On Normalcy and Adaptation
On Normalcy and Adaptation
A better world is necessary
The persistent question of when “we” could get “back to normal” has been answered. While many people are still suffering and dying from COVID-19, previously adopted public health measures are almost entirely gone. For all intents and purposes, in the US we can now do everything we did in February 2020—with additional and unequal risk. In February, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised their guidelines to be based on hospital data rather than COVID-19 cases, changing large swaths of the country from “red” to “green” overnight without any actual difference in conditions. The plan is now seemingly to pretend that the pandemic is over, which hangs the most vulnerable out to die and leaves us woefully unprepared for any new variants or upsurges in cases.
I do not know what will happen with the pandemic going forward. But rather than being back to normal, it is perhaps more accurate to say that we are in a new normal with a little more tolerance for the already staggering amount of unnecessary suffering that our capitalist society requires.
Of course this suffering is not distributed even remotely evenly. A recent study in Social Science & Medicine found that hearing about the racial disparities of the pandemic caused white US residents to fear the virus less, feel less empathy for those suffering from it, and have less support for mitigation measures (although policy is certainly not driven by public opinion in this country). This has obvious implications for how white US residents react to the knowledge that the effects of pollution are and will continue to be borne most heavily by those who are poor, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, particularly in the Global South.
The climate and ecological crisis, like COVID-19, does provide the very real possibility of harming even the most wealthy and powerful. At the end of the day, we are all just mortal organisms of flesh and bone, with all the physical vulnerability that entails. But wealth provides the ability to purchase protection and distance from harm in all sorts of ways. And whiteness provides insulation from “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” which is how Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism.
With that being said, unless you are in the rarefied air of the truly rich and powerful, whatever protection you have is meager at best. In the US—with our preponderance of predation alongside a dearth of safety nets or public goods—most of us are just a bad break or two away from poverty, homelessness, or premature death. This is what our normal is and always has been.
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Shifting baseline syndrome refers to the phenomenon when changing ecological conditions over time causes collective environmental knowledge to be lost, and then these new conditions become the baseline against which normative evaluations are made. For example, when I was growing up it was a regular chore to scrub the front of your car because it would hit so many insects. But since insect populations have declined so dramatically in the last couple decades, bumpers and windshields now stay clean and this people who have not experienced anything different do not internalize this loss.
We can see similar phenomena play out in a variety of areas beyond just ecology as people adjust to altered conditions. Psychologically, this is in some ways a useful response; it is counterproductive to be stressed out 24/7 by a persistent awareness of the deterioration of our society or biosphere even as we experience the harmful effects. But obviously it also limits our horizons and can make the unacceptable seem inevitable, and how we experience shifting baselines is mediated through the very systems and conditions that are producing the changes.
Humanity’s reaction to the climate crisis is sometimes compared to the urban legend that if you put a frog in a slowly heating pot of water it will stay in until it dies because it does not notice the water is boiling until it is too late. In some ways this is apt, like the delusional musical chairs of real estate speculation in Miami. But there is not a singular humanity responding to the crisis in anything resembling a homogeneous way. Many of us are actively trying to get out of the metaphorical pot in all sorts of ways with the often maddening experience of needing to also continue living our normal day-to-day lives with all the mundanity that entails. And other people are keeping the gas on because they profit from it.
The possibility of essentially a shifting baseline society that keeps chugging along for awhile and adapts to a significantly hotter world is compelling for a ruling class that refuses to cede its power. While we certainly must adapt because weather and ecosystems will change irreversibly in many ways and in many places, there is only so much that can be done no matter how successful we are at stopping the crisis. So the transformative changes to society that serious mitigation requires can be thought of as the most important means of adaptation.
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The present state of things requires a great deal of unnecessary harm from pollution, homelessness, lack of medical care, war, stress, and more. The people with power in this system develop a robust indifference to this suffering as a justification for the perpetuation of this arrangement, and the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare a depth to this tolerance that bodes ominously for how our society as presently constructed will deal with the climate crisis as it escalates.
More broadly, the world is slowly getting worse and the prospects for our future look grimmer by the day. Ecological degradation is obviously notable in that regard, in addition to skyrocketing costs of basic necessities like housing and healthcare alongside scams, rent-seeking, and extraction everywhere we turn. At the state and local level, the Republican Party has been waging an all-out assault on public schools and teachers, squashing mere discussions of racism, restricting and banning abortion, relentlessly attacking gay and trans people, banning books, stopping climate action, and more. Conservatism is centered around the idea of returning to or creating an even more white, Christian, patriarchal normal that punishes deviation.
The Democratic Party establishment does not appear to be interested in doing much about any of these things. But people are fighting all over the place—wherever you find oppression, there is resistance—and sowing the seeds of better futures.
What does it mean to adapt to a changing world without accepting the injustices that can be repaired and prevented? It might look like what Enzo Rossi and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò call a responsive universalist approach that accounts for both our shared and disparate vulnerabilities, desires, and needs. A collective, shared humanity built out of the old world that is dying.
There is no comprehensive blueprint for either this horizon or the journey towards it. In order to reverse our apocalyptic trajectory, we should reject the longing for a return to conditions that will never exist again (or may never have existed the way we imagine them). This understanding can be frightening—better the devil you know than the devil you don’t—but it also offers the hope and possibility of creation. Our task is to construct new normals based in solidarity and care, and we can only do this together in the conditions we find ourselves in. I can think of no greater calling.