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/

The post An open letter to Extinction Rebellion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Robert Raymond: The third episode of The Response travels to Northern California to provide a unique perspective on the topics of climate change and immigration. California’s climate-fueled weather conditions have left the state in an extreme condition that has led to an unprecedented number of wildfires that are burning hotter, faster, and ever more acreage. The largest wildfire in the state’s recorded history was the Mendocino Complex Fire, which scorched well over 400,000 acres during the summer of 2018. And the second largest fire in California burned just a year before that. As California Governor Jerry Brown says, “since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse.”

We’ve already reached a one degree celsius increase in average global temperatures, and we may be on track for four by the end of the century. As the reality of an increasingly chaotic climate begins to settle in, it must be viewed through a lens of social, economic, and political circumstances as well. What does the growing threat of climate-fueled disasters mean for the most vulnerable among us?

In this episode, we put the focus on last year’s Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, California — the state’s most destructive fire to date — and how it impacted the undocumented community. We explore how, in the face of ICE raids, labor violations, a housing crisis, and climate-fueled wildfires, the broader community is coming together to stand in solidarity with those who are being forced into the shadows.

Episode Credits:

• Senior producer, technical director, and designer: Robert Raymond
• Field producers: Ninna Gaensler-Debbs and Robert Raymond
• Host and executive producer: Tom Llewellyn
• Voiceover and narration: Luisa Cardoza

Music by:

• Chris Zabriskie
• Lanterns

Header illustration by Kane Lynch

Listen and subscribe with the app of your choice:

For a full list of episodes, resources to cultivate resilience in your community, or to share your experiences of disaster collectivism, visit www.theresponsepodcast.org.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure.

[Chanting from Rise for Climate Justice march]

Crowd: What do we want? Climate Justice! When do we want it? Now! [Repeats]

Tom Llewellyn: It’s an unusually warm and sunny September day in San Francisco, and we’re standing right in the middle of Market street, within a sea of banners, megaphones, drums, and about thirty-thousand people. It’s the Rise for Climate, Jobs and Justice march — the anchor event preceding a week of official climate talks hosted by California governor Jerry Brown.

Within this crowd, There are groups representing all sorts of causes, from trade unions, to buddhists, to indigenous folks, and many more. And their message is clear: an end to fossil fuel production and justice for those impacted disproportionately by the effects of climate change.

Well in this episode of The Response, we put the spotlight on an especially vulnerable community here in California: undocumented immigrants. We’ll investigate how, in the face of ICE raids, labor violations, a housing crisis, and climate-fueled wildfires, the broader community is coming together to stand in solidarity with those who are being forced into the shadows. I’m your host, Tom Llewellyn.

Tom Llewellyn: Although still under investigation by CalFire, it’s likely, that at around 10pm on October 8th, 2017, power lines on Tubbs Lane in Calistoga, California, were downed by high winds. The live wires would have sent a shower of sparks through the air, thus starting the Tubbs Fire. Hurricane-force winds whipped the blaze southwest through the Mayacamas Mountains.

Fueled by this bone-dry landscape still recovering from a five year drought, it only took a few hours to reach the city limits of Santa Rosa, where, as the city slept, it jumped Highway 101 and continued its deadly march through the densely packed neighborhoods of Fountain Grove and Coffey Park.

Pastor Al: I was working in Healdsburg, I was coming back at eleven o’clock at night. And I came in, I just went right to bed. The kids were sleeping and I was sleeping and I was just tired. I just never thought that the fire would jump all those freeways.

Tom Llewellyn: This is Pastor Al. He was living in Coffey Park at the time of the fire. On his way home from work that night he saw an orange glow in the distance, but at that time it was still many miles away.

Pastor Al: A little bit after two o’clock, I heard the phone ringing. It was the police department saying, you know, “Get up and get out now.” The smoke was so thick that night. And, you know, I was like, “Okay,” I said, “We need to leave.”

Tom Llewellyn: Fifteen people had already died as the fire made its way down from Calistoga, and Coffey Park was just one of a long list of neighborhoods put on a mandatory evacuation notice that night.

Pastor Al: I opened the door and I was shocked, you know, and the wind, and the fire was all over the place and that was it. Survival was the only thing that I had in my mind.

Tom Llewellyn: Al woke up his wife and kids, and they rushed to get out. The only thing he had time to grab was his daughter’s asthma medication. As they made their way through the thick smoke and floating embers towards their car, he suddenly noticed that his wife was missing.

Pastor Al: And I started calling my wife, and then I heard my wife was knocking on one of our neighbors — he was about seventy-four, seventy-five. And all I remember, I heard my wife calling out, “Get up and get out!” And my wife went to four, five other houses she went to to knock on the doors. And I was like, “Man, get up and get out!” And so she came and we went.

Tom Llewellyn: As they scrambled through the smoke-laden streets, the houses around them were already starting to catch on fire. Eventually they made it out of the neighborhood, and headed south on Highway 101 where they ended up pulling into a Home Depot parking lot.

Pastor Al: So that’s where we hunkered down for the night and, you know, we were just waiting there until we see what we can do the next morning.

Tom Llewellyn: Like many of the twenty-thousand undocumented people living in the area, Pastor Al and his family avoided going to official shelters. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and deportations are something that this community has to deal with on a daily basis, and the possibility of federal agents at shelters made them nervous. Many folks ended up just sleeping on the beach or in their cars.

When Pastor Al and his family were finally able to make it back to their house, everything was gone.

Pastor Al: You know, all of it. I mean there’s nothing. We looked around, you know, we were shocked. I mean all you see there, you just stood there and cried. I mean, it’s like, my goodness. Everything was burned to the ground. I mean the metal, it is unreal. And I think to us it was that my son came up and showed me this ceramic was given to us by a friend of ours. And the only thing the reading on ceramic was Luke: 137, that “Nothing is impossible with God.” That was the only thing that survived the whole fire. I said, “This is the only thing that we’re going to hang on to.” And I guess that’s part of our story. So I walked out, I said, “Okay, it’s only thing I can hang on.” And that it was only thing that survived the fire. Everything else burnt.

Tom Llewellyn: The Tubbs Fire was the most destructive wildfire in California history. It burned almost 40,000 acres, taking the lives of 22 people along the way and incinerating almost 3,000 homes in Santa Rosa alone — five percent of the city’s housing stock.

Historically, wildfire has always been a normal part of California’s ecosystems. It clears out dead litter on the forest floor and plays an important part in helping certain plants reproduce themselves. But what’s not normal are the climate-fueled extreme weather conditions that have lengthened the fire season and are leading to massive wildfires that threaten major urban centers and can take months to contain.

The largest wildfire in the state’s recorded history was the Mendocino Complex Fire, which scorched well over 400,000 acres during the Summer of 2018 and was still not fully contained at the time of this recording. And the second largest fire in California history? Well, it burned just a year before that. Last year’s Thomas Fire in Southern California blazed across almost 300,000 acres. So, as you can see, there’s a disturbing trend. This is California Governor Jerry Brown.

California Governor Jerry Brown: We’re being surprised. Every year is teaching the fire authorities new lessons. We’re in uncharted territory. Since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse. I mean, that’s the way it is… We’re in for a really rough ride.

Tom Llewellyn: We’ve already reached a one degree celsius increase in average global temperatures, and we may be on track for four by the end of the century. As the reality of an increasingly chaotic climate begins to settle in, it must be viewed through a lens of social, economic, and political circumstances as well.

What does the growing threat of climate-fueled disasters mean for the most vulnerable among us? Here’s Irma Garcia, who, like Al, is an undocumented immigrant, and was also living in Coffey Park at the time of the fire.

Irma Garcia: We were asleep during the fires. We were asleep when my neighbor came and knocked on the door at three in the morning and told us there was a fire. We got up and just grabbed the basics and went to the veterans building.

Tom Llewellyn: The Santa Rosa Veterans building had been set up as an official shelter. When Irma and her family arrived, they quickly noticed that the whole system was a mess. They tried to offer their help, but the Red Cross staff brushed them aside. Still, they couldn’t just sit idly by. And so, despite everything that they were going through, they found ways to to make themselves useful. But even as they were helping to set up beds and clear out debris, they felt unwelcome. The Red Cross staff had begun ordering Irma around in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, and one of them actually yelled at her five year old daughter for being in one of the beds that Irma had helped to set up.

Irma Garcia: My daughter was 5 years old and she hadn’t slept, and she had behaved very well, so I told her to rest in a bed, and I said to the lady from the Red Cross, “Please do not talk to my daughter like that.” And she said again, “Get out of the bed and get out of here.” And then my husband said, “We’re leaving. We’re better off outside than here.”

So we left, and we were going to spend the night in our car because it was so sad to see what was going on in the shelter. And as I was leaving the building, we looked around and I realized that there were no immigrants, and that there were only Americans. There were just a few immigrants, but they were outside or in the corner. That was when I realized that our immigrant community was suffering a lot during this disaster. And to this day they’re still suffering.

Tom Llewellyn: The disrespect and hostility that Irma and her family were subjected to at the shelter was one of the most traumatic parts of their experience with the fire — particularly for her daughter. And though their house was spared by the flames, the hardships were really just getting started.

Irma Garcia: The fires had a big effect on us because we couldn’t work for three weeks. Imagine, three weeks without working. So we fell behind on our bills and on rent because rent is so high. And then, on top of that, we had to deal with the fear of ICE and that we wouldn’t be able to work or that if we did go to work, they’d show up and take us away.

—

Mara Ventura: The number one way that we saw undocumented folks impacted was actually through loss of wages.

Tom Llewellyn: Here’s Mara Ventura, the executive director of North Bay Jobs with Justice  — a community and labor coalition based out of Santa Rosa.

Mara Ventura: Either of their works burned down, or their works closed down because their bosses lost their homes or their bosses had to evacuate. And so, to give a brief picture for folks in other parts of the country, the main two neighborhoods that we really want to focus on when we’re talking about these fires is Coffey Park, which is a mostly residential area and home to mostly middle class families, but also were homes where two to three different undocumented families were sharing one home.

And then we also had another area, which is the area called Fountain Grove which was home to a lot of mansions. We’re talking multimillion dollar homes. And so there’s quite a differential in terms of the experience of the families, the income levels and so forth of the folks in between those areas. But in the places where undocumented families were impacted they either were losing their homes in Coffey Park or they were losing the places where they had more stable work up in the Fountain Grove area where many undocumented folks were doing landscaping work, were doing pool maintenance, were doing house cleaning, were doing domestic care, et cetera.

Tom Llewellyn: Unlike most people affected by the fire, the undocumented community had no access to federal relief funding to help offset any of their losses. They were largely on their own. Or, they would have been, if it wasn’t for a rapid grassroots mobilization coordinated by local organizations and activists.

—

Tom Llewellyn: We’re at the Santa Rosa Community College, where hundreds of volunteers and undocumented families have gathered as part of an application process for what is known as Undocufund.

Omar Medina: My name is Omar Medina and currently I am the coordinator for Undocufund. Undocufund arose out of the Northern California wildfires. It was a combination of three organizations that came together to address the issue of recovery for undocumented families that would not be eligible for a lot of the aid that was going to come out for the disaster. So we knew there was going to be a void and we decided that something needed to happen to help those families. And so Undocufund was developed to raise funds to help provide financial assistance.

Tom Llewellyn: Certain public services were available to undocumented families, but there was a lot of fear around actually accessing those services. For example, undocumented immigrants with naturalized children are eligible for federal relief funding — but many felt uneasy navigating the process or were just outright afraid.

The coordinators of Undocufund knew it would take a lot of grassroots organizing to build trust and to spread awareness for their relief fund. It helped that the three organizations involved — North Bay Jobs with Justice, the Graton Day Labor Center, and the North Bay Organizing Project — were already known by much of the immigrant community for their advocacy work. Here’s Irma again — she actually works with the North Bay Organizing Project and the North Bay Rapid Response Network, which tracks and monitors ICE raids.

Irma Garcia: We learned all about the experiences of people in our community during the fires, and realized that many undocumented immigrants were sleeping in their cars or were going to the beach at Bodega Bay because they didn’t feel safe in any of the shelters. They didn’t provide any help for us, and we didn’t trust anyone. We didn’t trust the law, much less in the police or the sheriff. And we didn’t trust FEMA because FEMA is very discriminatory.

So we went to seek out stories, and as we learned about the experiences of people in our community, we began to spread the word. We realized that our people were suffering a lot — and our children too. So that’s how Undocufund got started with Omar Medina — he was the one who helped a lot with all this, along with the rest of the community. They started fundraising, donating, and doing events. It helped a lot of people.

