record of political
activity exemplifies a very wide variety of unrealisms, and is equally rich in
cases of people only finding out that they were being unrealistic afterwards,
when action has collided painfully with the resistant reality which they had
misconstrued or downplayed. And of course it also displays abundantly
the irony of our never knowing beforehand whether or not that is actually
going to be our situation. Thus, to take a couple of instances more or less at
random, while it turned out to have been realistic of Hitler to think that he
could come to power in Weimar Germany, despite his widespread dismissal
during much of the 1920s as a political no-hoper, it proved wildly unrealistic
of him to suppose that he could knock out Soviet Russia at a single blow in
1941, even though no army in Europe had been able to resist the Wehrmacht
for years before. Again, it was in fact realistic of Tony Blair to trust to his
instincts and push for the abandonment of Labour’s time-hallowed Clause
Four commitment to public ownership almost immediately after taking
over as leader, but career-wreckingly unrealistic of him to imagine that he
could inspire public support for the invasion of Iraq solid enough to tolerate
anything except the swiftest and least costly victory and exit. In both these
pairs of examples and in a thousand others like them, calculations beforehand
easily deceive, and the realistic option, the one that would have reflected how
the balance of relevant political and military forces actually stood, is revealed
only when the chosen alternative has led to confusion, chaos or disaster.
In political and public affairs, however, we much more often than not
have to act well before the relevant reality has fully declared itself. Thus our
constant liability to falsify our situation for Orwell’s kind of reason tends
to place us even more than usually at the mercy of events in these spheres.
As a defensive response, there have therefore naturally evolved some fairly
straightforward rules of thumb (if only we could stick to them) for aligning
one’s picture of how things are with how they actually are, before acting on
it. These rules of thumb familiarly include paying less attention to what
people say (about what they believe, intend and so on) than to what they have
actually done, and particularly to what they have been in the regular habit of
doing; assuming that, generally speaking, more immediate and self-interested
concerns will win out over remoter and more altruistic ones; recognizing
that, of two conflicting ‘expert’ opinions, the reassuring one will always be
much more readily believed; and trying hard not to underestimate people’s
capacities for self-deception about motives, loyalties, values and goals. This
response needn’t go so far as the realpolitik which takes it for granted that
human beings are always inherently egoistic and self-interested, and that states
naturally replicate those motives in their dealings with one another. But the
general strategy is nevertheless to step back as far as possible from whatever
16
is liable to be infected by self-deceiving or self-gratifying misrepresentation,

in order to identify patterns of activity which have a chance of inhering
objectively in the kinds of situation which again and again come up. It
acknowledges that, while in human affairs we are never operating under
anything like laboratory conditions with surrounding circumstances held
artificially constant, nevertheless an objectively reliable way to keep ourselves
in contact with how matters actually stand is to ask what broad patterns we
can perceive in our experience, and base our future actions on projecting
those patterns forward. This whole empirically-grounded interpretive
mindset, or apparatus of pragmatic suspicion, we might well call the realism
of disillusion. It reflects long-embedded human experience of having been
regularly disillusioned whenever ideology or blinkered groupthink has first
obscured and then collided with reality; and it seeks deliberately to puncture
in advance any further such illusions under which we might be labouring
going forward.
Now evidently our climate and environmental future is an intensely
political matter. It is also something which we daren’t misrepresent to
ourselves if we can possibly avoid doing so, especially at this now very
late stage –the stakes (the habitability of the planet) being just too high.
So there is a premium in this area, perhaps above all others, on bringing a
determinedly disillusioned eye to the scrutiny of our prospects –that is, on
submitting our hopes to the test of a firmly empirical realism, in order to
distinguish whatever may be robust in them from whatever is a product of
wishful thinking.
What, then, does such a scrutiny reveal?
The vicious syllogism

I think it now plainly tells us that if we had been going to prevent destructive
climate change, we would have put in place genuine constraints on our
emissions-generating behaviour worldwide quite soon after this first became
a live issue, instead of dragging our collective feet from the 1980s through
Rio 1992 to Katowice 2018 and beyond, until it was much too late; but we
didn’t; and so, we’re not going to prevent it. This little argument, which in
After Sustainability I called ‘the vicious syllogism’, is valid (that is to say, its
conclusion is guaranteed if its premises are true) and its minor premise, at any
rate, clearly is true. To the disillusioned eye, the vision informed by carefully
rejecting the temptations of illusion, we palpably didn’t do what was needed
by way of putting serious constraints in place when we had the chance. We
learnt to talk the talk over this period, but only ever to walk as much of
the walk as would enable us to go on talking –as the sad succession of last-
chance saloons along the way (Copenhagen, Cancun … Paris) makes plain
enough. The form standardly taken by wishful thinking over this period, as
17
I suggested in the Introduction, has been that of ‘sustainable development’.

This approach has not only failed to deliver change of anything like the order
required since it started to figure in mainstream policymaking: it was evidently
always going to fail. It looks hard-headedly pragmatic at first blush: having
quantified future needs for ecological resources to sustain welfare levels at least
equal to our own, we work back, again quantifiably, to what we must do or
refrain from doing now to ensure that those future needs can be met. But this
whole purported constraint from the future depends on our believing what
we want to believe, because under pressure it is as full of escape clauses as a
dodgy insurance contract. Its apparent pragmatism turns on gross exaggeration
of our powers to predict and control, and does so in the service of supposed
stewardship obligations to future generations which are no more than pseudo-
obligations, since the only people interpreting them and monitoring how far
we are meeting them are ourselves –that is, present people who are obviously
interested parties. Its basic purpose, and the real reason why environmental
concern got mainstreamed on this model, has been to ensure that we have
been able to continue wishfully shunting the last-chance saloon-car further
on down the track without ever banging up against any buffers within the
model –although, of course, the real-world buffers are rapidly looming up.
Meanwhile, the hypothetical major premise of the vicious syllogism (“If
we had been going to …”) depends on the assumption that we are now
out of time for the required changes, and thus looks as well grounded in
scientific evidence and hard-headed economic, sociological and political
observation as any empirically based counterfactual well could be. Perhaps
the most effective way to demonstrate this point is to invoke the concept
of the global carbon budget. What warms the atmosphere by trapping solar
heat (the ‘greenhouse effect’) is basically the accumulation of carbon dioxide
resulting from increasingly carbon-intensive human activity since the start
of the Industrial Revolution. Focusing on the cumulative nature of these
emissions, we can easily think of the difference between the amount of
human-generated CO2 already aloft, and the amounts which will, as they
are reached, produce various degrees of warming above the Earth’s pre-
industrial state: 1.5ºC, 2ºC and so on upwards (there being a reasonably
linear relationship between the atmosphere’s CO2 burden and global surface
temperature). These differences are then our still-available carbon budgets,
the amounts of extra emitted CO2 to which we must limit ourselves if we
want to retain a calculable chance of keeping atmospheric temperature rise
to each of those identified levels in turn. The current scientific consensus at
the time of writing (September 2020) is that we must live within a budget of
at most around 495 billion more tons of emitted CO2 (some expert estimates
suggest a considerably lower figure) in order to have an evens chance of
keeping warming below 1.5ºC –the level which has latterly been taken
by the climate policy community, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on
18
Climate Change (IPCC), as just about manageable for the ongoing viability
of global civilization in something recognizably like its present form.
Four hundred and ninety-five billion tons of CO2 sounds a lot –enough,
perhaps, to give us time for adaptation, for developing the cleaner
technologies, carbon capture and storage systems and widespread substitution
of renewables for fossil fuels which we will need either to keep within our
carbon budget for the foreseeable future, or to move us into a zero-carbon
regime when the budget runs out. Visit the Carbon Countdown website
maintained by The Guardian newspaper, however, and that impression of
global elbow-room evaporates. This web page displays figures, changing in
real time, for the total remaining carbon budget for a 66 per cent chance of
2ºC; that is, the target level to which the Paris accords supposedly committed
everyone, 1.5ºC being still aspirational at that point although it has since been
recognized as the level at which the commitment should have been set. The
carbon budget for the higher figure is of course somewhat larger, at around
647 billion tons, but there still only remain some sixteen and a half years
before at current emissions rates we overspend it. That is perhaps startlingly
less than one might have expected, but the really shocking figure is the one for
ongoing emissions. Confronting you at each visit to the site is a countdown
clock showing the worldwide total in tons of CO2 equivalent which has
been emitted since you clicked in. As the numbers on this clock flicker past,
so swiftly that you can only keep track of the mounting thousands, the scale
of the challenge facing humanity emerges literally before your eyes. At each
of several visits during the period of writing, this counter was registering
atmospheric carbon being added worldwide at the rate of some 77,000 tons
per minute, or about 1,280 tons –a weight of carbon roughly equal to that
of 103 new-style Routemaster buses –being pumped up into the skies every
second. (That’s some four thousand buses-worth since you started reading this
paragraph, unless you can speed-read.) And when you remind yourself that
atmospheric carbon dioxide is a gas, and therefore how much of it would be
required to tot up to just a single ton in weight, and how far (for instance)
you personally would have to drive in order to emit even that much, you can’t
help being overwhelmed by a sense of the gigantic scale, utter relentlessness
and frenzied intensity at which human activity is spewing out this climate-
destabilizing pollutant around the globe.
And of course by the same token, these eye-glazing magnitudes emphasize
the scale and rapidity of the changes in all this activity which would be
required if we are to have any prospect of hitting even the higher (Paris)
target. An effective graphic representation of what would be involved is at
Figure 1, which pictures what would be required to give us a slightly better
than 66 per cent, but still not especially confidence-inspiring, chance of
keeping within 2ºC. (It is worth asking yourself whether you would get
on a plane with this chance of not crashing en route.) Even on the very
19
Figure 1: The carbon cliff-edge: global carbon dioxide cuts required for a 75
per cent chance of not exceeding 2°C, with a peak today
Source: Image from The Burning Question: We Can’t Burn Half the World’s Oil, Coal and Gas:
So How Do We Quit? by Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark, foreword by Bill McKibben.
Reprinted with permission from Profile Books and Greystone Books.
optimistic assumption that emissions have now peaked, the precipitously

