Game of Thrones was arguably about climate change, but the HBO series turned this narrative around by presenting a last-minute technological solution as magically saving the day, the planet, and existence. 

!!! SPOILERS AHEAD !!!

Game of Thrones was arguably about climate change. George RR Martin himself confirmed that it is indeed “a great parallel”. Perhaps that is still the case in the books (we’ll have to wait until, or if, he completes his story), because the HBO series certainly shattered this narrative.

Presumably the message here is: no need to stop our petty squabbling in the face of a cataclysmic threat looming, a last-minute solution will magically turn up. While that might be an unfair bit of criticism to place on a show that indeed specialises in human squabbling, it is yet another example of pop culture reinforcing a dangerous idea. That whatever existential peril we may face as a species, we can solve through our real-world magic: technology!

This belief that eventually technological breakthroughs solve our problems is as powerful today as ever. How could it not? In the face of a problem like planetary collapse, which would require us to completely alter the way we exist as a society, it is easier to just passively hope for that inevitable bit of tech that will save economic growth!

One might imagine that this development in the show was forced due to the creators’ desire to move onto other projects. Because up to the point where the massive problem is instantly resolved, the show seemed to be building a narrative that relied on the humans getting their act together and making radical changes to their behaviour in order to survive. Thus, the opportunity to make a point to millions of people watching was sadly lost.

From Arya Stark’s dagger to personal computers and smartphones, technological artefacts reach users who often ignore the production history of those artefacts. Who produced them? At what social and environmental cost? How was nature transformed in the place where the materials of a certain technological artefact were found? The technologically-enabled abundance that a few people experience is linked to the scarcity experienced by many.

Ecomodernism argues that the issues of scarcity and environmental degradation can be addressed by using more efficient technologies. It has been a matter of debate in political ecology and in this blog. Ecomodernism overlooks the consequences of efficiency improvements. The Jevons Paradox is a finding attributed to the 19th century economist Stanley Jevons. It illustrates how efficiency improvements can lead to an absolute increase of resource use.

For example, the invention of more efficient train engines allowed for cheaper transportation that catalyzed the industrial revolution. However, this did not reduce the rate of fossil fuel use; rather, it increased it. More efficient technologies use less energy, and thus they cost less, which often encourages us to use them more—resulting in a net increase in energy use. Although since the 1970s technological advances have been significant, both global energy use and global material use have increased threefold.

In a famous quote, prolific writer Ursula K. Leguin says

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art…”.

Art, and especially science fiction and fantasy, has the power to challenge ingrained beliefs and explore radical imaginaries, which may inspire action. Sadly, however, the Game of Thrones series failed to deliver.

Vasilis Kostakis is a Professor at TalTech and a Faculty Associate at Harvard. He is coordinating the Cosmolocalism.eu project. Chris Giotitsas is a Research Fellow at TalTech and a core member of the P2P Lab.

Header image: CC Chapman/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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“You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”- Buckminster Fuller

Ruth Gordon: In recent years there’s been a global awakening to the momentous choice humanity now faces: do we cling to the old system and choose extinction, or create a new system that grants us a future worth living?

Movements such as Standing Rock, Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future are giving voice to the widespread longing for a tenable alternative to capitalism – our urgent need for new, regenerative ways of living: systems of life that use clean renewable energy, restore ecosystems, and re-position human beings as nurturers of social networks that enable us to be caretakers for the Earth.

In Fridays for Future, the weekly youth strikes kick-started by Greta Thunberg’s solo action of protest, a new generation are questioning the apathy of the societies they’ve been born into, marching under the slogan “System Change, Not Climate Change.” They are loudly demanding that we wake up, pull ourselves back from the brink of catastrophe, and put our energies into co-creating a system of life that can avert climate disaster.

The success of Extinction Rebellion, “a revolution of love, deep ecology and radical transformation,” is partly due to the ways in which their vision of building such a regenerative culture guides their methods of organization. It was the integrity of their commitment to nonviolence and the functioning support systems that emerged among members that made it so difficult for the police to make arrests during the recent ten days of protest in the UK.

Those who thronged the streets were nourished by the actions they took part in, which were creative and joyful. This led to results, with the UK Parliament declaring a climate emergency. It remains to be seen whether this will really influence decision-making in the UK, but it’s further proof that nonviolent action sustained by networks of real solidarity can create change.

Standing Rock set a precedent for this form of holistic activism. It was one of the most diverse mass political gatherings in history, hosting such historic scenes as US army veterans asking forgiveness from Native American elders. Its unique power to gather together Indigenous peoples, environmentalists, spiritual seekers and ordinary Americans was a tribute to the depth of intention at its core – people took a stand for life itself, for the water, for the sanctity of the Earth. It showed how a global cry of outrage can be transformed into a healing convergence for life.

Although President Trump’s executive order to go ahead with the pipeline was eventually passed and the camp violently evicted, the story did not end there. Resistance continues at Standing Rock, and its example has inspired many other water protectors to stand up in movements around the world. But how can we create a worldwide and permanent shift to regeneration in every sphere of life?

What could a regenerative culture look like?

In 2017, when members of the Tamera Peace Research and Education Center in Portugal heard about the resistance at Standing Rock, they accompanied the protest with prayer and reached out to its leaders in solidarity. This exchange led to the initiation of the annual “Defend the Sacred” gatherings, which foster a network of exchange and support among activists, ecologists, technologists and Indigenous leaders who share the vision of creating a regenerative cultural model as a response to the global crisis.

Tamera is an attempt by Europeans to restore community as the foundation of life, with the vision of seeding a network of such decentralized autonomous centers (known as Healing Biotopes) right across the world. Creating solidarity between diverse movements and projects requires deep investigation of the human trauma that so often creates conflict and derails attempts at unification. This is why Defend the Sacred gatherings focus on healing trauma through consciousness work, community building, truth, and transparency. The goal is to create bonds of trust among people that are so strong that external forces will no longer be able to break them.

The leaders of the gatherings know that we can’t create a regenerative culture solely by trying to ‘smash capitalism.’ Instead, we need to understand and heal the underlying disease that generates all such systems of oppression. This disease can be described as the Western sickness of separation from life, or “wetiko,” as it was named by the North American Algonquin people. Martin Winiecki (the gatherings’ co-convenor) describes it like this:

“‘Wetiko,’ literally ‘cannibalism,’ was the word used by the Indigenous peoples to describe the disease of white invaders. It translates as the alienated human soul, no longer connected to an inner life force and so feeding on the energy of other beings.”

Wetiko is the psychic mechanism that keeps us trapped in the illusion that we exist separately from everything else. Within the isolated selfish ego, the pursuit of maximum personal gain appears to be the goal and meaning of life. Coupled with the chronic inability to feel compassion for the lives of other beings, violence, exploitation and oppression are not only justified, but appear logical and rational. If we resist only the external effects of wetiko, maybe we can win a victory here or there, but we can’t overcome the system as a whole because this ‘opponent’ also sits within ourselves. It is from within that we constantly feed and support this monstrous system.

An important part of healing wetiko relates to healing our interracial wounds. It’s significant that Defend the Sacred was initiated in Portugal – the place from where so many perpetrators of genocide and slavery in the Americas and Africa set out. A new path towards a nonviolent future will emerge from creating spaces where we can acknowledge our violent past and gain insight about what we have done as a collective. Such spaces offer the possibility of finally stepping out of the futile pattern of oppression, guilt and blame.

Tangible visions of the future.

In a recent co-written book, Defend the Sacred: If Life Wins, There Will Be No Losers, participants in the gatherings offer a mosaic of short essays that present their shared vision, along with many different ways to put it into practice. These include ending fossil fuel dependence, healing natural water cycles in cooperation with ecosystems and animals, transforming economic structures from systems of extraction to systems of giving, re-centering the voice of the feminine, creating a planetary network of solidarity and compassion, and anchoring everything in spiritual connection with the Earth as a living organism.

