Stuck Monkey: The Deadly Planetary Cost of the Things We Love

By James Hamilton-Paterson

People hunting monkeys in the jungle once devised a simple yet effective trap: When the creature found a banana in a large jar with a narrow neck, it would plunge its paw in to retrieve it. But it couldn't let go. And unless the monkey released the banana, it was stuck.

We are, of course, the stuck monkey, paralysed by our modern lifestyles and consumer habits: our constant stream of online shopping deliveries, our compulsive dependence on digital devices, our obsession with our
pets. These addictions, as small and harmless as they may seem, are quietly destroying the planet. And the eco-friendly alternatives that alleviate our guilt are often not much better.

In Stuck Monkey, James Hamilton-Paterson uncovers the truth behind the everyday habits fuelling the climate crisis. Drawing on eye-opening research and shocking statistics, he mercilessly dissects a wide spectrum of modern life: pets, gardening, sports, vehicles, fashion, wellness, holidays, and more. Ferociously unflinching and
intelligent, this book will make you think twice about the 'innocent' habits we often take for granted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Apr 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781803285504

James Hamilton-Paterson

James Hamilton-Paterson is a novelist and non-fiction writer whose books defy easy categorisation. Gerontius won the Whitbread Prize; Cooking with Fernet Branca was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His acclaimed books on the oceans, including Seven-Tenths, have been widely translated, and his books about aviation have set new standards for writing about aircraft. Born and educated in England, Hamilton-Paterson has lived in the Philippines and Italy and now makes his home in Austria.

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Also by James Hamilton-Paterson

NON-FICTION

A Very Personal War: The Story of Cornelius Hawkridge

Mummies: Death and Life in Ancient Egypt

Playing with Water

Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds

America's Boy

Three Miles Down

Empire of the Clouds: When Britain's Aircraft Ruled the World

Marked for Death: The First War in the Air

Beethoven’s Eroica: The First Great Romantic Symphony

Blackbird: The Story of the Lockheed SR-71 Spy Plane

What We Have Lost: The Dismantling of Great Britain

Trains, Planes, Ships and Cars: The Golden Age 1900–1941

FICTION

The View from Mount Dog

Gerontius

The Bell Boy

Griefwork

Ghosts of Manila

The Music

Loving Monsters

Cooking with Fernet Branca

Amazing Disgrace

Rancid Pansies

Under the Radar

STUCK MONKEY

James Hamilton-Paterson

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

First published in the UK in 2023 by Head of Zeus Ltd, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © James Hamilton-Paterson, 2023

The moral right of James Hamilton-Paterson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781803285528

ISBN (XTPB): 9781804545768

ISBN (E): 9781803285504

Head of Zeus Ltd

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www.headofzeus.com

‘Modern man no longer knows how to foresee or to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth from which he and other living creatures draw their food. Poor bees, poor birds, poor man.’

Albert Schweitzer, in a letter to a

French beekeeper, quoted by Rachel Carson

Contents

Welcome Page

Copyright

How the Monkey Got Stuck

Eat Your Pets!

Gardening

Sport

Cars & Aircraft: Hybrid, Electric and Hydrogen-powered

The Fashion Industry

Military Carbon

Happy Holidays: Eco-lodges and Cruises

Mobile Phones & Computers

Wellness & Beauty

Personal Freedom vs the Planet: Cryptocurrencies

Shipping & Shopping

The Stuck Monkey Takes Stock

Appendix 1: Petroleum-based Products in Everyday Life

Appendix 2: Biofuels

Endnotes

About the Author

An Invitation from the Publisher

How the Monkey Got Stuck

I began writing this book in early November 2021 just as the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow was taking place. Despite the marked absence of major players like Russia and China, COP26’s importance was hailed by most speakers and delegates as representing absolutely the last chance for ‘world leaders’ to make political decisions that might enable the planet to remain habitable by humans for the foreseeable future. And this despite everybody knowing that, in self-styled democracies at least, heads of state have very little power to dictate radical shifts in policy in a world where almost everything, and certainly energy pricing, is largely beyond their control because they have ceded power to transnational corporations. So much for democracy. Nevertheless, it was ritually agreed that the universal enemy is global warming and all remedy appears to hang on reducing reliance on fossil carbon sources, chiefly natural gas, coal and oil: all still vital enablers not just of the global economy but also of life itself for billions of people. On 1 November the BBC’s website headlined just how serious it thought the matter: ‘World temperatures are rising because of human activity, and climate change now threatens every aspect of human life. Left unchecked, humans and nature will experience catastrophic warming, with worsening droughts, greater sea level rise and mass extinction of species.’

