The Will to Change

Knowing what you mean, to make that leap
bite into the fear over & over
& survive. Hoarding my “liberty”
like a compulsive—more
than I can use up in a lifetime—
two dozen oranges in the refrigerator
for one American weekend.
—Adrienne Rich, “The Will to Change”1

In a 2019 essay for Slate, David Wallace-Wells argues that “in a storytelling culture obsessed with bigger stories and higher stakes, climate change should be irresistible. And yet when we try to tell the story, we fail, invariably, to do it well.”2 The idea that failure of action on climate breakdown can be attributed to a failure of storytelling is so often repeated it has become a truism in many parts of the environmental movement. Over the last five or so years, I have sat in meetings with people ranging from superstar policy advisors and public radio executives to young students. What nearly all have in common is a belief that if they can locate and refine the perfect story, they will be able to convert people from concerned bystanders into active participants in whatever struggle they are championing. I’ve been asked to find, or indeed create, a Grapes of Wrath for climate change, a #MeToo for air pollution, and, perhaps most bizarrely, an Erin Brockovich for concrete.

Stories, or at least conventional stories that are driven by plot, are machines to interrogate the relationship between intentions, actions, and their consequences. The kinds of stories that campaigners seek are generally the exceptional instances where harm can be neatly ringfenced, an actor and a victim clearly identified. Often, they are engineered to obey a neat narrative arc, in which a challenge is overcome and things return to the status quo.3

This drive to tell stories is based on the idea that inaction on climate breakdown is due first and foremost to a lack of awareness, or, where there is awareness, to a lack of emotional engagement. But I don’t have to look any further than the end of my own nose to establish that it is possible to be both aware and emotionally engaged, and still struggle to know what to do. Indeed, there are a great many people who believe that climate change is happening and that it is anthropogenic, but who find themselves doing little, or even nothing, to address it.4 The discomfort of the cognitive dissonance this generates can manifest in many ways: in the defeatism that says there is nothing left to be done; in the optimism that someone or something will come along to resolve the problem; or in the moral displacement that leads to the production of books, exhibitions, and protests designed to urge other people to take action. The cognitive overwhelm can also lead to a kind of tunnelling of attention, causing us to over-focus on a single dimension of the problem at the expense of the broader context.5

In The Death of Adam, novelist Marilynne Robinson writes that the collective impact of all this searching for the right story has become “like quarrelling over which shadow brings evening.” “We are,” Robinson argues, “caught up in something much greater than its innumerable manifestations.”6 One of the reasons that climate breakdown is such a difficult problem to solve is exactly this issue of scale. It is not a new problem, but a new dimension to nearly every existing problem. Another reason is that the mechanisms that drive climate breakdown defy our intuitive understanding of the link between what we do and what happens. Globalized supply chains mean we are often distant in both time and space from sites of harm. The widespread dispersal of pollution, emissions, and other forms of waste means that the impact of any one action is impossible to track. And even if it was possible, it wouldn’t necessarily lead to a clear understanding of harm, as climate harms are cumulative, and coalesce and accelerate in ways that are poorly understood and hard to predict.

This is a particularly acute issue in architecture practice. Most, if not all, of the stuff used to build contemporary buildings is ultra-processed, marketed under snappy but opaque brand and product names. It is specified from catalogues or bought off-the-shelf, and it is sometimes quite difficult to find what a product is made from, let alone how it was made, by whom, or where the raw materials came from. Although some products can be traced back neatly to a site of extraction or harvesting, this is rare. And most products are compounds of multiple minerals, fibers, and petrochemicals, each of which may be attached to harm at sites of extraction, processing, and transportation.

