Consider the Ant

Why is it hard to be climate conscious?

Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash

Ants are fascinating. Individually they are not particularly remarkable — many insects can do more; fleas jump, spiders spin silk, and bees fly. But get lots of ants together, and they create a superorganism capable of amazing feats of construction and growth. I once watched the amazing spectacle of a straight line of ants urgently carrying small globs of discarded pesto across the ground and became very curious about what was going on. Well it turns out there is a rather neat explanation. When searching for food, each ant leaves a type of scent trail. As they search, this trail meanders seemingly randomly until they find food to take back to the nest. At that point they change the scent they give off so that other ants know this trail has food at the end. When you have many ants all searching, several paths to the food are found, but more ants will end up going onto the best trail. By a form of positive-scent-reinforcement the best trail to the food wins out. That’s because more ants go on it and it gets an increasingly stronger scent. Often it will be a straight path between food and nest, which gets the food most quickly back home.

A bit like the ants searching for food, thinking about climate change can have many complicated, twisting paths which are difficult to follow. Myriad interplaying physical and social factors make it difficult to see how climate consequence can be linked to our seemingly inconsequential actions. Not to mention all the different viewpoints we are exposed to about what is going on and what our response should be. To become engaged with the details of the problem, we need a clear straight line in our thinking connecting what we do and the affect it has on the world. Similarly to the ants, a strong and direct ‘scent’ trail needs to be found which can become the motivation for taking meaningful action.

In this and the next post the aim is to explore the two sides of this. This week we’ll look into why thinking about climate change and acting on it in our day to day life doesn’t come easily. Next week we’ll consider the urgency of the issue — why we need to bother to change.

Time to move on from the ants now and ask the question: why is it hard to engage with the link between what I (and society) do and its real consequence? Here are four reasons.

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The first is to do with our perception of big things. The world is a really huge place[1], and often only by looking at a graph is it possible to see some of the really important climate trends. But when we light a bonfire in the evening, the smoke dissipate gently into the air without apparent consequence, and we still feel cold when we move away from the flames. Our normal senses don’t often tell us much about global warming. Plus there are so many other people that any contribution we make individually can seem almost meaningless. The consequence appears to be ‘far out there’.

The second is linked to knowledge. Understanding the details of the carbon cycle (and other environment systems) is incredibly complicated. It’s straightforward to know that burning methane gives off carbon dioxide (CO2), but it’s also true that plants absorb CO2 as part of photosynthesis which removes it from the atmosphere. The ocean absorbs CO2 as well. In fact, it’s called a cycle for a reason, because carbon goes around and around, being converted between different forms along the way. Understanding it is hard, and it’s possible to miss the overall story by focussing on only one detail. For example, focussing on how CO2 in the atmosphere changes between May and November over one year gives the impression that it is decreasing. But measure it over several years and you can see the trend of overall increase as well as seasonal variation, which also flags up the influence of plant growth upon gasses in the atmosphere. Because of the complexity, it’s easy to cast doubt on the big picture by choosing to focus upon details without recognising their context — true of any complex problem.

The third is to do with what could be called ‘impact exporting’. I don’t know about you, but for me wearing clothes is an everyday thing. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that is a fairly common point of view and has been for most people since almost forever. In July 2018, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences published an article with the gripping proposal that “the switch from splicing to draft spinning plant fibres occurred much later than previously thought”. Essentially suggesting that, based on analysis of a diverse sample of different ancient cloths, people only started using spinning as a cloth making method around 600 BC, before which a technique called splicing was the norm[2]. Imagine having to extract plant fibres from say, a stinging nettle, before splicing these together to make thread, then weaving them together to make cloth for your T-shirt. I strongly suspect that having to do that myself or watching the local cloth maker prepare clothes in that way would give me a very clear idea of the resource and effort required. Now though, when I need clothes, I go to the high street. I have almost no concept or picture in my head of the raw materials, thread making, cloth making, garment making and transport processes that go on for me to have a stripy jumper. Or the fact that each step requires energy and has a carbon footprint (as well as a social footprint). Impact exporting means I rarely recognise the impact I have when I buy goods and products because I simply don’t see it. I just pass over my money to get the thing I want. As in the first point, the consequences seem far away which makes it hard for me to be urgent about them.

The final reason to mention is that we don’t want to engage too hard. The reason being that acting on climate change often means disruption to how we live, and potentially sacrifice of what we can have. Typically, we will make choices based on what is immediately easiest for us and our close dependents, filtered through our convictions. Choosing something which is a little bit harder and which has almost no detectable improvement for me rarely makes it through that choice filter, unless it is a strong conviction. Examples of this range from the small (do I have the willpower today to make a slow cooked dinner?) to the much larger (would the public keep voting for a government who introduced policies which raise environmental standard requirements for every-day imported goods, but also push up prices for everyone and potentially harm the economy?).

I find it difficult to act on climate change for all these reasons and strongly suspect I’m not alone. They are challenging because in large part they are based upon what comes most naturally to us. Next week, I want to explore the scientific basis for why climate change is an urgent issue, and why what you and I do matters. I hope that will give a general response to the first three points made here and help us discover that motivational ‘scent trail’.

1. Citation needed
2. Gleba M., Harris S., Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (2019) 11:2329–234