How do you degrow?

SUBHEAD: Facing large obstacles, huge consequences, humbling lessons and above all, mixed feelings.

By Constanza Hepp on 23 November 2018 for Degrowth.info -
(https://www.degrowth.info/en/2018/11/how-do-you-degrow/)


Image above: Handwashed cloth diapers hanging in the sun to dry. From original article.

We live nextdoor to my partner’s grandmother, Maria, who was born during the Second World War in Northern Italy. This means that she knows what hard times look like. Maria could not believe we would be using washable diapers for our baby boy.

With genuine surprise she asked me, “why?”, and then she was curious in which pot we were planning to boil the diapers. In her eyes, we could not possibly be choosing to use washable diapers – to her, an extinct garment reminiscent of poverty and manual labour – when there exists the comfort of the disposable.

Therefore, it must be that we cannot afford disposable diapers. Needless to say, for the first six months of our son’s life, every time Maria went to the supermarket, she bought us a packet of disposable diapers.

Everything about the lifestyle we are accustomed to, as rich westerners, has to change. If we let that sink in for a little bit that is when the real disruption comes in, giving way to a radical shift in perspective. So, where do we go from here?

As practitioners of the degrowth creed, the first challenge we face is precisely this, where do we start?
This is a very real question that needs to be answered when degrowthers decide to settle down. Since it’s possible to start anywhere, why not start with the closest and most immediate: ourselves. Our life.

Our lifestyle, our diet, our jobs. I want to bring forward how this radical decision – to choose the self as the first point of action towards a degrowth future – brings large obstacles, huge consequences, many humbling lessons and above all, so many mixed feelings.

How do we go about practicing degrowth?

So again, how do we go about practicing degrowth? Keeping in mind that the larger goal of degrowth is to socially organize through sufficiency, not to individually organize a lifestyle that soothes colonial guilt.

As I see it, there are two paths for practicing a degrowth lifestyle. One is to build an autonomous off-the-gird community that performs the visions for a degrowth society and the other is to coexist within existing ‘conventional’ communities, neighbourhoods and families.

I can only speak for the latter path, as it has been my experience for the last couple of years. Through coexisting with the status-quo, we are trying to change it from within. So far, the result is a living contradiction: we live in a small town, we manage a small homestead, and share with our community, but at the same time we are constantly breaking apart from them. The cultural obstacles are soul crushing.

Being surrounded by conspicuous consumption and judged by the same standards is overwhelming. It’s too easy to feel constrained when we are just trying to live in a way that is respectful of the natural world.

“I don’t understand this poverty vow you have taken for the sake of the environment”

Before my son was born, my mother said to me once, “I don’t understand this poverty vow you have taken for the sake of the environment”.

Only in that moment I realized what my choices look like to others. To me, it was both a sobering and a liberating choice, choosing to living with less in some aspects but really having so much more in other regards. However, to a set of very pragmatic eyes, voluntary simplicity looks a whole lot like poverty.

It’s hard to swallow just how much privilege is contained within that sentence, but it’s true. With her comment, my mother was echoing the common renunciations of Degrowth, which is something we (as a movement) absolutely must learn to deal with.

Part-time jobs mean more time for the unpaid reproductive labour in the home and the farm, but it also requires to make do with half the salary.

Second-hand clothes are an opportunity to be creative and original, but they also look like you cannot afford clothes and rely on hand-me-downs.

Fostering cooperation is a way of strengthening the bonds within a community, but it could also mean you are just needy and always seeking help. And so on.

Can we calmly coexist in communities when the waters are turbulent and bitter with contradiction? Not really, that’s my honest reply. There is no way around it, wherever both voluntary simplicity and frivolous materialism (and its resultant over-consumption) occur, a permanent contradiction exists that must be dealt with, never reconciled.

A couple of weeks ago, our neighbour’s daughter handed me a bag full of boy’s clothing and begged me not to be offended. Since the clothes were still good she thought maybe I could find use for them.

