Dark Clouds: Regulatory Possibilities

Abstract

Tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today. African ProverbThis book arises at a time when our skies are dark, and are becoming darker.There is now irrefutable evidence that the temperate era of the last 12, 000 years, the Holocene era, is drawing to a close. We are moving towards a series of tipping points that could well bring an end to the nurturing 'ecological assemblages' (Trisos, Merow andPigot, 2020) andSchumacher's (1973) 'natural capital', which provided humans and many other species with the provision of essential 'ecosystem services ' (Farber et al., 2002). During this now vanishing era the earth has been characterised by what Rockström et al. (2009: 1) have termed 'planetary boundaries' that provide a 'safe operating space for humanity'.The warning that these dark clouds carry with them is that we humans have been, especially since we have begun living in industrial societies, systematically destroying the very basis of our existence -an engagement that Brisman and South (2018) compare with self-cannibalism, autosarcophagy. This autosarcophagy has been, and remains, the consequence of carbon intensive economies --ways of being, built on fire and the heat it produces (Hartmann, 1999).Hidden in these dark clouds is the spectre of collapse (Diamond, 2005), a collapse that, as Umair Haque (2019) has recently argued, emerges from the bottom up. This is a collapse of the biospheric foundations (see also Smil, 2002), upon which CrimRxiv Dark Clouds: Regulatory Possibilities 3 humans, as biophysical and social creatures, depend for their existence and upon which they have built their worlds. Yet, despite this complete dependence on these foundations, humans have collectively paid very little, if any, attention to them.The consequences in this 'age of collapse ', according to Hague (2019), is that 'the bottom [is] depleted, which causes the middle to implode, which takes the top away with it, too'. Back in 2017, as we began planning this volume, we settled on the term 'harmscapes' to conceptualise the evolution of arrays of intersecting and interacting harms. Climate change is a primary exemplar (Berg and Shearing, 2018: 75): a globally coherent phenomenon that creates myriad diverse harms, manifesting in multiple and connected ways. Climate change harms play out at multiple spatial and temporal scales: spatially, harms range from localised to global scales, and temporally, some harms are immediate, others are delayed, and others again are, from any meaningful human perspective, effectively permanent.Climate change is a change process characterised by nonlinear dynamics and threshold effects: as such, impacts can cascade across sectors, and with limited predictability (Duit and Galaz, 2008). The impacts of climate change are dispersed, but uneven. And as with impacts, attribution of climate change,