Climate is (Dis)Connection
AD
September 2026
“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron's beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments;”
Psalm 33 vv1-2 [KJV]
The emergency is over.
You can unsound the alarm: we’ve gone past the point of no return.
In 2019 local governments around the UK declared a climate emergency, and committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050. Wales committed to this as a nation, and then Scotland. Finally the UK government made a binding agreement in law for the country to be net zero.
They said it was an emergency, but didn’t act like it was one. And sure enough, not even ten years later, it’s clear they’ve all missed the target. And some local authorities have now dropped their targets.
We knew this would happen: we already knew it was the hottest summer ever before the statisticians told us. Many of us couldn’t sleep, or study, or work. Some of us couldn’t go outside, or breathe. And some of us died from it (2,877 more by the end of June than would normally be expected).
We also knew the world would not stay within the 1.5 degrees of temperature rise, the safe limit for climate change agreed at Paris in 2015.
We’ve already had hotter years than that (take 2024 for example).
And the UN has just confirmed the planet won’t stay within 1.5 degrees, in fact we’ve already reached 1.8 degrees.
They say we’re on course for 2.5 degrees by the end of the century, if governments deliver on their current policies and pledges, or up to 4.4 degrees if not - which is doom.
Going past 1.5 degrees means extinction for many people, some islands, and many species (all coral, for example).
But it is also a threshold, which we’ve breached. Climate change is now out of control.
And this changes everything. We might as well toss away the Paris Agreement and the carbon accounting on which it is constructed because we are no longer able to control the amount of temperature rise, or a whole range of other (un)natural phenomena.
We can do what we like (or what we should do, or should have been doing for decades now) but we cannot prevent more dangerous warming, increasing inevitably year on year, and all the extreme weather events this brings.
This is what breaching limits feels like, this is what is meant by runaway climate change. We can act, but the system will not respond.
This is hard enough to face, on the surface of it: we cannot manage our way out of climate change, there is nothing we can do to prevent it getting worse, more painful, more deadly.
But understanding this is even harder to face: climate change is out of control, out of our control.
Fundamentally, the link between our human action and a reaction in our environment has been broken.
How can we understand this? We learn as children that our actions have consequences. What goes up must come down, and so forth. But now climate change is out of control (past 1.5 degrees) this is no longer true.
Which in turn asks us what it is to be human. We will have to relearn. And fast, given how fast the planet is heating (and wildfires travel, and floodwaters rise). Until we do, we will not be able to adapt, and respond.
It is plain we can’t continue as we were. Even our best efforts (what we should have been doing) are no longer valid.
For instance, we will need to install air conditioning in our homes and communities to survive the summer heat. This is the advice of the UK Climate Change Committee, whose job is to set the carbon budget that will keep the UK on course for net zero by 2050. Their recommendation shows that something is more important than cutting carbon: saving lives from climate change now, never mind in the future.
So what should we do, apart from fit aircon, to save ourselves?
Again, we have known the answers for a long time. From the beginning in fact: climate change is not the cause of our woes, but a symptom. And its roots are in man’s disconnection from one another, from nature, and from our environments, the places where we live.
Though climate change is new, our separation from nature goes back to the beginning, it is foundational to the stories we live by in the global West and North. It’s always been there it was just foregrounded by the Enlightenment and accelerated through the industrial revolution, in a progress of mechanisation, consumption, and atomisation.
It goes back to the Judaeo-Christian creation story, Day Five.
God gives man dominion over the creatures of the land, the bids of the air, and the fish in the sea. Man is invited to take from nature to meet his needs – “herb for food”. And shortly after God separates man from nature, expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden because they have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and in so doing set themselves up as gods.
And if man can set himself above other creatures, so he can set himself above other men. Oppression and subjugation follow (Adam and Eve’s children are Cain and Abel).
And where there is ecocide there is genocide too. When the children of the Enlightenment expanded into the New World they subdued other peoples, removed them from their environments (eg. Africa), took them to a foreign place over which they claimed ownership (eg. West Indies), conquered the local people, destroyed the ecology, and set the enslaved people to work, planting monocrops (for food, or more often pleasure: eg. sugar and tobacco). All this they turned into money (profit).
This is war, and it is war on people and nature. In the UK we may not be invaded and colonised (or, have not been for a thousand years) but we may have a civil war. The same people who spread rumours of civil war are those who spread denials of climate change – and truly, they want both.
The journey to a four degree world can be envisioned as one in which different people fight over resources (war and climate go hand in hand). But the resources do not in fact belong to one set of people or another: it is the story that makes the fighting possible. Instead the resources should be held in common.
Nature does not belong to anyone any more than one group of people belongs to another. We are part of nature, and each part depends on the others to survive and thrive.