The grab-bag of the summit’s journalistic clichés was familiar enough. An editorial without the word ‘catastrophic’ in it was rarer than hen’s teeth. Many including the then-Prince Charles gave their considered opinion that we were now in the Last Chance Saloon. Furthermore, there were no genies to be plucked from magic bottles, no wands to be waved. Now everything depended on technology. This meant switching to alternative, ‘clean’ sources of energy such as wind, wave and solar power to generate electricity, together with newly efficient batteries for storing it. At the same time we would need to develop alternative, zero-emissions fuels such as liquified hydrogen for engine-driven transport. The usual ghostly silence surrounded nuclear energy, the cleanest of them all, with zero carbon emissions when generating electricity.

It is now almost immaterial whether human-induced global warming is actually taking place. For years its reality has been relentlessly endorsed by the great names of the Earth sciences and most of the world’s press, increasingly coupled with the entirely unscientific word ‘consensus’. Today, anyone can see its apparent effects everywhere. Global warming has the self-fulfilling properties of UFOs, such that almost everybody now believes ‘there must be something in it’. To make quite sure we all know what to think about the way the world’s great and good attended the climate summit in Glasgow, newspapers obligingly pointed the moral with headlines like ‘Hypocrite Airways? Jeff Bezos’s $75m Gulf Stream leads parade of 400 private jets into COP26 including Prince Albert of Monaco, scores of royals and dozens of Green CEOs’.¹ The image of those 400 private aircraft crammed into the parking lot of the Last Chance Saloon provided a welcome touch of satire. Nor had it gone unnoticed that US president Joe Biden arrived from a G20 Summit in Rome where he and his entourage drove around in an eighty-five-vehicle convoy. The absurd self-importance of these so-called ‘world leaders’ consorts oddly with the global damage caused by what they represent. Bezos’s Amazon bestrides the world far more like an octopus than a colossus; while Commander-in-Chief Biden’s US military with its 4,800 bases in 160 countries has been named as ‘the world’s single largest consumer of oil and [...]one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters’.²

So it seems we no longer need the significance pointed out to us of how exhaust fumes are playing their part in tornadoes, bushfires, droughts or horrendous floods such as those in Germany’s Ahr valley in July 2021, even though the evidence suggests that those particular floods were to some extent the direct result of culpably bad local planning that permitted extensive building on what should have remained riverine wetland. At that point the Ahr is about to flow into the Rhine and its valley is historically known to have flooded causing fatalities, such as in 1804. But planners have short memories and instinctively feel that modern know-how can anyway deal with threats that were once a danger to preindustrial societies. The overall message of COP26, with its besuited ‘world leaders’ and impassioned teenaged saints delivering sermons, was that the gloomier forecasts may yet be averted by technology. The purpose of this book is to show this to be little more than brainless positivity. Naïve optimism is common to many nations but in its pathological Pollyanna form is the besetting sin of the United States, with that country’s conviction that technology will always come to humanity’s rescue with undreamt scientific breakthroughs. (This despite cumulative scientific breakthroughs down the centuries being at the root of the planet’s present plight.) The main problem with this sort of wishful thinking is that it conveniently mistakes symptoms for the disease itself. Global warming itself is merely a symptom; it is not the malady. We need to make a radically different assessment of what lies at the root of global warming. The planet’s real disease is us – or, for present purposes, The Monkey.

There is a story – whether fable or true – that some people hunting monkeys in the jungle once devised a simple trap that proved remarkably effective. It was nothing but a stout glass jar with a comparatively narrow neck, such as might once have contained a local delicacy such as salted plums. Into this they put a large juicy banana and then went back through the jungle to their village for lunch. On their return they discovered that they had indeed caught a monkey. Having plunged its paw into the jar to grab the banana, the creature found its fist was now too bulky to fit through the jar’s neck. Unfortunately for the monkey, its yearning for the banana was too overwhelming to make it let go of the fruit, withdraw its paw and then simply upend the jar. On seeing the hunters arrive, even panic failed to lend it the wit to smash the jar against a boulder or a tree trunk and make off with the coveted banana. Instead, its intelligence had simply fused and all it could do was jump up and down in a frenzy with the heavy pot on its paw. The hunters easily took the wretched animal to put it into a still larger pot.