But many people didn’t trust it at first. It’s difficult to give your information when everything is connected to everything else, so the last thing we wanted to do was to give out our information, to keep ICE far away from us.

Tom Llewellyn: This fear was also present for Pastor Al. At first, he’d avoided applying for Undocufund as well.

Pastor Al: We were just worried about who’s going to be controlling that information? If we’re going to put our names out there, you know, where is it going to go? That’s the other side of it, that I kind of of withheld this whole idea of going to them. I just didn’t know what, you know, I know it’s undocumented fund but I just thought, you know, how are these things going to work out? Who’s handling your information?

Tom Llewellyn: But eventually, Al and has family applied. And so did almost 2,000 other families. Here’s Mara Ventura again.

Mara Ventura: We recognized that undocumented families automatically had less access to many different social services, but particularly ones that were set up to help families recover during times of natural disasters. And so we wanted to ensure that there were funds available for them. And we wanted to ensure that they were unrestricted funds. That people could use them for whatever they needed them for and that there was a sense of ownership and autonomy that families could decide for themselves what they needed, and we would have a process that helped them think through all the different needs that they had — both before the fires and during the fires.

And so we brought I think a very unique perspective to putting a fire relief fund together, one in which we thought about what were different systematic, operational pieces we needed to have in the fund to ensure that it was accessible and equitable and truly reached undocumented communities where they were at. But also from the get go have been thinking about not just the immediate needs but also the intermediate and long term needs.

And as we were going through the process of helping families get aid from the fire fund, incorporated in our conversations an understanding of what was happening in people’s lives. So an example of that is that we really tried to ensure that as people came and applied for aid they didn’t feel like they were at an agency filling out a bureaucratic application. So we wanted an application process where folks came in and sat down with a trained volunteer and just started off with a conversation. Really ensuring right away, our job is to be here to help you get as much aid as you can get for the things that you need. And tell me a little bit about what happened during the fires and and really thinking about questions that also got at the systems that they were up against.

So really trying to understand like what systematic barriers were people facing even in the moment. Because it’s not something that you you’re always thinking about when you’re in the moment of a natural disaster and you’re in a high anxiety, high stress mode. So I think being social justice organizations we brought that really unique experience to creating this Fire Relief Fund where we tried to identify systems.

Pastor Al: We were very grateful for the help — the help that helps my family especially get situated, the food, the clothing, and that part of, we were very grateful for the of the fund that was given to us. I think what I discovered is that in these kind of situations it’s nice to have a place where you can go and just, you could hear others. And by talking about I think it’s so therapeutic. It’s so healing when people can understand and then listen to your stories and even just, you know, that you can express your emotions, your feelings. I think it does something to all of us.

Tom Llewellyn: With donations coming from over eight thousand individuals, Undocufund was a powerful demonstration of solidarity in action. In the beginning they thought they’d raise maybe fifty, or a hundred-thousand dollars, if they were lucky.

Omar Medina: Never did we expect the six million we’ve raised so far. But the generosity of people as the disasters were happening, as the fires kept going, and the media kept covering it, and people learned about us, and they sympathized with the need. They understand the need based on everything that we’ve experienced lately, you know, on a national level as it relates to the undocumented community. And the generosity of people came in. And so that gave us the opportunity to help a lot more people.

Irma Garcia: Undocufund definitely did unite the community, because, as an undocumented immigrant, you realize that the police, the sheriff, the system — everything — we’re outside of that. We’re totally excluded. But when Undocufund started and we saw so many people helping from all kinds of different places, we realized that although we’re outside the system, we’re not outside the community. And that the community supports us. We know now that at least we are not alone.

—

Tom Llewellyn: Like we learned in our previous two episodes on Hurricanes Maria and Sandy, when disasters strike in vulnerable communities, they tend to merely intensify issues that are already happening. For example, the loss in wages that resulted from the Tubbs Fire was a serious challenge to many in the undocumented community — but the truth is that their wages before the fire were already almost impossible to live off of in the Bay Area. Not to mention ongoing labor violations, sexual harassment and assault, and a housing crisis that was only exacerbated by the fire. Here’s Davin Cardenas, the co-director of the North Bay Organizing Project. He’s learned a lot more about these struggles during the time he spent coordinating Undocufund.

Davin Cardenas: You get your finger on the pulse of what’s happening with the immigrant community in terms of wages, living conditions, needs. And so it was really an experience of having your eyes open a little bit more. You know, I’d be in an interview one after the other after the other, speaking with local immigrant workers — women especially — who were being paid like ten dollars an hour for house cleaning jobs and that’s you know that’s below the minimum wage. And as an housecleaning is rigorous — it’s a very difficult job to do and it taxes your body. And so I think that being what it felt like was the norm — was severely underpaid workers working extremely hard to make our county beautiful. And so, for me, you know, we know some of these things but it’s also a stark reminder of the economic conditions that people are living in and trying to raise babies and trying to raise families here in the North Bay.

Tom Llewellyn: Because of these chronic struggles, the Undocufund coordinators didn’t want to focus their efforts only on immediate fire relief.

Davin Cardenas: I think the Undocufund becomes another space where we can talk about greater systemic issues. The fact that immigrants are subsidizing the way we live. They’re subsidizing the standard of living in Sonoma County. This is the wine country, and when people think about the wine country they think about kind of the iconic vineyard landscape. But we think about the workers who put the wine country on the map and the taxation that comes with the physical labor — the tax on your body, the tax on the land, the pesticides that are being pushed into our waterways and our rivers — those things are also an inherent part of what we call the wine country.

And so I think with the Undocufund it’s an opportunity to start talking about equity amongst working people, talk about new voices and the people who make this county actually function and flourish. And it’s an opportunity for workers to start having their voices heard on a broader scale. Not only through the Undocufund, but immigrant workers have also been putting proposals to the county supervisors about what disaster preparedness should look like for Spanish-speaking peoples in the county. And, I think, also immigrants are stepping in to talk about just the anxiety that comes with the federal immigration situation, the Immigrant and Customs Enforcement. So they’re finding new ways to communicate. And part of the Undocufund infrastructure is also to make sure we’re developing relationships and beginning to heighten the voices of workers in all of these issues.

Mara Ventura: Undocufund folks we’re now continuing to have this conversation of what really fueled this this outpouring of support and how do we capture it? How do we use it to enable and continue to empower undocumented community members here to really say, like, people from not just Sonoma County, not just California — we received donations from all over the country — folks all around the country are concerned about your livelihood, and your ability to stay in this community, and not continue to worry about the displacement and the lack of services and the lack of the ability to stay in your homes and all these things that you’re already facing.

They’re investing in you and they care about you. And how do we sort of capture that and empower them to also figure out what are other systematic changes that need to be made here in our community to ensure that they don’t just have money today to pay their rent but that there are systems that we’re changing that enable undocumented folks to make a living and to have livable wages, and health benefits, and all the things they need to continue to live here.

Tom Llewellyn: Organizers have launched a series of people’s assemblies and listening circles with Undocufund recipients to learn more about the challenges they’re facing and the kinds of changes they’d like to see.

Mara Ventura: That’s really the next step in thinking about our resiliency is that undocumented people are leading and making the decisions for the solutions they want to see, that they’re getting the skills and the training they need to help see through the solutions that they want to build, that their voices are the decision-makers, that we’re actually changing systems — or building new systems — to address long term needs. And really trying to recapture going back to folks that came together for them during the recovery and during the fires and saying, “Here’s a more long term way that you can invest in our undocumented community and hopefully build a model for folks to then do that for their own communities and for undocumented people in their own neighborhoods.”

Pastor Al: What happened was just the incredible sense of people, just the people wanting to help out. I think that’s one of the things that I was so blown away. That people were basically saying, “What can I do to help you in your situation?” The amount of help, the amount of willingness — the heart was so open. That’s one of the things that I was so blown away.

—

Tom Llewellyn: This episode was written, produced, and edited by Robert Raymond. Interviews were recorded and conducted by our field producer Ninna Gaensler-Debbs and Robert Raymond. A big thanks to Chris Zabriskie and Lanterns for the music.

That’s it for the first season of The Response, we’ll see you again in 2019. Until then, be sure to subscribe on the podcast app of your choice in order to receive additional interviews and other bonus material.

This season of The Response is part of the “Stories to Action” project, a collaboration between Shareable, Post Carbon Institute, Transition US, Upstream Podcast, and NewStories, with distribution support from Making Contact. Funding was provided by the Threshold and Shift Foundations.

If you liked what you just heard, please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave us. It might not sound like much, but it’ll make a huge difference in helping others hear this story.

If you’ve been inspired by the themes and stories we’ve shared in this season of The Response, are interested in exploring how you can cultivate resilience in your own community, or would like to share your experiences of disaster collectivism, head on over to TheResonsePodcast.org. We wanna hear from you.

With an uncertain future ahead marked by deepening divisions and climate change, the many examples of collective relief and recovery efforts can serve as a blueprint for how to move forward and rebuild with a radical resilience. They can also provide a glimpse of another world, one marked by empowered communities filled with more connection, purpose, and meaning.

The post The Response 3: The impact of Northern California fires on the undocumented community appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This logic of expansion and conquest undoubtedly changes the relationship between humans and their environment. In this context, the “debate” over climate change actually becomes a matter of human survival. Those who entertain climate change as a question at all have already, maybe unknowingly, chosen a side. The fact is that climate change will create more refugees and forced human migrations; it will lead to the murder of environmental activists around the world and start new resource wars; it will spread disease and destabilize everything in its path — and more. Unless capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for natural resources and the fossil fuel combustion that powers it is abandoned, the Earth will be forced to do away with humans cancerously plundering the carbon energy it has stored over millions of years of natural history.

What is most unfortunate is that capitalism, which has multi-layered discriminations encoded within it — racism, sexism, classism, and so on — affects how thoroughly people are capable of bracing for the damages wrought by climate change. Though nature is indiscriminate in its wrath, the sustained ability to protect oneself from rising temperatures and natural disasters is a privilege not all can afford. Those who are already harmed under the pitiless whims of capital are doubly hurt by the lack of protection afforded to them for life in an increasingly turbulent environment. The Global South is much more likely to feel the brunt of climate change, despite contributing much less to causing it. But even in the world’s wealthiest nations, the poor and working classes are much more vulnerable to ecological devastation.

If the people who understand the gravity of the situation want this state of affairs to cease, then the system of capitalism and the egregious consumption of the so-called First World itself must cease. That which puts all of us at risk cannot be tolerated. The vast satisfactions in wealth hoarded by a few does not outweigh the needs of the many suffering the consequences every day, as the Earth deals with malignant human behavior. The systemic drive towards excess that is pushing the planet’s carrying capacity to the brink must be brought to a halt throughout the world, but especially in the empire that exemplifies excess best: the United States of America.

The Myth of “The Nanny State”

Ever since Donald Trump became president, crisis and disarray have been regular in an extraordinary sense. Not that the United States hasn’t always been this way; it has been for many of those oppressed within this society. But the dramatic events unfolding today have been very confronting for those who are only now realizing that progress — or the things that represent it symbolically — can be done away with overnight.

In the midst of an onslaught of draconian far-right legislation, the liberal establishment has failed to muster a convincing rebuff. This is due in part to complicity in the shift towards the right, and in part due to a more general crisis of confidence within liberalism. But what is also failing today is the state itself. At a time when environmental, social and economic crises are running out of control amid authoritarian overreach, the state seems to be in a moment of purposeful neglect and disarray. This is leading people to take the response to the confluence of crises into their own hands, raising the question of the state’s raison d’être to begin with.

When former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he said that President Trump’s choices for his cabinet would be aimed at “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon suggested that the primary goal should be to limit the regulatory agencies and bureaucratic entities getting in the way of the administration’s self-styled economic nationalism. “The way the progressive left runs,” Bannon went on to say, “is if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.” Years before this, in 2013, he had already told a writer for the Daily Beast that “I’m a Leninist … Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Without overemphasizing the irony and jocular misleadingness of the latter self-comparison, Bannon does raise a key question for the far right: what’s the use in a state? While such a question could potentially be put to progressive use in some hands, it is definitely dangerous in these. For the right, the question of the state’s usefulness is answered by the assertion of dominance and the infliction of violence — something that is clearly distressing for those of us resisting oppression. But at the same time, right-wing propaganda and talking points also depict the state as a “nanny state,” or an overprotective manifestation of liberal charity. Clearly, this characterization is as stale as it is untrue. The very idea that liberalism itself is charitable is a blatant falsification, yet the far right continues to disseminate this myth in its unending desire to maximize the state’s fascistic potential while depriving it of its limited welfare functions.