We could have chosen this story, a different story, but the other story, the one of domination, will always win. The commons story doesn’t seek to win, because winning isn’t part of its make-up. It rules itself out of the competition.
So, if the current situation is unsustainable, we urgently need another way. In this sense, we know what is to be done already. We (I) have been working on ‘sustainable lifestyles’ since the 90s, drawing on ideas some of which were already old, and most of which involved reconnection, including:
Fair Shares
As in the Brundtland Declaration (1987): “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Enshrined as law in Wales in the Well-Being of Future Generations Act (2015). The recent trend for Doughnut Economics can also be traced back to this source.
Conviviality
As in Ivan Illich’s Tools (1973): a convivial society requires “survival, justice, and self-defined work”. Wealth inequality is inimical to such a society, and creates unhappiness at population scale (see eg. Richard Wilkinson’s Spirit Level).
Commons Economy
As in Elinor Ostrom’s (1990) Nobel prize-winning work on holding natural resources in common for the lasting good of all (including Swiss alpine meadows, Japanese village forests, and Spanish huertas). And Juliet Schor’s work on the time economy (in favour of a shorter working week, bringing individuals’ wellbeing benefits, but also cutting emissions, because productivity = environmental impact – whereas voluntary work, or the ‘care economy’, helps people thrive).
These pieces of wisdom are not new but recent. They amount to a revolution in governance. A revolution we needed but never had: by the people for the people; doing with not to; providing for each according to need. Many of these ideas were inspired by Marx, and were then denigrated (by the dominant regimes) as communist. But they could just as well have been referenced to Jesus (“love together, as I have loved you”). Moreover, we know how to do these things: the impulse to co-operate is in our DNA (or hardwired, as the neuroscientists would re-explain to us).
But the above theories and revisions are indeed from another time, a time we ran out of. We know what to do, but it is too late to do it. Even a revolution will not save us now (or the Maldives) because of all the heat locked up in the ocean, and carbon dioxide in the sky.
So why bother? There is no earthly reason. For answers we must look deeper, beyond the surface, out of this world.
We need to reimagine what it means to be alive, a revolution in the human project, a correction to the course we took a few hundred years ago.
We need to reconnect to all living things because we are alive.
We need to bother reconnecting because bothering is what it is to be alive – it’s one way in which we know we are alive (if we stopped bothering to eat and drink, we would soon not be alive).
So we must reconnect to one another and all living things, not because we think it will bring about a positive reaction. We now know this is no longer the case: we cannot control nature.
But we need to reconnect in order to stay alive, in order to be human, to tell the truth that all living things are connected.
If we do not tell this truth, we will cease to live our lives. Or, we will simply be waiting to die. We need to connect to others so we can connect to ourselves. To know who we are, what we have done, and could do now.
All living things are connected. And all things that ever lived are connected. And when living things die, what remains are the connections, to the living and the dead.
Humans know this. We have always known this. Way way back before religion, and civilisation, we were connected to all living things, and to all living things which had died.
But right now, at this point in time, as natural and non-natural systems collapse, we have forgotten this (willingly, or by force). We might argue the forgetting is a part of how we reached this point, was how we got into this mess. We chose to learn something else instead, to become enlightened, and in the process we forgot what humans always knew: we are all connected.
We are nature. And we are killing ourselves.
And what will be left?
The connections. Our spirits. Points of light.
[References]
CAPE (2026) Database of UK local authority climate action plans, targets, and declarations
https://cape.mysociety.org/councils/
LSE (20/3/26) 7 out of 9 Reform led councils have scrapped climate targets, study finds. Press Release by Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics
UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) (30/7/26) Rapid ssessment of Heat-associated Deaths in May and June 2026 (England only - Provisional)
Guardian (8/7/24) Temperatures 1.5C above pre-industrial era average for 12 months, data shows
Guardian (2/9/26) Global heating will hit at least 1.8C, UN warns, and there are ‘no good outcomes’
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (2/9/26). Limiting Overshoot: Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return
https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshootnavigating-exceedance
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (April 2022) Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability – Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/
UK Climate Change Committee (20/5/26) A Well-Adapted UK: The Fourth Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk (CCRA4-IA)
https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/a-well-adapted-uk/
Guardian (10/6/26) John Harris: Cars burn in Belfast, bricks fly in Southampton – and the ubiquitous cry of ‘civil war’ goes up again
United Nations (UN) (1987) Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Report)
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/139811?v=pdf
Welsh Government (2015) The Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015
Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist. Random House Business Books.
Illich, I (1973) Tools for Conviviality. Harper & Row.
Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009) The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. Allen Lane.
Ostrom E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
Schor, J.B. (2005) ‘Sustainable consumption and worktime reduction’, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 9(1–2).
Rilling, J.K. et al. (2002) ‘A neural basis for social cooperation’, Neuron, 35(2).