Effing bonkers?
I went the other week to a local community showing of the People’s Emergency Briefing film. This is worth seeing if you get the chance, and well worth encouraging anyone not yet persuaded about the seriousness of the climate and ecological emergency to go and see.
The film, accessibly introduced and compèred by the television naturalist Chris Packham, essentially comprises a sequence of extracts from presentations by a range of relevant experts, recorded at a ‘National Emergency Briefing’ event held before an invited audience of politicians, business leaders and others at Westminster in November 2025. Of the presenting experts I recall only the climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson by name, but others included an eminent medical person, a retired general and an academic economist. Their presentations, accompanied in the film by dramatic illustrative footage as well as by admirably clear charts and graphs, laid out a range of highly credible imminent dangers to the British public arising from climate destabilisation – from floods and wildfires through threats to the food chain, to public and individual health and to national security.
In case this should come across as too daunting and depressing, the presentations towards the end of the film also seek to reassure us that all is not yet lost, and that a serious transition to renewables and resilience-building would still be in time to make us both safer and better off. The showing of this film at community and workplace-based events around the country in fact forms part of a campaign, supported by various organisations including the National Trust and conservation charities like the RSPB and the Church of England, encouraging people to sign a petition calling on Government to level with the nation about this whole situation through a televised emergency address from the Prime Minister.
No doubt in an attempt to foster such public engagement, the film intersperses its expert presentations and illustrative material with reactions, orchestrated by Packham, from random lay people sat on studio sofas. This running commentary, with its burden of more-or-less wide-eyed shock and surprise, struck me as in general a mildly annoying distraction from the powerful overall effect. But there was one exception here: the robustly-spoken middle-aged lady whose response to several aspects of our present way of going on – the continued burning of fossil fuels as the planet heats up, the depositing of untreated sewage in rivers and so on – was the comment (repeated with variations) that “We must be effing bonkers!”.
This characterisation, I think, bears much pondering. Indeed it might well be the single most alarming message from the whole film. For suppose it is not merely a venting of exasperation, but the colourful expression of a literal truth. Suppose that our current climate and ecological plight genuinely manifests a condition of collective insanity – what then? And there certainly seems to be ample warrant for the supposition, not just in this civilisation’s pertinacious trashing of the life-supporting living world, as documented in the film, but in many aspects of the way of life in pursuit of which that trashing takes place (and which, unsurprisingly, the film passes lightly over). What are the life-denying work and the vacantly passive leisure suffered by so many, the fever of mechanised mobility, the distracted on-line twittering, the muddled sexuality and the widespread enthrallment to helplessly destructive material consumption, if not symptoms of derangement? – the last in particular representing a form of addiction which in an individual would very readily be diagnosed as pathological.
Concede any plausibility at all to that interpretation of our condition, and pressingly urgent questions arise. The whole hopeful turn with which this film deliberately concludes – the encouraging economics and sociology of full-scale green transition – must then be cast in a rather different light. To put it bluntly: if we are bonkers enough to have caused this mess, mustn’t we be too bonkers to fix it? If we are so collectively deranged across the spectrum of human life that we have gone this far towards jeopardising the planet’s biosystems, how on Earth should we suddenly recover the collective sanity to pursue rational and obvious counter-measures?
To insist on these questions is not to counsel despair, but it must suggest the need for a much more demanding approach than the film offers to finding hope. For if the climate emergency is in fact the most acute manifestation of a general state of civilisational insanity, there can be no hopeful project of addressing it without also, and simultaneously, tackling that underlying condition. How we might do that calls for kinds of philosophical, political and cultural thinking and analysis of which there is not as yet much evidence. (I attempt a beginning, but only a beginning, in my recent books Realism and the Climate Crisis and Lifeworld.) Perhaps the People’s Emergency Briefing will stimulate others to take such thought further – or at least to recognise that nothing, at the moment, matters more.