We're making a big mistake. We are seeing saving the planet as separate to a wider vision of society.
This accusation is not true of some of the campaigners and thinkers that have been around the environmental movement forever, such as the Green party and the ever younger looking George Monbiot. But it is true for many of us, and those commentators, thinkers, influencers and politicians that have begun to be convinced that preserving the environment for our children's future is unquestionably the right (fashionable?) thing to do and have rendered the cause meaningless as it has become disconnected with wider social goals and visions for our future.
***
We are becoming predictably American about the environment. It's become fashionable for us all to be doing something, so we are clambering around to recycle things by putting things into a separate bin (revolutionary!), planting trees in Nicaragua by credit card (long live the Sandanistas!), and rub our chins seriously at the threat because the scientists at the UN, the brilliant BBC wildlife team and big fat Al “I diluted Kyoto when I was in power” Gore tell us that it is serious. Americans, with their evil climate-change-denying ways, have been recycling and looking down on their non-recycling friends with disapproval for years and now we follow.
Whilst I mock, all this hullabaloo is not inherently a bad thing (perhaps this is how more strategic change happens, with, as marketers call them, the early adopters piloting change prior to mass mobilisation), because climate change due to humankind's activities is happening and we need to act concertedly to ensure we keep temperature change within the 2-3 degree margin.
But the way we are responding to it is fairly random and depressingly unconnected to a vision of building a better world. We are getting very pleased with ourselves (except the luddites that deny that climate change is happening or the doomsayers saying it's all too late anyway) with turning off the TV, changing light bulbs, talking about taking less flights, carbon off-setting and weeping at the sight of animals becoming extinct, that we are forgetting to look at the big picture, and even forgetting, it seems, to ask why do this at all?
The answer: because saving the planet is a necessary component of building the good society that we strive. But are our green ways enabling more people to live lives of their choosing? Is it adding to our freedoms? Is it enabling us to act in collective and intelligent ways to ensure rights for all and to ensure the greatest positive outcomes for as many people as possible?
It can. But we definitely need to move past this fashionable choice-based, market-led approach to managing climate change that seems to have formed the consensus amongst excited journalists, serious politicians and appropriated scientists. The randomness in our current response to climate change - so important to our neo-liberal political-economic consensus that places consumer choices above collective will, immediate goals over long-terms plans - have led to some problematic consequences. Some examples…
1. A large proportion of our recycling is being shipped to
2. The demand for rape seed oil, as a replacement for crude, is contributing to a rise in food prices as less and less land is being used to grow food stuffs. Due to the way in which global agribusiness has developed, thanks to our friends at the World Bank and IMF, large parts of the world's arable land is being tilled as international cash crops rather than managed in a sustainable fashion that serves local economic and nutritional needs. This same outcome is occurring as corn growers, cow grazers and the like are now becoming tree planters to reduce the rich North's carbon footprint. The free-marketers among us would argue that a balance would be achieved over time (expensive foodstuffs become more profitable and more farmers grow it and reject rape seed oil etc...). All well and good for those who can afford significant shifts in the price of basic commodities or live in societies where the state is rich, responsible and stable enough to cushion these shifts, but that is the vast minority of the world's population.
3. The move to fly long haul less could threaten the best outcomes of our long tradition of internationalism - people meeting in unpredictable ways around the world due to trade, exploration and tourism. This could happen because it is the gap-year students, the Guardian reading lefties and charity workers (and not the resort-goers) who are at the vanguard of this internationalism and these folk are the most likely to feel guilty about their carbon stamp and instead plump for the rough shores of the
The good intentions of people are having some rather unintended consequences. This is because they are structured within a quick-win, choice-based culture. And whilst the targets of this blog seem to be the poorly thought out actions of individuals, it is through collective action that we really must focus our lens on. Collective actions that would make a real difference include:
- population control through universal education, which includes family planning classes for all, as possibly the most efficient form of environmental protection
- loosening the grip on patents on clean technology to support poor nations to technology leap-frog
- managing the movement of people as a result of environmental degradation, including encompassing environmental catastrophe within the legitimate causes of becoming a refugee
- developing international mechanisms for managing arable land, which would involve a system of subsidies and support alongside the promotion of market mechanisms to ensure land is used in a sustainable fashion that benefits all, particularly the most vulnerable for whom it has supported for centuries
- an international clearing house that vets climate change policies to ensure that crops, workers' lives and poor people's access to goods and services are not compromised to enable rich individuals and nations reduce their carbon footprint and meet their
- putting the contraction and convergence framework at the heart of global treaties for managing the climate and organising global redistribution.