plunging curve from that peak gives to anyone who has ever ridden a
fairground roller coaster a very vivid impression of what the necessary
changes would feel like. Professor Kevin Anderson of the University of
Manchester and the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
has argued that in pursuing these changes we should be looking at global
energy-related CO2 emissions decreasing by 10–20 per cent per year over
the next decades: ‘Flying, driving, heating our homes, using our appliances,
basically everything we do would need to be zero carbon.’ And plainly, to
achieve such cuts would mean economic and social upheaval on a scale on
which the ‘austerity’ imposed in the UK after 2010, for instance, simply
wouldn’t register.
Nor would this be just (just!) a matter of people worldwide altering their
directly energy-using behaviours. As I noted in the Introduction, a crucial
driving force for dangerously high levels of global CO2 emissions at the
present time is the heavy reliance on coal-based electricity generation in the
rapidly growing economies of China and India (among others countries, but
these are the principal ones). Simplifying boldly, we can identify two main
motive forces for this growth. First, there is the desire of the peoples of these
countries to attain something much closer to Western material standards of
living, as exhibited to them by a globalized media, than traditionally they
have enjoyed. Second, the deindustrialization of many Western economies,
such as the British, in recent decades has exported much production –and
20
therefore, much of the energy-demands of production –of the material goods

supporting their favoured lifestyles to these countries where labour costs are
cheaper. (This process, which essentially transfers Western responsibility for
carbon emissions eastwards, is the reason why it is unjustifiable, even if it
were a practical policy, to blame China –in particular –for the intractability
of the climate crisis.) There would seem from our entire track record to
date to be no credible scenario under which all this indirect energy demand
is shifted to renewables within anything like the necessary time frame and
given current renewables technology. Hence, there would equally seem to
be no chance whatever of even beginning to reverse these trends while the
West remains firmly attached to a way of life heavily dependent on material
goods (and their cross-global transit) as well as in itself very energy-intensive.
Hence, in turn, the vitally necessary changes represented by the plunging
curve must also include widespread abandonment of the consumerist lifestyles
and expectations which are currently interlocked with global capitalism, and
correspondingly a very significant localization of power to communities
and away from global elites with vested interests in the centralized fossil-fuel
state. That means a decisive shift away from neo-liberal capitalism as the
default socio-economic mode in the North and West of the world –even
if we factor in the controlled roll-out of negative emissions technologies
(themselves still very speculative) for reabsorbing already-emitted carbon
and do not rely on these as justification for resiling from any of the other
requirements, but essentially use them as ‘belt and braces’. Nor would there
be any real prospect that even this epochal recension of priorities would be
effective without an accompanying and very significant change in Northern
and Western attitudes to overseas aid aimed at mitigating at least some of the
impacts of global heating already in the system on the areas of the world most
exposed to those consequences, as well as at building renewable capacity and
local economic resilience in those areas.
Attempting to envisage shifts of this order, in all their geopolitical,
economic, organizational, cultural and lifestyle dimensions, makes it
irresistibly clear not just how drastic are the changes in question, but also
that change at such breakneck speed is without the faintest shadow of a
forerunner in human affairs. As Anderson soberly puts it, ‘we simply have
no precedent for transforming our economies in line with our commitments
to avoid dangerous … climate change’. Nothing in any human experience
to date suggests that change of that order in that kind of timescale could be
practically possible.
A bleak prospect
So the claim that we can’t now turn things around and avoid a succession
of climate-driven disasters within the window of opportunity which we
21
have left ourselves appears to be decisively vindicated by these empirically

realistic considerations. This is an ugly conclusion, but one which recent
thinkers about the issue have increasingly been reaching. As well as my
own work, a wide diversity of authors (Anderson, as mentioned, together
with Jem Bendell, Clive Hamilton, Dale Jamieson, Tim Mulgan, Rupert
Read and David Wallace-Wells) now make the working assumption that
climate change, somewhere between seriously disruptive and catastrophic,
is no longer something we must find ways of avoiding, but something we
are going to have to live with. Parallel to this recognition is the rise of the
‘Anthropocene’ trope with its defining acceptance that human beings have
decisively altered the atmosphere and set in motion a mass extinction as
drastic as any produced by Earth-system changes over geological time.
Ah, but –someone might protest –what about the Paris Agreement? Hasn’t
that been the game-changer which gives us a better chance? As Brian Heatley
and Rupert Read point out, however, in a paper from the think tank Green
House, achievement of the Paris goals depends entirely on the self-monitored
meeting by each signatory country of its self-set emissions reduction targets.
The apparent plausibility of these targets is largely an artefact of setting a
modest-seeming annual reduction commitment against a target date which
still feels comfortably distant –and we need only recall the racing carbon-
counter to have the gravest doubts about that. But we shouldn’t in any case
need that reminder to make us realistically cynical about such a process, when
entered upon by countries still uniformly committed to economic growth and
rising material living standards, and therefore resembling nothing so much as
a bunch of alcoholics left to agree and police their own safe drinking levels.
Subsequent developments up to and including the 2018 Conference of the
Parties at Katowice (focused on fiddling the rule book while Rome burns)
provide no grounds at all for modifying that comparison.
Moreover, even if such a process inspired any confidence (and as climate
scientists had in fact pointed out well beforehand), the whole regime based
on the 2ºC target is still called into question by highly likely feedback effects
of which it takes no account, such as release of methane from thawing
permafrost or increased heat absorption by the ocean as the Arctic ice
melts. So even though the rogue Trump administration didn’t manage to
wreck the whole Paris-initiated process, the clear implication of all this to
a disillusioned eye is that global temperature rise will be at the very least
3–4ºC over pre-industrial levels by 2100, and more likely 4–5ºC –taking
us into a world which has been described by those in a position to know as
‘incompatible with any reasonable characterisation of an organised, equitable
and civilised global community … [and] devastating for many if not the
majority of ecosystems’.
It is no argument at all against an empirical realism this bleak that it
goes unacknowledged, and still less acted on, in the official policy world.
22
The truths which it would force us to acknowledge are very hard, and
modern telly-democratic electoral politics, with its crass simplifications,
brief attention spans and routine substitution of slogans for thought, has
not characteristically been an arena in which hard truths can be faced and
then fed into policymaking. That we are already in for what a former UK
government Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington, has described as a
‘perfect storm’ of food, water and energy shortages, entailing famine, disease
and homelessness on an epic scale, with associated worldwide migratory
pressures and resource wars, is not going to form the starting point of any
election manifesto under present political conditions –and this includes the
manifestos of Green parties which have undertaken to operate under those
conditions. It is far easier for the political and policy community to stay in
denial with the paradigm of ‘sustainable development’, and its climate-change
corollary of managed incremental (or would-be incremental) emissions
constraints. I have commented already on what this paradigm does for us
by way of giving comfort to wishful thinking. What it certainly doesn’t do
is mandate messy and dangerous challenges to global corporate power, the
world trade regulations which seek to lock that power into place, nor the
governing elites who profit so grotesquely by these arrangements. Hence,
in large measure, its continuing official hegemony. Appropriate action in
the public realm would, as I have shown, need to be driven by policies for
the decisive ending and indeed reversal of material ‘progress’ and for the
best available mitigation of a now gravely alarming climate and ecological
future. No such policies are imaginable from any plausible government of
any fossil-fuel state as currently constituted. So it looks as if what is already
firmly on course to be disastrous won’t be addressed, or even recognized,
in time to prevent its escalating into catastrophe.
How might this escalation progress through the lifetime of someone
born around now? We could divide the process roughly into three phases,
the first of these characterized by widespread and various forms of denying
the situation’s seriousness, until the reality of disastrous impacts becomes
unignorable; then a desperate resort to heroic technology and authoritarian
political management: the failure of which will deliver us into an increasingly
Hobbesian world of the kind imagined in John Lanchester’s recent novel
The Wall, where getting one’s survival strategy in first is the only thing
that really matters to nations and increasingly to individuals. This division
is illustrative and all the hazards of forecasting must be remembered. That
said, it is empirically realistic to suppose that in the first of these phases, the
world will by and large keep soldiering on within the Paris framework, or
patched-up successors based on equally flawed premises, because facing up to
the inadequacy of that approach would simply demand too huge a political
and lifestyle shift. As this strategy fails, however, and the ‘perfect storm’ which
Beddington anticipated from the impacts of continually rising emissions
23
starts to become unignorable (he dated this development at somewhere