Supporting the transition away from fossil fuels, some members of the group are developing decentralized alternative technologies based on solar energy, while others are creating open source blueprints that enable people without specialist knowledge to construct simple plastic recycling machines all over the world.

Continuing the work of Standing Rock, the last two gatherings focused on thwarting oil drilling threats in Portugal, and each included an aerial art action in which participants used their bodies to form giant images alongside messages to “Stop the Drilling.” These actions strengthened the growing resistance in Portugal to fossil fuel extraction, which won a significant victory in October 2018 when the oil companies involved announced that they were voluntarily withdrawing all plans to extract oil in the country.

The group is also working on an approach to climate change that goes beyond the mechanical question of carbon reduction or balancing inputs and outputs, to one that views the Earth as a living whole whose ‘organs’ all need to be intact for life to flourish. A key part of this approach is the widespread restoration of ecosystems through creating Water Retention Landscapes (a method of sculpting the land to help it absorb and retain rainwater where it naturally falls). Such landscapes heal natural water cycles, which in turn can rebalance the climate and protect forests from the increasing risk of wildfires.

Another central aspect of the group’s work is to create social systems that both support the revival of feminine power and reestablish a basis of mutual support between the masculine and the feminine. Since overcoming patriarchy cannot be achieved by simply demanding change, this means creating forms of human co-existence that do not replicate patriarchal structures, but, as Monique Wilson puts it (another contributor to the book and coordinator of One Billion Rising), instead allow women to rediscover solidarity and “remember their abilities to heal, to teach, to create and to lead.”

Imagine what would happen if all the separate movements for climate justice, racial justice, ending sexual violence and developing new forms of economy could unite around a shared spiritual center, just as they did at Standing Rock. Imagine if, drawn together by their love of life and their commitment to protecting our home, the Earth, they could come together to articulate a shared vision for a future that is more compelling to people than remaining in the current broken system. This is what our planet needs now.

To join this year’s Defend the Sacred gathering from August 16–19, please click here.

For more information on our new book, Defend the Sacred: If Life Wins, There Will Be No Losers, please click here.

Reprinted from opendemocracy. You can find the original post here!

Featured image: Aerial art action during Defend the Sacred in Portugal, 2018. | Tamera Media. All rights reserved.

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Within just three months, 42 councils have signed the pledge – representing over 17 million people between them in the UK  – and more than 34 million in the US, Australia, Canada and Switzerland.

Declaring a climate emergency creates an opportunity to:

1. Involve citizens through citizen’s assemblies and other processes of participation and consultation in setting priorities for ambitious carbon reduction and understanding and engaging with the difficult choices that implies.
2. Create healthier, more resilient and sustainable local communities powered by locally generated low carbon energy, served by affordable and sustainable transport, higher quality and more efficient housing stock and fed by sustainable food and land systems.
3. Un-do business as usual. In a time of cut-backs, reverse costly policies and investments in carbon-intensive infrastructures such as roads or airports and divest council pension funds from fossil fuels.

What does it mean to declare a climate emergency?

For a council to have called a ‘climate emergency’, commonly advanced guidelines say that they must have: used these specific words in a motion or executive decision; they must set a target date to reduce their local climate impacts consistent with the IPCC report; they must set up a working group to report within a short timescale; and they must engage with a cross section of the community.

When in ‘emergency mode’, councils must allocate discretionary funds towards climate action. That includes things such as: educating the community, advocating for action from higher level governments, mitigating and building resilience against the impacts of climate change, and funding or undertaking the planning and research needed to implement full state and national emergency mobilisation.

So far, councils’ pledges and aims have varied enormously. For example: Scarborough council has committed to a target of zero carbon emissions by 2030, and will seek up to £80,000 in funding over two years for a sustainability officer to help achieve their goals. Meanwhile, Liverpool City Council deleted all references to declaring a ‘Climate Emergency’ and many of the suggested actions to be taken. Its plan has no stated target, no timeline and no budget. In Lancaster and Oxford a Citizen’s Assembly is being set up as part of their process; this is a deliberative process in which a representative group of citizens selected at random from the population, learn about, discuss, and make recommendations in relation to a particular issue or set of issues.

Local governments are often in the front line of dealing with climate change impacts (such as flooding, fires, storm damage) and the on the receiving end of demands for mitigation action. A key issue is working out what local governments have exclusive control over (as opposed to national and regional authorities): and where the boundaries of responsibility lie, because with climate change they are often very complex and diffuse. Clearly councils also facing funding difficult constraints. Yet, across transport, energy, housing, waste, buildings, people are looking to councils for leadership.

So what can they do?

We are not short of concrete ideas about what to do. Reports such as Zero Carbon Britain show sector by sector analysis of what’s possible in the UK by 2030. Many cities have already taken the lead with emissions reduction pledges and zero carbon targets including commitments from Bristol and Manchester aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030 and 2038 respectively. Across the world, the cities organisation C40 has been calling for fossil free streets: commitments to procure only zero-emission buses from 2025; and ensuring a major area of the city is zero emission by 2030.

Planning is key and so is reducing demand. The services people want, such as heat and mobility, are often those they show the greatest indifference towards. We are often fearful of challenging people’s attachment to their cars, for example. But if safe, reliable and affordable alternatives are provided, people will use them. When affordable and accessible infrastructures are built for buses and bikes and pedestrians, people use them as numerous examples around the world have shown.

Around housing, councils can help to deliver on the government pledge to halve energy use from new build by 2030 and for all new homes to be heated by fossil free systems by 2025. They can promote energy efficiency schemes and exploit other grant funding, promote new carbon neutral housing schemes, either as authority owned projects or with partners and transform council’s own properties to maximise their own potential for energy production and saving.

Regarding transport, councils can promote energy efficiency in local transport, promote cycling and car sharing, consider car exclusion zones or access charges, promote the use of electric cars by providing charging points and invest in EV infrastructure, improve public transport integration (bikes, buses and trains) and consider how transport contracts can be used to promote green travel.

On energy, councils can promote low energy use- smart energy, energy efficiency and conservation. They can consider providing funding for solar energy installations on the basis of shared returns, review the authority’s own energy use and consider setting up ESCOs (energy service companies).

Others areas include waste and food. Councils can review waste and recycling policies- take pressure off land-fill and reduce methane and other emissions. Where possible they might target food consumption through procurement and menus in schools to include less meat and dairy.

In terms of business, they can promote support services for local businesses. Preferential business rates for local firms, for example, as part of much needed regional redevelopment, or creating Local Enterprise Partnerships to set up low carbon enterprise zones with tax breaks to nurture jobs, investment and innovation.

What can we stop doing?

As well as thinking creatively about how to deliver services in low carbon ways, we also need to accelerate the shift away from the fossil fuel economy.

Declaring an emergency permits a veto over actions which are incompatible with radical decarbonisation in line with the Paris agreement, and climate-proofing all areas of policy. This should mean divestment from fossil fuels. Local councils in the UK invest over £14 billion in the fossil fuel industry. Divestment from cities assets from fossil fuels though pension funds sends a powerful signal and makes a major contribution. Of the 1032 institutions that have divested from fossil fuels worldwide, just 15% are governments. But there are now more than 15 UK councils – from Sheffield to Stroud, Brighton to Birmingham –calling for divestment from their pension funds.

Beyond the local

Local council action doesn’t exist in a vacuum of course. Some of the measures described above require a supportive national regulatory environment. Financing could be delivered as part of a Green New Deal. Carbon budgets need to be set and enforced by independent national agencies such as the climate change committee. National government needs to give direction by laying down limits and reversing major decisions that produce carbon lock-in incompatible with 1.5 around airport expansion and fracking for example. Local government can make their voice heard to lobby government on this.

Declaring a climate emergency is just a starting point, and not without its challenges. But the good news is there are numerous policies that can be put in place as well as initiatives bubbling up from below that can be harnessed to scale up and accelerate the pace of change.

So what are we waiting for?

Reprinted from Rapid Transitions Alliance. You can find the original post here!