Twice she apologized for offending me in such a way. Offended! If anything, I am offended she thought I would be offended! I tried to show my gratitude and praise her gesture, but still she shied away.

In the performance of degrowth principles, the everyday things that add up to our existence become tense, there are constant contradictions and irreconcilabilities with the status-quo. And that’s a good thing. But a great deal of support is lacking, because there is definitely a kind of solitude in trying to be alright with a paradoxical existence.

There is a large degrowth community out there

The good news is, we are not alone! There is a large degrowth community out there; many odd-duck degrowthers living amidst capitalistic exploitation who can inspire and encourage each other. We are the revolutionaries that are living with less, the ones whose food choices imply a long explanation, and the ones choosing to wash diapers.

I’ve always accepted Maria’s weekly gift of disposable diapers. Although I’ve tried to explain several times, my point doesn’t really get across. She is doing us a favour and refusing her gift would damage our friendship. She is a generous woman who takes pride in her position of caretaker and the diapers are one of the many ways she helps us out.

I am thankful for that, but we don’t really understand each other. She has come to interpret that we are ‘artistic’, ‘eccentric’, and that we ‘experiment’ a lot. To her, we are not degrowthers, we are just poor.

This is an invitation: we want to read and share your stories.

How do you degrow? Share with us your experiences, your challenges, or even better – your successes. Write to us at blog@degrowth.de

Author:

Constanza Hepp studied Journalism in Santiago (Chile) and Human Ecology in Lund (Sweden). She is currently living in northern Italy, caring for her young family and establishing a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) project. She is interested in creating a bridge between academic activism and social practices with potential towards systemic change.

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Scientists outline paths to survival

SUBHEAD: World greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 — just 15 months from now.

By Eric Holthaus on 4 October 2018 for Grist -
(https://grist.org/article/with-the-world-on-the-line-scientists-outline-the-paths-to-survival/)


Image above: Efforts to rebuild concrete bulkhead on an eroding shore in the Marshall Islands. From original article.

This week, scientists and representatives from every country on Earth are gathering in South Korea to put the finishing touches on a report that, if followed, would change the course of history.

The report is a roadmap for possible ways to keep climate change to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels

Anything beyond that amount of warming, and the planet starts to really go haywire. So the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a U.N.-sponsored, Nobel Peace Prize-winning assemblage of scientists — wants to show how we can avoid that.

To be clear, hitting that goal would require a radical rethink in almost every aspect of society. But the report finds that not meeting the goal would upend life as we know it, too.

“This will be one of the most important meetings in the IPCC’s history,” said Hoesung Lee, the group’s chair, in his opening address on Monday.

The report will be released on October 8. From leaked drafts, we know the basics of scientists’ findings: World greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 — just 15 months from now.

The scientists also show the difference in impacts between 1.5 and 2 degrees would not be minor — it could be make-or-break for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, for example, which would flood every coastal city on Earth should it collapse.

“The decisions we make now about whether we let 1.5 or 2 degrees or more happen will change the world enormously,” said Heleen de Coninck, a Dutch climate scientist and one of the report’s lead authors, in an interview with the BBC. “The lives of people will never be the same again either way, but we can influence which future we end up with.”

The report has been in the works since the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Three years ago, during the climate talks, leaders of a few dozen small island nations and other highly vulnerable nations, like Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, demanded the bolder 1.5 degrees C temperature target be included in the first-ever global climate pact.

The group represents 1 billion people, and for some of the involved countries, like the Marshall Islands, their entire existence is at stake.

At the time, the lead negotiator from that tiny Pacific island nation used the word “genocide” to describe the inevitable process of forced abandonment of his country due to sea-level rise, should global temperature breach the 1.5 degree target.

Even taking into account the policies and pledges enacted globally since the Paris Agreement, the world is on course to warm between 2.6 to 3.2 degrees C by the end of the century, according to independent analysis by Climate Action Tracker.

