Review

Books

Climate

Culture

13 April 2023

4 min read

The rude guests

The Earth Transformed chronicles what happens when civilisation comes up against environmental change. Hannah Eves reviews Peter Frankopan’s analysis.

Hannah Eves

Hannah Eves is a policy officer at A Rocha UK, a Christian nature charity working to protect and restore nature in the UK and equip individuals and churches to care for creation.

The head and torso of a mannequin lie abandoned in undergrowth

Dragon Pan on Unsplash.

Essay

Culture

Re-enchanting

A ploughed field of red soil is in the foreground, sloping down into a valley with a track and green fields beyond

A place on Earth

Elizabeth Wainwright

Pondering the power of a place, Elizabeth Wainwright believes it roots us and asks us to play our part here and beyond.

11 April 2023

7 min read

In his meditation on nature, The Peace of Wild Things, the agrarian poet Wendell Berry writes: ‘When despair for the world grows in me… I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought.’ The despair Berry describes sounds a lot like climate anxiety, the fear or worry about the environmental doom that more and more people are feeling, because anyone who has understood recent climate and biodiversity trends has been burdened with forethought on behalf of wild things. It’s a forethought that can lead very easily to despair. Only last month, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) issued its most serious warning yet about irreversible levels of global heating and the catastrophic impacts the world is facing without drastic action to address climate breakdown. Secretary-General of the UN António Guterres issued this warning: ‘Humanity is on thin ice – and that ice is melting fast… In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts -- everything, everywhere, all at once.’

While climate change is often seen as a modern political issue, the question of how to understand or adapt to changes in the natural world, and failures to do so, is not unique to the last century. In fact, it’s foundational to all of history, so argues historian Peter Frankopan in his new book The Earth Transformed. Frankopan charts a path from the dawn of time through development of human civilisation and empire up to the making of the modern world asserting that underpinning everything that has ever happened (ever) is a central relationship of transformation. The natural environment shaped the development of human civilisation and humanity has ‘expanded, colonised, reproduced, created and dominated’, but also ‘destroyed, devastated and exterminated’, the natural landscape.

Frankopan shows how environmental fluctuations and changes have shaped the course of history. For example, he tells the story of how a ‘mighty civilisation’ folded in on itself in the face of environmental catastrophe. Around 2253 BC Naram-Sin ruled over the Akkadian empire (in Mesopotamia in modern Iraq) during which ‘The Curse of Akkad’ grips the empire. Said to be a divine judgement of Naram-Sin’s rule and ‘insulting behaviour’, the curse was a period of drought and crop failure, leading to price inflation, mass death and political chaos. Climate data shows that what actually happened was an ‘evaporation event’ leading to drought impacting most severely areas that were ecologically sensitive and having such a ripple effect as to prompt what one scholar called a ‘Dark Age’ of ecological collapse and political instability. Frankopan notes, ‘changes in climate had brought about nothing less than the collapse of the Akkadian empire.’
The Earth Transformed places human beings within a wider context of all creation, not only transforming the natural world but being shaped and transformed by it. In fact, human beings are like ‘rude guests’ who arrive late, cause havoc and destroy the house to which they have been invited. We are a new and late arrival in the grand scheme of history and yet our impact on the natural world has been substantial and has pushed scientists to the point of questioning the long-term viability of human life.

However, we are not alone in transforming the world around us; nature is not a passive force but actively ‘involved in the process of change, adaptation and evolution, sometimes with devastating consequences’. And so, Frankopan insightfully illustrates how nature underpins everything that makes our lives possible. It’s not simply that environmental factors are actors in the story of our species, they ‘provide the very stage on which our existence plays out, shaping everything we do, who we are, where and how we live.’ And yet, we are living on the edge of our means and are dependent on ‘everything to go right and with little margin of error for things to go wrong.’