The reason these actions need to be put at the forefront of our thinking is that they are all located within broad goals that do not just include managing climate change. Family planning is closely connected to a rise in women’s and children’s rights; managing land sustainably is about ensuring biodiversity and affordable food for local people; having a clearing house is about ensuring pro-poor policies. They are about reducing poverty, promoting rights, enabling effective redistribution, building structures that advocate for otherwise disenfranchised people as well as serve to protect the environment and reduce our carbon footprint.
***
Despite calls from excited journalists, serious politicians and appropriated scientists that preventing climate change is our ultimate challenge, it must be seen as just a huge step on the journey to building the good society. If it is not, the changes will not occur in an ideological vacuum, but will provide further strength and grounding to current neo-liberal ideologies.
As a social democrat, that vision of the good society involves working towards greater freedom and
The real challenge climate change adds to this well grounded ideology is shifting policy, which is usually about working within a generation (at best), to become intergenerational. Radical ideas to institutionalise intergenerational policy making - such as giving rights to future generations, or giving formal protections to life that lives well beyond our lifespan (eg trees) - need to be considered, so that supporting a planet that can sustain all of us is integrated within our vision of the good society.
The current absence of ideology in politics is currently pervading our response to climate change and preventing us and our leaders find connections between the major challenges we face and building a coherent path for the future. We need to be reminded that keeping Earth’s temperature within a certain variance is not our ultimate goal; it is a necessary step to building the good society.
8 comments:
This short-sighted environmentalism might, perhaps more cynically, be seen as tokenistic environmentalism. Genuinely green policies inevitably conflict with economic growth and consumer lifstyles which are the central issues, recognised by people like the Green Party but something the mainstream of politics and business is hardly likely to swallow anytime soon.
Ships carrying all our consumer goods return to China full of 'recyclable' plastic because there is no market for such waste in Europe. But these ships are otherwise filled with water to ensure stability, so in one sense at least the 'ooportunity cost' of such recycling is close to zero.
Recycling is all very well but there is no guarantee of demand for 'recyclables' and this points towards a more significant point about environmentalism. Despite some excellent examples of sustainable technology, carbon-neutral transportation and so on the market is highly unlikely to offer a solution to global environmental protection and international politics doesn't seem to offer much promise at the present moment either. Both have rather short-term horizons in practice.
While the most rapid growth in carbon emissions etc. is in China and India, the 'developed' world is the overwhelming cause of climate change etc. So why are we not surprised to read that the World Bank and other donors consider it essential to promote education in the poor world in order to 'stem the tide of environmental degradation'? Western lifestyles are behind climate change and these are increasingly the desire of those in the developing world and indeed Western companies depend on exporting such lifestyles eastwards to 'emerging markets'.
Almost a qarter of production in China is in the hands of American investors and it is increasingly where our pension fund providers are looking to secure our consumer lifestyle for the future.
Can we really hope for technologies that will allow the majority of the world the lifestle the current unsustainable minority enjoys? Can we deny that lifestyle to them while preserving it for ourselves? Are people willing to accept material changes to their wealth and lifestyle which amount to rather more than composting potato peel?
I think the piece could have also discussed the impact people's food habits have on the environment. Humans have consumed haddock and cod nearly to the point of extinction; for every kilogram of shrimp that is ripped from the ocean, 4 kilograms of marine life are hurled back into the seas as corpses. Oceanic ecosystems have evolved over hundreds of millions of years - the destruction that humans have caused over a few years will have unimaginable consequences. It certainly does not help that governments, in particular the US government, subsidise fishermen to the point where they are almost forced to buy bigger, more destructive boats. Educating populations on the dangerous impact their food consumption has on the environment would certainly fit within the actions you proposed, and in the spirit in which you proposed them.