According to a U.N. preview of the report, meeting the 1.5 goal would “require very fast changes in electricity production, transport, construction, agriculture and industry” worldwide, in a globally coordinated effort to bring about a zero-carbon economy as quickly as possible.

It would also very likely require eventually removing huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using technology that is not currently available at the scale that would be necessary. And there’s no time to waste: “The longer CO2 is emitted at today’s rate, the faster this decarbonization will need to be.”

The world has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees C, and the implications of that are increasingly obvious. In just the three years since the Paris Agreement was signed, we’ve seen thousand-year rainstorms by the dozens, the most destructive hurricane season in U.S. history, disastrous fires on almost every continent, and an unprecedented coral bleaching episode that affected 70 percent of the world’s reefs.

In this age of rapid warming, the IPCC report is inherently political — there are obvious winners and losers if the world fails to meet the 1.5-degree goal.

If the world’s governments are to take the implications of IPCC’s findings seriously, it would be nothing less than revolutionary — a radical restructuring of human society on our planet.

Right now, scientists are trying to find the precise words to describe an impending catastrophe and the utterly heroic efforts it would take to avert it.

“We’re talking about the kind of crisis that forces us to rethink everything we’ve known so far on how to build a secure future,” Greenpeace’s Kaisa Kosonen told AFP in response to a draft of the report. “We have to try to make the impossible possible.”

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Downshifter's way to RetroSuburbia

SUBHEAD: Review of book by David Holmgred on a resilient future for today's suburbanites.

By Bob Hopkins on 26 April 2018 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-04-26/my-review-of-david-holmgrens-retrosuburbia/)


Image above: Photo enactment of living in RetroSuburbia from the original article.

I am increasingly fascinated by two words I think are vital to our future, but which I see declining in the world around us, “what if?”

Navigating a way to a safe, nurturing and liveable future requires our coming together to create "what if?" spaces, places and events where we can come together with others to ask those questions.

The Transition movement, for me, has always been one of those spaces, the invitation for people to join up with others to look at their place through what if lenses.

David Holmgren’s new book is a fascinating, and intoxicating blast of "what if?" which ought to be put through every suburban letterbox in the world, although given its size I have doubts that it would fit.

I am a huge Holmgren fan. ‘Permaculture: principles and pathways beyond sustainability’ changed my life. The "what if?" at the heart of RetroSuburbia is “what if our suburbs were reimagined and repurposed to be sustainable, productive and vibrant?” Good question.

It takes his ‘permaculture flower’ at its basis, as the lens through which it looks at the possibilities of how the suburbs could be if catalysed with imagination and possibility.

Although written very much for the Australian context, there is much in its almost 600 pages to inspire suburban permaculturists anywhere.

There’s a treasury of Holmgren insight on topics from retrofitting your house, harvesting water and storing food, to setting up a food garden, managing with less than perfect urban soils, working with animals in the suburbs and maximising diversity.

You’ll find guidance on different models of living together, making decisions, creating a livelihood, reimagining your family finances, planning for disasters, ‘rearing self-reliant and resilient children’ and so much more.

While ‘Permaculture’ was a book that had so many brilliant ideas it struggled sometimes to imagine that you might need some time and space, or some nice photos even, to be able to digest them, ‘Retrosuburbia’ is a different beast.

Presented in full colour it is rich with photos, case studies from his own life and the lives of people he knows, every page drips with ideas, experience and advice with dirt beneath its nails.

A couple of years ago, David and I debated publicly his ‘Crash on Demand’ paper, where he declared that “an argument can be mounted for putting effort into precipitating that crash, the crash of the financial system”.

I disagreed, arguing that we needed to be very careful what we wish for. What I love about ‘Retrosuburbia’ is that the concerns that underpinned that paper are still present here, but beautifully couched in an utterly practical, utterly convincing vision for the suburbs.