The book closes with this harrowing warning that ‘it would be nature, rather than human action, that ultimately brings net emissions towards zero’ through ‘catastrophic depopulation, whether through hunger, disease or conflict’. With fewer people on the planet to use up the earth’s resources by burning fuel, cutting forests down or tearing minerals from the ground, the carbon footprint of humanity would plummet, and we would get closer to a ‘lush paradise of our fantasised past’. Frankopan concludes: ‘Perhaps we will find our way back there through peaceful means: a historian would not bet on it.’

It’s somewhat of a cliche to say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it and yet Frankopan’s book shows how if we don’t take the capacity of nature and the climate to transform us we are not just doomed to repeat ourselves, but, well, doomed. Published in the same month that the IPCC has issued its final warning on 1.5 degrees, The Earth Transformed presents both a fascinating and essential lens to view history through in such a time as this.

The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan is published by Bloomsbury.

Article

Character

Culture

Leading

Virtues

19 September 2024

6 min read

What is Putin thinking? And how would you know?

The self-centeredness of modern culture is antithetical to strategic thinking.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson writes on geopolitics. He is also a business executive and holds a doctorate in theology.

Preisdent Putin stands behind a lectern with a gold door and Russian flag behind him.

What is Putin thinking?

In a world of Google Maps when walking on city streets, or of Waze when driving, it is difficult to ever become lost.

The AI algorithm provides us with the shortest route to our destination, adjusting whenever we make the wrong turn. We do not need to think for ourselves, technology instead showing the way forward.

But there are times where it is possible to get lost. This happens less in a city with its clearly set-out streets, and more so when taking the wrong turn in open expanses: hiking in the mountains, traversing farmers’ fields or while navigating at sea. In each of these situations, a miscalculation may lead to peril.

It is in these situations that we must carefully think through our steps, determining how to proceed, or whether to turn back. Often, these situations are ambiguous, the right way forward unclear.

Much of life – perhaps more than we wish to acknowledge – is like this, more akin to a walk across an open field with multiple possible routes forward, than a technology-enabled walk through a city.

When making important decisions, our grasp of a given situation, of others’ intentions and motives, and the networks facilitating and constraining action, are less evident than we may initially think.

This acknowledgement of uncertainty is no reason for delay, but rather a basis for careful deliberation in determining what to do, and how to proceed. It is necessary if we are to pursue what we believe is right, in a manner that may produce positive results.

In a recent interview with the BBC Newscast podcast, University of Durham Chancellor Dr Fiona Hill – who previously served as White House National Security Council Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs, and currently as Co-Lead of the UK’s Strategic Defence Review – provides listeners with a powerful reminder on how to proceed within ambiguous situations, especially in navigating the choppy seas, or rocky terrains, of human relationships.

Strategic empathy requires self-restraint when natural impulses urge a person to make rapid conclusions about the reality of a given situation – the default human tendency.

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Dr Hill uses the term “strategic empathy” to consider how the political West might proceed in its relationship with Russia, and specifically with Vladimir Putin.

Strategic empathy is a serious commitment to understanding how another person thinks, considering their worldview, their key sources of information (in other words, their main three or four advisors, who have a person’s ear), and other emotional considerations that underpin decision-making.

It is much more than just putting oneself in other’s shoes, as is often said about empathy. The approach is one of realism, suspending judgment based on self-protective or self-aggrandising illusions, in favour of what is actually the case.

In the case of Putin, Dr Hill helpfully reminds listeners that his worldview is drastically different than that of Westerners, and that significant intellectual effort (and specifically, intellectual humility in setting aside one’s own default frames of reference) is necessary to consider decisions from Putin’s perspective, and so make the right decisions from ours.

Technology is here an assistant but not a cure-all. Whereas AI might – based on a gathering of all possible publicly available information written by and about a particular person – help to predict a person’s next move, this prediction is imperfect at best.

There are underlying factors – perhaps a deeply engrained sense of historical grievance and resentment in the case of Putin – that shapes another’s action and that can scarcely be picked up through initial conversation. These factors may not make sense from our perspectives, or be logical, but they exist and must be treated seriously.