The Monkey is of course us, and the way we are paralysed by our inability to relinquish or even change our way of life and its consumer goodies on which the global economy depends. True, in the spirit of the times citizens of developed countries who care enough and can afford it buy hybrid cars, instal solar panels and (electrically powered) heat pumps, and shun plastic bags. This seems like mere virtue signalling if these same people still buy ever more things on Amazon Prime, shop for akebi fruit from Japan (when available in Waitrose), and book a trek to Machu Picchu or a diving holiday in the Seychelles.

In time our machines may well be tamed and some of their pollution abolished. With luck even a patch of The Monkey’s jungle can be saved. Yet periodic jamborees like COP26 and the desperate quest for carbon neutrality are expensive farces. By far the greatest threat to the planet’s health comes from the inexorable demands made on its limited resources by its human freight and by our obsession with burning things. The environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne has coined a word to describe our era: the Pyrocene. ‘A global regime of burning: coal and oil, agricultural land and forest, bush and wetland, most of it planned… Wherever you look, the earth is in flames. The residue is carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, black carbon, sulphur dioxide, and the particularly toxic grouping of small particulate matter known as PM2.5. Everything we burn, we breathe.’³

Countless poor souls have experienced the awful shock of hearing a doctor confirm they have contracted a virulent form of cancer. The blow may be softened by a cheerful prognosis or ritual words of hope; but one morning in a well-lit hospital office with a potted Swiss cheese plant on the windowsill the sufferer is brought face to face with the unavoidable reality of their own death. No longer might it lie in wait a hopeful forty years down the line, by which time a cure surely will have been found. No longer is it something that only affects other people. Suddenly, it really is now your turn.

The immediacy of this bowel-draining shock is exactly what we all ought to be experiencing over our own environment’s cancer diagnosis. The signs have been clear for decades but political flummery, outright denial and American-style positivism have always kicked in to enable us to carry on much as usual. That and the iron laws of the global market. The Covid pandemic brought about more actual change to people’s lives worldwide than any measure ever taken to protect the planet’s health. Ever since, the political priority everywhere has not been to rethink and start afresh more sensibly, but to ‘get back to normal’ as soon as possible.

The overwhelming difficulty is that there is no unity. Economists and politicians tend to fret only about their own country’s – or bloc’s – performance, or about anybody else’s only insofar as it affects their own. Had we had the sense decades ago to realise that we should be worrying primarily about the planetary economy, we might not now find the global environment facing a cancer prognosis gloomy enough to qualify as a death threat. Yet the reality is that we are as far now from instituting any practicable world governance as we have ever been. No measure that makes significant inroads into our rabid global consumerism stands the faintest chance of being universally agreed, let alone implemented and policed. We are still parochial in our outlook, still too devoted to the national lifestyle we already have or the one we aspire to. Our attempts at global change are constantly undercut by disparate influences as the biggest countries, industries and corporations vie with each other like dinosaurs bellowing in a swamp for superpower dominance while the lesser take sides or demur. Not only that, but the decriers of anything that casts doubt on the inherent rightness of the marketplace always produces the ritual, even belligerent, prognosis: Sure, things may look a bit grim now but have faith: the market knows best. Gordon Gekko lives! Greed is good! You’ll see. Things will straighten themselves out just as they always have...

Only this time they won’t. It is partly the nature of the marketplace itself that has led to our world’s terminal illness; but it is also the way we treat that marketplace as having a godlike inherent rightness. ‘While fetishes made by African priests were denigrated as irrational, the fetish of the capitalist marketplace has long been viewed as the epitome of rationalism,’ as Anna Della Subin wrote recently. ‘Abstract European social theories are no more universal, eternal truths than African gods are.’⁴ What has thrown everything permanently out of kilter is the pursuit of economic boom through unlimited (if geographically unbalanced) consumerism, rather than an aspiration to a modest standard of living that might have made possible a reasonable life for all of Earth’s nearly 8 billion people.