It is the perfect riposte to anyone who says “permaculturists/Transitioners/greenies just want to take us back”.

 Although that’s always a lazy and rather pointless accusation, this book shows a way forward in which human culture, in all its aspects, can flourish. This is my vision for the future. It’s beautiful, it’s delicious, and it’s entirely possible.

You want ‘Take Back Control’? In these pages, you got it. This book will become the banner, the standard, around which people everywhere reimagine their future and then make it happen. And written on that banner? Two words. “What if?”.



Video above: Brief description of "RetroSuburbia" by David Holmgred. From (https://youtu.be/lm0eT1EMh4w).

IB Publisher's note: If you are interested in seeing a "Flip-Thru" of the pages of the book please visit the original review.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture in Hawaii 4/26/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Decolonizing with Permaculture 2/22/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Why Permaculture? 4/18/15
Ea O Ka Aina: The trouble with Permaculture 1/23/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Let's get real! 7/17/13
Ea O Ka Aina: What Permaculture Isn't and Is 6/10/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Relative Location 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Use of Space 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture Taking Off in Hawaii 5/29/11
Island Breath: TGI Column - The Garden of Eden 4/19/07
Island Breath: Farming vs Gardening 8/31/06
Island Breath: Permaculture in Hawaii 6/25/06

Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 1 - Growing Zones 3/22/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 2 - Multiple Functions 3/29/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 3 - Relative Location 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 4 - Problems into Solutions 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 5 - Design Diversity 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 6 - Use of Space 5/24/12

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Grow food for collapse

SUBHEAD: Getting ready for a sustainable lifestyle takes more practice than most people suspect.

By Juan Wilson on 6 August 2017 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2017/08/grow-food-for-collapse.html)


Image above: "Occupy the Farm -  Take Back the Tract". From a film "The Wisdom to Survive: Climate Change, Capitalism & Community" From (http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/films/reviews/view/27313).

A few decades ago back on the mainland in rural north-west New York state my wife Linda and I did a website named The Gobbler. See TheGobbler. It followed a printed version that we put out eight times a year and distributed to local businesses and to subscribers through the 1990s: 

The Gobbler was a seasonal & regional journal from
the Chautauqua Lake area of New York with a
Green Philosophy towards nature, spirit, art and politics.
The Gobbler was been part chronicle, part almanac,
part journal of fiction and even environmental newsletter.

The area we focused on was within what used to be called "courtin' distance" to our place in Panama, New York. "Courtin' distance" was how far a boy might travel to visit a girl and get back home to finish his chores before dinner. We thought that covered an area of about 50 square miles.  

A lot of that area around our place was either state conservation land, trailers on old lots,  and Amish or "English" farms. Some gravel covered roads near us had no power or telephone lines. You might see a horse and buggy there.

The point is that that is where we are headed back to - that is if we can survive the times we are in right now. Printed local publications, some telephone and maybe even telegraph communication. If we're lucky there will be some ham radios left too.

What there will not be are high resolution small portable screens with stereo sound and motion and touch detection that absorb hours of our days and know more about us than we do. We will more likely be using those Samsungs, iPhones and tablets for drink coasters and sushi plates.

Here in Hawaii, where there is close ground water (until the rain cycle fails,) all the added sunlight, humidity and CO2 which have created an environment that is causing the plants to grow like crazy.

Find a place and grow food now!
The moral of the story is to start growing as much food as you can immediately. Don't wait for the kids to be gone or retirement. Don't wait for the money to buy that homestead or farm.  Join a community garden or start one.

We are getting closer to that time when the shipping containers crossing the the Pacific (on the water or in the air) won't be coming cheaply and reliably. When that occurs we will really be on our own.

A worldwide reset is on the way. When completed there will be far fewer people and much less available energy for getting work done. We will all be on our way to a life like the indigenous Hawaiians or the faithful Amish.