Featured image: Climate Emergency – PeoplesClimate-Melb-IMG_8280. By Takver. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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Derek Wall: Almost every day, we learn of new horrors in the Middle East. Syria and Iraq are suffering from a brutal war. Fundamentalist groups like the so-called Islamic State and authoritarian leaders are murdering innocent citizens. Yet there is one sign of possible hope: in Northern Syria, the Kurdish people and their allies have established a secular, feminist and ecological republic, called Rojava, which means ‘the West’.

It would be easy to romanticise this – in a situation of conflict and war, it can be difficult to put high ideals into practice. Nonetheless, Rojava, with its organic agriculture, cooperatives, direct democracy and women’s leadership, is both fascinating and inspiring.

Most striking is the fact that Rojava is based on the teachings of a New York, working-class and Jewish-born green philosopher, Murray Bookchin. Bookchin, who died in 2006, is having a massive and massively positive effect in the Middle East. Ecology or Catastrophe is the unputdownable biography of Bookchin, which I am sure will be thought provoking to any member of the Green Party.

Bookchin was born in the 1921. His parents had emigrated from Russia and his grandmother had been a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a peasant- based radical organisation. From childhood, Bookchin was immersed in political activity and made a transition from socialism to anarchism to his own form of politics he called communalism.

He can be seen as an early advocate of radical green politics. His book, Our Synthetic Environment, published in 1962, discussed the dangers of pesticides. In the 1950s, he was already warning of the effects of climate change caused by fossil fuels. He campaigned against giant freeways that devastated cities and felt that cars were wrecking the environment.

Janet Biehl was Bookchin’s partner, and her book is honest, showing Murray’s flaws as well as his greatness. It is a very personal and sometimes sad book, but it is also political and philosophical, introducing the reader to important ideas.

Bookchin thought deeply about green politics, arguing that capitalism threatened our survival and that we need a democratic, ecological alternative. To challenge climate change and introduce a socially-just society isn’t easy, but Murray provides some ideas and inspiration we can learn from.

Reprinted blog by Derek Wall on Greenworld, you can see the original post here

Featured Image: “Kurdish YPG Fighters” by Kurdishstruggle is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

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This letter was collaboratively written with dozens of aligned groups. As the weeks of action called by Extinction Rebellion were coming to an end, our groups came together to reflect on the narrative, strategies, tactics and demands of a reinvigorated climate movement in the UK. In this letter we articulate a foundational set of principles and demands that are rooted in justice and which we feel are crucial for the whole movement to consider as we continue constructing a response to the ‘climate emergency’.

Dear Extinction Rebellion,

The emergence of a mass movement like Extinction Rebellion (XR) is an encouraging sign that we have reached a moment of opportunity in which there is both a collective consciousness of the immense danger ahead of us and a collective will to fight it. A critical mass agrees with the open letter launching XR when it states “If we continue on our current path, the future for our species is bleak.”

At the same time, in order to construct a different future, or even to imagine it, we have to understand what this “path” is, and how we arrived at the world as we know it now. “The Truth” of the ecological crisis is that we did not get here by a sequence of small missteps, but were thrust here by powerful forces that drove the distribution of resources of the entire planet and the structure of our societies. The economic structures that dominate us were brought about by colonial projects whose sole purpose is the pursuit of domination and profit. For centuries, racism, sexism and classism have been necessary for this system to be upheld, and have shaped the conditions we find ourselves in.

Another truth is that for many, the bleakness is not something of “the future”. For those of us who are indigenous, working class, black, brown, queer, trans or disabled, the experience of structural violence became part of our birthright. Greta Thunberg calls world leaders to act by reminding them that “Our house is on fire”. For many of us, the house has been on fire for a long time: whenever the tide of ecological violence rises, our communities, especially in the Global South are always first hit. We are the first to face poor air quality, hunger, public health crises, drought, floods and displacement.

XR says that “The science is clear: It is understood we are facing an unprecedented global emergency. We are in a life or death situation of our own making. We must act now.”  You may not realize that when you focus on the science you often look past the fire and us – you look past our histories of struggle, dignity, victory and resilience. And you look past the vast intergenerational knowledge of unity with nature that our peoples have. Indigenous communities remind us that we are not separate from nature, and that protecting the environment is also protecting ourselves. In order to survive, communities in the Global South continue to lead the visioning and building of new worlds free of the violence of capitalism. We must both centre those experiences and recognise those knowledges here.

Our communities have been on fire for a long time and these flames are fanned by our exclusion and silencing. Without incorporating our experiences, any response to this disaster will fail to change the complex ways in which social, economic and political systems shape our lives – offering some an easy pass in life and making others pay the cost. In order to envision a future in which we will all be liberated from the root causes of the climate crisis – capitalism, extractivism, racism, sexism, classism, ableism and other systems of oppression –  the climate movement must reflect the complex realities of everyone’s lives in their narrative.

And this complexity needs to be reflected in the strategies too. Many of us live with the risk of arrest and criminalization. We have to carefully weigh the costs that can be inflicted on us and our communities by a state that is driven to target those who are racialised ahead of those who are white. The strategy of XR, with the primary tactic of being arrested, is a valid one – but it needs to be underlined by an ongoing analysis of privilege as well as the reality of police and state violence. XR participants should be able to use their privilege to risk arrest, whilst at the same time highlighting the racialised nature of policing. Though some of this analysis has started to happen, until it becomes central to XR’s organising it is not sufficient. To address climate change and its roots in inequity and domination, a diversity and plurality of tactics and communities will be needed to co-create the transformative change necessary.

We commend the energy and enthusiasm XR has brought to the environmental movement, and it brings us hope to see so many people willing to take action. But as we have outlined here, we feel there are key aspects of their approach that need to evolve. This letter calls on XR to do more in the spirit of their principles which say they “are working to build a movement that is participatory, decentralised, and inclusive”. We know that XR has already organised various listening exercises, and acknowledged some of the shortcomings in their approach, so we trust XR and its members will welcome our contribution.

As XR draws this period of actions to a close, we hope our letter presents some useful reflections for what can come next. The list of demands that we present below are not meant to be exhaustive, but to offer a starting point that supports the conversations that are urgently needed.

Wretched of the Earth, together with many other groups, hold the following demands as crucial for a climate justice rebellion:

• Implement a transition, with justice at its core, to reduce UK carbon emissions to zero by 2030 as part of its fair share to keep warming below 1.5°C; this includes halting all fracking projects, free transport solutions and decent housing, regulating and democratising corporations, and restoring ecosystems.
• Pass a Global Green New Deal to ensure finance and technology for the Global South through international cooperation. Climate justice must include reparations and redistribution; a greener economy in Britain will achieve very little if the government continues to hinder vulnerable countries from doing the same through crippling debt, unfair trade deals, and the export of its own deathly extractive industries. This Green New Deal would also include an end to the arms trade. Wars have been created to serve the interests of corporations – the largest arms deals have delivered oil; whilst the world’s largest militaries are the biggest users of petrol.
• Hold transnational corporations accountable by creating a system that regulates them and stops them from practicing global destruction. This would include getting rid of many existing trade and investment agreements that enshrine the will of these transnational corporations.
• Take the planet off the stock market by restructuring the financial sector to make it transparent, democratised, and sustainable while discentivising investment in extractive industries and subsidising renewable energy programmes, ecological justice and regeneration programmes.
• End the hostile environment of walls and fences, detention centers and prisons that are used against racialised, migrant, and refugee communities. Instead, the UK should acknowledge it’s historic and current responsibilities for driving the displacement of peoples and communities and honour its obligation to them.
• Guarantee flourishing communities both in the global north and the global south in which everyone has the right to free education, an adequate income whether in or out of work, universal healthcare including support for mental wellbeing, affordable transportation, affordable healthy food, dignified employment and housing, meaningful political participation, a transformative justice system, gender and sexuality freedoms, and, for disabled and older people, to live independently in the community.