Austerity measures — something the world has become all too familiar with in recent years —provide us with the brutal confirmation that we never actually needed to dispel the far right’s propagandistic falsehoods. As governments around the world cut back on services, regulations and agencies that are meant to benefit social welfare and the public good, the trope of overzealous liberal government is shown to be untrue. Austerity threatens to undermine the very things that are supposed to make societies peaceable. But as consistently seems to happen in a world dominated by capitalism, those who are most vulnerable bear the brunt.

Dismantling Progress and Protection

In 2016, Oxfam announced that world’s 62 richest billionaires held as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. In 2017, this number decreased significantly to just eight people because new information came to light showing that poverty in China and India are much worse than previously thought, widening the gap between the ultra-wealthy elite and the bottom 50 percent. While this information is certainly beyond troubling, capitalism largely continues its path of destruction without being disturbed itself.

A slew of hurricanes hitting the Caribbean in 2017 made the world pause to consider the dangers of climate chaos. Many of the conversations that took place as a result of the back-to-back destruction wrought by hurricanes Irma, Jose and Maria focused on the threat of a disturbed environment. Under President Trump, these threats are only further exacerbated. As someone who campaigned on rejuvenating the coal industry and who has actively worked to transform climate denialist sentiments into government policy, Trump is one of the worst presidents anyone could hope for at a time of pressing climate disaster. With regard to the aforementioned “deconstruction” of the regulatory state that Banon spoke of, Trump accomplished major strides at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Under the regressive guidance of Scott Pruitt, a long-time fossil fuel defender, the EPA has seen absurd government moves to destabilize the very purposes of the agency itself in favor of corporate interests.

Pruitt built his career off of suing the EPA as attorney general for the state of Oklahoma. Under Trump, he can now secure his ultimate favor to corporate interests by dismantling the state agency altogether. Everything is up for grabs and the agency has become increasingly secretive about its agenda. The New York Times reported complaints of career EPA employees working under Pruitt, explaining that “they no longer can count on easy access to the floor where his office is,” as well as doors being “frequently locked.” It has even been said that “employees have to have an escort to gain entrance” to Mr. Pruitt’s quarters, as well as some being told not bring cell phones or take notes in meetings. The Washington Post recently reported that the EPA spent almost $25,000.00 to soundproof his work area. For a state agency tasked with protecting the environment, the actions being carried out sound more in line with that of federal law enforcement or intelligence at the FBI or CIA.

The example of Pruitt is one of many hinting at an increasingly restructured state, in which right-wing corporate forces that once fought regulation now become the regulator themselves, showing how the will of capital will always fulfill itself in this system. At the same time, as the trifecta of terrible storms hit the Caribbean and the Southern US coastline, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) displayed a similar lack of social concern. In response to the lackluster response of the authorities, local communities were left to fend for themselves, with only a few celebrity figures tasking themselves with taking action. At a very emotional press conference, Mayor Carmen Cruz of San Juan compared the neglect taking place to genocide and shed tears demanding more help for US citizens in Puerto Rico: “we are dying here. And I cannot fathom the thought that the greatest nation in the world cannot figure out logistics for a small island of 100 miles by 35 miles long.”

A U.S. flag hangs in front of a burning structure in Black Forest, Colo., June 12, 2013. The structure was among 360 homes that were destroyed in the first two days of the fire, which had spread to 15,000 acres by June 13. The Black Forest Fire started June 11, 2013, northeast of Colorado Springs, Colo., burning scores of homes and forcing large-scale evacuations. The Colorado National Guard and U.S. Air Force Reserve assisted in firefighting efforts. (DoD photo by Master Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, U.S. Air Force/Released)

Citizenship, expectation and failure

The emphasis on Puerto Ricans during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the other storms often gives special attention to their Americanness. Despite the fact that the entire Caribbean was hit, the question is why US citizens would be neglected in this way. The logic of American exceptionalism should render everyone within the nation’s borders and territories — or colonies — special due to their citizenship within the bounds of empire. But as Zoé Samudzi and I argued in our essay for ROAR Magazine, “The Anarchism Of Blackness,” some US citizens, particularly those of us who are Black, are actually considered extra-state entities.

Though not all Puerto Ricans are Black, from Flint to San Juan we have seen that when certain geographies are associated with Blackness or the non-white Other, their citizenship can always be called into question. As Zoé and I wrote:

Due to this extra-state location, Blackness is, in so many ways, anarchistic. African-Americans, as an ethno-social identity comprised of descendants from enslaved Africans, have innovated new cultures and social organizations much like anarchism would require us to do outside of state structures.

Now, as Puerto Ricans have worked excruciatingly hard with the assistance of other people throughout the US to pick up the slack of the Trump administration, we can see the emerging contours of an anarchistic response brought about by the climate crisis. In the shadow of Hurricane Katrina and Flint, we have had it proven to us one too many times that the white supremacist state does not care about us. The consistent need to crowdfund and organize to fill in the gaps of the lackluster response of federal agencies for the richest nation in the world must call into question the very purposes of the state itself.

Trump’s proposed military budget of $700 billion is more than enough to end poverty in the US, make college free, or provide everyone with universal health care — let alone quickly fix the problems in places like Flint, Puerto Rico, and so on. Instead, people are left to fend for themselves, begging the state to carry out the functions it is supposedly obliged to carry out while depending on celebrities and liberal oligarchs to give like the rest of us. This is clearly absurd, given the endless wealth of the state and the gap between the rich and the poor.

The expectation that lower- and middle-income people will provide aid during crises with greater passion than the super-rich and state agencies, when we do not have nearly as much money as either of them, is absolutely and utterly ridiculous. But it is this utter ridiculousness that is the quintessence of contemporary capitalism. Though capital is unequally distributed, the burden of fixing whatever the problems of the day may be is all ours, while the elite shy away from ever having to pay as large a price as the cost of being poor in a capitalist society.

One of the most despicable examples of these injustices played out in California, where raging wildfires killed dozens of people in 2017, while inmates were being paid $2.00 per hour to risk their lives fighting the fires. Their confinement makes their labor hyper-exploitable and again flattens the burden of problems linked to natural disasters, while the elite who caused the problems remain unfazed in their chase to destroy the planet for profit. In Texas, inmates raised about $44,000 to aid those affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. After Hurricane Harvey, inmates remembered previous fundraising efforts and requested officials to restart a program that allows them to donate their commissary for relief purposes. After just one month, 6,663 inmates had donated $53,863 for Hurricane Harvey relief from the usually very small commissary accounts that they maintain (often $5.00 or less depending on the person).

Picking Up Where the State Falls Through

None of this is new. The Black Panthers focused much of their work around meeting the needs of the Black community that the capitalist state and market had failed to fulfill. Projects like the Free Breakfast Program and ambulance services give credence to the extensive history of this type of mutual aid. It was the Panthers who exposed the extensive sickle cell anemia epidemic in the Black community by carrying out the work that the state should have done.

The concept of “revolutionary intercommunalism,” theorized by Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, helped develop a strategy for structured community service programs also known as “survival programs.” These programs were meant to address the lack of helpful institutions and services in Black communities serving the needs of the people. The current situation demands proper respect given to its purpose. Intercommunalism focuses on and prioritizes Black self-determination outside of the state’s failures to adequately look after the needs of the Black community. The survival of underserved people is understood to be a part of the necessary politics of transformative change. Aside from the glitz of revolution that fuels popular depiction in the media, politics and culture, our current pre-revolutionary situation requires the everyday survival of those of us who would do the revolting in the first place. Intercommunalism pays respects to revolution as a process, and not merely an overnight reaction.

Across communities Black and all colors, we see a persistent need to address whatever shortcomings white supremacy delves out to us. It is not necessarily new for communities in the US dealing with white supremacy to support each other and build resistance from within. Starting our own services and building up each other is an everyday revolutionary politics of survival. However, what can and often does happen is that maintaining our own institutions within the bounds of capitalism becomes the objective when ending capitalism should be a necessary outcome. More than simply reacting to capitalism in anarchistic ways, we should be proactively working to overcome it by making our very models of resistance anti-capitalist. Depending on the likes of sympathetic capitalists and liberal elites is counterproductive in this respect. Instead of building ways to consistently respond to disaster, we must be proactive in ending the crisis of capitalism rather than solely attempting to counter it one day at a time.

A proactive pre-revolutionary situation will raise the consciousness of people to realize that they are already carrying out the radical politics they are often told to despise. Ahistorical liberal reimaginings of the past make tragedy into a necessary stepping stone for an empire that is learning at the expense of the oppressed. Real resistance positions people to build movements that undo the violence that oppression inflicts. We are not in need of excuses; we are in need of a better world. If we want that better world, we have to align our politics with a radical imagination, with sustainable everyday resistance and innovative strategy.

The task of making the planet a better place is a great task, but it is the only choice we have — lest we allow capitalism to destroy the carrying capacity of the one we currently inhabit. We can no longer afford to let crisis keep us entangled in this current state of disarray. Instead, we should charge our suffering to a system that must pay with its unacceptable existence.

Over 150 people worldwide have been murdered this year while defending the environment. This piece is in loving memory of those who have died and will die doing so. Thank you for all that you did for us.

William C. Anderson

William C. Anderson is a freelance writer. His work has been published by The Guardian, MTV and Pitchfork among others. Many of his writings can be found at TruthOut or at the Praxis Center for Kalamazoo College, where he is a contributing editor covering race, class and immigration. He is co-author of the forthcoming book As Black as Resistance (AK Press, 2018).

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #7: System Change.

Illustration by David Istvan

The post Climate Crisis and the State of Disarray appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this series of podcasts, we explore pathways for climate justice in the Anthropocene – a geological epoch shaped by humans. Should we become stewards of our planet or live in harmony with nature to achieve a good life for all? We take our listeners on a journey to find out how we can reach the Paris goals. Through the lens of activists, experts, and scientists around the world, we reflect on this exciting challenge and explore paths that might lead us into a better future.

The pictures of our planet from a distance are beautiful and insightful. They show us a fragile marble in space that is ours to protect. But these pictures have also brought us another belief: that what happens on the ground is too small to count. We think that only global solutions can solve our global problems. But at the most local level, communities are already developing solutions. And this is why it’s time to zoom in again – back down to Earth.

In this podcast series, we’ve looked at different strategies to address climate change. We’ve discussed the risky ideas of geo-engineering and heard about climate cases in courtrooms around the world. We also considered the failures of carbon markets and talked about the links between climate change and agriculture.

In this final episode, we will take a look at the broader transformations that are necessary. Climate change is such a unique challenge that each and every sector of our society will have to change. At the same time, it is just one of the many urgent crises we face today. To get to the root of all of them, we need to consider a fundamental shift in thinking about our economies and lifestyles.

Do we need a master plan to get there? Maybe not. Because right now, people are already developing local solutions. They are experimenting with new paths toward just and sustainable lifestyles across the world. It’s a diverse set of approaches, but they share a common vision: The idea, that a good life for all is possible.

Do you know these moments when you reflect on your life and it feels like everything is accelerating?  We feel pushed to work more, to work harder and to always compete. Not because we want to move forward, but just because we want to keep up with everyone else.

This treadmill is part of a larger paradigm that we live in. It’s the logic of growth, says Barbara Muraca. Barbara lives in the United States and teaches Environmental and Social Philosophy at Oregon State University:

Modern, capitalistic societies are completely built around the idea of increasing economic growth. The retirement system in many countries, the taxation system, employment etc. So, if modern industrialized societies stop growing, they collapse. We call one year with reduced growth recession or crisis!

When you read the news, it may seem as if we’d be lost without an ever-growing economy. Growth is considered essential for a stable and booming society, and it comes with huge expectations. It’s supposed to guarantee employment, ensure peace, and provide wealth for everyone. We treat growth as the promise of a good life for all. But unfortunately, growth hasn’t delivered on its promise.

Now, the problem is that we have reached a point at which growth has turned from a means to improve quality of life to a goal of its own. Now, we can imagine what it means if we apply that to our own body. What would it mean if we grew every year 3 percent more than the year before? That would be completely crazy, and the balance of our body would indeed collapse, says Barbara Muraca

What seems crazy for our bodies is an accepted paradigm in economics: that we can grow and grow forever. In the process, our societies have become more and more divided. A few people get very rich, but the vast majority struggles. Growth doesn’t mean employment for everyone. And the financial market has stumbled into crisis. So why do so many of us still believe in the logic of growth?