Through these material entanglements, the responsibilities of the architect stretch not only across space, but also both back into the past and into the future, as materials continue to leak and disintegrate into the environment at the end of or even during their useful life. Untangling this web is extremely, even prohibitively, difficult. Unless you have significant budgets to do primary research, you are highly reliant on self-serving information generated by manufactures about their own products, and there are many competing systems of assessment that are overlapping and contradictory. The complexity of trying to work out where the stuff we work with comes from is not only beyond the capacity of the average architect, but beyond the capacity of most dedicated and skilled researchers. Even looking at a single dimension of a problem like greenhouse gas emissions is a highly specialized and uncertain art.7

But the issue is usually further upstream than a lack of reliable information about provenance. The products we build with are, by and large, taken for granted. The harm in the supply chain is offsite, out of sight, and out of mind. Even in the most ambitious and responsible offices, it often just doesn’t come up. There might be specific materials around which there is heightened awareness, such as, for example, timber. But the glass, pipes, wires, sticky tapes, membranes, glues, sealants, and everything else that goes inside the timber frame are more often left unconsidered. Nowhere is this more stark than in the PassivHaus movement. The PassivHaus standard generated a good deal of positive change, but the obsessive focus on energy efficiency on site comes at the expense of a more expanded understanding of the overall impact of construction design decisions.8 Air-tightness is a game of rapidly diminishing returns, and bringing a design all the way up to standard requires a level of extra material that is hard to justify when the impact offsite is also considered.

This is not a newly identified problem by any stretch of the imagination, and many committed architects and designers have expended a good deal of intellectual and creative energy to create narratives that bridge the gap between a material and its origin. There are many brilliant examples, covering a huge range of materials, contexts, and narrative forms. What they all seem to have in common is specificity. That is, they draw their power from tying a single material object back to its particular geological, industrial, or ecological origins.9 As with so many things, the strength of this kind of work is also its limitation, as it doesn’t, and, perhaps more to the point, can’t, offer any tools that allow the viewer or reader to extrapolate beyond what is actually shown.

The very focus on tangibility and materiality also reaffirms our existing cognitive bias towards privileging what we can see, hear, or feel directly over what we can’t, in nearly every decision-making context, regardless of whether such privileging is in line with our expressly held beliefs and ideas.10 Much of the harm generated by material production is diffuse and hard to detect. This includes things like particulate air pollution, the leaking of toxic byproducts into water and soil, greenhouse gas emissions, or the generation of waste for landfill. Narrative, or at least the narrative forms we have available to us now, can only take us so far. If we are to start to really grapple with all this, what we need is a renewal of our ethical imagination.

Ethics is the field of thought that helps us think through the connection between what we do and what happens, and unearth the moral consequences of particular ways of interacting with the world, and with each other. Rather than rely on specific instructions, it deals with abstraction and example, offering tools to help us think through problems clearly and consistently. However, many ethical ideas that we rely on today date back to the nineteenth century, or earlier, and assume an integrity of time and space that would allow an actor to perceive and understand the impact of their actions, and to isolate moments of ethical consequence from the rush and turn of the everyday.

Within architecture education and practice, talk of ethics usually implicitly or explicitly relates to issues covered within professional codes of conduct, and primarily to an architect’s clients, contractors, and other professional collaborators, and to any impact their work may have on or directly around its site. In specialized settings, including primary research and participatory work, this expands to a more general duty of care towards individuals or communities a practitioner might come into contact with.11 These ethical frameworks are useful and necessary, but the complexity embedded in the wider impacts of everyday design decision-making and material procurement fall firmly beyond their scope. Many professional bodies, including the Architects Registration Board (ARB) in the UK, have taken steps to extend the scope of their guidelines by providing additional advisory notes, articulated in terms of desired outcomes. These are also useful, and perhaps even necessary, at a strategic level, but they fall short of providing tools or support to anyone who might want to act on the ambitions they describe.

The first task in any serious attempt to expand our understanding of the ethical dimension of architectural practice is to establish that such a project is relevant to day-to-day architectural practice, and that its relevance is not academic, but of practical moral urgency. There has been a rather marked tendency, particularly among the left, to emphasize the political dimensions of climate breakdown and environmental harm, and to focus attention on system change. This has been bolstered by the argument that the category of the individual is in itself a tool and a product of capitalism, which has damaged our ability to understand our place in the world, and our relationships with each other and the non-human. There is no sensible argument to be made against either of these positions. However, they have come at the cost of giving many people an excuse to overlook or underestimate the meaningfulness of what we do day-to-day. In the introduction to a 2011 paper, ethicist John Nolt put it like this:

In discussions of global climate change, it is often assumed that the consequences of the choices of a single individual are negligibly small. I am not, however, aware of any serious attempt to justify that assumption.12

In what follows, Nolt attempts to demonstrate that the harm caused by an individual’s emissions was not only approximately estimable but also morally significant.13 Generally speaking, emissions calculations are very labor-intensive, as they involve recording every action or purchase, and then using an index to add up all the associated greenhouse gas emissions. Not only is this a lot of work, it also relies on access to a lot of good quality data about the emissions associated with each activity. While it’s relatively straightforward to find a number for, say, a transatlantic flight, the data about more specific activities and products is often unreliable, behind paywalls, or, quite often, simply does not exist.

Nolt introduces two innovations. Firstly, he inverts the “carbon footprint” methodology, which relies on a large quantity of low-level, unreliable data. Instead, he starts with a small amount of high-level data, about which there is established scientific consensus, and extrapolates downward towards the individual. Secondly, he uses IPCC data on the future impacts of climatic instability to associate the emissions with harm. To do this, Nolt first constructs an “average American” who is born in 1960 and will die in 2040, during which time, Nolt estimates that atmospheric greenhouse gases will increase by a total of 78% above pre-industrial levels.14 Nolt then estimates the percentage of those emissions attributable to the USA, and then divides this total by the average number of people alive at any one time during that period, to conclude that the average American is responsible for one two-billionth of all increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases above pre-industrial levels. He then uses IPCC estimates of total future harm attached to climate destabilization associated with those emissions and an estimate of the total number of people that destabilization will affect, to conclude that the emissions attributable to the “average American” are responsible for the death of or serious harm to one to two future people.15

It’s hard not to be startled by the starkness of this calculation. Like many of Nolt’s critics (and there are plenty), I initially focused all my attention on the limitations of his method and the many assumptions on which such an estimation could trip.16 Much progress has been made in efforts to expand our ethical imagination back into the past, and to popularize an understanding of the continued shared responsibility for legacies of empire, particularly those related to racialized violence. But that is a different task than recognizing the way that we actively create and benefit from violence. The more I thought about it, the more I could intuit the moral usefulness of Nolt’s ideas. Ever a fan of the thought experiment, I opened a spreadsheet to see how far I could get using Nolt’s method to work out how many future deaths the average British architect is responsible for, as a result of the emissions produced by the construction projects they deliver over the course of their working life. I followed all of Nolt’s assumptions and used data in the public domain to make the new figures specific to architects and to the United Kingdom.

Starting with the average age of a working architect of forty-two, I assumed a thirty-six-year career,17 spanning from 2005 to 2045, with an associated 55% increase in atmospheric carbon above pre-industrial averages.18 Like Nolt, I significantly simplified the potential complexity of the calculation in several ways, most notably, by only including embodied carbon, and not any reduction or increase in emissions associated with running buildings for which an architect could reasonably be assumed responsible.19 But, accepting the experiment for what it is, I estimate that the embodied carbon associated with the work of an average UK architect across their career will cause the death of or serious harm to around fifty people.20

There is, of course, a level of cruelty to this calculation. There are very few people, even at the more extreme end of climate catastrophism, who would deny that people need buildings. Complex surgery and rescue helicopters are also very energy-intensive, and there is more than a small moral hazard in attributing emissions to surgeons and air ambulance pilots. The key difference is that, unlike surgeons, architects are explicitly tasked with making decisions that lead to emissions and other harms associated with producing, consuming, and disposing of building materials. A calculation about the impact of architecture might be complicated by a consideration of how much of that harm is caused by building things we don’t really need, in the sense of being necessary for the alleviation of excessive suffering or for supporting core human needs such as shelter, sustenance, and the pursuit of a dignified, meaningful life. Our ability to make such a calculation would depend on our ability to tell the difference between what we need and what we want, something very few people can honestly claim to be good at in their personal lives, let alone on behalf of others. But Nolt dismisses any such wrangling: to him, the harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions represents an unjust oppression of people in the future, and this remains true “whether or not we also provide them with any compensating benefits.”

