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.
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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.
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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.