I like the idea of mental infrastructures. You can imagine the highways that are built in our mind that we are used to take and stop seeing the side-roads and possible alternative paths, because we are used to take these highways, says Barbara Muraca

We want both: More energy, and clean energy. Can the two go together without doing harm to nature and other people? Technology is the focus of the so-called Green Economy, but it doesn’t come without side-effects. And while we green our energy systems, we are also consuming more and more resources. So if we really want to reduce our footprint, we need to change our lifestyles and habits. Like eating less meat for example, since breeding livestock produces high carbon emissions.

So, the good news is that especially in countries, like Europe and the US, meat consumption has been significantly reduced in the last years. The bad news however, is that, precisely because of the logic of growth and profit, the export of meat from Europe and the US has increased in the last years as well. And the OECD countries have really been celebrating the creation of new markets for meat in China and India and even issued dietary recommendation to increase meat consumption in these countries, says Barbara Muraca

This is just one example of how the logic of growth reproduces itself  against our best intentions. We are unable to simply stop growing no matter how much we try to size down. Sowe must change the basic structure of our societies in order to make them less dependent on economic growth.

Did you know that many rich countries have already hit their limits of growth? Their economies don’t grow as much as they used to anymore. This is the case in Germany, Canada or the U.S. In such countries economies grow only slowly by just one or two percent each year.

At the same time, many developing countries are growing quickly, like China and the Senegal. Their growth can be as high as five or six percent a year. The rate is much slower than it used to be but still high compared to some of the old industrialized countries. A big part of this boom happens in Asia.

In India’s, for example, the economy is expected to grow by up to eight percent each year. And this boom comes with huge changes. We reached out to AshEEsh Ko(h)thar(EE) to understand how such a fast-growing world looks like. Ashish is based in Pune in the West of India:

It’s a very large city, well small by Indian standards, about 4 million people.

Ashish is an environmental activist and co-author of the book “Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India”. The miraculous growth of his country has come at a huge cost, he explained to us:

Well, in India, as I guess across the world, we have a model of development which essentially focuses on economic growth and industrialization and commercialization. You know, a uni-directional approach which says that we have to move from agriculture and pastoralism to industrialization to services to digital economy etc. etc. And what this has meant for very, very large sections of India’s population is dispossession, because this kind of an economy needs the land and the forest and the waters to be taken away from those who traditionally depended on them. It holds to be primitive and outmoded their own knowledge systems, very sophisticated ways by which people have dealt with or have lived within nature. All of that is considered to be out-modeled and is supposed to be discarded.

The city of Pune has become one of India’s tech centers. International companies working in information technology, agribusiness and renewable energy have set up camp in the region. The car industry here accounts for a third of the Indian market. More and more Indians are buying cars. And they are finding jobs in the tech sector – and not just in Pune:

In all the schools if you look at the kind of teaching that happens, people are taught that doing farming, and pastoralism or fisheries or forestry work is no longer cool. It’s not something that one needs, should be doing in the 21. Century, the 21. Century should be about computers, it should be about being in industries, it should be about learning sophisticated technologies, being savvy with gadgets and so on. So, what we’re seeing is a kind of dispriviledging and displacement of nature-based livelihoods, which in India, most of the population actually still is living that.

Half of India’s people still work on farms, in forestry or in fishing. But their numbers are decreasing. People are moving away from the rural areas and into the cities. They give up their traditional livelihoods, hoping to succeed in the new economy.

And from those livelihoods where people are being offered are what I call deadlihoods. Because essentially their mass jobs there, there is no dignity, there is no meaningfulness with this, people are just part of a much larger chain of production. They are subject to the whims and fancies of a small number of owners, whether it’s government or it’s capitalist. And even in the so-called modern sector, things like computers and all, most of the jobs that people have are extremely deadening, there is no liveliness and then there’s no passion. And so, really, the replacement is by jobs with actually what I call deadlihoods, says Ashish Kothari.

Oftentimes, this means repeating the same action in a factory over and over again for a tiny payout. As you heard, AshEEsh calls these jobs ‘deadlihoods’. They separate people from nature and from the products they make, and expose them to tough and toxic working conditions that can be extremely dangerous. Here, global companies can produce at a lower cost, because the rules for the protection of workers and the environment are still less stringent. In many cases, the products are then shipped abroad.

So, there is also then a significant impact on the environment. In India, we already know that we are on a very steep, unsustainable path, using twice the amount of natural resources that can be regenerated. We’re already seeing severe, very severe shortages of water, problems of deforestation, flooding, droughts. And, of course now, combined with all that, the impacts of climate change, says Ashish Kothari.

India is both fueling climate change and suffering from its consequences. More and more cars are crowding the streets, and coal-fired power plants pollute the air. To AshEEsh, the current system perpetuates inequalities, to the benefit of a small elite. Simply greening the economy, he says, won’t solve the larger problem.

If one wants to change the situation we’re in, we have to tackle the system at its roots. We have to tackle the system in terms of the political concentrations of power in the state, the economic concentrations of power in capitalism, the gender concentrations of power and patriarchy. And depending on where we are in the world, in India for instance, castism, which is very old. These fundamental actors of society have to be challenged and changed, if we’re really want to try and solve this problem, says Ashish Kothari.

You’ve heard it from our guests in the United States and India: Ashish and Barbara are convinced that we need a new kind of thinking and a new way of doing. They say we need to work on creating a fundamentally different world. This might sound utopian. But there are already projects emerging that try to do just that. Take the concept of Degrowth:

The movement on Degrowth in Europe, is a very, very important one, because we have to really challenge and say that not only have we gone too far and too much, too big. Actually, we have to degrow, we have to scale down considerably our use of materials and energy. Especially if we are genuine about other parts of the world that have got left behind. Being able to at least meet their basic needs. I’m not saying they should be able to develop in the same pattern, but at least be able to do away with the kind of deprivation that there’s an unequal form of development has caused.

The Degrowth idea comes in many shapes. Initially, the movement formed in France, under the name décroissance. It was taken up in Italy and Spain, where Degrowth is called Descrescita, or Decrecimiento. And in Germany, economists are working on so-called post-growth societies. Barbara is among those who support this Degrowth movement.

I do not think that growth is in the long term possible at this rate and I think that if we don’t move on with a radical transformation, we will end up in recurrent crisis, even worse than the crisis of 2008. So, for me, Degrowth is not just a utopia, it’s a necessary path to transform society, says Barbara Muraca.

But Degrowth seems a rather vague term. So what would this transformation actually look like? The people working on Degrowth won’t be able to send you a copy of their master plan. They don’t claim that they even know how it’s going to work. Instead, they are all about leaving the beaten path, and venture into uncharted territory.

And for this we need spaces in which we can experience and experiment what the difference might be like.) We have to experience what it means to live differently. Not only to think about that, but to make the experience in our bodies, in our minds, and in our desires. And I don’t think that this is not just an abstract idea or wishful thinking. Around us, there are so many different projects, social experiments and initiatives, that are already embodying this perspective. And they are already creating spaces where we can experiment alternative futures and start working on them. And I think they are contagious and powerful, says Barbara Muraca.

One space in which such alternative worlds are being explored is the Transition Town movement. Barbara says this is a great example of how we could develop new solutions.

You have small towns or neighborhoods, where people get together and the leading idea is to develop a plan to make their community no longer dependent on fossil fuels. But it is more than that. People build learning networks and start from their potentials and the skills that are there at the local level and they start to re-imagine the place where they live. They really rethink the economy, they reimagine work, they re-skill in order to develop the competences that are necessary to implement a different way of living, but they are also very concerned about social justice for example, says Barbara Muraca.

One of the most well-known Transition Towns is Bristol in the United Kingdom. The people there have developed creative ideas like the Bristol Pound. It’s a local currency, and it cannot be accumulated like normal money in the bank. Instead of generating profit, the Bristol Pound sustains the local economy. There’s a food network and there’s a community-owned farm. In these projects, what’s also being tested are new models of ownership:

It’s not just about sharing the use of tools, but about really rethinking the way we produce stuff. If we can generate production which is independent from the logic of profit, we don’t have to keep going with the idea of mass production and mass consumption. We can produce things that are modular, that can be highly recycled by local communities, that can tackle and address the needs of communities, and that are completely independent from the necessity of generate, recreate and accumulate increasing profit – which is what is happening now with the standard model of production.

If we produce locally, share our stuff and repair things when they are broken, we can decrease our footprint on the planet. And we can defy the logic of growth, by taking back control over our local resources. An interesting example of this comes from Mendha Lekha in India.

And this village in the last 40 years has kind of declared that in its village and for all the ecosystems around it, the…nobody else will be taking decisions but the village assembly itself. So their slogan is that while we elect the government in New Delhi and Mumbai, in our village, we are the government. (Now, through all of this they have upturned 200 years of colonial and forced colonial history, where the forests have been taken control off by the state.) They’ve taken control back to themselves and they now manage the entire forest, 2000 hectares around them, and they manage it in such a way that it is sustainable, that the conservation is taking place, they also recently agreed communized all the agricultural land, which means there’s no private land on the village anymore. And this also helps them to control cropping patterns, to make sure what lands are not being sold off for mining or industries, and so on, says Ashish Kothari.

Ashish calls it a form of direct and radical democracy. Around the world, communities have reclaimed control over important resources, such as water. In another case, in the Western Indian district of Kachchh (Kutch), local people are taking care of their water in a new way. It’s an area where water is extremely scarce. So one hundred villages have banded to collect and use rainwater in a local, equitable and decentralised way. They manage it through local committees. In this way, the system provides enough water for the basic needs of every village:

This becomes very important because when one is talking about  the mainstream model of water, creating a big dam somewhere and then transporting that water somewhere else,  we now know that large reservoirs can also be serious sources of emissions.

When a valley is flooded to build a dam, it buries the soil and vegetation. The plants start rotting and emit methane. This powerful greenhouse gas can warm the planet. The second issue is that big dams often change the agricultural practices around it. Farmers shift from dryland farming to irrigated farming and start using chemical fertilizers, says Ashish. So the people of Kutch are saving planet-warming emissions, as well as their traditional farming practice.

When they are able to do local water harvesting, they continue with mostly their dry land farming agriculture, which necessarily is more diverse, it’s more localized, has less emissions, it’s mostly organic – and because it is diverse it is also more adaptable and able to deal with aspects of climate change, says Ashish Kothari.

Our addiction to growth has reached its limits. It’s threatening our environment as well as human dignity. Can we imagine a world beyond growth? Let’s look at our bodies when we get older.

After a certain threshold, our bodies stop growing physically, but do not stop being creative and learning and developing in a different way. And for the economy it’s similar, says Barbara Muraca.

Degrowth activists like Barbara are convinced that another world is possible. But she also says we need more than small reforms and green technologies. We need a fundamental change. What could this look like? There are many people already out and experimenting. Barbara says that the key is to build alliances among them:

So, stopping coal extraction in Germany for example, per se is not enough, because it leads to coal being imported now from Colombia. And in Colombia, pristine forests are destroyed and indigenous people are evicted for the coal mines. So, we to have to combine the blockage of coal mining in Germany with the things that the Transition Town people are advocating which is transforming the economy and society to make it less dependent on fossil fuels at the same time.

Modern culture tells us that we count mainly as individuals. We are divided into producers and consumers. This makes us easy to control. But if we reconnect as collectives, we can realize our power to shape the world:

If all goes well I think the world is moving towards what I call the radical ecological democracy, where the basic unit of decision-making is the collective, in the village or in the city neighborhood or in a school or college or wherever there are electives and communities are forming and being self-defined, says Ashish Kothari.

Ashish tells us more about his vision for the future. It’s a world, where people take back the means of production from states and corporations, and organize locally. Here progress is not measured by growth, but in terms of happiness and relationships. His is a vision of justice without the great inequalities between genders and classes we know today. It’s a world where humans are much more in tune with nature, and their knowledge is a common good.

These are the sorts of things we are seeing already in hundreds of initiatives in India, thousands across the world. And I think the more we are able to network them, bring them together, the more we can actually practice, bring into practice, a very very different vision for what the world would look like in 2050, says Ashish Kothari.

Does it sound idealistic? Well, yes. But idealism is the start of any meaningful process of change. And it’s about time that we take our knowledge on crucial issues like climate change and social justice, and turn them into reality.

This is a radical change in the view that we have. So, in other words, moving from the globe to the home, to the Oikos which is the word that is in the word ecology and in the word economy. Starting to shape together an alternative house, an alternative home for us, and not considering the globe as an abstract thing that can be organized from above, and managed from above and reproduce the logic of management as the solution to our problems, says Barbara Muraca.

The first photograph of planet Earth was taken in the late 1960’s. It made us conscious of the fragile place that we share. But it also planted a bias into our minds: That any solution to a global problem must be global in scale as well. But maybe that’s not true. We can start on the ground now, and develop our own, local solutions. In this respect, climate change is a wake-up call, and a real opportunity: To change our world for the benefit of everyone.

