How Soon is Now?

In How Soon is Now? From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation, presents his argument for the need for urgent transformations at both the personal and global scale if we are to tackle the ‘hard problems’ posed by climate change and other pressing environmental issues.

While querying aspects of Pinchbeck’s argument and the transition movement more broadly, Jason Hickel nonetheless welcomes this as a brave and necessary book from an important contemporary thinker. 

Our civilisation is in the throes of multiple, interlocking crises. Over the past 60 years, half our planet’s tropical forests have been destroyed, and by 2050 most of the rest will be gone.

40 per cent of our agricultural topsoil is seriously degraded, and scientists expect that continuing degradation will cause farming yields to collapse within our lifetime.

Fish stocks are rapidly disappearing. Species are becoming extinct at a rate faster than any time in the past 66 million years. And we’re presently on track for around four degrees of global warming – with catastrophic consequences – even with the emissions reductions promised under the Paris agreement.

In light of all this, I’m always a bit surprised by how little urgency I sense out there. It’s not that the writers who fill the pages of our newspapers and books are unaware of the magnitude of these crises: the science is hard to avoid. But people seem to feel that it’s somehow unbecoming to sound the alarm with any immediacy.

Nobody wants to appear panicked or unreasonable, after all. And so the veneer of calm sophistication persists, with a few gentle reformist suggestions offered here and there – nothing too disruptive to our cellophane status quo.

There are, of course, a few voices out there that buck this trend. Daniel Pinchbeck is one of them. His new book How Soon is Now? From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation ruptures through the fog with energy and passion. It offers a readable account of the hard limits we’re bumping up against, reviewing the state of knowledge on climate change, arctic methane, ocean acidification, land use and many other pressing ecological issues.

There are, of course, a few voices out there that buck this trend. Daniel Pinchbeck is one of them. His new book How Soon is Now? From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation ruptures through the fog with energy and passion. It offers a readable account of the hard limits we’re bumping up against, reviewing the state of knowledge on climate change, arctic methane, ocean acidification, land use and many other pressing ecological issues.

What are the solutions to these crises? Pinchbeck is, refreshingly, not persuaded by those who claim that we can avert disaster without making any substantial changes to our lifestyles or the way our economy works. On the contrary, he cuts straight to the chase: the problem is our economic operating system itself, with its reliance on ever-increasing consumption and its addiction to exponential growth.

How Soon is Now? is packed with ideas for how to make this transition happen. We get punchy primers on regenerative farming, permaculture, the localisation movement and the importance of shifting away from meat consumption, for instance. In a chapter on the money system (which, being based on interest-bearing debt, has a destructive growth imperative built into it), Pinchbeck explores alternatives like cryptocurrencies, time banks and demurrage. Recognising that policymakers are unlikely to organise a total system overhaul, he hopes these piecemeal alternatives – which are already being practised – will gradually catch on to the point of rendering our current system obsolete.

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