This is not to preach. The truth is, we can’t help it. We are The Monkey. Each one of us is hardwired by evolution to strip trees bare of fruit when we find them: to survive by grabbing as much as possible of everything in case of later famine. We will only ever act to the benefit of our own immediate tribe, and the economic system we have fashioned merely reflects this. It is the legacy of countless millennia of hunter-gathering, of hand-to-mouth survival that today leads to panics when people clear supermarket shelves of the last toilet roll on the basis of a mere rumour of shortage. There was a story of a man queuing for hours at a petrol station during a recent tanker drivers’ strike, getting his petrol and then driving nine miles to collect his daughter from school and deliver her home. After that he promptly drove back to the petrol station and rejoined the queue to top up, having already wasted upwards of three hours of his life in a queue. Get it while it’s still there. To call such stories examples of FOMO (fear of missing out) or greed is simply to moralise a genetic imperative. We who are briefly alive at this moment are the glutted survivors of our species and stand on an alp of corpses well over 200,000 years high. It is best not to enquire too closely into who of our forebears were the best grabbers, nor who among us now are dying of hunger. There will soon be even more people standing on us.

And that is the second direct cause of the planet’s sickness: precisely those 8 billion hungry mouths and grabbing hands. In 1950 when I was eight years old the world population stood at 2.5 billion, and if the planet as a whole was in any danger it was considered far more threatened by thermonuclear war than by population pressure. Today, the same planet is host to over three times that number of people while the likelihood of nuclear destruction still exists, although maybe with a little less urgency. The more immediate threat to planetary survival is that figure of 8 billion people almost all of whom, thanks to modern technology, are perfectly aware of the sort of things on offer in more privileged societies and understandably want them for themselves.

That is not going to happen. Not only are the planet’s natural resources not infinite, they are already seriously compromised by overexploitation and climatic change. No matter what we do now, populations are already on the move and countries will become extinct. This will either be because of rising sea levels (the Maldives); rising temperatures (Mauritania, the Gulf States); or because a long succession of disgustingly corrupt, inept and brutal governments at home drive their youngest and best potential wage-earners to emigrate. As I was writing this a great horde of people from South America, particularly Venezuelans, was stumbling its way on foot through the Panama jungle towards the Promised Land of the United States. En route through the isthmus they would gather further pilgrims from other failed states (Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala). Several thousand miles to cover, often with small children, at the mercy of venomous snakes and equally venomous border officials, thieves and brigands. At the same time other desperate people are trekking northward from sub-Saharan Africa towards the Promised Land of Europe. The bones of many of them litter the desert or drift down to the Mediterranean sea bed while the survivors overwhelm islands and refugee camps where their progress is officially blocked. Neither in Europe nor the US is there a clear agreed policy on how to deal with these wretched people, any more than there is in the long-established refugee camps scattered in Jordan and throughout a Middle East devastated by wars we largely initiated. Not our tribe. As of writing, Britain was attempting to export migrants to Rwanda in a chartered aircraft. There exists no political body with the overall clout to force any of the Promised Lands to take these people, nor anyone that wants them. The sole body that might have agreed a unified policy, the European Union, has ignominiously failed and has allowed ruthless gangs of people smugglers to pack people into rubber boats for the often-lethal Channel crossing. Elsewhere, millions of refugees will remain and fester in their improvised tent cities, growing ever more disaffected and radicalised. The situation can only get worse.

It is true that for some years now there has been growing awareness that our consumerist way of life might be having major climatic consequences. Better-heeled and more thoughtful people do now sometimes think twice before taking long flights, aware of such things as carbon footprints and vapour trails. In Sweden in 2018 a movement known as flygskam or flight-shaming began, although since flying anywhere was soon made far less possible by the Covid pandemic it is not clear how effective this campaign may yet be. Devout – often Republican – capitalists tend to mock such middle-class consumer renunciation as borderline socialist. They argue that long before The Monkey evolved, the planet’s archaeo-history shows clear evidence of abrupt climate changes of unknown origin: sudden ice ages and rising and falling sea levels. They reject an overwhelming majority of Earth scientists who claim that current global warming is directly related to (among other things) the pollution of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other chemicals that has steadily increased since the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Science does not agree with such devout capitalists any more than I do. Even the smallest intelligence must acknowledge that in a closed system such as our planet’s, surrounded as it is by the vacuum of space, the massive and ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels over the last two centuries – the gaseous by-products of which wind up in the air and the oceans – can’t not have had an effect on the climate as well as on the rest of the natural world. Where else could these pollutants have gone? Their history is now legible in black-on-white as soot written deep into snowcaps and glaciers.

Once this commonsensical notion achieved global currency people have tended to think simplistically but understandably in terms of factory chimneys and exhaust pipes. Smoke is a visible sign of pollution and it is logical to concentrate on such sources. Thus cars and power stations have been relatively easy to demonise while science and technology devise magic wands to wave over them (e-vehicles, solar and