The post The great transition – Alternative paths for a better and climate just future appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Global Resistance to Fossil-Fuelled Capitalism

1. What is the key idea of the climate justice movement?

We are not all in the same boat: The climate crisis as a crisis of justice

What is climate change about? First and foremost, justice! The best symbol for this process is not the sad polar bear, but New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. There, the majority of the wealthy white population succeeded in fleeing from the floods and the ensuing chaos, because they (for the most part) owned their own cars, which they could use to leave the city. The mostly poor black population largely remained behind, and was subjected to the government’s incompetent and repressive disaster management for several weeks. Burned into our minds are images of African-Americans, standing on rooftops, signalling to the helicopters flying over the city that they need help —and yet being wantonly ignored.

Black inhabitants of New Orleans call for help after hurricane Katrina while securing themselves on the roof of their house. (Image: World Socialist Web Site)

We often think of ourselves as being all in the proverbial ‘same boat’. Unfortunately, this is not true. If we are all in the same boat —let’s say, the (space)ship Earth— then there are several classes on this ship, and in the event of an accident, the lower decks are flooded first. And just like on the Titanic, there are lifeboats available for those who can afford them. Another example is rising sea levels. They are rising for everyone, but in Bangladesh people are being flooded, while in Holland floating cities are being built with resources accumulated there while using the global environment as a dump, all without a second thought.

In summary: On average, those who have contributed least to climate change suffer the most, while those who have contributed most suffer the least. The latter usually have sufficient resources to protect themselves from the effects of climate change. They have accumulated these resources, this wealth, precisely through those activities that have driven climate change. This central fact, which, by the way, applies to almost all so-called ‘environmental crises’, is perhaps best described as ‘climate injustice’. That is why the call for mere climate protection does not go far enough. What we need is climate justice.
——————–

2. Who is part of the climate justice movement, what do they do?

From the environmental justice movement to the climate justice movement

In order to understand the demands and requirements of the climate justice movement, it is worth taking a look at the history of social struggles, in particular the emergence of the environmental movement in the USA in the 1960s, which was first and foremost a movement of the white middle class for the white middle class. It originated in relatively privileged ‘white’ city districts and towns, and fought to keep these communities free from air pollution and to prevent the inhabitants’ children from being poisoned by chemical plants and power plants. As understandable as these demands were, they had a regrettable effect. Instead of such plants being closed down, they were simply moved; from the richer communities to the poorer ones, populated mostly by African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and other marginalised groups. The struggles of the liberal environmental movement did not lead to the solution of the problems they had criticised — instead, they were simply shifted a few steps further down the ladder of social power.

The fight for environmental justice is a fight for your own life. Material from the website “beautiful solutions”. (Image: Wake Forest University)

Resistance to environmental and climate racism

The communities of colour, suddenly oppressed by a whole range of polluting industries, did not merely become passive victims. Instead, they organised themselves, accused the environmental movement of ‘environmental racism’, and began their own movement for environmental justice. Analytically, this means: If apparent environmental problems are not seen as social problems, if there is no awareness of how a single polluting factory is embedded in broader social structures of domination and exploitation, not only are these problems impossible to solve, but existing social inequalities will be exacerbated.

In the 1980s, as the debate on climate change began to gain momentum, the idea developed that the problem was above all technical —that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had to be reduced and eliminated through certain mechanisms. In the 1990s, this in turn facilitated the development of so-called market mechanisms to combat climate change. Without opening up the entire critical debate on these impressively ineffective environmental policy tools (Altvater/Brunnengräber 2007; Moreno/Speich Chassé/Fuhr 2015), they are based on a technical logic that does not take social structures into account; i.e. that because every CO2 particle is the same, it does not matter who saves CO2 where and under what conditions.

In economic terms, it is actually best to save CO2 where it is cheapest, and that is easiest in the global south, where everything is cheaper on average. So, we could give money to development aid organisations to protect forests from deforestation, so as to protect the climate, while we in the global north continue to burn fossil fuels. However, this idea has a huge catch: the forests which were suddenly to be saved from excessive deforestation were often home to indigenous peoples who have excelled at sustainable forest management for thousands of years. And these peoples were threatened by expulsion from their ancestral lands, so-called ‘green grabbing’ (see Heuwieser 2015) through the market mechanisms negotiated in the 1990s as part of the Kyoto Protocol. In the context of these negotiations, the story of environmental justice was once more taken up. In response to the ‘climate racism’ of official climate policy, American activist for indigenous peoples and founder of the Indigenous Environmental Network Tom Goldtooth, who himself comes from the environmental justice movements, for the first time formulated the demand for climate justice. Thus began the fight to construct climate change as a question of human rights and justice.

The next step in the development of the climate justice narrative was the publication of the Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice report (Bruno et. al. 1999). The report focused on fossil fuel energy companies; and instead of suggesting solutions at the individual level (for example, ethical consumption), it focused on major structural transformations. In addition, the struggle for climate justice was quite explicitly described as a global struggle. The report also put forward the movement’s most important policy framework to date, namely a critique of the Kyoto Protocol’s market mechanisms as ‘false solutions’.

This image was made by the Ingham County Health Department in Michigan (USA) and shows topics connected to environmental justice (Image: Jessica Yorko, Environmental Justice Coordinator, Ingham County Health Department)

A global movement for climate justice is created

In Bali in 2002, the organisations that would later become the core of the movement, and articulate the Bali Principles of Climate Justice, met for the first time. In 2004, several groups and networks which had long been working on a critique of market mechanisms in general, and emissions trading in particular, came together in Durban in South Africa and founded the Durban Group for Climate Justice. The final breakthrough came at the 13th Climate Change Conference in Bali in 2007. The aforementioned network of critical organisations provoked an open conflict with the politically more moderate Climate Action Network, whose cosy lobbying strategy had been shown to be something of a flop. One result of this conflict was the founding of the Climate Justice Now! network in 2007. The press release announcing the formation of this new actor articulated a number of claims which still apply to the climate justice movement today. Later translated into a sort of founding manifesto, the press release demanded:

• that fossil fuels be left in the ground, and replaced with investment in suitable, safe, clean and democratic renewable energies;
• the drastic reduction of wasteful overconsumption, especially in the global north, but also in terms of southern elites;
• a massive transfer of funds from North to South, under democratic control, based on the repayment of climate debt (…);
• resource conservation based on human rights and enforced under indigenous land rights, with control of energy, forests, land and water driven by these communities;
• sustainable, small-scale farming and food sovereignty.

To achieve these goals, the movement has made use of a wide range of instruments, from the publication of clever reports and day-to-day political work in communities particularly affected by climate change, through civil disobedience (for example coal mine blockades), to the militant struggles of the Ogoni in the Niger Delta.

In summary: the climate justice movement is a descendant of the environmental justice movement. Like the environmental justice movement, the climate justice movement originated in the global south (see below), and aims to focus less on technical change and more on basic social structures. I would venture the following definition: Climate justice is not so much a state of affairs — e.g. the fair distribution of the costs of a potential solution to the climate crisis— but more a process, namely the process of struggling against the social structures which cause climate injustice. If we heed this broad definition, we can even say that many of the struggles for climate justice are not necessarily being fought under the banner of climate justice, but are represented as struggles for land, water, and other basic needs and human rights.

USA: Indigenous peoples and communities of colour as supporters of resistance

The fact that the climate justice movement arose in the US also structures the way that the project’s social base is viewed. On average, alleged ‘environmental problems’ hit the most socially vulnerable the hardest. In the US, this usually means the communities of colour, among which Native American communities are once again generally the most marginalised. Thee groups designated in the USA and Canada as First Nations see themselves as part of a global indigenous network which is most affected by environmental disasters. In addition to this, they live (on average) in places where the highest biodiversity is concentrated, and their socio-ecological practices —for example, forest use— are highly sustainable. Our survival may also depend on them, as learning from them could mean learning real sustainability. This is why so-called ‘frontline communities’ or ‘affected communities’ (often indigenous communities) are the main supporters of the resistance, the famous ‘revolutionary subject’ of the climate justice movement.

These ‘frontline communities’, often communities of colour in the USA, thus join forces with typically white and/or otherwise privileged ‘allies’ (see Moore/Kahn-Russel 2010). With regard to these activists, we tend to find the social milieus we have been expecting in this part of the world since the emergence of the so-called ‘new social movements’ from 1968 onwards: younger, more mobile, better educated, and often slightly more ‘alternative’ than the social average.

Boreal forests are destroyed by the expansion of Tarsands (Image: Dru Oja Jay, Dominion)

The view of Europe: The role of allies, and differences from the environmental movement

The European wing of the movement, which does not have the US’s tradition of environmental justice struggles to fall back on, and which is dealing with different social structures, is significantly more represented by the white and privileged than the movement in the US. This is quite logical to a certain extent: in the global north, there are simply fewer affected groups or ‘frontline communities’ —with a handful of exceptions, such as the villages in the Lusatia region and the Rhineland which still fall victim to the madness of lignite mines. Most of us act, globally speaking, in the role of allies.

In Europe, the climate justice movement differs from the broader environmental movement in two main elements: firstly, through its conceptual anti-capitalism, including a clear rejection of all varieties of green capitalism (green market economy) (see Müller/Kaufmann 2009); and secondly, through its focus on the tactics of civil disobedience (often mass civil disobedience) and deliberate rule-breaking, in contrast to the more legalistic tactics of traditional environmental organisations. Examples of this type of climate activism in the global north are the civil disobedience campaigns at the climate summits in Copenhagen (2009) and Paris (2015), but above all sit-ins and blockades of coal power plants and coal mines, airports and other places where climate change is generated. Of the above-mentioned key demands made by the climate justice movement, the central one is: ‘Leave it in the ground!’ —fossil fuels must be left in the ground!

3. How do you see the relationship between the climate justice movement and degrowth?

Climate justice and degrowth: United against fossil capital!

There is a positive, fairly close relationship between the climate justice movement and the degrowth movement, something which should come as no surprise to anyone after the Degrowth Summer School at the Rhineland Climate Camp in 2015. The reason for this is obvious: they have a common enemy, namely the fossil fuel-based energy system.

Protests at the climate summit in Posen/Poznan (Poland) in 2008: Juana Camacho Otero of Friends of the Earth Columbia at the global action day. (Image: Friends of the Earth International)

On the side of the climate justice movement, the argument is quite clear: Climate change, as explained above, is a deeply unjust phenomenon. Behind this are a number of social structures, but the key driver of climate change is an energy system that has been based on fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. After the COP21 climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 demonstrated to the climate change movement and its more radical climate justice wing that little should be expected from ‘the powers that be’ in the fight against fossil fuels, they began to focus on local and national energy struggles (see Müller 2012; Bullard/Müller 2011). The core of the climate (justice) movement now consists of fighting for a rapid phasing out of fossil fuels, opposing fracking and the development of gas infrastructure, and campaigning for the development of democratically controlled, largely decentralised renewable energies.

From the perspective of degrowth, the argument is a little more complicated, due to the ‘political polyvalence of the growth-critical paradigm’ (Eversberg / Schmelzer 2016). In other words, there are a wide range of political positions on the degrowth spectrum, some of which are more critical of capitalism than others, and some which concern themselves with environmental issues to a greater or lesser extent. Nevertheless, Eversberg and Schmelzer describe degrowth as having a perspective of transformation which is predominantly ‘critical of capitalism’, and which has abandoned the idea that sustainable development is possible in the context of a capitalist economy. Although there are also non-ecological reasons to be interested in the topic of degrowth, it appears that many people become involved with the issue due to the constantly escalating socio-ecological crises with which we have been confronted in recent years.

And so we come to the crux of the matter: If the post-growth movement is first and foremost about the destruction of our natural resources, then it also has to be about capitalism, because capitalism has an in-built microeconomic compulsion towards infinite growth. The growth dynamics of capitalist production are not explained through oft-cited metrics such as gross domestic product, but through the microeconomic behaviour of individual companies, which are driven by market forces to invest money today in order to make more money tomorrow —companies that don’t achieve this don’t survive. If this is not mere speculation, then the result is the following correlation: money => commodity production => consumption => more money, followed by the re-investment of at least part of this money. Or in summary: M => C => M’. This microeconomic equation represents the general formula for capital, and it expresses the compulsion to act felt by each businessperson every day. From an ecological point of view, this means that this necessary additional daily profit must come from somewhere ‘in nature’. If every day more workers convert more raw materials into commodities by using more energy, then M => C => M’ also means a continuous rise in global resource consumption (see Müller 2014). This is the nature of capitalism.