We will all be on a path back to something like the 17th to 19th century - if we're lucky. And it is going to take quite a bit of practice to get along in that world.

Getting a headstart is not only fair, it is required.

Hone your skills. As Dmitry Orlov said on several occasions "Collapse now and avoid the rush!"

Below is a video of a talk given by Orlov about that subject (less than two weeks after "3/11" the Fukushima Daiichi triple meltdown).


Video above: "The Wisdom to Survive: Climate Change, Capitalism & Community". From (https://youtu.be/7QLIOuRS1n4).


Video above: "The Collapse -Dmitry Orlov". From (https://youtu.be/Ecfxl1wZDpE).

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Find and Limit Ourselves 2/17/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Capitalism is a form of Cancer 10/7/16
Ea O Ka Aina: How about a "Grown" economy? 10/11/16
Ea O Ka Aina: From Here on Down 8/4/15
Ea O Ka Aina : Oases on a future Eaarth 6/28/15
Ea O Ka Aina: The Last Straw 12/17/14 
Ea O Ka Aina: Worse than you think 5/21/14
Ea O Ka Aina:Things won't get back to normal 2/10/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The New Game 11/10/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Food, Water, Energy & Shelter 1/31/13
Ea O Ka AIna: Embrace the Change 7/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Trick or Treat! 10/31/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Last Trip to the Moon 5/10/11
Ea O Ka Aina: The Five Year Plan 3/4/10
Ea O Ka Aina: All Aboard! 12/9/09



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G20 told CO2 talk is cheap

SUBHEAD: Report reveals that financing by wealthiest governments belies commitments to Paris climate goals.

By Andrea Germanos on 5 July 2017 for Common Dreams -
(https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/07/05/talk-cheap-g20-told-end-public-subsidy-all-dirty-fuels-2020)


Image above: From (https://www.interplansystems.com/).

Extreme weather trends continue. CO2 emissions remain above the safe threshold. And President Donald Trump's decision to ditch the Paris climate pact underscores the need for other world leaders to live up to their promises to uphold the accord.

But a new report by a group of environmental advocacy organizations presents a sobering finding: G20 governments are bankrolling fossil fuel projects big time. In fact, they're pouring four times more public finance into fossil fuels than they are into clean energy projects.

Released Wednesday by Oil Change International, Friends of the Earth U.S., the Sierra Club, and WWF European Policy Office, Talk Is Cheap: How G20 Governments Are Financing Climate Disaster shows that between 2013 and 2015, public fossil fuel financing from these countries added up to over $71.8 billion annually.

The bulk of that amount—84 percent—funded oil and gas projects. Public financing for clean energy, meanwhile, averaged just $18.7 billion annually during that time frame.

"Our research shows that the G20 still hasn't put its money where its mouth is when it comes to the clean energy transition.

If other G20 governments are serious about standing up to Trump's climate denial and meeting their commitments under the Paris Agreement, they need to stop propping up the outdated fossil fuel industry with public money," said Alex Doukas senior campaigner at Oil Change International and report co-author.

This public finance comes by way of insurance, loans, and grants, and is provided by national and multilateral development banks, export credit agencies, and majority state-owned domestic banks, the report explains.

"Particularly egregious," the report says, is that G20 public finance for exploration for new reserves of fossil fuels averaged $13.5 billion a year. But "most already-discovered reserves must remain unburned to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."

Japan had the dubious honor of the biggest fossil fuel financer, averaging $16.5 billion annually for 2013-2015. For comparison, its support for clean energy finance for that time frame averaged $2.7 billion a year.

The United States, for its part, averaged $6 billion annually in public finance of fossil fuel projects, compared to $1.3 billion for clean energy projects.

G20 governments' public financing of fossil fuel projects presents a three-pronged dagger to climate change efforts, the groups argue. From the report:

Lowering the cost of carbon emissions, thus undermining carbon pricing: To the extent that it functions as a subsidy to fossil fuel production, public finance for fossil fuels provides an incentive to emit carbon, encouraging higher levels of fossil fuel production and consumption. In this way, government spending to support fossil fuel production acts as a negative carbon price, pulling in the opposite direction of climate policy and sending confusing market signals.