(These and other extremely useful and interesting facts can be found in "A Short History of Nearly Everything". For example, a lightening bolt heats the air around it to 28,000 Centigrade, several times hotter than the surface of the Sun. And, the Moon is receding 1.5 inches per year, which is rather unfortunate since it is the Moon's gravitational pull that keeps the Earth at an angle appropriate for life to thrive. All this talk about the environment won't matter in a couple million years when the Moon is so far away life can't exist anymore)
Sounds like you're trying to define you're own religion, pinned down by similar vague prophetics, laying similar claims to ownership of human ideals.
Environmentalism is exactly that, its not a concept or part of a wider movement, its Ism about the Enviroment. It is the consequences of our collective physical actions. People can have whatever motive they like, whether they follow your concept of The Good Society, they have a hard-on for David Cameron or they just want to leave things how they found them.
Surely this is more important than who owns the journey. Seems like I've just read another pitch of the people you are castigating (of which strategies you suggest I am not criticising).
If we fight over the common cause, then it stops being common. Thats my first point.
And now for my second.
Consequences as stated in your 1 and 2 are, as I think you believe, due to the fact that environmentalism is championed to a greater extent by marketeers, rather than by legislators. HOWEVER, this is not the fault of the marketeers, but the legislators.....
Businesses exist to make money and cannot be trusted to do anything else. The notion of Corporate Responsibility, has served to pass the buck from Governments to the market. And in turn, the buck is being passed on to the consumer. Most of your mockery centres on the consumer, but all your solutions are legislative?
Thanks for the comments.
I am in agreement with the substantive points made. Particularly, Caine, with the questions you raise about choices that need to be made pertaining to our and others' lifestyles. These are some of the most intractable questions to answer.
Our food, particularly our meat consumption again raises tough choices. The meat industry is one of the most polluting of them all. By becoming a vegetarian, at one stroke, you become unbelievably more green. A tough choice for a seasoned meat eater like myself. May be, one day, taxing meat will be like taxing petrol, cigarettes and alcohol - just expected in each budget round.
Joe, you are absolutely right; it is the legislators that need to be corralled, not the consumer. But the legislator is ultimately accountable to the citizen - a beast that needs given a booster to enable meaningful change to happen.
On comparing me to an every-day politician, I can see what you mean. However, I suppose whilst politicians may talk in a similar fashion to the blog - in terms of visions for a better society - they are, in practice, in such an ideological vacuum they are afraid of thinking beyond the next poll.
one of the places I have been was really hot, +57C sometimes and sometimes I thought that that was exactly how the end of the world might look like killed by climate change. People do not like to talk about environmental problems these days and if they do, they see themselves separately, not part of it, like they do not contribute... it’s not about economy or politics (only), it’s more about how people are able to reunite with nature again, and how often they do it and if they miss it at all? How many of us actually realise that this freedom has been already taken away from those living in developed countries? And how many people actually think (especially buying cheap flight tickets) about the freedom of reuniting with nature (which means reuniting with SELF in the first place) being more limited everywhere in the world because of our life style… Has anyone read “Small is beautiful : a study of economics as if people mattered” by Schimacher? He said it all in 1973!
Just to mention that Schumacher says that humans are actually not designed to live in multi-million cities, but also if you read Arne Næss, this will show the concept of deep ecology and reunification with nature - meaning deep understanding that you are part of ecosystem which leads you to protection of it.
The reference to Schumacher is an important one - thanks for making it. His small is beautiful stuff is a coherent theory that starts with how we can live well, not what the temperature should be; and if harnessed can generate coherent policies that will make environmentalism long-term.
Besides the arguable American stereotypes in the piece, there were important points mentioned on collective action to overcome the environmental crisis we face. I would argue that the greatest factor in saving the environment is the role of the private sector because corporations cause the greatest pollution and they also are the most powerful entities on our planet. This is the case in the U.S. and in developing countries. Consumers do have a role to play in forcing companies to become more green; however, until industries create frameworks of self-regulation and governments or multi-national organizations force companies to change their ways, there will be no major change. It would help if individuals recycled and drove hybrids, but governments tightening regulation on industries would make a far greater impact. I agree that the central issue is green politics vs. economic growth. In the current competitive global market place, a global warming treaty cannot be reached without imposing the same restrictions on all global powers, particularly the U.S., China and India. Governments and international organizations must work together to create incentives for the private sector to become more green. The comments about nature and individual choices may be true, but only institutional changes will make the difference.
Post a Comment