And capitalism would not have developed in this way, perhaps would never have arisen at all, if it had not entered into a quasi-symbiotic relationship with fossil fuels (coal at that time) in 18th century England (see Malm 2016). I do not believe that a form of capitalism based on renewable energies is impossible, but the capitalism which exists today, and which has already passed several ‘environmental limits’, could never have existed without fossil fuels. Whether we speak of fossil capital or fossil-fuelled capitalism, capitalism is the root of our global need for growth, and its motor runs on fossil fuels —precisely those fossil fuels which are also driving climate change.

4. Which proposals do they have for each other?

Better together: The weaknesses of one are the strengths of the other

Accordingly, the climate justice movement can provide the degrowth movement with something that the latter occasionally lacks: a common, antagonistically structured field of practice. This has nothing to do with the now somewhat tedious question of whether degrowth is a movement or not, given that it has no identifiable opponents. I accept the argument of Eversberg and Schmelzer (2016) that the target of the post-growth movement is not a single sector or institution or external process, but the ‘imperial mode of living’ as a whole, which we in the global north have —at least to a certain extent— internalised. This is not about the academic definition of a movement, which is ultimately irrelevant anyway, but about the motivation of the people involved, and the need to create conflicts so that the movement can develop transformative potential beyond articles in the culture section and niche day-to-day living practices. In 2015, the Ende Gelände campaign brought more than 1,000 people together (and over 4,000 people in 2016!) in an act of mass civil disobedience, namely the peaceful occupation of a lignite mine. This action created a conflict which the campaign then won, thus generating an enormous sense of collective empowerment (see The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination 2015). It is this collective empowerment that enables the creation of a type of antagonistic identity construction, without which major social transformation is almost certainly impossible.

Ende Gelände activists in the lignite mining region Lusatia claim the democratisation of energy production and much more. Image: CC BY-NC 2.0, Ende Gelände 2016 / Fabian Melber.

In turn, the degrowth movement can offer the climate justice movement something that it lacks: a narrative that will have strong appeal in parts of Europe and the global north. Exhibit 1: The fourth Degrowth Conference succeeded in gathering together approximately 3,000 people in Leipzig, while no other social movement I am aware of can muster more than 2,000 (even in Berlin); I would hazard that a conference on climate justice would find it difficult to attract even 1,000 participants. Doubtless this success is in part due to the amazing work of the organisers. But it is also an indicator that the degrowth narrative is attractive to more than just the ‘usual suspects’ who attend social movement events. (This impression is reinforced by the fact that many of the participants had never been to a social movement conference before.) Exhibit 2: The culturally important (albeit politically somewhat irrelevant) German parliamentary commission of inquiry on ‘Growth, Prosperity, Quality of Life’ from 2011 to 2013 shows that criticism of growth has even ‘infected’ conservative and liberal cultural milieus. Exhibit 3 (from my own experience): When I try to convince my conservative grandfather of the climate justice narrative, and of the fact that the wealth we have accumulated in the global north is —in reality— a great debt that we should return to the global south, he usually ignores me. When I present him with perhaps the central point of degrowth reasoning, namely that you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet, he is forced to agree. On this basis, we can then start a conversation critiquing capitalism. In this story, my grandfather is representative of many people in the global north who have little interest in ‘climate justice’, but who share the unease that the degrowth movement is able to formulate.

5. Outlook: Space for visions, suggestions or wishes

Strategy, strategy, strategy!

Politically speaking, the climate justice movement reached a new peak in May 2016. In the second round of Ende Gelände, this time held as part of a global campaign entitled Break Free from Fossil Fuels, which led actions against fossil fuels and in favour of energy democracy on five continents, we achieved a number of significant successes. By gathering together approximately 4,000 participants in a highly tactical and strategic act of civil disobedience in the field of climate action, we have set new standards; the level of international participation in the act itself, and the international coordination of the act in the context of the Break Free campaign are reminiscent of the degree of internationalisation which made the alterglobalisation movement so inspiring. More important, however, is the fact that this time we did not remain in the coal mine; instead we reacted to the tactical and political retreat of our opposition from the pit (Vattenfall and the Brandenburg Ministry of Interior) by playing off our political and moral strength and setting up the blockade on the tracks. ‘On the tracks’ here refers to the railway tracks in the Lusatia region that supply the coal-fired Schwarze Pumpe (Black Pump) power station with lignite from three opencast mines. This rail blockade was of prime importance because we in the global north do more damage to the planet through expanding our industrial and service sectors than through primary resource extraction (such as lignite mining): this primarily refers to power plants, factories and server farms, not to gold mines and coal mines.

Start of a group of Ende Gelände activists in 2016. Image: CC BY-NC 2.0, 350.org.

Why am I writing about this at the end of this text? Because this time something happened that very rarely happens in the social movements that I have experienced: They assessed their own strength realistically, and developed tactics and strategies which related this strength realistically to the scale of the challenge. So if I could articulate a wish to both movements (a somewhat strange task, I might add, as for me the two are not unrelated), it would be: Let us plan strategically, let us act wisely, and not merely expressively, because we are few, with scarce resources, and we have an enormous task ahead of us (the abolition of capitalism, saving the climate etc. …). Consequently: strategy, strategy, strategy. Without strategy, it’s all bullshit.

Literature and links

Links

• Ende Gelände
  Socio-ecological restructuring at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
  Beautiful Trouble – A Toolbox for Revolution

Applied as well as further literature

Bruno, Kenny; Karliner, Joshua; Brotsky, China 1999. Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice. San Francisco: Transnational Resource and Action Center. Accessed: 11.07.2016. <http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1048>

Dietz, Kristina; Müller, Tadzio; Reuter, Norbert; Wichterich, Christa 2014. Mehr oder weniger? Wachstumskritik von links (Reihe: Materialien). Berlin: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. <http://www.rosalux.de/publication/40728/>

Eggers, Dave 2011. Zeitoun. London: Penguin Books.

Elmar Altvater; Achim Brunnengräber (Hrsg.): Ablasshandel gegen Klimawandel? Hamburg: VSA.

Eversberg, Dennis; Schmelzer, Matthias 2016: Über die Selbstproblematisierung zur Kapitalismuskritik. Vier Thesen zur entstehenden Degrowth-Bewegung. Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen 1/2016: 9-17. Access: 11.07.2016. <http://forschungsjournal.de/node/2821>

Focus on the Global South [without year]. What’s missing in the climate talks? Justice! Access: 11.07.2016. <http://focusweb.org/node/1301>

Heuwieser, Magdalena 2015. Grüner Kolonialismus in Honduras. Wien: Promedia-Verlag.

Kaufmann, Stefan; Müller, Tadzio 2009. Grüner Kapitalismus: Krise, Klima und kein Ende des Wachstums. Berlin: Karl Dietz.

Moreno, Camila; Speich Chassé, Daniel; Fuhr, Lili 2015. Carbon Metrics. Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide. Berlin: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. <https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/2015-11-09_carbon_metrics.pdf>

Müller, Tadzio 2012: Von Energiekämpfen, Energiewenden und Energiedemokratie. LuXemburg 1/2012: 6-15. <http://www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/von-energiekampfen-energiewenden-und-energiedemokratie/>

Russell, Joshua Kahn; Moore, Hilary 2011: Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections on Navigating the Climate Crisis. Oakland: PM Press.

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination 2015. Drawing A Line in the Sand: The Movement Victory at Ende Gelände Opens up the Road of Disobedience for Paris. Access: 11.07.2016. <https://labofii.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/drawing-a-line-in-the-sand-the-movement-victory-at-ende-gelande-opens-up-the-road-of-disobedience-for-paris/>

Header-image: 2014 People’s Climate March NYC, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, Stephen Melkisethian

Author Tadzio Müller was born in 1976 and has been involved in the climate justice movement for a decade, before which he was active in the alterglobalisation movement.

As an activist, his main area of focus is the organisation of mass civil disobedience, for example, the successful Ende Gelände¹ protests. He currently works as an expert on climate justice and energy democracy at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Degrowth is not only a label for an ongoing discussion on alternatives, and not just an academic debate, but also an emerging social movement. Regardless of many similarities, there is quite some lack of knowledge as well as scepticism, prejudice and misunderstanding about the different perspectives, assumptions, traditions, strategies and protagonists both within degrowth circles as well as within other social movements. Here, space for learning emerges – also to avoid the danger of repeating mistakes and pitfalls of other social movements.

At the same time, degrowth is a perspective or a proposal which is or can become an integral part of other perspectives and social movements. The integration of alternatives, which are discussed under the discursive roof of degrowth, into other perspectives often fails because of the above mentioned skepticisms, prejudices and misunderstandings.

The multi-media project “Degrowth in movement(s)” shows which initiatives and movements develop and practice social, ecological and democratic alternatives. Representatives from 32 different fields describe their work and history, their similarities & differences to others and possible alliances. From the Solidarity Economy to the Refugee-Movement, from Unconditional Basic Income to the Anti-Coal-Movement, from Care Revolution to the Trade Unions – they discuss their relationship to degrowth in texts, videos, photos and podcasts.

The project was run by the “Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie” (Laboratory for New Economic Ideas) in Germany, so most of the authors are from there. However, there are a couple of clearly international perspectives and most of the movements work far beyond the national level.

The post Degrowth in Movements: Climate Justice appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It’s mainly about the atmosphere and polar bears and carbon, right? Well, not really. I mean yes – it is about those things, but mainly it’s about human rights and politics. If that doesn’t make immediate sense to you, then this post is for you. Here’s why climate change is about human rights:

• Responsibility for climate change, its impacts and the capacity to adapt to it are unequal
• Climate change deepens every existing social inequality
• Climate action has huge potential to enhance equality and human rights

Not convinced yet? Let’s explore each of those points…

Responsibility, impacts and capacity are uneven

Responsibility for climate change

The roots of climate change go back to the drawn of the Industrial Revolution, which kicked off in the UK in the late 1700s and quickly spread around North Western Europe and then the world.
The discovery of coal, and later oil and gas, changed everything.

These three fossil fuels are fossilised organic matter from millions of years ago, hugely energy-dense, which release their pent up energy when burned. Being made from ancient dead plants and animals, they are full of carbon, and when burnt, that carbon goes into the atmosphere. The extra carbon acts like an insulating blanket, blocking heat from radiating out to space, making the Earth warmer. This is known as the “greenhouse effect” and is vital to life. Without it we’d be absolutely freezing, like a planet sized fridge-freezer. But when it comes to blankets, it’s not just ‘the more the better’ is it? You get too hot. And that’s what’s happening now.

Related: Understand Basic Climate Science With These 5 Beautifully Simple Videos

Europe and later the other rich nations were blazing it up for decades before poorer countries came on the fossil-burning scene, and by the time industrialization took off in the rest of the world (which is still ongoing) we had already chucked enough carbon into the sky to start changing the Earth’s entire climate. Until the 1960s the top emitters were all rich industrialized nations (with the UK at the top of that list for roughly a century after kicking off the Industrial Revolution). In the mid 20^th century China and Russia joined the big boys of carbon pollution. Today China is the biggest emitter, but it’s important to remember that:

• They have well over a billion people, roughly one seventh of the world’s population
• They manufacture a large proportion of the world’s goods

If you put it in per person terms instead, the biggest emitters are all rich countries, with Australia and the USA topping the list.

See this 49 second visualisation of historical emissions around the world to get a sense of it. (and check out this epic interactive version on Carbon Brief).

The point is, over the last 200-odd years, the vast bulk of the carbon emissions have come from the rich countries – Europe, North America, Australia, Japan. Apart from Japan they happen to be Western and white.

Impacts of climate change

The impacts of climate change are also uneven across the globe, and across each country. The most severe climate impacts are expected across tropical regions – which happen to be in Africa, Asia and South America – as they are already hot and stormy. The more arid parts of Australia and USA will also be seriously affected by heatwaves, droughts, storms and wildfires. Low-lying and coastal areas will be worst hit by rising sea levels – there are small low-lying island states which are literally already disappearing under the sea. Most of the countries hit first and worst by climate change are poor, and all the poorest regions of the world are expected to have very severe impacts.

Map of the Day | Impact of global warming on crop yields | UN Climate Change report released http://t.co/Lxq42nrrsI pic.twitter.com/R8EPZ3taPw

— Dr Steve Millington (@DrSDMillington) March 31, 2014

It’s worth noting that even at the catastrophic 4 degrees of warming that sees most of the world turn into a desert or a floodplain, the UK remains “habitable”. That doesn’t mean we’d get off scott-free, it would still see floods, droughts, sea level rise, water shortages and food prices rocketing. (And those impacts would be mostly borne by the British poor – who else?) But it would be an oasis of liveability compared to the rest of the world.