This empathy is strategic, because effective strategy is the “How?” of any mission. Whereas a person’s or organisation’s mission, vocation or purpose (all words that can be used relatively interchangeably) is the “Why?” of a pursuit, strategy is the “How?” which itself consists of the questions “Who?” “What?” “When?” and “Where?”

To understand how to act strategically requires a prior effective assessment of reality. This requires going beyond what others say, our initial perception of a situation, any haughty beliefs that we simply know what is happening, or even the assessments of supposedly well-connected and expert contacts.

Dr Hill’s strategic empathy is an appeal to listeners to ask questions – digging as much as possible – to arrive at an assessment that approximates reality to the greatest degree possible. This exercise might be aided by AI, but it is at its heart a human endeavour.

Strategic empathy requires self-restraint when natural impulses urge a person to make rapid conclusions about the reality of a given situation – the default human tendency. The persistent asking of questions is difficult – requiring mental, emotional and intellectual endurance.

There is considerable wisdom in Dr Hill’s reflections on strategic empathy, which extend well beyond the fields of intelligence, geopolitics or defence. The idea of strategic empathy helps show us that in much of modern culture – which glorifies the self, individuals putting their wants, needs and desires before those of others – developing strategy is very difficult.

The key then, when deliberating on potential right courses of action in ambiguous situations, is to not begin believing that the right way is clear. It rarely is.

Why is this the case? When popular culture favours phrases such as “You do you,” the you becomes a barrier to asking questions, with some aloofness to the situation, necessary for understanding how another thinks. People are encouraged to focus on themselves at the expense of others, and so fail to understand others’ worldviews and ways of operating.

Simply put, the self-centeredness of modern culture is antithetical to strategy. It impedes deliberation, which involves patience in the gradual formation of purpose for action. It wages war against the considered politics or statesmanship that many want to see return. In place of this is crisis or catastrophe, in which self-focus leads to clashes with others that could otherwise be avoided or worked through carefully.

The Biblical story of the serpent in the garden is another vantage point for the idea of strategic empathy. Soon after Adam and Eve eat the apple in the garden and become “like gods, knowing good and evil,” God searches for them and asks “Where are you?”

It is right after individuals try to become the judges of good and evil – “like gods,” that Adam and Eve find themselves lost: God’s “Where are you?”

Put differently, when a person is convinced they are right, but without asking questions, they make mistakes, they likely suffer unnecessarily because of this, and then become anchorless – the “Where are you?”

This applies to countries as much as it does to people: the more they moralize, seeking to become the judges of good and evil in a complex geopolitical landscape, the more they drift from their sense of purpose.

The key then, when deliberating on potential right courses of action in ambiguous situations, is to not begin believing that the right way is clear. It rarely is. A belief in evident rightness often leads to error, whereas the ability to suspend such judgment helps reveal – often gradually – the right path forward.

The strategic empathy approach requires both assertiveness – in asking good questions and maintaining persistence in doing so – and self-restraint in the face of believing that the right answer is clear.

The glue between assertiveness on the one hand and restraint on the other is faith, which helps a person to move forward in a trusting manner, but without exerting oneself so much so that they become the centre of the situation.

So, while Google Maps, Waze or other technologies might be at our disposal in our travels, both real and metaphorical, these technologies only get us so far.

The right way forward is seldom initially clear when navigating ambiguous situations, the frequency and stakes of which increase as we embark boldly – with faith – on the adventure of life.

Dr Hill’s strategic empathy – asking questions, listening carefully, suspending a self of sense, seriously considering diverging worldviews, and adjusting as necessary – helps us to achieve the understanding and direction we need.

Indeed, this approach is fundamental to a more effective and resilient political West. It is necessary for sounder deliberation, better strategy and statesmanship, in an increasingly ambiguous world.