The fight for climate justice is the fight of our lives, and we need to do it right. We share this reflection from a place of love and solidarity, by groups and networks working with frontline communities, united in the spirit of building a climate justice movement that does not make the poorest in the rich countries pay the price for tackling the climate crisis, and refuses to sacrifice the people of the global South to protect the citizens of the global North. It is crucial that we remain accountable to our communities, and all those who don’t have access to the centres of power. Without this accountability, the call for climate justice is empty.

The Wretched of the Earth

• Argentina Solidarity Campaign
• Black Lives Matter UK
• BP or not BP
• Bolivian Platform on Climate Change
• Bristol Rising Tide
• Campaign Against the Arms Trade CAAT
• Coal Action Network
• Concrete Action
• Decolonising Environmentalism
• Decolonising our minds
• Disabled People Against the Cuts
• Earth in Brackets
• Edge Fund
• End Deportations
• Ende Gelände
• GAIA – Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
• Global Forest Coalition
• Green Anticapitalist Front
• Gentle Radical
• Grow Heathrow/transition Heathrow
• Hambach Forest occupation
• Healing Justice London
• Labour Against Racism and Fascism
• Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants
• London campaign against police and state violence
• London Feminist Antifa
• London Latinxs
• Marikana Solidarity Campaign
• Mental Health Resistance Network
• Migrants Connections festival
• Migrants Rights Network
• Movimiento Jaguar Despierto
• Ni Una Menos UK
• Ota Benga Alliance for Peace
• Our Future Now
• People’s Climate Network
• Peoples’ Advocacy Foundation for Justice and
• Race on the Agenda (ROTA)
• Redress, South Africa
• Reclaim the Power
• Science for the People
• Platform
• The Democracy Centre
• The Leap
• Third World Network
• Tripod: Training for Creative Social Action
• War on Want

Wretched of The Earth is a grassroots collective for Indigenous, black, brown and diaspora groups and individuals demanding climate justice and acting in solidarity with our communities, both here in the UK and in Global South. Join our mailing list by completing this registration form.

Image of Wretched of the Earth bloc with “Still fighting CO2lonialism Your climate profits kill” banner.

Originally published on the Red Pepper website, 3rd May 2019: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/an-open-letter-to-extinction-rebellion/

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12.00pm, Thu 23 May 2019 – 6.00pm, Sat 3 August 2019

Arts Catalyst
74-76 Cromer Street
London
WC1H 8DR

FURTHER INFORMATION

Free, no need to book

we-are-in-this together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same” — Rosi Braidotti

Towards the Planetary Commons is a new exhibition investigating agency and autonomy in the face of global ecological crises. Encompassing artist film, an evolving installation and a programme of talks and workshops, the programme reflects on different ways of living and how new knowledge can emerge from struggles against current ecopolitical challenges.

Part I
Showing Marwa Arsanios: Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part I (2017) and Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2(2019)
23 May – 6 July 2019 | Preview: Wednesday 22 May, 6.30pm 

Part II 
Showing Paloma Polo: The earth of the Revolution (2019) 
11 July – 3 August 2019 | Preview: Wednesday 10 July, 6.30pm 

Neoliberal policies imposed on communities of humans and non-humans reinforce strategies of land grabbing and monoculture, threatening the land and its biodiversity. Whilst corporations and governments alike remain removed from accountability for pollution, natural resource extraction and displacement of entire communities, across the world, in regions such as the Philippines and Kurdistan, people are collectively adopting new modes of decision-making and self-governance through approaches inspired by eco-feminism, class struggle and planetary commoning practices. 

In one room of the exhibition is a rotating programme of artist films by Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios and Spanish artist Paloma Polo, all of which are presented for the first time in the UK. 

In Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part I (2017) Arsanios addresses forms of self-governance and knowledge production that have emerged from the autonomous women’s movement in Rojava. Shot in the mountains of Kurdistan and through recorded testimony, the film tracks the practical work of the movement – how to use an axe, how to eat fish within its biological cycles of production, when to cut down a tree for survival and when to save it. It explores how individuals come to a conscious participation in the movement; how they become part of the guerrilla, highlighting group learning as essential to the movement itself. In the film, the soundtrack of testimonies, analyses, and critical histories from those within and in proximity to the movement are edited together in a single, solid density. In Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2 (2019) Arsanios focuses on the ecofeminist groups that form part of the movement, honing in on the alliance between communities of women, nature and animals and problematising the care roles ‘naturally’ assigned to women. 

The second phase in the programme, will see artist Paloma Polo’s The earth of the Revolution (2019) premiered for the first time. Emerging from Polo’s research in the Philippines, cultivated over three years, and during which time the artist located herself at the heart of the ongoing democratic struggles in the region – a struggle in which marginalised countryside communities are actively fighting for democratic and progressive transformations, emancipation and the common good – this new work offers viewers a glimpse into the political practices that underlie the revolution. Segmented into scenes, the film closely follows the guerrilla as they go about their everyday tasks, from lessons and habitual meetings, reporting and assessments to personal conversations and confidences, moments of solitude and rest. Blurring the distinctions between documentary and artist film, The earth of the Revolution seeks to expand our understanding of how revolution manifests itself in a contemporary context, reflecting on some of the positive human elements and processes that might arise from such conflicts. 

Arts Catalyst’s second space will take the form of a ‘living room,’ an evolving installation showcasing case studies that emerge from the programme, presented within the framework of a modular environment designed by artist Lorenzo Sandoval. Works by collective practice They Are Here, artists-in-residence throughout 2019, will be presented alongside Sandoval’s installation. They Are Here draw from research over the past two years into Wardian Cases, a botanical container developed in the early 19th Century to transport plants across great distances. Prototypes for New Wardian Cases (2019) are material structures modelled on non-European architectural histories that function as a form of speculative design. In the context of the public programme, They Are Here will present a live-mix of their new audio-visual work, BRUNO, an enveloping, free-ranging meditation on the relationships between ecology, migration and the urban environment. 

Towards the Planetary Commons is part of Arts Catalyst’s Test Sites programme, an ongoing co-inquiry exploring the rapid transformations in human and non-human lives caused by environmental change. Featuring works by international artists, this next phase in the project opens up the programme to broader planetary perspectives. An accompanying programme of talks, conversations and workshops will be announced soon via Arts Catalyst’s website.

Image: Paloma Polo: Still from ‘The earth of the Revolution’ (2019), courtesy the artist

Reposted from the Arts Catalyst website: https://www.artscatalyst.org/towards-planetary-commons-reimagining-infrastructures-autonomy

The post Arts Catalyst Event in London, UK – Towards the planetary commons: reimagining infrastructures for autonomy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This an intensely risky moment, emotionally and strategically. The phase change could knock you off your feet, especially if this is your first time participating in a major mobilisation. I’ve been in this position before, back in 2011 when we decided to close the camp at Occupy Wellington. So I wanted to write you this letter. Granddad Rich has a story for you. Please imagine a rocking chair, a pipe, a pot of tea.

Back in my day…

Joining Occupy absolutely blew my mind, and blew my heart right open. It was the first time I felt the courage that comes before hope, the first time that “solidarity” moved from my head down into my heart, my blood, my hands. I reckon I did 30 years of growing up in 3 weeks. It felt like we were on the front edge of history, wide awake and fully alive at last.

So leaving the camp feels super risky. At this moment, despair is the biggest threat. Is this the end? Do I go back to my normal life now? Was I deluded when I felt like we were changing the world?

First off, I know you know this, but humour me while I remind you anyway: the camp is closing but there’ll be more actions. These weeks in London were just one line of an epic beautiful song. Extinction Rebellion will carry the tune for maybe a verse or two, and then some other movement will pick it up and carry on. When I joined Occupy in 2011, I had no idea that I was entering into a lineage, generations of resistance made invisible by the histories I learned in school, a thousand grandmothers I never knew the names of. Occupy dispersed, but the lineage continues. I watched it surging through Hungary, Taiwan, Brazil, Korea… the movement of movements is everywhere. Your job is not to bring an end to injustice, to stop climate change, or to replace capitalism. You just have to keep going.