Global map of climate change impacts – physical, biological & human http://t.co/RyicjZ4h4D #IPCC #AR5 pic.twitter.com/ZBsWNBfZw0

— EGU (@EuroGeosciences) March 31, 2014

It’s also worth noting that even 2 degrees of warming, which politicians have agreed as the line in the sand, would still be an absolute disaster for Africa. Yeah, looks like the West is screwing over Africa yet again. Shameful.

The point is, the countries that have done the absolute least to cause climate change, and benefited the least from industrialization, are expected to be some of the hardest hit. If that isn’t injustice, I don’t know what is. But wait, there’s more…

Capacity to adapt to the impacts

The final in the trio of shit which is climate injustice, is the capacity to adapt.

This is where the stark differences in the most affected countries comes into play. Australia and the USA will both be badly hit, and are actually already seeing impacts, but the difference between them and the others is that they are rich countries. Their governments have budgets for public spending, they have emergency services, they have a welfare state (kind of – I’m looking at you America), they have strong institutions and infrastructure. These tools of survival mean that while impacts may be dire, the government has some capacity to respond and invest in adaptation.

Compare this to, for a random example, Chad. In land-locked northern Africa with a sizeable desert region and a non-desert arid region that runs the risk of becoming desert, they’re one of the many countries that will be seriously impacted, like USA and Australia. The difference in that Chad is one of the poorest and most corrupt in the world. Most people are subsistence herders and farmers, earning their livelihood directly from the land – meaning they’re incredibly sensitive to environmental change. And they don’t have stored wealth or a welfare state to fall back on. Also, they’re biggest export is crude oil, so when that’s no longer a viable industry they’ll likely be even poorer.

The problem for countries like Chad, is that they’re struggling as it is, so literally cannot afford to invest in adaptations for climate change. They simply don’t have the cash, can’t borrow on favourable terms, often don’t even have the policy freedom, they lack the institutions and infrastructure they need, in some cases officials are corrupt and there’s all too often political/religious/ethnic violence to contend with. What a shit-storm. And that’s before you add in the increased risk of actual storms.

So, many of the countries most effected by climate change are not only the ones who’ve done the least to cause it and reap the benefits of carbon-heavy industry, they’re also the least capable of adapting to it.

Climate change deepens existing inequality

The second key reason why climate change is about human rights, is because due to the uneven nature of its cause, impacts and adaptability, it tends to deepen existing inequalities.

I have already alluded to the raced nature of climate change. Zoomed out, it looks awfully like a case of white people screwing over everyone else. Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s true. As discussed above, the (mostly) white rich nations have by far the most historical responsibility for causing climate change, have benefited the most from carbon-heavy industrialization, and yet it is the mostly black, Asian and Latino countries that will see the most catastrophic climate impacts, despite being poorer and less able to cope with them. Pretty damn racist, when you put it like that.

But there’s more: obviously many countries are now very multicultural, so race is relevant within countries, too. Case in point of course is the USA: due to the history of racism, black and Latino people are more likely to live in polluted areas and less likely to be protected by the state. Remember Hurricane Katrina. A much higher proportion of the people who were stranded, lost their home or lost their lives happened to be black. Also, sometimes crisis can push people into crime. It’s well known that American police and courts are massively harsher to black criminals than white.

Of course, you could say it’s not really a case of race, but class. That’s kind of true, although you can’t ignore the reality that people of colour tend to be poorer on average. (I wonder why that is? Hmm… *Cough* history of massive racism *cough*). The two are entwined. Anyway, arguably the clearest reason climate change is political is because it’s all about class and power. Like usual, the poor are most at risk simply because they are poor so don’t have the required capacity to adapt. They also have less political power so governments are prone to policymaking that serves the richer classes instead. Whenever a crisis hits, it’s usually the poor who bear the brunt of it.

Climate change can also deepen gender inequality. This isn’t too relevant in the West, but many poor and rural societies have a very gendered division of labour that sees women doing work that is hit by climate change first and worst. For example, women may be gathering water, growing vegetables and gathering firewood, while men of the community are travelling to do paid work in the city or working on an industrial cash-crop farm. In these cases women will have their work more badly hit. Depending on how much understanding of climate change there is in the community, they could potentially be blamed for their lower yields and be seen as less capable, leading to a loss of power and worse prejudice against them. Also existing issues like women having less access to land, less legal rights and social inequality could see single and widowed women finding it harder to cope with climate impacts.

Basically, without a huge concerted effort to ‘level the playing field’, climate impacts are likely to deepen existing inequalities.

Climate action has huge potential to enhance equality and human rights

Lastly, climate change is political because it doesn’t necessarily need to deepen inequalities; it has the potential to do the opposite. The movements for climate justice and environmental justice are about healing deep wounds of injustice and oppression via environmental action. Climate action can, if done right, be a powerful force for making a society more equal and advancing human rights. It can be a catalyst for positive social change.

Take my native UK as an example. A climate strategy could include bringing high-tech green industries to the North of England that has never recovered from the deindustrialization of the 1980s; it could see parks, urban farms and green spaces bought to inner city areas; it could see run-down coastal towns becoming hubs for off-shore wind and marine energy; it could see struggling farms reinvigorated with an increased demand for local food and extra income streams from ecotourism and renewable energy; it could see public transport improve and also become more affordable. Such schemes wouldn’t only lower carbon emissions, they’d also create millions of good jobs, spread wealth more equally across the country, improve public health, regenerate poor neighbourhoods and improve quality of life for everyone – especially those on lower incomes.

Detroit 'Agrihood' Turns Vacant Lots Into Edible #Farms via @seeker https://t.co/DQR3Xs2teE #urban #agriculture #sharingcities #ecocity

— Julian Zelazny (@BorealJulian) December 16, 2016

Paris Mayor @Anne_Hidalgo plans to restrict traffic, create more spaces for cyclists, pedestrians & clean transport: https://t.co/3UO2BRTDBV pic.twitter.com/DzdPeuyzPX

— C40 Cities (@c40cities) January 15, 2017

Also look at the global scale. Climate action has the potential to reduce the sickeningly-enormous gap in living standards, wealth and power between the rich and poor nations via transfers of money and tech. Such actions would not be charity. They would be a good start to paying off the huge debt of injustice discussed earlier. We’re already seeing a glimpse of this: there is an agreement for rich countries to send $100 billion a year in climate funding to poorer countries. Unfortunately this hasn’t been done yet, but it has been signed into the Paris Agreement as a key target. Concerted climate action has the potential to make the world a much fairer place. This is what the climate justice movement is all about.

Sooner or later, we will be moving to a post-carbon world. It could be one in which the rich huddle in their guarded air-conditioned mansions while starving environmental refugees clamour at the gates. Or it could be a brighter more beautiful world, one where we deal with the impacts of climate change with solidarity, cooperation and compassion. What that would look like is uncertain, there are so many possibilities. Personally I see a world of egalitarian high-density high-tech globally-connected eco-cities surrounded by newly planted forests.

So, climate change is about way more than carbon. It’s about who lives and dies, who survives and thrives, who has power and who is powerless. Change is coming whether we like it or not, but that change can be harnessed in dramatically different ways. And what determines what path we take, is politics.

Featured image: People being rescued after being stranded by Hurricane Katrina. (US Navy / Public Domain).

Cross-posted from The Climate Lemon

The post Why Climate Change Is About Human Rights, Politics & Justice appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this light, the editorial below illustrates some of the many and diverse ways in which a call for sharing is being expressed, whether it’s by campaigners, activists, progressive economists, academics or anyone else. To learn more about STWR’s campaign, please visit: www.sharing.org/global-call

In January, the case for sharing the world’s wealth was given major prominence at the annual gathering of the super-rich in Davos. Although the issue of inequality was noticeably pushed down the agenda at this year’s event itself, Oxfam again made newspaper headlines with its latest review of statistics on the growing gap between rich and poor – showing that 1% of people now own more wealth than the other 99% combined. Their new report titled “An economy for the 1%” revealed how the global inequality crisis has reached new extremes, with the wealth of the richest 62 people growing by 45% in the past five years. Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half has dropped by 38% in the same period.

Whether or not there was a previous in time in history when so few people controlled so much wealth, one thing is for sure: any so-called recovery from the global financial crisis in 2008 has been overwhelmingly captured by the “Davos Class”, and hardly shared by the world’s majority poor.
According to Oxfam’s report, inequality is the result of “an economic system that is rigged to work in the interests of the powerful”, leading the anti-poverty charity to call on governments to commit to a number of common sense policies that can “end the economy for the 1%” and start building “a human economy that benefits everyone”. Above all, they call on world leaders to agree a global approach to end the era of tax havens. “This global system of tax avoidance is sucking the life out of welfare states in the rich world,” the report states. “It also denies poor countries the resources they need to tackle poverty, put children in school and prevent their citizens dying from easily curable diseases. … Far from trickling down, income and wealth are instead being sucked upwards at an alarming rate.”

Yet civil society demands for tax justice – meaning greater transparency, democratic oversight and redistribution of wealth in national and global tax systems – were delivered another blow following recent negotiations on corporate tax dodging at the European Union. The Anti-Tax Avoidance Package (ATAP) agreed by the European Commission at the end of January was widely denounced by progressive analysts, despite some previously high expectations. Far from making it harder for companies to dodge tax via tax havens, the Tax Justice Network reported that the new measures will do nothing to enhance the transparency or accountability of the EU’s tax rules. It may even add “fuel to the fire” by, in some cases, weakening member states’ own rules, or by the creation of major loopholes.

The EU has still to adopt the minimal measure of country-by-country reporting, which could help ensure that multinational corporations pay their fair share of taxes where they do business. The latest Google tax row in the UK has also further underlined how the British government lobby’s on behalf of major profit-making interests, and has no real concern whatsoever of ending the abuses of blacklisted tax havens.

Who then can blame the residents of Crickhowell in the heart of Wales, where small local businesses have decided to use the same tax-dodging practices of the likes of Google, Amazon and Starbucks by moving their entire town offshore. They have now become the UK’s first Fair Tax Town, with a brilliant campaign to copy the tax dodging practices of the big corporate players. As they state on their video below: “Either we all pay tax, or none of us do. If it’s optional for the multinational corporations, then it’s only fair that it’s optional for us small high street guys. If the government doesn’t act now to close the loopholes, then we’re going to use them too!”

Looking ahead towards 2016, there are of course many other areas of policy and activism where a call for sharing is central to political demands, especially in new economic activities on a more local or national level. Chief among these is the initiatives and practices that form part of the sharing economy, which is also becoming a hot topic of intellectual debate among academics and progressive thinkers. As another recent academic paper questions: is the sharing economy “a pathway to sustainability or a nightmarish form of neoliberal capitalism?” The answer of course depends on what you mean by economic sharing, which from STWR’s perspective is an explicitly political question in relation to the power structures and policies that maintain an unjust status quo.

We’ll soon publish a valuable contribution to this debate from STWR’s founder Mohammed Mesbahi, who has a unique and visionary take on what the sharing economy means in its most spiritual, universal and futuristic meaning. Of the Top 10 sharing economy predictions for 2016, we can only agree with Neal Gorenflo, founder of Shareables, that mounting social crises are bound to “elevate sharing and the commons as a systemic solution”. Another important development to look out for in the field of online sharing, as pointed out by commons theorist David Bollier, is platform cooperativism – which can be described as where the cooperative movement meets with 21st century technologies, or “an online economy based in democracy and solidarity”.

A separate but connected field of scholarly debate concerns the degrowth or post-growth movements, which are fast increasing in popularity as we transition towards more democratic, just and balanced modes of economic organisation. In many ways, the degrowth discourse – despite the issues it raises in terms of its negative framing – is one of the most important economic debates for students and activists, and one that is entirely predicated on the need for a fairer and more sustainable sharing of global resources.

All of the core proposals that are generally discussed within the movement – from a citizens debt audit and basic income to green tax reforms and setting environmental limits – in some way reflect the “new common sense of sharing” that must govern social and political relations in the new millennium. It also embraces the question of living more simply, which has monumental significance in relation to resolving the huge imbalances in consumption patterns across the world. To quote from a recent article in the New Internationalist by the prominent degrowth scholar Giorgos Kallis:

“From a degrowth perspective, the issue is not that the Global North consumes more than it produces (or produces more than it consumes, à la Keynesians). The issue is that it produces and consumes more than what is necessary, at the expense of the Global and inner ‘South’, other beings and future generations. Producing and consuming less will reduce the damage done to others.