around 2030), responses in the second phase will include a combination
of command-and-control energy substitution (too little too late), border
controls against forced migration, resource wars for the remaining fossil
fuels and predictably mismanaged geo-engineering interventions, while
the Paris-plus regime finally unravels. This trajectory will not be simply
business as usual because it will take place within a context of at least would-
be mitigation, but it will still be mitigation designed, on the ‘sustainability’
model, for pretending that we are doing far more than actually we are, and
so for achieving much less than is called for. It will take us maybe to a 3–
4ºC world rather than the 4–5ºC which would have resulted from business
as usual.
By around mid-century, however, massive feedback effects from our
failure to control global heating to 2ºC up to that point will have started to
become evident. These will arise specifically from the release of methane
from thawing permafrost, the effects of rainforest dieback and ocean
warming in reducing carbon dioxide absorption and significantly rising sea
levels from melting polar ice. Their consequences will entail sea-level rise
of at least 3–4 feet with many low-lying coastal areas, including in Europe
and the US, becoming uninhabitable; many more extreme weather events
such as major storms and widespread flooding; high temperatures over land
making outdoor work difficult or impossible in some months of the year,
with dustbowl conditions in many areas currently heavily populated or
intensively farmed, and resulting food and water insecurity leading to severe
famine and drought in high-population areas within the global South and
a range of direct and indirect health impacts elsewhere.
While the broad parameters of these effects have been explored in scientific
modelling which has already been done, they are individually unpredictable
and could well be more severe than this suggests. (The general trend is for
improved modelling to show up previous figures as underestimates.) Even
less predictable are the ways in which they will interact with each other and
with the changes that will already have been set in train in the first half of
the century by the break-up of the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Plausibly to be anticipated on the basis of
the historical record are wars over resources and territorial defence which
will massively destabilize the international balance of power and global
security –and it will be a significant stroke of luck if some of these wars
don’t involve a nuclear dimension.
Disillusioned hope … ?
That, if we are looking to be empirically realistic, is the future for my
grandchildren –and of course for the rest of their generation across the
24
world and those generations which will follow. It is a bleak prospect indeed.
Is it also hopeless?
With this question we are prompted to explore further into the idea of
hope than the brief foray in the Introduction took us. I said there that hope
for the human future is not optional, and linked that claim to its arising
out of the energy of life itself. But there are of course a variety of possible
futures, including the one just sketched, through which life in its human
manifestation might persist. Is there anything in the nature of hope to demand
that we invest it in something more ambitious than whatever a disillusioned
empiricism suggests is realistic? My whole argument in this book is going
to turn on an affirmative answer here.
Hope, as I suggested in those introductory remarks, is the form taken
for a creature which can think about its future by life’s instinctive always-
ongoingness. Life’s commitment to itself takes, in creatures conscious of
having a future into which they are always moving, the form of a forward-
facing generic trust. That trust exhibits itself to us as hopefulness in respect
of the particular projects in which we invest our life-energies. And because
having that kind of consciousness of self over time means being aware of one’s
exposure to contingency, the condition of realism arises in connection with
it: we cannot just trust blindly to life, as creatures without conscious foresight
do, but intentionally direct our living forwards through hope invested in
our various projects and purposes. Where we invest it is then guided by
what we are aware of being able realistically to hope for, and that is how
we steer ourselves through a world of contingency: where hope in ordinary
cases evidently fails the condition of realism, we withdraw it and transfer
it elsewhere as part of the very process of conscious life moving forward.
But we cannot withdraw hope in that way from the overall project of life,
which expresses itself precisely as generic hopefulness seeking out plausible
projects. Thus we have no option but to hope that we can overcome threats
to the viability of the human life which manifests itself in us as hope. That
is the fundamental sense in which we must take the claim that hope is not
optional in face of the climate emergency –life itself in us will not let us
just give up on any prospect of a human future and enjoy what is left to us
in the present while we can.
It is to this sense, I think, that the basic notion of sustainability must be
related, if we are not to misconceive it. That concept tends to be interpreted
economistically as the intergenerational transmission of equal resource-
quanta. But its compelling force as a goal for action comes from much
deeper down –from recognition that it expresses the energy of continuity
at the core of life. The hope that what we do can be sustainable at bottom
expresses an intuitive awareness that a crucial part of the point of life is just
to iterate itself onwards. The underlying impulse of sustainability, in other
words, is life-hope.
25
But then, to press again in a different form the question from the start
of this section: how much does sustainability, so understood, demand? Are
the very reduced prospects which seem to be all that empirical realism now
leaves us, hopeless in that sense?
On these grounds, surely not. Life and hope seem so connected that
where life remains at all, no prospect can be completely hopeless, and we
are certainly not here confronting the final end, either of human or –despite
the forecast sixth mass extinction –of all other life either. Moreover, it seems
possible for at least some of us to go on hoping that anyone about whom
one actually cares will belong to a lucky minority. Those will be people
living in currently temperate zones which will become warmer but still for
a time remain habitable. They will need to live outside urban areas where
life-support systems will collapse, and beyond the suburban wastelands
in which people will find themselves stranded as transport infrastructure
unravels. They will need somewhere with some access to land which can
be made productive and on which well-integrated, intelligently led and
practicably defensible local communities can be reconstituted. (Continuingly
habitable areas will in this scenario depend on self-sufficiency not only in
food and other necessary goods, but also in effective weaponry.) And these
lucky ones may be able to insulate themselves from the wider global effects
of climate destabilization for some considerable time. Thinking parochially
(as in respect of such a future one has little option but to do), this is all fairly
readily imaginable for at least parts of Britain, which is not only temperate
and even yet incompletely suburbanized, but which starts the process of
insulating itself from wider chaos with the great advantage of being already
an island. (See, again, Lanchester’s story The Wall.) This prospect is grim,
but it is plainly distinct from the classic post-nuclear-holocaust situation
where, in Khrushchev’s chilling prediction, ‘the living would envy the dead’.
We should surely be foolish to claim that life under these conditions –at
the favoured end of the feasible –could never be worth living in default of
anything better.
It would nevertheless clearly involve hugely diminished human possibilities,
even for the lucky minority. Our recognition of and reaction to this reflects
our strong tendency, already noted, to think of what sustainability requires
in moral terms, and specifically in terms of justice –as placing us under an
obligation to leave future people no worse off, at least in essentials, than
we currently find ourselves. (Hence, of course, arises the dominant picture
of this requirement as to be operationalized economistically.) There seems
to be an obligation of this kind on us in the present to direct our hopes
towards a much more generous future. Thus to envisage a world in which
there is any human flourishing at all would involve hoping for one where
nobody, wherever or whenever born, starves or suffers systematic deprivation
merely by that chance of birth; a world where everyone enjoys, as of right,
26
a normal human lifespan in reasonable health, is able to gain respect and

obtain reasonably fulfilling work and has the chance of finding a life-partner
and raising a family. Plainly, from the perspective of disillusioned empirical
realism, this is not what a destabilizing climate and a degrading biosphere
are going to permit, as the twenty-first century advances towards the
twenty-second, to any but a lucky minority, who would therefore be most
unjustly favoured by geography and history. Moreover, if the only hope
which such realism leaves us is that these lucky ones might continue (for
a while) to enjoy some limited material well-being, that might seem to be
giving up on human flourishing as such. For it is in the nature of human
beings to flourish, if they do, as self-aware moral agents, and in the kind of
moral regime envisaged, where those remaining in the habitable interstices
of an irreparably damaged world would depend for their survival on the
abandonment of others to destitution, famine and war, any prospect of
human flourishing might seem hopeless.
Simply as far as that goes, however, it could well be responded that such
a view allows the best to become the enemy of the sensibly pragmatic. It is
surely better, even morally better in a longer view, that some people continue
to live tolerable lives, albeit under hugely adverse global conditions, than
that none do –if only because that preserves the outside chance of gradually
turning things around again for greater numbers, and at least maintains some
continuity of civilization in the meanwhile, albeit a form of civilization
for which no universalist morality remains possible. If the global economy
collapses quickly enough under pressure from accumulating climate disasters,
the warming to which we are already committed just might not trigger
positive feedback drastic enough to make the whole planet permanently
incapable of supporting organized human life, so that a narrow pathway
through to a broken but still partially habitable world may remain open.
And while a just world is no doubt ideally best, one in which some people
retain enough elbow room for keeping alive the aspiration to justice along
with other characteristic features of the human project seems as if it must
be better than nothing. Hope for the better still makes sense even when it
must be entertained in full recognition that the best is beyond our reach.
And as regards our present moral obligation, as decent people, to hope
for something more generous, it has to be admitted that morality in this
context now cuts, very sharply, both ways. For as well as a requirement
to pursue and affirm justice, we are also under a moral requirement to
be honest. Honesty, as I have been pointing out all through this chapter,
demands that we do not protect our hopes for a just future world from
failure to meet the condition of realism by indulging ourselves in any of the
multiple forms of activist denial which are so readily available –extending
all the way from the broken-backed sustainable development paradigm
at the policy level, to the manifold displacement activities with which
27
environmentalism prompts us as individuals. I have written elsewhere