“It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either.” — Rabbi Tarfon

The surest way to guarantee your endurance is with company.

If you’re not sure what to do next, I can tell you what worked for me. After we left Occupy, a small crew of my closest allies made a commitment to each other. We made a pledge to keep going: to let go of individualism and hold tight to the mutual aid, the care, the passion and the purpose that we found in camp.

Eventually we started a tech co-op to spread the meme of participatory democracy. Now I have a consulting company helping groups to get beyond hierarchy. For the past 7 years I’ve been paid to work on the problems that feel most urgent to me. I’m free from the discouraging, dehumanising, exhausting grind of my old bullshit jobs. I’m not rich, but I’m satisfied, deep down in my guts. It’s not all plain sailing, but I have an anchor, a rudder, and crewmates I trust with my life. I can’t tell you how much my life has improved since I found my meaningful work, and found the people to share it with. Sure, that’s partly down to privilege and good luck, but don’t underestimate the value of a clear intention. It’s in my head every day like a mantra: mutual aid, meaningful work, mutual aid, meaningful work.

Probably you’re not going to start a tech co-op. If you’re committed to Extinction Rebellion, you can join one of the many local XR groups. But XR doesn’t have a monopoly on solidarity: you can form a savings pool, a reading club, a shared house, a freelancer collective, a community choir… just don’t go on alone. At the very least, find 3 or 4 people you can meet with every couple of weeks: form your crew now while the enthusiasm is high, so you can hold each other up when the energy gets low. If you need inspiration or resources for how to do this well, check out microsolidarity.cc.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
Don’t go back to sleep
You must ask for what you really want
Don’t go back to sleep
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch
The door is round and open
Don’t go back to sleep

— Rumi

p.s. This story is published by Richard D. Bartlett with no rights reserved: you have my consent to use it however you like. You’ll find files for easy reproduction on my website. The artwork is licensed for non-commercial use.

No rights reserved by the author.

The post The Morning After The Rebellion: An Open Letter To The People of #ExtinctionRebellion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Most of that transformation will come from the efforts of ordinary people at creating the building blocks of the successor society on the ground, and from those building blocks replicating laterally and coalescing into an ecosystem of counter-institutions that expands until it supplants the previous order.

Some of it will come from political engagement to run interference for the new society developing within the shell of the old, and pressuring the state from outside to behave in more benign ways. Some of it will come from using some parts of the state against other parts, and using the state’s own internal procedural rules to sabotage it.

Some of it will come from attempts to engage friendly forces within the belly of the beast. Individuals here and there on the inside of corporate or state institutions who are friendly to our efforts and willing to engage informally with us can pass along information and take advantage of their inside positions to nudge things in a favorable direction. As was the case with the transition from feudalism and capitalism, some organizational entities — now nominally within state bodies or corporations — will persist in a post-state and post-capitalist society, but with their character fundamentally changed along with their relationship to the surrounding system.  If you want to see some interesting examples of attempts at “belly of the beast” grantsmanship and institutional politics, take a look at the appendices to some of Paul Goodman’s books.

A great deal, I predict, will come from efforts — particularly at the local level — to transform the state in a less statelike direction: a general principle first framed by Saint-Simon as “replacing legislation over people with the administration of things,” and since recycled under a long series of labels ranging from “dissolution of the state within the social body” to “the Wikified State” to “the Partner State.” The primary examples I have in mind today are the new municipalist movements in Barcelona, Madrid, Bologna, and Jackson and the dozens and hundreds of cities replicating that model around the world, as well as particular institutional forms like community land trusts and other commons-based local economic models.

There is no “magic button” that will cause the state to instantaneously disappear, and it has currently preempted the avenues and channels (to paraphrase Paul Goodman) for carrying out many necessary social functions. So long as the state continues to be a thing, I prefer that its interventions in society and the economy take the least horrible forms possible, and that its performance of the necessary social functions it has preempted be carried out in the most humane and humanly tolerable ways possible during the period of socializing them — i.e., returning them to genuine social control by non-coercive, cooperative forms of association. I prefer that reforms of the state be Gorzian “non-reformist reforms” that lay the groundwork for further transformations, and bridge the transition to a fundamentally different society.

In dealing with cases like catastrophic climate change, where lifeboat ethics comes into play and it’s justifiable to forcibly shut down economic activities that actively endanger us, when the regulatory state has already preempted the avenues for otherwise shutting down such activities, stepping back and allowing the state  to actually do so — especially when it’s acting against entities like corporations which are abusing power and privilege granted by the state in the first place — may be the least unsatisfactory short-term option. When the state has created and actively subsidized the entire economic model that threatens the biosphere, intervening to partially curtail and reverse that model is probably the form of intervention I’m least likely to lose any sleep over.

To take a case from ten years ago as an illustration, something like Obama’s stimulus package was necessary, given the existence of corporate capitalism on the current model and its chronic crisis tendencies towards surplus capital and idle productive capacity, to prevent a Depression. So long as capitalism and the state existed, some such intervention was inevitable. Given those facts, I would prefer that the hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus spending go towards fundamental infrastructures that would bridge the transition towards a more sustainable and less destructive model. I recall reading at the time that for $200 or $300 billion dollars — about a third or less of the total package — it would have been possible to build out the bottlenecks in the national railroad system and transfer around 80% of long-haul truck freight to trains, thereby reducing carbon emissions from long-distance shipping to a fraction of their former value. Instead, Obama elected to dole out the money to “shovel-ready” projects, which meant local infrastructure projects already promoted and approved by local real estate interests and other components of the urban Growth Machines, to promote further expansion of the ultimately doomed model of car culture, sprawl, and monoculture.

Given that massive deficit spending to avert Depression was inevitable, it would have been far less statist to simply spend money into existence interest-free along the lines suggested by Modern Monetary Theory, either by appropriation for government projects or simply depositing it into people’s checking accounts as a Citizen’s Dividend, than to finance deficit spending by the sale of interest bearing securities to rentiers. It would have been less statist to carry out quantitative easing functions by eliminating the current central banking model of authorizing banks to expand the money supply by lending it into existence at interest, and instead creating new money by simply issuing in the form of a Basic Income. It would have been better to make the bank bailout conditional on banks marking mortgages in default down to their current market value and refinancing them on more affordable terms. You get the idea.

Which brings us back to the Green New Deal.

Getting back to our earlier principle that, if the state has already entered the field, I prefer state interventions that are less shitty rather than more shitty, I would definitely prefer that tax money be spent building public transit that partially reverses or undoes a century of social engineering through state subsidies to highways and civil aviation, to interventions that continue to subsidize the further expansion of car culture.

The question is, to what extent does the Green New Deal actually do this?

Insofar as it proposes shifting public funding from the automobile-highway complex and civil aviation system to local public transit and intercity passenger rail, or reducing fossil fuel extraction and shifting to renewable energy, I think it’s about the best line of action we could possibly expect from a state given the likely realities in the near-term future.  

But there are two main structural problems with the Green New Deal as proposed by Michael Moore, Jill Stein, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. First, it takes for granted most of the existing economy’s patterns of energy use and simply calls for decarbonizing actual power generation.

As an illustration of the general spirit of this approach, Alex Baca mentions a Berkeley parking garage:

It’s got “rooftop solar, electric-vehicle charging stations, and dedicated spots for car-share vehicles, rainwater capture, and water treatment features” — not to mention 720 parking spots. It cost nearly $40 million to build. At night, it positively glows. And it’s a block from the downtown Berkeley BART station.

That America’s most famous progressive city, one where nearly everything is within walking distance, spent $40 million to renovate a parking garage one block from a subway station suggests that progressive Democrats remain unwilling to seriously confront the crisis of climate change.

In fairness to Ocasio-Cortez, she does favor shifting a considerable share of public subsidies from highways to public transit. But the overall thrust of her approach is far more towards decarbonizing power generation than changing the ways we use energy.