Driving high carbon lock-in: High carbon lock-in—aided by public finance for fossil fuels—makes the transition to clean energy more difficult and costly.

Making uneconomical dirty energy economical: Public finance subsidizes unburnable carbon, enabling production of 'zombie energy'—that is, energy that would otherwise be uneconomical to produce.

Among the recommendations for G20 leaders the report lays out are setting a 2020 deadline for ending the public financing of all fossil fuel projects, including new exploration; expanding support for "truly clean technologies"; and providing support for development countries to make a swift clean energy swift "in line with developed countries' historical responsibility."

"The best climate science points to an urgent need to transition to clean energy, but public finance from G20 governments drags us in the opposite direction. We must stop funding fossils and shift these subsidies," Doukas said.

The report is released just days before the G20's two-day summit in Hamburg, Germany, where climate change is expected to be a major agenda item.

According to Kate DeAngelis, international policy analyst at Friends of the Earth and report co-author, "G20 countries should take this moment in Germany to start in earnest the massive financial shift from dirty fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy for the entire world."


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Time for new Climate Paradigm

SUBHEAD: We need citizens with individual and collective conscious self-limitation beyond domination and hierarchy.

By Yavor Tarinsky on 1 June 2017 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-06-01/climate-change-and-the-need-for-a-new-paradigm/)


Image above: Cistercian monks at work in wheat field. A detail from the Life of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, illustrated by Jörg Breu the Elder in 1500AD. From (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J%C3%B6rg_Breu_d._%C3%84._002.jpg#mw-jump-to-license).

We live in times where there seems to be a crisis in just about everything – from the so called financial sector, through the contemporary mass migratory processes, to the severe corrosion of the social fabric.

The ruling elites, devoted to the dominant doctrine of economism, advocate for the priority that should be given to the economy, many activists struggle for the humane treatment of migrants, while growing numbers of new age mysticists call for escapism and individual salvation.

One crisis in particular, however, is being unevenly neglected, in comparison with the above mentioned crises – the climate one. There is reason why this serious problem is being constantly postponed by those in seats of power.

Unlike the financial crisis, which offers a wide playground for different economic “shamans” to put forward their theories that do not leave the imaginary of economism, the climate change and the ongoing environmental degradation questions the contemporary dogmas of constant growth and domination, demanding solutions beyond them.

Surely there are international summits and agreements for tackling this problem, but their outcomes are nonbinding and often neglected in the expense of economic “prosperity”.

The climate crisis, as growing number of researches are revealing, will have us pay a dear cost for the wasteful and destructive lifestyle that capitalism promotes. It will even deepen the rest of the ongoing crises.

It is not yet completely clear what exact effects and processes will be triggered by the climate change, but it is increasingly clear that the results will not be favorable to us, unless we decide to change the contemporary dominant paradigm with a new one that will allow us to develop our potential inside the planetary limits.

Climate change and global poverty
Many reports[2] suggest that the ongoing climate change will lead to increasing levels of poverty.

Agriculture is of enormous importance for the countries of the south. It also is the main source of subsistence and sustainability for countless indigenous communities facing hostile private and state enclosure of commons. But it is also among the most sensitive to climate change due to its dependence on fragile weather conditions.

The rapid changes in these conditions will lead to food shortages. Due to climate change there already is a reduction of wheat and maize yields in tropical and temperate regions along with some rice and soybean crops.

Such shortages will lead to rising food prices that will hit the poorest the hardest, while making traditional and sustainable ways of life that do not depend on imports practically impossible. Reports[3} suggest that by the year of 2030 close to 100 million people will fall under the poverty line as a result of climate change.