about denial of this kind. Unlike the still too-common denialism driven by
financial and other interests vested in not admitting anthropogenic climate
change to be serious or even real –driven, that is, by greed where not by
mere ignorance –it demands respect: those who resort to it do so to make
space for honourable hopes. But for all that, its general form is the attitude
classically expressed when a recent survey question asked respondents
whether they thought it was too late to stop drastic climate change: ‘No,
of course it’s not too late, because if you think it’s too late, then where’s
the drive to act immediately?’ If we are being empirically realistic, this
is just the chocolate-cake logic of wishful thinking (“Of course it’s not
too fattening, because if I thought it was too fattening, I might have to
not eat it”). The danger of deploying that logic is not so much that you
risk putting on weight, as that you do so through forsaking contact with
reality. And then in the climate case, the hope for which you might thus
have made room turns into an insidious kind of self-indulgence –it has
come to be more about what you can bear to accept and confront, than
about its ostensible objects. The bottom line is that the moral requirement
of being honest here must trump that of pursuing justice, since there is at
least some chance of meeting it.
So realism might seem bound to confine our hopes to these very
disillusioned prospects. But this is before we reckon further with the inner
dynamic of life-hope itself –hope as it both expresses life-energy and engages
with the conditions of life-continuity. Such hope of its very nature demands
to be directed at sustainability in its much fuller sense: human flourishing
within a rich and diverse biosphere indefinitely into the future.
… or life-hope?
This can be seen most clearly by foregrounding the impersonal dimension
beyond the personal concern when, say, I worry about the future awaiting
my infant grandson. What do I hope for him? Well, first of all the basics –
conditions in which he can live healthily and in physical safety, and so on.
I am also concerned that he should be able to find meaning and purpose,
encounter beauty and experience wonder. Being aware that humans cannot
flourish in any of these ways without a functioning biosphere surrounding
and supporting them, I also hope that this will continue to be the case while
he lives. But the key point is that I don’t hope all this for him just as some
particular individual about whose welfare I happen to be exercised, but as
someone for whom I have a grandfatherly concern –and that is, a concern
arising directly out of the natural ongoingness of life. That makes a crucial
difference. For if what I hope for on his behalf arises thus, it would be
completely self-defeating not to hope for it as something which I must also
28
at the same time hope that he will, in his turn, be in a position to hope for
in respect of his own children and grandchildren, and then they for theirs.
I take over this thought gratefully from my fellow philosopher Rupert
Read, though I give it a form slightly different from that in which he has
expressed it. His version of the argument is that if we care for our children,
we must care equally for whatever they will care for, which will mean caring
in just the same way for our grandchildren, for our great-grandchildren and
so onwards. Our care for the nth generation will always therefore be just as
intense as that which we feel for our immediate descendants, and this will
motivate us to avoid harming any future generation as we should flinch from
harming our own children. This avoidance will then take the form of our
adopting present practices premised on indefinite biospheric integrity. That
formulation in terms of care, I have to confess, seems to me implausible.
Care is surely the kind of feeling which quite naturally attenuates with either
physical or temporal distance, and I am perfectly happy to admit to not
caring a hoot for my thirtieth-century descendants, if any. But my present
grandfatherly concern for my grandson’s flourishing does I think commit
me in the way I have suggested to desiring (now) the indefinitely continuing
sustainability, as we should try to retrieve the term from economistic misuse
by calling it, of humans-in-the-biosphere. This plainly cannot just be a matter
of his managing to get through and out, nor of his own grandchildren doing
so, before a degrading biosphere becomes terminally damaged. Rather, I have
to hope for the continuance of a healthy relation between human beings
and the biosphere as the basis of life’s essential ongoing intergenerationality,
its iterating itself onwards as far as we can foresee, and further yet. And my
hope for this is not born from any pseudo-obligation owed to distantly future
people, with all the baggage of conceptual difficulties which that idea drags
in its train, but from a genuine duty owed to my children and grandchildren,
to whom I am actually answerable in the way of intergenerationality. To put
this in something like Read’s terms: if you really love your kids, you owe
them your best efforts to retain an indefinitely habitable planet.
Now a wide variety of possible ways of life, economic arrangements
and distributions of power, resources and opportunity could be consonant
with that onward iteration of habitability (so that concerns for justice, just
as such, are beside this particular point). But what certainly could not be
so consonant is the sort of human-driven further degradation of the living
world which a disillusioned empirical realism, as outlined previously, now
gives us overwhelming warrant to expect. Accepting such a future as all we
have left to hope for would involve a deep betrayal of the life-continuity
which life’s inherent intergenerationality itself charges us to foster.
‘Grandfatherly concern’, in other words, is not a concern just for the
appealing little individual who happens to be my grandson, but for how in
and through him life moves forward from ancestor to descendant becoming
29
in turn ancestor, and so onwards. It is an impersonal concern which demands

robustly stable continuity in the biosphere within which human life has
always been so intimately embedded. (It is not just for technical reasons that
we could not export ourselves to carry on human life in a geodesic dome
on an alien planet.) More, it demands such a biosphere non-instrumentally.
Just as hope for my grandson’s flourishing cannot stop with him, but invests
itself in the indefinite continuance of a human heritage in which he and
I are linked, as an expression of impersonal life-impulse flowing through us,
so life-hope cannot consort with an attitude to the biosphere which regards
it as purely instrumental to human flourishing –as having done its job, as it
were, provided humanly habitable enclaves remain. Hope invested in human
heritage has of its nature to be more non-anthropocentrically generous than
that: its impersonality in relation to particular human individuals is denatured
unless it carries over into non-specificity in the literal sense, a non-species-
centred hope for a world of resilient and robustly generative (which means,
prolifically diverse) life-at-large. We can’t hope thus for an ongoing human
heritage subserved by a destabilized and precarious biosphere which manages
to supply us with just enough patchy support for viability. Sustainability, as
in the nature of hope and life we have to hope for it, has to mean indefinite
human flourishing within an independently rich and diverse living world. The
hope that my grandson’s grandson, and his in turn, will be able to hear the
curlew’s call from the moorland, and the hope that the curlew will go on
calling in springtime whether or not anyone hears it, are both expressions,
in the uniquely human mode of hope, of the same undifferentiated and
indefeasible life-energy which vibrates in us, in the curlew and in all life.
But this brings us to the crux which it has been the point of this whole
chapter to make explicit. We have seen that investing hope in the human
future is not optional, not something which we can ever really abandon
while we remain alive, and also that it must consciously meet the condition
of realism if it is to maintain itself as hope rather than collapsing into wishful
thinking. Yet we have seen also that the internal logic of life-hope requires
us to envisage for that future a kind of sustainable world, the transition to
which it is, if we are honest, no longer realistic to regard as achievable, as
long as we understand realism as shaped by what is empirically plausible.
This bind is uninhabitable –not only intellectually, but also vitally. The
only way out of it is to appeal to a different way of understanding realism.
The next chapter begins that task.
30
2
Transformation?
The realism of empirical plausibility represents, as I said in the Introduction,
our taking the parameters for what is count as thinking realistically from a
certain underlying conception of, or set of unquestioned assumptions about,
what is fundamentally real. Central to this at least tacitly operative metaphysic
is the belief that in the nature of reality, true general laws instantiated by
what has happened are determinative of what can happen, and attention to
them is always strongly predictive of what will happen. This is so because
the basically real is thought of as a world of objects and forces located in
space-time, a world which holds together wholly impersonally and not just
as seen or grasped from some unifying perspective, and which therefore
must be organized exclusively and exhaustively by causal connections.
For impersonally and objectively –that is, removed from any notion of an
informing intention or shaping will –the only possible reason for anything’s
happening is that something else caused it to happen. These assumptions,
coupled culturally with growing technical capacity and declining religious
belief, provided the underpinning for the scientific world view as it has
been articulated and developed over the past three centuries. They are also
(and of course, relatedly) the grounding for our deeply held common-sense
conviction that you can’t ultimately buck the odds –that it is unrealistic (it ignores
how things really work) to expect more from the future than you are licensed
to expect by the pattern of probabilities derived from scrupulously careful
observation of the past. From this disillusioning common sense comes the
depressing picture which we were tracing in the first chapter of just how
intractable our climate plight must now appear.
But if life will not let us abandon hope for a genuinely sustainable human
future, if realism is a condition of all hope, and if conceiving the realistic
in terms of what is empirically plausible now leaves us no room for hope
of that order, it follows that life must insist on our conceiving the realistic
differently –which means that it must insist on something to be underpinned
by a different metaphysic of reality. That is a very tall order, given how solidly
embedded is the one which I have just sketched, the one which not only
31
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‘Oh yes, it’s true, you understand everything.’ Jennifer tightened her
arms desperately and seemed to be hesitating, then said at last: ‘No, I’m in a
muddle. I’m afraid. I should explain all wrong, as I always do. But I’ll write
to you, darling. I may not write to you for some time: or it may be to-
morrow. But I swear I’ll write. And then I’ll explain everything.’
‘And we’ll see each other again, Jennifer? We’ll meet often?’
‘Perhaps. I don’t know. It depends,’ she whispered. Her face was still
hidden, her arms firm in their strangling grip.
‘Oh yes, yes, Jennifer! Oh please! Why these mysteries? Jennifer—if—if
there’s somebody else you’re fond of I don’t mind. Why should it make any
difference to you and me? I’m not jealous.’
‘I’ll write to you,’ repeated Jennifer, very wearily whispering.
‘Soon then, soon, Jennifer. Tell me how you are, what you’re going to
do. Tell me if you go abroad, who—who you go with. Tell me everything.
Because I shall wonder and wonder. I shall imagine all sorts of things....
Jennifer....’
‘Hush, darling. I’ll be all right, I swear. And I swear that directly
everything gets clear I’ll write to you. And then we’ll see. You do trust me,
don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you must promise me to answer.’
‘Yes.’
‘But don’t write before I write to you.’
‘No.’
‘Good-bye, my darling.’ She let her arms fall to her sides.
At the door Judith turned, forcing her mouth into a smile, but Jennifer
was not looking at her. Once again, only the tangle of her hair was visible,
burning in the lamplight.
The end of the term.