The Green New Deal, Baca says, “has a huge blind spot.”

It doesn’t address the places Americans live. And our physical geography — where we sleep, work, shop, worship, and send our kids to play, and how we move between those places — is more foundational to a green, fair future than just about anything else. The proposal encapsulates the liberal delusion on climate change: that technology and spending can spare us the hard work of reform.

Baca points, in particular, to the car-centered urban design model — promoted by decades of social engineering by the automobile and real estate industries in conjunction with urban planners — which locates housing and work/shopping in monoculture enclaves widely separated from one another and linked by freeways. More than anything, we need to return to the kind of urban layout that prevailed before widespread car ownership: compact population centers with a mixture of residences and businesses where people can get to work and shopping by walking, wheelchair, bicycle, bus, or streetcar. And rather than just replacing internal-combustion vehicles with electric ones and coal plants with solar panels, we need to travel fewer miles and consume less power.

Baca’s focus on urban layout, as on-the-mark as it is, doesn’t go nearly far enough. Equally important is industrial organization and the need to relocalize production and change the fundamental ways that production and distribution are organized.

Because of a combination of massive subsidies to energy consumption and transportation, entry barriers that promote cartelization and enable oligopoly firms to pass on overhead from waste and inefficiency to consumers on a cost-plus basis, socialization of the cost of many material and social inputs to production, and artificial property rights like trademarks and patents that facilitate legal control over the disposal of products whose manufacture is outsourced to overseas firms, we have market areas, supply chains, and distribution chains many times larger than efficiency-maximizing levels if all costs were internalized by capitalist firms. And even when production within a plant is rationalized on a lean or just-in-time basis, the existence of continental or trans-oceanic distribution chains means that the old supply-push model of the mass production era is just swept under the rug; all the in-process inventories stacked up by the assembly lines and warehouse inventories of finished goods that characterized Sloanist production have just been shifted to warehouses on wheels and container ships.

Ultimately, what we need is a relocalized economy on the lines described by Kropotkin, Mumford, and Borsodi, which capitalizes on all the advantages offered — but ignored — by the introduction of electrically powered machinery in the Second Industrial Revolution. Namely, we need high-tech craft industry with community and neighborhood workshops using general-purpose CNC machine tools to produce for consumption within the community, frequently switching between product runs as orders come in on a just-in-time basis. This would eliminate not only a huge share of the transportation costs embedded in the current system, but additional costs associated with mass marketing in an environment where production is undertaken without regard to existing orders, and the cost of waste production (planned obsolescence, the Military-Industrial Complex, car culture and suburbanization, etc.) that is used as a remedy for idle production capacity.

Building “infrastructure” as such is not progressive. It’s only progressive when it’s compatible with things like industrial relocalization and the replacement of the car culture with compact mixed-use communities.

Second, the Green New Deal is very much an agenda for saving capitalism in the same spirit as the original New Deal. It’s an anti-deflationary program to create new outlets for surplus labor and capital and provide “jobs” for everyone, instead of directly confronting the fact that technical progress has drastically reduced the amount of labor and material inputs required to produce a high standard of living and seeing that the leisure and productivity benefits are distributed fairly.

This was central to the Green New Deal model proposed by Michael Moore several years back, and it’s central to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s version.

The Wikipedia article on “Green New Deal” attributes first use of that phrase to Thomas Friedman, who envisioned it as a way to “create a whole new clean power industry to spur our economy into the 21st century.” And the creation of new “green” industries as a huge source of “jobs” has been the chief selling point of every Green New Deal proposal since. More broadly, it’s the defining theme of the whole “Progressive Capitalist” or “Green Capitalist” paradigm promoted by Warren Buffett, Bill  Gates and the like. The idea is to use new technology as a weapon against capitalism’s chronic problem of surplus capital without a profitable outlet, by enclosing it as a source of profit, and using it to create new industries and new support infrastructures that will provide a new “engine of accumulation” or “Kondratiev wave” to soak up capital for another generation or so. This creation of new industries is one of the “counteracting tendencies” to the tendency for the direct rate of profit to fall that Marx described in volume 3 of Capital.

And that’s basically the same vision promoted by Michael Moore: run those Ford and GM factories at full capacity and put millions of auto workers back to work building buses and bullet trains, and employ millions more building solar panels and wind generators. The problem is that the cheapening and ephemeralization of production technology is rendering a growing share of investment capital superfluous at such a rapid rate that building buses and trains and generators will barely put a dent in it. And in any case, a major share of existing production is waste that just needs to be ended, not run on a different power source;  while replacing necessary transportation with more environmentally friendly forms is a great idea, the fact remains that most existing transportation is also unnecessary and should be eliminated by restructuring the layout of cities and industry. The buses and bullet trains may take up the slack left by ceasing to produce cars for a few years, at most.

There is simply no way to invest enough money in producing alternative energy, trains and public transit to guarantee 40-hour-a-week jobs, get the assembly lines moving in Detroit again, and prevent the bottom from falling out of the capital markets, without enormous levels of waste production.

So to the extent that AOC and her friends want to keep oil and coal in the ground and promote decarbonization, and end America’s subsidies to car culture, I wish them well. But “green jobs guarantees,” promises of economic expansion through new “green industries,” and similar approaches aimed at prolonging the long-term survival of capitalism, are a dead end.

Where does that leave us? What do we do in the meantime?

In framing the alternatives, I start from the assumption that our primary purpose is actually building the post-capitalist society, and that our engagement or lack of engagement with the state is a secondary course of action whose main purpose is to create a more conducive, less harmful environment in which to do the building. If you want to vote strategically for the sake of damage mitigation, or try to push the state in less environmentally harmful directions, or shift its existing interventions in a more environmentally favorable direction, more power to you.

It was this kind of thing that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt referred to, in Declaration, as part of a symbiotic strategy between the horizontalist left with its practice of building prefigurative counter-institutions, and leftist parties attempting to influence state policy. It’s fine for grassroots movements engaged in constructing a new society outside the state to throw support behind political actors who are taking specific measures to push things in the right direction, or enlist their help in running interference for us and creating a more favorable environment for the process of building the new society. But it’s absolutely vital to retain total autonomy and freedom of action, and resist being turned into the social movement auxiliary of a political party as Van Jones tried to do with Occupy, and not let leftist parties in government divert suck up all the energy and oxygen from those engaged in building counter-institutions like Syriza did to Syntagma after coming to power in Greece.

Our most important strategic focus must be on institution-building. The most important form of institution-building is at the local level, and some of it may or may not entail incidental engagement with local government.

Pressuring local government to scale back zoning laws that mandate sprawl and monoculture, and to stop actively subsidizing sprawl through below-cost extension of utilities to outlying developments, may well be fruitful. But the most productive path in local decarbonization will be the work of actually retrofitting suburbs and strip malls into mixed-use communities with diversified local economies.

These things will become a matter of necessity for survival, as the combined effect of Peak Fossil Fuel and monkeywrenching efforts aimed at keeping it in the ground make long commutes prohibitively expensive for growing numbers of people, and growing numbers at the same time are forced by rising unemployment, underemployment, and precaritization to supplement or replace their wage incomes with direct production for use in the social economy.

When it comes to strategic action to promote decarbonization, direct action to make the fossil fuel industries unprofitable and fossil fuel projects unworkable in practice are at least as important as any local “carbon free” initiatives. Physical obstruction of pipeline projects, the use of the legal system and bureaucracy to sabotage them with their own system of rules, divestment efforts, and sabotage of existing pumping stations and other vulnerable nodes, together offer great hope for making such projects increasingly risky and decreasingly attractive and hastening post-carbon transition.

And it’s the people engaged in open hardware and micro-manufacturing efforts, hackerspaces, neighborhood gardens, community currencies, community broadband projects, squats in abandoned buildings and vacant lots, community land trusts and cohousing projects, tool libraries and other genuine sharing efforts, who are actually building a society that will function on zero waste and sustainable energy.

