Rational Fear
This is one of the best argued clearest pieces on the problems we face I've seen for years. It's published in the excellent Scottish Left Review.
In it Justin Kenrick argues that there are reasons to be scared and reasons to be hopeful, but only if there is a realisation that the agendas of socialists and greens are not only compatible, but cannot be achieved without the other.
How do we make the transition from capitalism to sufficiency, from a system of exploitation to ensuring the well-being of all people, species and ecosystems? What would such a transition look like? Would it, for a start, require a radical rethinking of what it is to be human, and therefore of what is socially and politically possible? The strategy outlined here is provoked by the scientific finding that climate change feedback loops are accelerating at previously unthinkable speeds; it is provoked by the much-repeated argument that we mustn’t scare people with this science; and it is provoked by the belief that in extraordinary times, extraordinary things can happen. The suggestion being made here is that we have to ‘tell it as it is’, tell people about:
The ecologically accelerating impacts of climate change, and also about a clear political strategy to stop this accelerating drive to extinction.
The political strategy being suggested here involves:
Supporting communities to undertake the Transitional Initiatives evident in, for example, community land buy-outs and in projects to reassert local and sustainable livelihoods in place of our current dependence on oil;
Building alliances between these and similar Life Projects throughout the world, through which people are seeking sustainability and autonomy;
Creating a Transitional electoral alliance to create a Transition Society: an alliance of those who are willing to face up to accelerating climate change, and willing to build alliances to protect and enable localities to refuse short-term exploitation in favour of long-term well-being. In a nutshell, current ‘affluence’ is built on the exploitation of human and non-human others, and on a dependence on transient and fast-diminishing supplies of oil. In effect we each depend on the equivalent of 40 ‘oil slaves’ (we depend on oil doing the work of 40 humans) to get, make, produce, sell, transport and dispose of the necessary and unnecessary stuff we use. A Transition Society would discard unnecessary production, and would make necessary production co-operative and sustainable. It would support initiatives which reject economic growth and its manufacturing of unsustainable affluence, unbearable impoverishment, and accelerating climate change. And to achieve this it may be important to show people why it is rational to be scared:
- that accelerating feedback loops are kicking in climate change decades earlier than previous scientific models had suggested (e.g. an ice free Arctic summer was predicted by 2070, then 2050, and now by 2012);
- that it may take the prospect of extinction to motivate people to get rid of a system which is killing people, species and ecosystems now; and
- that this prospect may be paralysing people into supporting corporate-led climate change ‘solutions’ which deepen the social and ecological crisis.
Accelerating climate change feedback loops are evident: in the Arctic, which was predicted to be ice-free in summer by 2070, then by 2050 and now by 2012; in the Amazon and Southern Europe, where drying-out forests are vulnerable to devastating fires; and in the severe droughts of North America and Australia. Meanwhile we are persuaded that only economic growth can meet our needs. Growth of three per cent a year translates into a doubling every 23 years of the use of the fossil fuels which overpowers the ability of the soil, the forests, the oceans and the air to absorb CO2. At the same time corporate competition driving this economic growth can only increase its profits by further exploiting social and environmental systems and disregarding the consequences. The responses to climate change by corporate compliant governments are the latest examples of this disregard. Here the focus is on carbon trading, which does not reduce the CO2 going into the atmosphere, but turns it into an excuse for doing nothing. The focus is also on maintaining the so-called ‘carbon sink’ forests of the Global South so that economic growth can continue unchecked, while justifying Global players appropriation of local peoples’ forests and livelihoods. But there is also rational reason to be hopeful:
- in managing these resources sustainably, many of these same local peoples demonstrate the viability of Commons systems of meeting human needs that are not based on scarcity, competition and amassing profit, but on ensuring that all have sufficient socio-ecological security to enable them to flourish as creative social beings.
- the rise of a powerful Global movement of movements is opposing corporations and governments suicidal ‘business as usual’ mentality;
- this movement draws inspiration from Commons systems of meeting local needs which refuse domination by extractive outside forces
”Life Projects are about living a purposeful and meaningful life. In this sense, their political horizons cannot be located in the future, just as living in the present cannot be put on hold in pursuit of a future goal. . . Life Projects have no political horizon; they are the political horizon. They are not points of arrival, utopian places, narratives of salvation or returns to paradise. They are the very act of maintaining open-endedness as a politics of resilience.”(Blaser et al, In the Way o Development, Zed Books 2004)
Leave a comment