There had been no word from Jennifer. She had vanished. But she was to
be trusted: you had only to wait and she would write. Or was she not to be
trusted?
Her copper bowl stood on the table, and there seemed no other rumour
of her left in the whole place, save on the tongues of people; and even they
were sparing of her name, spoke it with doubt and hesitation.
On the last day of term, Judith, peering a moment into the aching
emptiness of Jennifer’s room, saw the cord of her old manly Jaeger
dressing-gown lying in the grate.
12
Then, for months, there was nothing in life save work: a careful planning
out of day and night in order that sleeping and eating and exercise might
encroach as little as possible on the working hours.
Soon, Midsummer term was back with unprecedented profusion of
blossom on the fruit trees, buttercups in the meadows, nightingale choruses
in the cedars and limes. But now it seemed neither exciting nor delightful to
be kept awake till dawn by nightingales; for sleepless nights lowered your
examination value. By day the two thrilling and unearthly pipe-notes of the
cuckoo seemed a mechanical instrument of torture: you found yourself
desperately counting the calls, waiting between each, with a shrinking of all
the nerves, for the next to strike. Almost you resented the flowery orchards
and meadows with their pagan-like riot of renewal. You noted them with a
dull eye from behind the stiff ponderous academic entrenchment of your
mind. But sometimes in the night, in dreams, the orchards would not be
denied: they descended upon you and shook out fragrance like a blessing;
they shone in pale drifts, in clouds, in seas,—all the orchards of England
came before you, luminous and stirring beneath the moon.
From early morning till late at night the desperate meek untidy heads of
girls were bowed over tables in the library, their faces when they lifted them
were feverish and blurred with work.
Pages rustled; pencils whispered; squeaking shoes tiptoed in and out.
Somebody tapped out a dreary tune on her teeth; somebody had a running
cold; somebody giggled beneath her breath; somebody sighed and sighed.
Outside, in the sunshine, tennis racquets struck vibrantly. Long ago, you
also had played tennis in May.
Mabel had a fortification of dictionaries around her corner; whenever
you looked up she caught your eye and smiled weakly from a hollow and
twisted face. Mabel had wished evil to Jennifer. But that was so long ago it
had ceased to matter.
‘Mabel, you’ve worked four hours on end. Come to lunch now.’
‘No, thank you, Judith. I feel I don’t want any lunch. I’d rather go
straight on and perhaps have a cup of tea later.’
‘Mabel, you’re to come with me.’
She came. But as often as not she laid down her fork after one mouthful
and sat and stared in front of her; then crept back to the library.
The copper bowl was filled this term with golden tulips or with dark
brown wallflowers.
Where was Jennifer?
Examination week. The sky was fiercely blue all day; the air breathless,
heavy. To walk into the town was to walk into a steam bath, where footsteps
moved ever more languidly, and the dogs lay panting on the pavement, and
the clocks seemed to collect themselves with a vast effort for their chiming.
This week there was nothing in your mind save the machine which
obeyed you smoothly, turning out dates and biographies, contrasting,
discussing, theorizing.
Judith walked in a dream among the pale examination faces that flowed
to their doom. Already at nine o’clock the heat struck up from the streets,
rolled downwards from the roofs. By midday it would be extremely
unpleasant in Cambridge.
This was the great examination hall. Girls were filing in, each carrying a
glass of water, and searching in a sort of panic for her place. Here was a
white ticket labelled Earle, J. So Judith Earle really was expected, an
integral part of this grotesque organized unreality. No hope now.
The bench was hard. Beside her sat a kind broad cow-like creature with
sandy hair and lashes. Her ruminative and prominent eyes shed pity and
encouragement. She was a good omen.
All over the room girls’ heads turned, nodding and winking at friends,
whispering, giggling and grimacing with desperate bravery. One simulated
suicide by leaning her bosom on her fountain pen.
Just behind sat Mabel. Her face was glistening and ghastly, and she
sniffed at a bottle of smelling salts.
‘Mabel, are you going to faint?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I generally feel faintlike first thing in the morning.
I’ll get better later.’
‘Mabel, you’re not fit—you mustn’t——’
‘Sh! I’m all right. Only it makes my head feel stupid.’ She stared aghast.
‘I don’t seem to be able to remember a thing.’
‘Don’t worry, Mabel. It’ll all come back when you settle down to it. I’ll
look around now and then and see if you’re all right.’
‘Thanks, Judith.’
‘Poor Mabel! Good luck. Wait for me afterwards and I’ll take you to
have a cup of coffee. That’ll do you good.’
‘I shall enjoy that. Good luck, Judith.’
She summoned a smile, even flushed faintly with pleasure.
Then panic descended suddenly upon Judith. Her head was like a
floating bubble; there was nothing in it at all. She caught at threads of
knowledge and they broke, withered and dissolved like cobwebs in the
hand. She struggled to throw off a crowding confusion of half-remembered
words.
Unarm Eros, the long day’s task is done. And we must sleep.... Peace!
Peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse
asleep?... Who said that? Who could have said such a thing? I am Duchess
of Malfi still.... Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young. Beatrice
died young too. Here Mother ... bind up this hair in any simple knot ... ay
that does well.... Prithee undo this button.... Thank you, Sir.... Cordelia!
Cordelia! So many of them died young. There were those two, you had
forgotten their names now, and Cordelia, and Desdemona too. O, thou
weed!... It might be useful to remember them.... But they had already
slipped away. This was the parting that they had Beside the haystack in the
floods. William Morris. Speak but one word to me over the corn. Over the
tender bowed locks of the corn. Gold cornfield like Jennifer. A bracelet of
bright hair about the bone. That had always been Jennifer’s bright hair.
Only a woman’s hair.... Calm hair, meandering in pellucid gold. But
Jennifer’s hair had never been calm.... Speak but one word to me. Roddy,
one whisper from you!
It was Tennyson who said: The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.... And
Browning who said: The old June weather Blue above lane and wall. Keats,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley.... What had they said? and Blake:
Bring me my bow of burning gold; Bring me my arrows of desire.... Once
you had composed a tune for that. Bring me my bow of burning gold.... Oh,
stop saying that now. Think about the origins of drama, the rise of the
universities, the development of the guilds, the order of Shakespeare’s
plays.... O God! A headful of useless scraps rattling about in emptiness—
The clock struck nine.
‘You can begin now,’ said a thin voice from the däis.
There was an enormous sigh, a rustling of paper, then silence.
The questions had, nearly all, at first glance a familiar reassuring look. It
was all right. Panic vanished, the mind assembled its energies, cooly,
precisely, the pen flew.
After an hour the first pause to cool her forehead with a stick of frozen
Eau de Cologne and to sip some water. Behind, poor Mabel’s dry little
cough and sniff went on. The head bowed low over her writing looked as if
it could never raise itself again.
Girls were wriggling and biting their pens. Somewhere the tooth-tapper
was playing her dreary tune. The Cow looked up, shed a peaceful smile
around her and continued to write, with deliberation, a little impeded by her
bosom.
Another hour fled. The trouble was having too much to say, rather than
too little. The room was rigid, dark with concentration now. There came an
appalling confusion of haste and noise, and a girl rose and ran from the
room, supported by the invigilator. The handkerchief she held to her nose
was stained sickeningly with scarlet. She returned in a little while, pallid
and tearful, resumed her seat, bowed herself once more over the paper.
Three hours. It was over. You could not remember what you had written;
but you had never felt more firm and sure of mind. Three hours nearer to
life.
Into the street once more, beneath the noon sun’s merciless down-
beating. But now its rays seemed feeble: their warmth scarcely penetrated
chilled hands and feet, or shivering, aching back.
A troop of undergraduates passed on the way from their examination
room. They looked amused and exhilarated. They stuffed their papers into
their pockets, lit pipes, straightened their shoulders and went cheerfully to
lunch.
The girls crept out in twos and threes, earnestly talking, comparing the
white slips they carried.
‘Did you do this one?’
‘What did you put for that?’
‘Oh, I say! Will they take off marks do you think?’
‘It was a beast.’
‘Oh, it might have been worse.’
Girls really should be trained to be less obviously female students. It
only needed a little discipline.
There was Mabel to be looked after. She was grateful, passive: she drank
much coffee but refused food. She broke the heavy silence once to say with
a quiet smile: ‘Of course I see now I shan’t pass—It seems a pity, after all
that work—My memory is practically gone——’
Back to the vault now for another three hours.
Suddenly round the corner came a slender, dark, sallow boy. He walked
with an idle grace, leaning slightly forward. His faint likeness to Roddy
made the heart leap; and his expression was dejected and obstinate, just as
Roddy’s would be if he were forced to spend an afternoon scribbling
infernal rubbish.
Judith paused at the entrance of the vault and looked back. His eyes were
eagerly fixed on her: and she smiled at him.
He was delighted. His funny boy face lost its heaviness and broke up
with intimate twinklings; and flashed a shyly daring inquiry at her before he
vanished round the corner.
It was like a message from Roddy, sent forward to meet her from the
new life, to say: ‘Remember I am coming.’
That day passed smoothly; and the next. The days sinking to evenings
drenched with the smell of honeysuckle and draining to phantasmal and
translucent twilights of blossom and tree-tops and starry skies, flowed
imperceptibly to their end.
Suddenly there were no answers to be written from nine till twelve, from
two till five—no lectures, no coachings, no notes, no fixed working hours.
Instead, a great idleness under whose burden you felt lost and oppressed.
The academic years were gone for ever.
13
The evening before the end of term.
Judith walked with the rest of the circle arm in arm across the grass,
down the wooded path, past the honeysuckle for the last time.
The garden spread out all her beauties that were hers alone,
overburdening the watchers, insisting:
‘See what you are leaving. Look at what you will never have again.’
The whole shrine lay wide open for the last time, baring its mysteries of
cedar and limes and nightingales, of lawns and mown hay, of blossoming
shrubs and wild flowers growing beneath them, of copper beeches and all
the high enclosing tree-tops, serenely swimming like clouds in the last of
the light.
They chose careers for each other, light-heartedly discussing the future,
and making plans for regular reunions.
‘But what’s the good?’ said one. ‘We shall all be scattered really. We
can’t come back year after year as if things would all be the same. There’s
nothing more awful than those gatherings of elderly people trying to be
girls together again. The ghastliness of pretending to get back to where one
was! If we meet again, let it be in the big world. I shall never come back
here.’
‘Oh, but I shan’t have the strength to resist it,’ said another. ‘You see I
more or less know I shall never be so happy again. I’ve got to teach brats
algebra. I shall be pulled back to indulge in vain regrets.’
‘Does it mean so much to you?’ murmured Judith. ‘You talk as if your
life was over.’
‘Something that matters—terribly to me is over,’ she said, almost
fiercely.
‘Oh!’ Judith sighed.
‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you then?’
Judith was silent, thinking how it had all meant the single tremendous
calamitous significance of Jennifer; how since her going it had been like the
muddy bed of a lake whose waters have been sapped day after day in a long
drought; like a tasteless meal to be swallowed without appetite; like a grey
drizzling unwholesome weather. Nothing had brought even a momentary
illusion of restored contentment: nothing save her copper bowl glowing for
her sake with flowers or fruit. Not one of those to whom she had turned had
been able to sooth the gnawing perpetual sore, or bury for a single day that
one face. And they knew it. The three years’ absorption in Jennifer had
separated her irrevocably from them, and, though they had kindly