In the end, I think it’s a mistake to put our hopes in a party or in progressive celebrities like Bernie Sanders or AOC, no matter how much better they are than more mainstream politicians. I have much more modest hopes for whatever level of political engagement with the state I choose. A political party — the Millennial wing of the Democrats, the Greens, DSA — will not be the avenue by which we create a post-state, post-capitalist society that’s worthy of the human beings who live in it. Our main goal, and most attainable one, is simply using whatever opportunistic center-left non-entity is most likely to get elected to stave off the immediate fascist onslaught and buy time. At best, in the most ideal situation — and this is at least plausible as the demographics of both the country and Democratic Party shift toward leftish Millennials — we might hope for a caretaker state that offers a somewhat less virulent social democratic model of capitalism and allows a relatively benign atmosphere for our own efforts.

But if you want to see the actual future, look at what people are building on the ground. As a character in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time put it, revolution, was not uniformed parties, slogans, and mass-meetings; “It’s the people who worked out the labor- and land intensive farming we do. It’s all the people who changed how people bought food, raised children, went to school… who made new unions, withheld rent, refused to go to wars, wrote and educated and made speeches.”

The post One Cheer — More or Less — For the Green New Deal appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Every now and then, history has a way of forcing ordinary people to face up to a moral encounter with destiny that they never expected. Back in the 1930s, as Adolf Hitler rose to power, those who turned away when they saw Jews getting beaten in the streets never expected that decades later, their grandchildren would turn toward them with repugnance and say “Why did you do nothing when there was still a chance to stop the horror?”

Now, nearly a century on, here we are again. The fate of future generations is at stake, and each of us needs to be prepared, one day, to face posterity—in whatever form that might take—and answer the question: “What did you do when you knew our future was on the line?”

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the past few months, or get your daily updates exclusively from Fox News, you’ll know that our world is facing a dire climate emergency that’s rapidly reeling out of control. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a warning to humanity that we have just twelve years to turn things around before we pass the point of no return. Governments continue to waffle and ignore the blaring sirens. The pledges they’ve made under the 2015 Paris agreement will lead to 3 degrees of warming, which would threaten the foundations of our civilization. And they’re not even on track to meet those commitments. Even the IPCC’s dire warning of calamity is, by many accounts, too conservative, failing to take into account tipping points in the earth system with reinforcing feedback effects that could drive temperatures far beyond the IPCC’s worst case scenarios.

People are beginning to feel panicky in the face of oncoming disaster. Books such as David Wallace-Wells’s Uninhabitable Earth paint a picture so frightening that it’s already feeling to some like game over. A strange new phenomenon is emerging: while mainstream media ignores impending catastrophe, increasing numbers of people are resonating with those who say it’s now “too late” to save civilization. The concept of “Deep Adaptation” is beginning to gain currency, with its proponent Jem Bendell arguing that “we face inevitable near-term societal collapse,” and therefore need to prepare for “civil unrest, lawlessness and a breakdown in normal life.”

There’s much that is true in the Deep Adaptation diagnosis of our situation, but its orientation is dangerously flawed. By turning people’s attention toward preparing for doom, rather than focusing on structural political and economic change, Deep Adaptation threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, increasing the risk of collapse by diluting efforts toward societal transformation.

Our headlong fling toward disaster

I have no disagreement with the dire assessment of our circumstances. In fact, things look even worse if you expand the scope beyond the climate emergency. Climate breakdown itself is merely a symptom of a far larger crisis: the ecological catastrophe unfolding in every domain of the living earth. Tropical forests are being decimated, making way for vast monocrops of wheat, soy, and palm oil plantations. The oceans are being turned into a garbage dump, with projections that by 2050 they will contain more plastic than fish. Animal populations are being wiped out. The insects that form the foundation of our global ecosystem are disappearing: bees, butterflies, and countless other species in free fall. Our living planet is being ravaged mercilessly by humanity’s insatiable consumption, and there’s not much left.

Deep Adaptation proponents are equally on target arguing that incremental fixes are utterly insufficient. Even if a global price on carbon was established, and if our governments invested in renewables rather than subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, we would still come up woefully short. The harsh reality is that, rather than heading toward net zero, global emissions just hit record numbers last year; Exxon, the largest shareholder-owned oil company, proudly announced recently that it’s doubling down on fossil fuel extraction; and wherever you look, whether it’s air travel, globalized shipping, or beef consumption, the juggernaut driving us to climate catastrophe only continues to accelerate. To cap it off, with ecological destruction and global emissions already unsustainable, the world economy is expected to triple by 2060.

The primary reason for this headlong fling toward disaster is that our economic system is based on perpetual growth—on the need to consume the earth at an ever-increasing rate. Our world is dominated by transnational corporations, which now account for sixty-nine of the world’s largest hundred economies. The value of these corporations is based on investors’ expectations for their continued growth, which they are driven to achieve at any cost, including the future welfare of humanity and the living earth. It’s a gigantic Ponzi scheme that barely gets a mention because the corporations also own the mainstream media, along with most governments. The real discussions we need about humanity’s future don’t make it to the table. Even a policy goal as ambitious as the Green New Deal—rejected by most mainstream pundits as utterly unrealistic—would still be insufficient to turn things around, because it doesn’t acknowledge the need to transition our economy away from reliance on endless growth.

Deep Adaptation . . . or Deep Transformation?

Faced with these realities, I understand why Deep Adaptation followers throw their hands up in despair and prepare for collapse. But I believe it’s wrong and irresponsible to declare definitively that it’s too late—that collapse is “inevitable.” It’s too late, perhaps, for the monarch butterflies, whose numbers are down 97% and headed for extinction. Too late, probably for the coral reefs that are projected not to survive beyond mid-century. Too late, clearly, for the climate refugees already fleeing their homes in desperation, only to find themselves rejected, exploited, and driven back by those whose comfort they threaten. There is plenty to grieve about in this unfolding catastrophe—it’s a valid and essential part of our response to mourn the losses we’re already experiencing. But while grieving, we must take action, not surrender to a false belief in the inevitable.

Defeatism in the face of overwhelming odds is something that I, perhaps, am especially averse to, having grown up in postwar Britain. In the dark days of 1940, defeat seemed inevitable for the British, as the Nazis swept through Europe, threatening an impending invasion. For many, the only prudent course was to negotiate with Hitler and turn Britain into a vassal state, a strategy that nearly prevailed at a fateful War Cabinet meeting in May 1940. When details about this Cabinet meeting became public, in my teens, I remember a chill going through my veins. Born into a Jewish family, I realized that I probably owed my very existence to those who bravely chose to overcome despair and fight on in a seemingly hopeless struggle.

A lesson to learn from this—and countless other historical episodes—is that history rarely progresses for long in a straight line. It takes unanticipated swerves that only make sense when analyzed retroactively. For ten years, Tarana Burke used the phrase “me too” to raise awareness of sexual assault, without knowing that it would one day help topple Harvey Weinstein, and potentiate a movement toward transformation of abusive cultural norms. The curve balls of history are all around us. No-one can accurately predict when the next stock market crash will occur, never mind when civilization itself will come undone.

There’s a second, equally important, lesson to learn from the nonlinear transformations that we see throughout history, such as universal women’s suffrage or the legalization of same-sex marriage. They don’t just happen by themselves—they result from the dogged actions of a critical mass of engaged citizens who see something that’s wrong and, regardless of seemingly insurmountable odds, keep pushing forward driven by their sense of moral urgency. As part of a system, we all collectively participate in how that system evolves, whether we know it or not, whether we want to or not.

Paradoxically, the very precariousness of our current system, teetering on the extremes of brutal inequality and ecological devastation, increases the potential for deep structural change. Research in complex systems reveals that, when a system is stable and secure, it’s very resistant to change. But when the linkages within the system begin to unravel, it’s far more likely to undergo the kind of deep restructuring that our world requires.

