Urgency Fatigue in an Age of Crisis
With so many demands on our attention, maybe a new framing can help the climate crisis break through the noise.
Wherever you happen to be, and whatever you happen to be doing, when you hear the fire alarm go off, everything stops. There’s only one thing to do: exit the building.
When you’re driving, and you hear a siren and see an ambulance with flashing lights, you pull over and get out of the way.
Why? Alarms and sirens signify an emergency. When there’s an emergency going on, we interrupt our normal patterns and act. We come together and do our part to prevent additional harm from taking place, to ourselves and those around us.
I recently attended a conference of companies in my industry. The opening keynote speaker laid out some staggering statistics, starting with a multi-trillion-dollar shortfall in financing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. He then pointed to research suggesting that there could be over 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050. Now, reports are showing this is Europe’s driest spring in a century. He didn’t include any sirens in his presentation, but the conclusion was clear: we are living in a full-blown, global climate emergency.
Then the regular conference programming started and nobody mentioned it again.
What happened to the emergency? I see this odd disconnect between threat and action all the time. Most of the world’s population wants more to be done about climate change. The future of capitalism itself is threatened by climate change. And yet, at every sustainability event I’ve ever been to, if anyone speaks with urgency it’s only at the beginning. Then, we all start discussing whichever new acronym is replacing the old acronym and seemingly forget all about it.
Anyone who works in sustainability will resonate with this dissonance. In the morning we check our email and see the latest reports about ecosystem collapse, topsoil degradation or catastrophic tipping points. Yet by the afternoon, somehow, we’re back to filling in forms for some new reporting standard.
The break between threat and action is a new symptom of the flattening of human experience. Let’s be honest: it’s difficult to break through and get to the essence of things anymore, from the climate crisis to simple acts of friendship. When you scroll the news or social media, you’ll experience celebrity gossip reported on with all the same passion as war, disasters appearing alongside heartwarming stories, and refugee crises buried under cute animal videos. You’ll even get social media that rages against social media, and material so steeped in irony it’s nearly impossible to unpack what’s being said. With every perspective presented at once, equal in form and unvarying in its urgent tone, it’s hard to feel anything about anything. Fredric Jameson called this “depthlessness,” referring to the impact of the shocking presented alongside the banal and the ironic next to the sincere, which over time reduces emotional responses to surface level. It’s hard, if not impossible, to formulate any kind of response to the thousand crises you’re likely to see in a couple minutes of scrolling.
In short, our culture has made it incredibly difficult to engage with anything beyond forming an instant like/dislike reaction. Every day brings fresh horrors and wonders presented equally alongside each other. A perfectly natural response is to enter a numb, “depthless” state. And when this flattened emotional register seeps into sustainability work the results are predictably bad. It’s incredibly hard to promote long-term systemic change when we can’t hold a crisis in mind longer than a single keynote address.
So how do we break through? How can we possibly find a way to cut through the noise, get the glazed-over look out of our eyes, and rise to the challenge?
This is where emergencies can help us. What if we could act the way we do when the fire alarm goes off: drop everything and address the emergency at hand?
I am aware that in some places, emergencies have already been declared. Where I live, there are trucks that do climate-related work labelled “climate emergency” vehicles, and in fact the UK declared a “climate emergency” several years ago. More recently, however, they approved hundreds of new North Sea oil and gas licenses, so apparently the spirit of emergency didn’t last particularly long.
Nevertheless, the power of emergencies lies in their ability to stimulate a suspension of the usual rules of conduct. This is, of course, a double-edged sword. Research on emergency governance “has been largely critical of emergency politics because of its anti-democratic tendency and potential for technocratic governing, while reducing the scope for accountability and transparency.” And yet, even without treating the climate crisis as an emergency, we’re still seeing a rise in anti-democratic activity, reduced accountability, and diminished transparency.
The reality is, as I argued last week, is that nobody wins in sustainability if anybody loses. If there’s one thing we can do, as businesses, to rise to this emergency, it is to put competition aside and work together. Just as everyone needs to pull over to let an ambulance through, we all need to take a pause and treat the emergency with the urgency it deserves. Nobody would tolerate one person blocking the stairs if everyone else is trying to evacuate a building. And yet here we are, making small talk as the room fills with smoke.
To be clear, progress has been made in a slow, gradual way. Renewables have quietly become about 1/3 of global energy production. The amount of land under organic farming practices has increased significantly over the past ten years. And there are activist groups whose actions’ mirror the intensity of what they’re opposing. But the problem remains: without accelerating the corporate rate of action, and breaking free of the cautious, handbraked response the market is currently comfortable with, it’s looking a lot like too little too late.
Still, successful emergency responses don’t come from panic. They come from calm, efficient, coordinated action. That is the sustainability work we need now. We do not have a knowledge problem. The technology and the ideas we need to make changes already exist. We have a framing problem. When we speak in terms of mitigating risk, finding opportunities, following trends and maintaining compliance, we’ve already lost. That discourse is no longer fit for purpose. This is an emergency; we should say so and act accordingly. Emergency responders, when they drop everything to put out fires or administer CPR, are heroes. A similar reaction is what the world needs now.