welcomed her, it had been with the tacit assumption that she was not of
them.
They were so charming, so gentle, so sensitive and intelligent:
fascinating creatures: how fascinating she had never troubled to realize and
would never know now. To all, save Jennifer, that had offered itself, she had
turned an unheeding ear, a blind eye. And so much that might have been of
enduring value had offered itself: so many possible interests and
opportunities had been neglected.
There had been that girl the first year who, from the pinnacle of her
third-year eminence, had stooped, blushing and timid, with her invitation to
an evening alone. Frail temples, narrow exquisite bone of cheek and jaw,
clear little face with lips whose composure seemed the result of a vast
nervous effort, so still were they, so nearly quivering, so vulnerable; eyes
with a sad liquid brilliance in their steadfast gaze; small head with smooth
brown hair parted in the middle; narrow hands folded in her lap; she had
sat, the most important scholar in the College, like a shadow, a moth, a bird,
listening, questioning, listening again.
She was a poet. She never showed her verses, but to you she promised to
show them. She had a mind of such immaculate clarity that you feared to
touch it: yet she was offering it to you, all that evening.
It had come to nothing after all. She had retired very soon, shrinking
from Jennifer as if she were afraid.
There had been the girl with the torturing love affair that had gone
wrong. One night she had suddenly spoken of it, telling you all. You had
lingered by her with a little tenderness and pity and then passed on. She had
said, “You won’t tell Jennifer, will you?”
There had been the girl who drew portraits and who had wanted you for
a model. There had been the silent girl who read “The Book of the Dead”
night after night in her room, who was studying, so it was whispered, to
raise the devil and who looked at you with a secret smile, half malice, half
something else; there had been that most beautiful young girl in the first
year, with her cold angelic face and shining silver-fair hair; all those and
countless others had offered themselves. There had been Martin ignored
and neglected because he disliked Jennifer. And there had been books, far
more books in far more libraries: and new poetry, new music, new plays,—
a hundred intellectual diversions which you had but brushed against or
missed altogether by secluding yourself within the limits of an unprofitable
dream.
She said at last:
‘Oh yes. It means something. I don’t know yet how much. I’m afraid
now I’ve missed a lot.’
They were all silent, and she thought with nervous dread that they were
all thinking of Jennifer.
‘Isn’t it extraordinary,’ said another, ‘how time seems to have stood still
in this place? Nothing’s moved since we’ve been here. Even though I
suppose it’s all been advancing towards the Tripos, I don’t feel as if there’d
been any step forward. Everything—what’s the word?—static. Or else just
making circles. I feel I’ve been sitting in a quiet safe pool for three years.’
‘And now we’re going to be emptied out.’
And swept into new life, thought Judith longingly. Yet her heart misgave
her. The building, caressed with sunset, looked motherly and benign,
spreading its sheltering breast for the last time above its midgets. New life
might find nothing so secure and tranquil as its dispassionate protection.
The clock struck the hour pensively.
‘Well, I think it’s beastly,’ said one. ‘I’m going in to finish packing.’
Where, on this calm lime-scented last evening, was Jennifer?
14
In the end there was no time to say good-bye to anyone. Girls were
scattering, flying about with labels and suitcases, or with flat-irons to press
the frocks they were to wear in May Week.
May Week had been fun last year: five nights’ dancing on end, with
Jennifer and a young cousin of hers at Trinity, and a boy in the Navy. This
year it had not seemed worth while to accept invitations.
While Judith was engaged in strapping her boxes and throwing the
accumulated rubbish of three years out of drawers and cupboards into a
heap on the floor, a maid came smiling and said a gentleman was waiting
downstairs.
It was Martin.
‘Martin! Oh, my dear!’
‘I came on the chance, Judith. I motored up to see a man who’s going
abroad. Are you—are you staying up for May Week?’
‘No, Martin. I’m catching a train in about two hours and going straight
home.’
‘Really home, do you mean? Next door to us?’
‘Yes. Thank Heaven. It’s not let any more. Mother and I will be there
part of the summer anyway. Will you—will any of you be there?’
‘Mariella’s down there now, with the boy. And Roddy and I are going for
a bit. In fact I’m going to-day—motoring. That’s what I came for—to see if
you’d care to motor back with me.’
‘Drive home? Oh, how marvellous! You are an angel, Martin, to think of
me.’
He was as shy as ever, bending his head as he talked to her. Observing
him she thought that she herself had grown up. The loss of Jennifer had
given her a kind of self-assurance and maturity of manner, a staidness. For
the first time she was seeing Martin from an entirely detached and
unromantic angle, and she thought: “Then this is how I shall see Roddy. He
won’t confuse and entangle me any more. All that sort of thing is over for
me.”
‘It’s very nice to see you again, Judith. It’s ages since.... You look a bit
thin, don’t you?’
‘It’s those miserable exams, Martin. I did work so hard.... I don’t know
why.’
‘Oh! You shouldn’t have.’
He seemed quite overcome.
Dear Martin!... In some corner of her heart a weight was lifting....
Jennifer was suddenly remote.
‘Wait for me, Martin.... I’ll be ready in a quarter of an hour.’
She had not said good-bye to Mabel. She had been dreading that last
duty.... No time now, thank heaven, for anything prolonged.... Simplest to
write a little note and tell someone to stick it in her door.
She wrote:
‘Dear Mabel,
‘I have been called for unexpectedly in a car. I have only ten minutes to
finish packing and do all the last things. I knocked on your door a little
while ago but got no answer.’
She hesitated. Was it too gross? It was; but it must stand now; it could
not be crossed out.
‘And now I’m afraid I haven’t a minute to try and find you. I’m
dreadfully sorry not to see you to say good-bye, Mabel. Won’t it be sad
when next October comes to think we shan’t all be meeting again? You
must write and tell me what happens to you, and I will write to you. I dare
say we shall see each other again. You must let me know if you ever come
my way——’ That must stand too.... What else?... Results would be out to-
morrow—Better not to refer to them; for Mabel had certainly failed. She
had not been able to remember anything in the end. The last three days she
had given in one of two sheets of paper blank save for a few uncertain lines.
She finished:
‘I do hope you are going to get a good long rest. You do need it. You
worked so marvellously. Nobody ever could have worked harder. We’ve all
been so sorry for you feeling so ill during tripos week. It was terribly hard
luck.
‘Good-bye and love from
‘Judith.’
Nothing could be added—There was nothing more to be said. Mabel’s
face this last week came before her, blank, haggard, still watching her from
moribund eyes, and she dismissed it. She had thought she would have to
kiss Mabel good-bye: and now she would not have to.
She must be quick now, for Martin.
The car turned out of the drive and took the dusty road.
Almost she forgot to look back to see the last of those red walls.
‘I’m saying good-bye to it, Martin. Ugh! I hate it. I love it.’
The poplars seemed to grow all in a moment and hide it. It was gone.
‘Well, Martin, how are you? What’s been happening to everybody? How
are they all?’
She was slipping back, she was slipping back.
They left Cambridge behind them, and she tried to recall it, to make it
come before her eyes, and could not. The dream of wake, the dream of
sleep—which had it been?
She wondered if she would ever remember it again.
Yesterday Martin had been standing with her under the cherry tree.
Now he was telling her about his home in Hampshire. He acted as estate
agent for his mother now that his father was dead. She must really come
and stay with them and meet his mother. He was perfectly happy farming
his own land: he never wanted to do anything else. He was improving the
fishing and shooting: they had just bought a bit of land they had been after
for two years: half a mile more river and a biggish wood. Forestry was the
most fascinating subject: he was going to take it up more seriously. Martin’s
life seemed very happy, very ordered, very clear and useful. He knew what
he wanted.
The cousins had all been scattered this last year or so. Mariella had been
working with a woman vet. in London. She had spent most of last summer
at his home because she had been hard up and obliged to let the house on
the river. Peter had been there too. He seemed a nice enough little chap, but
nervy. He had a nursery governess now, and Mariella seemed to think more
about her dogs than him. At least that was the impression she gave.
Mariella, so Martin said, had not changed at all.
Julian he had scarcely seen. He thought he wrote about music for one or
two weeklies, but he didn’t know which. Also he had heard that he was
writing a ballet, or an opera or something; but he did not suppose it was
serious. He had developed asthma since the war, poor chap, and he spent all
the winter abroad and sometimes the summer too.
And Roddy. Oh, Roddy seemed to be messing about in Paris or in
London nearly always, doing a bit of drawing and modelling. Nobody could
get him to do any work: though last year he had done some sort of theatrical
work in Paris—designing some scenery or something—which had been
very successful. He was saying now that he would like to go on the stage.
Martin laughingly said he was afraid Roddy was a bit of a waster. Anyway
he was coming for a week or so, and Judith would see him for herself.
At six o’clock in the evening they stopped before the front door of her
home. There, waiting to enfold her again, was the garden. The air was sweet
with the smell of roses and syringa, the sun-flooded lawn stretched away
towards the river, and the herbaceous border was burning miraculously with
blue delphinium spires, white and yellow lilies, and great poppies.
‘Good-bye, Martin. It’s been lovely. We’ll meet soon, won’t we? Come
and fetch me.’
She went into the cool and shadowed hall. There was the old butler
hastening forward to receive her; and her mother’s voice came from the
drawing-room saying softly:
‘Is that my girl?’
PART FOUR
S HE was ready for the picnic. She wore a yellow linen frock and a hat of
brown straw, shaped like a poke bonnet and trimmed with a beautiful
yellow ribbon. It was Mamma who tied the ribbon in a great bow: the
loops fell in the nape of her neck and the ends ran down between her
shoulder blades.
‘Lovely young creature,’ said Mamma dispassionately observing her.
Judith had been home more than a week, and Mamma was being
charming. She had taken her to London to buy frocks. They had stayed at
Jules for a couple of nights, and Mamma had ordered pretty clothes
generously from her own dressmaker. She had said at last in her curious,
harsh yet beautiful voice, with a shrug of her shoulders, as Judith paraded
before her in the fifteenth model:
‘As you see, everything suits that child.’
And the dressmaker had solemnly agreed.
They had been together to a play, and to the opera; and every morning
and every night Judith sat on Mamma’s bed and they chatted together with
friendly politeness, almost with ease.
She was a woman exquisitely dressed, manicured, powdered and
scented. Her face did not age, though the colourless cheeks were now a
little hollowed, and the eyes sharper. Her eyes were like blue diamonds, and
she had an unkind reddened mouth with long pointed corners. The bones of
her face were strong and sharp and delicate, and something in the triangular
outline, in the set of the eyes, the expression of the lips, made you think of a
cat.
She was elegant in mind as well as in person, capable, quick-witted. Her
conversation was acute and well-informed over a wide field,—and men
admired and delighted in her. She had always, thought Judith, seemed to
move surrounded by men who paid her compliments. She had no women
friends that you could remember. She remarked, now and then, how much
she disliked women; and Judith had felt herself included in the
condemnation. She had never been pleased to have a daughter: only a
handsome son would have been any good to her. Her daughter had
discerned that far back in a childhood made overwise by adoration of her.
There was scarcely anything about Mamma to remember: nothing but a
vague awestruck worshipful identification of her with angels and the Virgin
Mary.
There was one night when she had come in, dressed for a dinner party,
all in white, with something floating, rosy and iridescent about her. The