Avram Hiller has argued that, if Nolt is even partially correct, “our entire moral orientation may be in jeopardy.”21 Many people will argue, here, that being involved in something doesn’t make you responsible for it. This is, perhaps, because we are used to thinking about responsibility in legalistic terms. Recent history has shown that it is extremely difficult to pin legal responsibility for harm on individuals acting within corporate systems, let alone within larger, loose associations. Climate related harms have proved, for now, to be close to impossible to prosecute except in the small subset of instances in which a climate harm coincides or overlaps with something that falls under a well enforced local environmental protection or health and safety law. Historian Michael Rothberg has argued that, to think accurately and constructively about responsibility that is shared by groups of people, we need to move past a legalistic mindset.22 Instead of viewing harms through the lens of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, he proposes the concept of an “implicated subject,” which includes anyone who benefits to any degree from harm inflicted on others, whether in the present, past, or—in the case of climate breakdown—in the future. The degree of implication varies dramatically across populations, from those who are themselves harmed while also benefiting from the harming of others to those who are relatively protected from harm. The idea of the implicated subject is not a tool to make moral judgements, or an identity, but an attempt to make an accurate description of an individual’s position in relation to a political, social, or historical context.

In Goatwalking, Jim Corbett approaches a similar idea by analogy.23 In a war-making society, he argues, there is no such thing as a conscientious objector. In many societies, individuals can respond to conscription by taking a role that avoids direct combat and instead take an auxiliary role, such as an ambulance driver, medic, or a cook. Corbett argues that refraining from direct violence is not enough if you continue to contribute, in any way, to a social system that produces that violence:

Any useful, productive role within a war-making society therefore contributes to the war effort; there is no place for non-participants, only for collaborators and resistors.

Conscience, he argues, is a tricky master, because it is not the conscience of the objector that matters, but the wellbeing of those impacted by the harm. It is all too easy, he argues, to fall into the trap of confusing “cleaning up the mess with washing one’s hands of it.” One thing I have learned over the last few years from people in architectural practice is how strong the fear of being (or being called) hypocritical is. There are numerous good reasons to avoid hypocrisy, but such efforts in service of internal consistency should not be mistaken for ethics. Consistency is a productive goal when you use it to hold yourself to account, but it is worse than useless when it leads you to avoid making commitments. It can, under those circumstances, be exactly the opposite of ethical.

One of the things that the distinction between “cleaning up the mess” and “washing one’s hands of it” brings up is how much space there is between the two. Many people struggle to assess what counts as meaningful resistance in the frame of their own working lives, particularly as our individual agency as architects is curtailed both by the clients and by our employment conditions. In “Power and Structure,” the opening chapter of his 1977 collection Essays in Social Theory, Steven Lukes addresses this head-on. Power, Lukes says, is, at its most simple, the capacity to bring about consequences. Within architecture discourse, this capacity is most often referred to as agency. Lukes argues that there are two competing ideas about the relationship between individual subjects and power. One school of thought, which he characterizes as voluntarism, departs from an idea of history centered around individual social actors, and from the metaphysical idea that we each have complete free will to negotiate our relationship with the rest of the world. The other school of thought, which he characterizes as determinism, takes a structuralist view, and primarily is concerned with political, economic, and industrial systems. In this view, history is produced by what Marx calls “definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will.”24

Lukes proposes an alternative model of power that supports the development of a more nuanced and active understanding of our capacity to bring about effects, and the real constraints or limits on that capacity. He argues that individuals have a degree, or margin, of agency, within constraints. He divides these constraints into two categories: rational and structural. Rational constraints are limits on action imposed by our own reason. Economic concerns are, Lukes argues, a good example of a rational constraint: we can perhaps afford to make a particular decision, but decide to prioritize conserving capital or acquiring something else. We might disagree with the decisions of our employers, but choose to prioritize remaining securely employed or career advancement over dissent. Structural constraints, on the other hand, are those that are external to us, and block any possible action. To assess the agency we have in any given situation, we must first assess which constraints are structural, and therefore unalterable, and which constraints are imposed by our own reason, and therefore have an ethical dimension. We must then engage honestly with ourselves about where we have placed constraints on our own action, asking firstly if those constraints are in the right place, and, secondly, what scope for action remains.