This is a question of social and environmental justice: a ‘shrink and redistribute’ from the global 1% (and to a lesser extent the 10%, which includes the middle classes of the EuroAmericas) to the rest. Such invocations of sober simplicity may resonate with dormant common senses about the ‘good life’ present in many cultures, East and West. It can recover the commonsensical critique of ‘excess’ from the grip of austerians, who hypocritically use it to justify their regressive policies.”

Along with the visions for fairness and equity in civil society campaigning on climate change, these debates on global degrowth encompass some of the foremost populist discussions on sharing the world’s resources. To be sure, the emphasis in these debates is on community-level alternatives or national policy proposals for governments, but there is nevertheless a vital focus on the question of a sustainable transition to a new international economic model. No doubt many of these big-picture issues will be discussed at the next International Conference on Degrowth, to be held in Budapest from 30th August to 2nd September this year.

There are many other ways of recognising and understanding the growing call for sharing, however implicitly it is expressed, especially in terms of worsening humanitarian crises across the world. What kind of sharing is there in a world where fears of terrorist attacks and mass refugee flows are driving many Western governments to roll back human rights protections? Where most governments (both North and South) are further cutting welfare spending, increasing fees and payments for healthcare systems, making the labour market more “flexible”, and further privatising public services and assets – all in a time of economic contraction and extreme wealth inequality? It seems that all the trend lines for social cohesion are going in the wrong direction, while the world is fast approaching an intensified period of economic turmoil, conflict and tension.

The case for sharing cannot anywhere be clearer than the ongoing refugee crisis, reportedly the largest humanitarian crisis since the second world war. The leading light of generosity shown by Germany and Sweden is now rapidly waning, and the prospect of a “fair and proportional share of refugees” among all European and other states is becoming a pipedream – let alone the viable prospect of legal entry and safe passage for the million-plus people fleeing war and persecution. Instead, EU governments are collectively spending billions on border controls, policing and razor wire fencing, while already scant international aid budgets are being diverted to domestic expenditures for dealing with asylum seekers.

It appears hopeless to rely upon our government leaders to “bear witness to the full arc of the refugee crisis”, when there is no official acknowledgement of how – in Professor Noam Chomsky’s words – this “human catastrophe” is “in substantial part the result of Western crimes”. Yet despite the increasing disunity and lack of empathy or compassion being demonstrated among nation states, there is a “solidarity explosion” from ordinary citizens who are working tirelessly to help the refugees. As reported on Common Dreams:

“Europe’s governments have largely failed the million refugees they’ve helped create – cue doors and wristbands of shame, theft, teargas and racist backlash – but its people often step up to declare “we are one, united humanity.” Greek islanders have earned a shot at a Nobel by saving thousands; online wise guys have shredded Denmark’s greed; Banksy has decried French violence; and Finnish clowns mocking racist patrols have taken to the streets to let “peace and love flow without borders.”

There is much more to say about the economic, political and even spiritual significance of the refugee crisis that STWR will discuss in the period ahead, including the inner or psychological changes that are needed before we can truly let “peace and love flow without borders”.

The above survey is, as ever, but a brief snapshot of recent trends and developments that relate to the growing call for sharing, and there are numerous other causes and issues that are worthy of mention – such as the growing campaigns against TTIP and other free trade agreements, and the budding Democracy in Europe movement (DiEM25). We will continue to highlight these issues in blogs, articles and future editorials. For regular sharing-related news and information you can also visit STWR’s Twitter and Facebook pages, as well as our Scoop.it! page on “what we’re reading”. If you haven’t done so already, please sign up to our newsletter on the homepage if you’d like to receive periodic updates in your email inbox about what we’re up to at STWR.

Photo credit: Metropolico.org, flickr creative commons

The post Letting “peace and love flow” for a world in crisis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The current landscape — shifting from ‘what’ to ‘how’ post SDGs

Clarity on where we go with the SDGs is also lacking. As SDG advisor Alex Evans says, now that the Open Working Group (OWG) on the post-2015 SDG agenda has reported, “minds are shifting to the ‘how’ as opposed to the ‘what’ — and what a new Global Partnership on development might look like. There is a risk that the soaring ambition of the OWG’s Goals will not be matched by adequate action on the delivery side.”

Many of the answers on how to solve the challenges we face now on climate and the SDGs will need to come from society at large, from social movements, communities and citizens. This calls for a p2p revolution, the end of top-down and the beginning of people-power. The institutions of today can, and indeed must be involved in this revolution. But power needs to disperse and so does the conversation.

So delivering on the SDGs will require a host of tough issues to be resolved and delivered on including those same climate finance, loan and developing world support details so missing from Paris.

Other key issues which need to be included in delivering on the SDGs include; strong action on tax avoidance and subsidies, stretching private sector ambition and support for SD, recognition of natural resources like land, water, and the atmosphere as a special category of property right, with dividends from their use accruing to society at large, a radical overhaul of the financial system, consideration of a universal basic income and some fundamental questioning of issues such as the growth paradigm, limits of decoupling and the need to shift from consumerism to a world of intrinsic values and wellbeing.

This starting list of key SDG delivery issues represent radical changes to the status quo.

This changes everything — why we need to think ‘system reboot not plug and play’

As the post COP party hangovers start to wear off people are recognising the momentous, perhaps paradigm shifting, scale of the challenge facing us as we attempt to deliver on the highest ambitions from Paris. As Richard Heinberg has said post COP, the required transition is “not plug and play, its civilisation reboot”.

And as Professor John Foran puts it, “Despite their beautiful words, our leaders remained trapped in a broken system and a crashing worldview.”

Coming out of Paris IPCC scientist Professor Kevin Anderson has concluded that we have to make: “Fundamental changes to the political and economic framing of contemporary society…let Paris be the catalyst for a new paradigm.”

The social justice narrative of ‘system change not climate change’ has now gone mainstream with voices such as UNFCCC Chief Christiana Figueres now calling for ‘a new system’ at COP21.

Delivering on these radical changes will require a sea-change in the process of change. Policy-wonkery and lobbying may play a role but above all what is needed is a new society-wide Big Conversation on paradigm shift and systems change.

The emerging new economy vision

Many of these issues are the staple diet of those involved in the wider ‘new/next economy’ world which is the focus of the Real Economy Lab I convene.

This new economy space is a vibrant hot-bed of innovation. As Professors Gus Speth and Professor Gar Alperovitz of the Next System Project put it, “just below the surface of media attention literally thousands of grass roots institution changing, wealth-democratizing efforts have been quietly developing.”

Hundreds of movements, alliances and organizations around the world are experimenting with a new-economy – new ways of living, of making, of commerce and of ownership — open-coops, social solidarity, Transition Towns, Commoning, Sharing, initiatives from groups like the Club of Rome, Nef’s Great Transition, the Next System Project, the New Economy Coalition, Neon, the Just Transition movement of labour, Movement Generation and Edge Funders and many others.

But between the current policy landscape and this vision of the future lies an unmapped territory on which we need to start to plot a roadmap to system change.

Where do we go from here?

Very different actors inhabit the worlds of the current policy landscape and this emerging vision of a new system. Some bridge both worlds — but too few. What is needed is a common vision and narrative and an inclusive conversation we are all part of.

I see this as a journey. For a journey to be worth taking you need a roadmap. Right now we have only the slimmest of clarity and agreement on even the shape of the landscape we need to cross let alone where we want to get to. Many of us are too busy looking at our feet, fearful of stumbling, few ever get even a glimpse of a possible horizon let alone the peaks we need to aim for.

Those working in the foothills need to be helped to see a vision of where we need to head. Those with their heads poking through the fog need support to keep their feet in reality and real-politic.

Above all what will be needed is to take everyone with us on this journey. What that will require a new form of conversation built on deliberative, participative dialogue, open-enquiry and inclusiveness and powered by digital democracy.

This dialogue will need to bridge the here and now with a desirable and achievable future which is truly fair and sustainable for people and planet.

Whats crucial is that the dialogue of the deaf between so many of us needs to end and we need to find a way to develop one big conversation about system change and transformation.

Perhaps our attitude to this journey needs to take a hint from another of Marvin Gaye’s songs What Going On.

Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
C’mon talk to me
So you can see
What’s going on

The post The World Post-COP — System Reboot, Not Plug-and-play — Part Two appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The SDGs and COP21 raise more questions than they answer — 2016 will need to shift the debate to wider system change.

The current policy landscape
“Woo mercy, mercy me, mercy father
Ah things ain’t what they used to be, no no
Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas
Fish full of mercury”

I was struck by the poignancy of Marvin Gaye’s 1971 poetry as I listened to broadway star and member of Hip Hop Hope for Divestment Antonique Smith singing Mercy, mercy me at an event at COP21 ten days ago.

The lyrics reminds us just how long it has taken us to wake up to the need for an end to the fossil-fool age and how, though 2015 was a good year in some ways, in others we have only just begun the real journey.

2015 saw at least three seismic shifts in the sustainable development world. For starters in September the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by governments, setting a new developmental pathway towards 2030.

Next, by November over $3.4 trillion of assets had committed to divest out of fossil-fuels and invest in a new economy, supported by a diversity of voices from Christiana Figueres, HRH Prince of Wales, Leonardo Di Caprio, Desmond Tutu, Mark Carney and the Hip Hop Hope Caucus. And finally at the eleventh hour COP21 culminated in a global agreement to set us on the pathway to a new low carbon economy.

Not a bad year then? But the devil is in the detail. For many people both the SDGs and COP21 raise just many more questions then they answer.

Opinion is widely split between those activists and scientists who see COP21 as a sham and others hailing it as the greatest victory for civilisation. George Monbiot sums up much of the consensus on the outcomes from the talks, saying: “By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.” Likewise the SDGs have been both lauded as a huge step forward and derided as fatally flawed.

My own feeling is that Paris was a success. Inside the negotiating halls I saw unusual alliances of policy makers, unions, progressive business leaders and NGOs finding common case in a way I have not seen before. The sight of the B Team’s Richard Branson holding a joint press conference with Kumi Naidoo was a welcome change from the old days of endless antagonism.

And outside around Paris I saw an ever stronger and more united civil society world emboldened to demand and bring about ever greater change. And the SDGs, though not perfect, at least represented a new, more consensus-based process of dialogue.

But wherever one stands on the details of the SDGs and the COP21 agreement, it seems to me that the biggest challenges we now face involve clarity on the ‘how’ behind the ‘what’. And, in my view is that clarity on those ‘hows’ will only come from a much wider and deeper examination of the need for paradigm-shifting system change.

Why the current landscape is not sufficient — shifting from ‘what’ to ‘how’

In principle COP21 has moved things on. At least the ‘what’ of the IPCC process, the shape of things to come, is now clearer. It rhetorically sets collective sights on 1.5 degrees, we can be sure that governments will be held to their INDCs by civil society, and $100bn of new money has in principle been committed to deliver on the agreement.

But many questions remain on the ‘how’ to achieve this. The COP outcome is still voluntary, its not negotiated with wider society, the INDCs arguably currently could lock us into at least 3degrees, the agreement’s mechanisms are weighted to ‘market solutions’ like trading rather than other solutions civil society favours and there is precious little clarity on where the $100bn will actually come from and in what form.

Perhaps that’s partly where the divestment movement comes in. As the divestment movement starts to shift its campaigning to focus on the ‘invest’ piece in 2016, it has already become clear even to the head of the coal industry lobby, that the fossil-fool economy is dying and that perhaps the world’s carbon traders are becoming the new slave traders.

But despite $trillions committing to some form of divestment, the DivestInvest movement has a long way to go to plug the investment gap and to integrate a wider equity and justice frame to its work.

The disjunction between the SDG narrative and Paris is stark, with COP21 failing to integrate key social issues into the text or sentiment of the talks despite these being central to the SDG vision. The framing of a Just Transition to a new economy was largely lost over the two weeks of haggling in Paris. Likewise fundamental pillars of sustainable development such as Climate Justice and equity were sidestepped as too uncomfortable.

Issues like consumerism are also largely absent from the SDG and climate agreements and Paris saw no confrontation of prickly questions such as what Professor Kevin Anderson says about the limits to economic growth relating to combating climate change.

Ignoring the views of civil society in this way is a mistake. As Naomi Klein said in her COP21 rally speech, the true leaders of system change are in the streets not in the negotiating halls.

These thorny issues won’t go away. The Divestment movement has been emboldened to go further and become more radical post Paris. And, as can be seen from the Too weak, too late opinion compendium, the failures of COP to include justice issues has strengthened the resolve and momentum of the climate justice movement.

This is part one of a two-part blog

Originally published in The Huffington Post

The post The World Post COP — System Reboot Not Plug-and-play -part one appeared first on P2P Foundation.