dress had geraniums on it, at breast, waist and hem, a bunch on one
shoulder, and flowing geranium-coloured ribbons. There were diamonds in
her fair cloud of hair. She bent over the cot, smiling secretly with eyes and
lips as if she were very pleased; and Judith hid her face from that angelic
presence; and neither of them spoke a word. A man’s voice called:
‘Mildred!’ from the door: not Papa.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Here’s the child.’
Somebody tall and moustached came and stood beside Mamma and
looked down, making jokes and asking silly questions, and laughing
because she would neither answer nor look at him.
‘Don’t be silly, Judith,’ said Mamma.
‘She hasn’t a look of you,’ said the man.
‘No, nothing of me at all.’ Her voice sounded bored.
‘Are you sorry?’
‘Fred isn’t.’
They both laughed a little.
They stood leaning on the cot-rail in silence side by side, and Judith’s
hand stole out unnoticed and touched a geranium. She gave it a little pull
and it slipped out of the bunch into her hand.
‘Come then,’ said Mamma; and then over her shoulder: ‘Go to sleep,
Judith.’
She would have been annoyed if she had noticed the geranium. It was
not real after all: it was made of pink velvet. Judith hid it under her pillow.
Mamma slipped her hand into the man’s arm and floated away.
That was the only vivid recollection of her left. The children next door
came close on the heels of the geranium-frock in memory; and after that
they, and not Mamma, absorbed her passion. Mamma was more and more
away, or busy; and more and more obviously not interested in her daughter.
All life that was not playing next door, or alone in the garden, was lessons
and governesses. Mamma and Papa were relentless about education.
They had dual personalities in Judith’s mind. There were Mamma and
Papa who loved each other, of course, and loved their only daughter; and
sometimes took her to the seaside, and now and then to London for the
pantomime. Once or twice she went abroad with them; but on the many
occasions when they left her behind, they wrote her affectionate letters
which she dutifully replied to in French, so that they might see how her
French was progressing; and they brought her back beautiful presents.
Often when they were at home they read aloud to her in the evenings.
The three were blent in a relationship of a romantic and consoling sort,
—an ideal relationship; but then Fred and Mildred would take the place of
Mamma and Papa, and shatter the illusion. For they, alas, seemed made of
stronger and more enduring fibre: they were real: and they were not often
together: and when they were, there was often coldness and now and then
quarrelling. Life with Fred and Mildred was neither comforting nor secure.
Fred was quite an elderly man, and terrifyingly silent and pre-occupied. He
read and wrote books, and had a few elderly friends. Sometimes these
would pause for a moment between their long spaces of ignoring her; and,
searching her face, would tell her she was growing up like her father. And,
each time, their voices, their faces, their words made an unknown past
spring up in her for a moment, rich with undreamed-of vanished graces—
and she would go away with an ache of sadness. People loved Fred;
Mildred they admired and deferred to, but did not love. That was clear at an
early age, when Judith went walking with one or other of them past the row
of cottages at the top of the garden, and they stopped to speak to the cottage
people over the fences. The cottage people had one sort of voice, look,
reply for Fred; and quite another for Mildred.
Judith grew up with a faint obscure resentment against Mildred for the
way she treated Fred, for her competence—her dry, unmerciful, cynical
success in dealing with the world. Fred was not at home in the world: even
less at home, thought Judith, than she herself; but Mildred was steeped in its
wise unkindnesses. She did not seem to realize that Fred needed to be
looked after.
Then he died; and they became Mamma and Papa again. Mamma had
been gentle, tired-looking, and pale in her black clothes, and dependent for
a little while on Judith. She had not spoken much of Papa; but she seemed
engrossed in sad contemplations, and her replies to letters spoke of him
with tenderness and pride.
But all that had not lasted long. After the first six months she had not
appeared to want Judith much during vacations. She was always visiting,
always travelling, always surrounded by flattering talkative men and
bridge-playing scented women; and she came only once for a few hours to
College during the whole three years. She had a flat in Paris, with a little
room for Judith; but she expected Judith to lead her own life and to stay
with her own friends, or with the one aunt, Papa’s sister, for a part, at least,
of every vacation. Reading-parties, short visits to friends’ homes, long visits
to the old literary maiden aunt in Yorkshire, had absorbed the time. There
had been one rapturous summer month alone with Jennifer in a cottage in
Cornwall; but there had never been a visit to Jennifer’s home. Her parents,
she said, were too unpleasant to be inflicted upon anybody except herself;
and then only for brief spaces and at rare intervals. Like Roddy, she
appeared and vanished again, without a background, blazing mysteriously
into and out of ordinary life.
The hoped-for letter from Mariella, asking her to stay, had never come.
She had not seen Mariella since the summer of Papa’s death; and had had
no sign from her save one little ill-expressed conventional letter of
sympathy, sent, so the writer said, from them all “to tell you how dreadfully
we simpathise.” (But Martin had written a note on his own account.)
The wandering vacations abroad and in England had become a habit; and
now, all at once, there was home again. Mamma had come home, out of
pure kindness and consideration for Judith; for she did not love it, did not
want to live there, found it a heavy expense; had had, so she said, several
magnificent opportunities of selling it.
‘But it seemed only fair you should have it, this summer at any rate,’ she
said. ‘I know you feel romantic about it.’ She added, ‘I see no reason why
we shouldn’t spend a very pleasant summer together. You are very
companionable—quite well-read now and quite intelligent; and extremely
presentable, I will say. I do not intend you to stay with me permanently. I
should find it extremely tiresome to be always dragging you about with me;
and I daresay you’d dislike it too. We are quite unsuited to being together
for long; we should only irritate each other. I thought you might have made
up your mind what you wanted to do by now—’ (Mamma’s remarks had
generally a faint sting in their tails)—, ‘however, since you haven’t, I look
forward to having you with me, till the winter at least. You can decide then
what you will do, and I will help you if I can. Does this arrangement suit
you?’
The arrangement promised to work admirably. It was a step of
considerable importance, thought Judith, that Mamma should want her at
all. And even though they never spoke intimately, they were never at a loss
for topics: there were books, people, plays, and clothes to discuss. And
Mamma seemed happy in the garden, reading or wandering about; she
admitted that she loved going out with a basket and a pair of scissors to cut
flowers for all the rooms.
Surely it was going to be possible at last to establish a satisfactory
relationship; to feel deep affection as well as interest, admiration, and that
curious pang and thrill of the senses which her scent, her clothes, the texture
of her skin and hair gave you and had given you from babyhood.
Mamma finished tying the bow, remarked: ‘Well—enjoy yourself,’ in a
half-amused, half-mocking voice; and dismissed her to her picnic.
2
They were all collected at the front door as she came down the drive: all
except Roddy. They had ceased to hold terror for her now, or anguish: she
had grown up. She could observe the tall group they made without a tremor.
What a way they had of all standing together, as if to prevent a stranger
from breaking in among them! But that did not matter now. Since she had
met them again, there had been no approach to intimacy on either side, no
significant interchanges; and she had not minded, had not lain awake
feverish with doubt and longing. She was equal to them now. Her heart was
in a stupor or dead; and it seemed as if they were never going to disturb her
any more.
Mariella, Julian, Martin; but no Roddy....
Julian had come down for the day. He was more cadaverous than ever.
His face was composed of furrows, projections, and hollows, with eyes
blazing far back in his head. A lock of his thick brown hair had turned
white. He wore elegant white flannel trousers and an apricot-coloured shirt
of softest silk; and he made Martin, in blue cotton shirt and old grey
flannels, look rustic and unkempt.
‘Pile in,’ said Martin. ‘Mariella, I can’t let you drive my new car. You do
understand, don’t you, angel?’
‘I’m not at all a good driver,’ said Mariella, smiling vaguely round upon
them all. ‘I smashed Martin’s car to pieces last year, didn’t I, Martin? I ran
it into a wall. He was awfully nice about it.’
‘He’s an awfully nice man,’ said Julian, putting his hand on Martin’s
shoulder.
Martin was the only one who ever received obvious marks of affection
from the rest. They all treated him in the same way—with a sort of teasing
tenderness.
‘Judith, will you come in front with me? And Mariella and Julian, you
go there.... Yes, that’s right. Will you be comfortable? Are you all quite
happy?’ Martin was terribly anxious lest there should be a hitch. Everyone
had got to enjoy the picnic.
‘Is the food in? And the drink? Who’s got the opener? Oh, I have.
Mariella, remember that this is Julian’s Day in the Country and don’t sit
there and never open your mouth, but point out objects of interest as we go
along, and any country sight or sound you happen to notice. Are we ready
then? To Monk’s Water, isn’t it?’
The car swooped up the drive.
‘Is Martin safe?,’ cried Julian, clinging to Mariella. ‘I don’t believe he’s
safe. If he goes fast I shall jump out. Oh, let’s stay at home and have a
picnic in the garden. Don’t let’s go away from this nice house and see
objects of interest. I didn’t mean it when I suggested it. I never wanted to.
Oh, why can’t you ever see a joke any of you? Oh!...’
He subsided with a groan and shut his eyes as Martin swung round the
corner and out on to the road. Mariella was giggling like a little girl, Martin
was grinning, everybody was in the proper picnic mood. But where was
Roddy?
‘Martin, what’s happened to Roddy?’
‘Oh, Roddy,’ said Martin. ‘Poor old Roddy’s got a headache.’
‘A headache?’ Something leapt painfully in her.
‘Yes. We left him lying down. The idiot would play tennis all yesterday
in the broiling sun without a hat, and the consequence is a touch of the sun I
suppose. He kept me awake most of the night shivering and warning me he
was going to be sick. He looked awful at breakfast I must say,—bright
yellow; so we gave him an aspirin and put him on the sofa and left him.’
‘Left him, Martin? But oughtn’t someone to have stayed with him?’
‘O Lord, no. He’ll sleep it off and be all right to-morrow. His temper was
his worst trouble, so we thought we’d keep away.’
Martin laughed cheerfully, as if he were amused about Roddy’s
headache. How cruel, how callous people were! They called themselves his
friends and they left him ill and alone, and went off to enjoy themselves. He
might get worse during the day: he might be sickening for a serious illness.
Roddy’s absence and his headache mattered terribly. She realized
suddenly that it was chiefly because of seeing him that she had looked
forward to the picnic; that she had hoped to watch him, to talk to him; that
she had had a pang of dismay at his absence from the group by the door;
that she had been secretly alert for his coming, in a fever for some mention
of him until the very moment of starting; and that then a weight had
descended; and that now the day was utterly ruined.
After all, was she going to be obliged to live, to feel, to want again?
Roddy was lying in the deserted house, on the red sitting-room sofa,
with the blinds down. His forehead and closed eyes were contracted with
his headache. He tossed his head and buried it in the cushions; and his hair
got ruffled, and the cushions became more and more uncomfortable. He
swore. You came in on tip-toe and knelt down beside him.
‘Roddy, I’ve come to see you,’ you whispered.
‘Oh, Judy, I’ve got such a headache and nobody cares.’
‘Darling, I care. I’m so terribly sorry. I’ve come to make it better.’
You stroked his forehead with cool fingers, smoothed his pillows, gave
him a drink and told him to lie still.
‘That’s better. Thank you, Judy. Do stay with me.’
It was bliss looking after him. He had ceased to withdraw himself and be
proud: he was utterly dependent. You bent and kissed his forehead....
Martin broke in upon her dream, saying: ‘Quite comfortable, Judith?’