Following Lukes’s thinking forces us to come face-to-face with the reality of where our own priorities lie, and how much more we might prioritize our own convenience and comfort over anything else. Engaging with this kind of thought process can at first be profoundly disempowering. For me, the hardest thing was the necessary reorganization of my self-image, from a compromised but basically good person to something much more muddled and contingent. It is difficult to let go of the freedom that the illusion of non-involvement affords us. Not only the obvious, practical freedom to travel, eat, and consume as we might wish to, but the stranger, even more seductive freedom of thought. The facts are no longer in dispute.25 The difficulty we face now is how to accept and act on what we know. In Don’t Even Think About It, George Marshall puts it like this:

I have come to see climate change in an entirely new light: not as a media battle of science versus vested interest or truth versus fiction, but as the ultimate challenge to our ability to make sense of the world around us. More than any other issue it exposes the deepest workings of our minds, and shows our extraordinary and innate talent for seeing only what we want to see and disregarding what we would prefer not to know.26

As architects, we have to come to terms with letting go of much of the extraordinary power to reorganize the material world that contemporary construction technology affords. Architecture is powerfully life-affirming, but the life that it affirms is uniquely human, and severs us from that which we depend on. Looked at from a distance, its power is not quite illusory, but also not quite solid either. It only holds so long as we continue to ignore everything that is outside the boundaries of the drawing, all the thousands of interlocking transactions and processes required to bring any single element to site and all the harm embedded in them, both now and in the future. Along with mass manufacture and industrial agriculture, architecture is one of the practices that is most responsible for creating and sustaining the collective illusion that we have mastery over the world and can bend it to our will. It is exactly this mastery over the immediate that puts us so profoundly out of joint with what is distant.

There is no great mystery about how we might change architectural practice to minimize present and future harm. Technically, we already know how to build in ways that are not only less harmful, but that can be actively regenerative. We do not need to wait for any great technical breakthroughs to move towards regionally specific architecture, engaged with local cultivation and production, based on predominantly bio-based and minimally processed materials. There are many challenges, in the short term, to making this happen, including practical issues like the lack of local processing facilities or appropriately skilled workers, but there are also plenty of examples of projects where these challenges have been overcome. The challenges that are harder to overcome are social, and have to do with the legislative and financial instruments that support and enable construction.

Less discussed, but equally important, is the way in which accepting the need for such a transformation undermines our sense of our own hard-won competence. Working with low-impact materials is outside the training and experience of most architects, and giving up much of what we know as no-good demands humility. Plant and minimally-processed materials do not comply so readily with architects’ dreaming. They buck, deform, degrade, evolve, hold, and maintain their own ideas of what they are. Compared to glass, concrete, and steel, they are frankly willful. They do not comply with our technologies of specification: they burst our illusions of competence and control.

Greenhouse gas emissions are, after all, a very crude measure of the processes that are generally referred to as climate breakdown. They offer a planetary level view, but that extraordinary scope comes at the expense of detail, and therefore at the expense of understanding. One of the things that a more regionally sourced, locally specific architectural and construction industry would be able to do, without any enormous effort of the imagination, is enable architects to connect what they do, at work, with what happens in the world around them. Material design decisions would draw from and impact local landscapes, shape local economies, and influence the quality and character of work available in the community. It is possible that communities could have more autonomy, with homes that are easier to keep warm, and could, if we do it right, be a lot more affordable, keeping value in regional economies rather than allowing it to disappear into complicated financial instruments that accumulate profits elsewhere. These things could no longer be out of sight, but part of the texture of life.

What then, of the will to change? Corbett argues that the only way out of our present entanglements, assumptions, and habits is through despair.27 Only once we have felt despair at the way things are do we experience a loosening of the ties that bind us; only through despair can we re-emerge into hope. Despair opens up space for transformation. Perhaps accepting our own entanglement with the harm that conventional architectural practice causes can loosen our attachment to the power, competence, and comfort it offers us. British psychoanalyst Adam Philips glosses it like this: everything depends on what we would rather do than change.28