It’s not Deep Adaptation that we need right now—it’s Deep Transformation. The current dire predicament we’re in screams something loudly and clearly to anyone who’s listening: If we’re to retain any semblance of a healthy planet by the latter part of this century, we have to change the foundations of our civilization. We need to move from one that is wealth-based to once that is life-based—a new type of society built on life-affirming principles, often described as an Ecological Civilization. We need a global system that devolves power back to the people; that reins in the excesses of global corporations and government corruption; that replaces the insanity of infinite economic growth with a just transition toward a stable, equitable, steady-state economy optimizing human and natural flourishing.

Our moral encounter with destiny

Does that seem unlikely to you? Sure, it seems unlikely to me, too, but “likelihood” and “inevitability” stand a long way from each other. As Rebecca Solnit points out in Hope in the Dark, hope is not a prognostication. Taking either an optimistic or pessimistic stance on the future can justify a cop-out. An optimist says, “It will turn out fine so I don’t need to do anything.” A pessimist retorts, “Nothing I do will make a difference so let me not waste my time.” Hope, by contrast, is not a matter of estimating the odds. Hope is an active state of mind, a recognition that change is nonlinear, unpredictable, and arises from intentional engagement.

Bendell responds to this version of hope with a comparison to a terminal cancer patient. It would be cruel, he suggests, to tell them to keep hoping, pushing them to “spend their last days in struggle and denial, rather than discovering what might matter after acceptance.” This is a false equivalency. A terminal cancer condition has a statistical history, derived from the outcomes of many thousands of similar occurrences. Our current situation is unique. There is no history available of thousands of global civilizations bringing their planetary ecosystems to breaking point. This is the only one we know of, and it would be negligent to give up on it based on a set of projections. If a doctor told your mother, “This cancer is unique and we have no experience of its prognosis. There are things we can try but they might not work,” would you advise her to give up and prepare for death? I’m not giving up on Mother Earth that easily.

In truth, collapse is already happening in different parts of the world. It’s not a binary on-off switch. It’s a cruel reality bearing down on the most vulnerable among us. The desperation they’re experiencing right now makes it even more imperative to engage rather than declare game over. The millions left destitute in Africa by Cyclone Idai, the communities still ravaged in Puerto Rico, the two-thousand-year old baobab trees suddenly dying en masse, and the countless people and species yet to be devastated by global ecocide, all need those of us in positions of relative power and privilege to step up to the plate, not throw up our hands in despair. There’s currently much discussion about the devastating difference between 1.5° and 2.0° in global warming. Believe it, there will also be a huge differencebetween 2.5° and 3.0°. As long as there are people at risk, as long as there are species struggling to survive, it’s not too late to avert further disaster.

This is something many of our youngest generation seem to know intuitively, putting their elders to shame. As fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg declared in her statement to the UN in Poland last November, “you are never too small to make a difference… Imagine what we can all do together, if we really wanted to.” Thunberg envisioned herself in 2078, with her own grandchildren. “They will ask,” she said, “why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act.”

That’s the moral encounter with destiny that we each face today. Yes, there is still time to act. Last month, inspired by Thunberg’s example, more than a million school students in over a hundred countries walked out to demand climate action. To his great credit, even Jem Bendell disavows some of his own Deep Adaptation narrative to put his support behind protest. The Extinction Rebellion (XR) launched a mass civil disobedience campaign last year in England, blocking bridges in London and demanding an adequate response to our climate emergency. It has since spread to 27 other countries.

Studies have shown that, once 3.5% of a population becomes sustainably committed to nonviolent mass movements for political change, they are invariably successful. That would translate into 11.5 million Americans on the street, or 26 million Europeans. We’re a long way from that, but is it really impossible? I’m not ready, yet, to bet against humanity’s ability to transform itself or nature’s powers of regeneration. XR is planning a global week of direct action beginning on Monday, April 15, as a first step toward a coordinated worldwide grassroots rebellion against the system that’s destroying hope of future flourishing. It might just be the beginning of another of history’s U-turns. Do you want to look your grandchildren in the eyes? Yes, me too. I’ll see you there.

FURTHER READING

Read Jem Bendell’s response to this article: Responding to Green Positivity Critiques of Deep Adaptation, April 10, 2019

Read Jeremy Lent’s follow-up response to Jem Bendell: Our Actions Create the Future, April 11, 2019.

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We’ve been taking the wrong approach to communicating about climate change. I get that the situation is dire. Really dire. But it goes way beyond the fact that every year is the hottest year on record, sea levels are rising, drought is forcing millions into refugee status, the Great Barrier Reef is almost dead, the oceans are 26 percent more acidic than preindustrial levels, our topsoil will be gone in less than 60 years, and we’re already at least 1.5 degrees Celsius toward the two degrees said to herald a real catastrophe. That’s all bad. The reality is actually worse.

By any rational analysis, civilization as we know it is on the brink of true disaster. And despite their outward messaging, even climate-denying, anti-scientific, messianic nations like the United States are quietly preparing for the coming storm. No, they’re not looking at how to mitigate climate change, but how to prepare for its inevitability. We’re building walls — not to keep out today’s immigrants, but to block tomorrow’s climate refugees. We’re being trained by our president and other leaders in the dark art of seeing people from other nations as less than human — a trick that will make it easier to watch as flooding and other climate catastrophes wipe out millions. “At least it’s them and not us,” we’ll be able to tell ourselves. This sort of alienation verging on sociopathy takes time to develop. But we’re working on it.

These are the sorts of things people do when they feel powerless to effect any change. They see the future as fixed — as something to predict and prepare for — but utterly impervious to their intervention. It’s the posture toward the future assumed by most corporations. They hire futurists and scenario planners to tell them what is most likely to happen 10, 20, or 50 years from now so they can invest in whatever is going to be valuable in that environment. Back in the 1980s, the futurists started talking about the coming water crisis. That’s what turned water into a private commodity — accelerating and worsening the very crisis they predicted.

Likewise, any futurist worth their coverage in Wired is telling their corporate clients about the coming global climate crisis in stirring detail: which regions will be underwater; how temperature changes are likely to effect social unrest, politics, and violence levels; how and where the populations of Africa and Southeast Asia will migrate; and so on.

We’ve won the communications battle in the sense that the rich and powerful now accept the reality of climate change and are actively betting on it happening. They believe us. But we’re losing the war in that they don’t believe the crisis can be averted. As speculators, they’re more committed to betting on the most likely future instead of investing in the future they’d like to see happen. In the finance world, betting on what you hope for is derided as “emotional investing.” One is supposed to bet only on existing probabilities — not on one’s genuine goals or dreams. And this mentality is self-perpetuating. The more we invest in the inevitability of climate disaster, the more assuredly we bring it on and the more devastating a future we are creating for ourselves.

If we’re going to get business on our side (after which government is sure to follow), we have to convince them that the most likely future scenario is one where the whole world tries to get in on the bet that we can avert climate change. Or at least we can mitigate its effects. Slow it down. Build more resilience. We have to show that the world is on board and ready to do and pay for what is necessary to keep the planet livable for the vast majority of species.

As a thinker who is often mistaken for a futurist, the last thing I should be doing is standing in front of people and telling them how many millions or billions of people may die, how mass migrations will threaten the sanctity of nation-states, or how the oceans are on the brink of death. Because then my audiences will start betting on those outcomes.

No, the people who needed to hear the alarm bells have heard them. Those who didn’t — who couldn’t — respond to the warnings with anything but self-interested bets on shotguns, iodine tablets, water futures, and land in New Zealand? They need to hear a different message. They need to hear that climate change is about to be defeated. If they don’t get in on climate remediation now, on the ground floor, they’ll miss the opportunity. This is the chance to invest in organic agriculture and to sell short on Monsanto and Big Agra. This is the time to go all in on solar, wind, and geothermal.

And once they do — once the big money is really in — just watch as Wall Street starts lobbying for the Green New Deal proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others. Net-zero greenhouse emissions is not a pipe dream, but a plausible, positive, attainable goal.

Let’s start talking about our collective sustainable future in ways that make people bet on it.

Photo by tim_gorman

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