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​2326-​2 hardcover

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Introduction: Hope, Realism and the Climate Crisis 1

The text following has been left deliberately undisfigured by a rash of

REALISM AND THE CLIMATE CRISIS

I have been honoured with opportunities to explore and develop my

to hope till Hope creates

Grounds for hope?

by this picture as by a mirage. Sustainable development benchmarks and

this coinage is a way of saying revolution without quite saying it –​something

blinding ourselves to a future which we find too ugly to contemplate. Given

warranted by appeal to experience, which only warrants anything through

And such responsibility comes at a price. Unless we are to slide into a

I must add a brief note on methodology. It will probably be already

The Demands of Realism

Politics, that is, characteristically constitutes an arena where one is at risk of

is liable to be infected by self-​deceiving or self-​gratifying misrepresentation,

The vicious syllogism

I suggested in the Introduction, has been that of ‘sustainable development’.

optimistic assumption that emissions have now peaked, the precipitously

therefore, much of the energy-​demands of production –​of the material goods

have left ourselves appears to be decisively vindicated by these empirically

starts to become unignorable (he dated this development at somewhere

a normal human lifespan in reasonable health, is able to gain respect and

environmentalism prompts us as individuals. I have written elsewhere

in turn ancestor, and so onwards. It is an impersonal concern which demands

The end of the term.

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ISBN 978-1-5292-2326-2 hardcover

Introduction: Hope, Realism and the Climate Crisis 1

this coinage is a way of saying revolution without quite saying it –something

is liable to be infected by self-deceiving or self-gratifying misrepresentation,

therefore, much of the energy-demands of production –of the material goods