Climate Refugees
The changes of the planetary climate will influence also the global migratory processes[4]. With the increasing temperatures and the rising sea levels (because of the melting Antarctic ice) many people (climate refugees) will be forced to leave their homes due to flooding or droughts.

Already there are examples of such cases. The Bangladesh’s Bhola Island in 1995 has been partially covered by the rising sea levels, leaving a half-million of its inhabitants homeless.

In another case the population of the island of Tuvalu has made an agreement with New Zealand so as the latter to accept its 11,600 citizens in case the country is submerged under water. Many coastal cities around the world are also vulnerable to sea level rise: Manhattan, New York; London, England; Shanghai, China; Hamburg, Germany; Bangkok, Thailand; Jakarta, Indonesia; Mumbai, India; Manila, Philippines; and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Droughts and desert expansion are also being boosted by climate change. Countries in North Africa like Libya, Tunisia and Morocco each lose more than 1,000 square kilometers of productive land annually due to desertification.

The Gobi Desert in Asia is expanding with more than 3,600 square kilometers per year, forcing farmers and peasants to migrate to the overpopulated Chinese urban areas.

Unlike the refugees fleeing warzones, the climate (environmental) ones are not protected by international laws[5]. Thus the risks they face when migrating to foreign places are immensely greater. With the expected intensification of the climate change, we will see new phenomena and humanitarian crises because of the specificity of this new type of migratory waves.

Choosing a different paradigm
Climate change will deepen ongoing current crises. It has the potential to radically alter the face of the planet, making our future on it quite uncertain. In a sense it is a holistic crisis. Thus the climate crisis has an existential character that places us on a crossroad – to continue down the road we are currently on, or choose a different path.

That’s why conventional approaches like responsible parliamentarism and green capitalism seems out of place and offer no real solution to climate change.

It is the very logic of domination that is at the root of the contemporary dogma of endless economic growth, which is currently cutting the branch we are sitting on.

Murray Bookchin has profoundly demonstrated throughout his works how the domination of man over man strengthens the domination of man over nature and vice versa. To escape this vicious cycle, society has to abolish domination in all its forms, so crises like the climate one can be avoided.

This requires, however, moving beyond narrow environmentalism, limited to parliamentary lobbyism and green consumerism, because it focuses on specific by-products, rather than targeting the root of the problem that is domination. Instead a new holistic paradigm is needed, based on different logic and values, that can offer tangible imaginary significations to replace the dominant ones of today.

One such paradigm is the project of social and individual autonomy. It counters the contemporary organizational forms of hierarchy and domination with that of direct democracy. In this paradigm it is the citizens that democratically determine the laws and institutions under which they will live, rather than tiny elites.

Thus it directly challenges the domination of man over man, proposing instead the collective self-instituting of all men as equal citizens.

The deliberative nature of the project of autonomy also rejects the logic of endless economic growth. Contemporary capitalist societies do not recognize any limitations. There is no question of whether something should be done or created but only when and how.

The project of autonomy on the other hand entails democratic self-limitation, which overpasses narrow techno-science and places forward the political choice. It is about the citizenry democratically deciding what direction it would like its society to take. To decide to commit collective suicide or to find comfortable place within the given planetary boundaries.

Self-limitation does not mean imposition of austerity or retreat to primitivism but recognizing and determining certain limits, environmental as well as political. Thus the feeling of superiority over nature, promoted by the doctrine of endless economic growth, is being replaced by symbiotic stewardship, exercised collectively by all of society.

Conclusion
The unfolding climate crisis is a holistic crisis and as such it requires a holistic answer. It cannot be resolved by economic “experts”, professional environmentalists or political representatives. What the successful tackling of a crisis with such magnitude requires is radical paradigm change.

The emergence of citizens capable of individual and collective conscious self-limitation beyond domination and hierarchy is what such an alternative approach should entail.

This however can only be done by common people through opening spaces of participation and emancipation that can embed responsibility and autonomy in every sphere of human life.

Endnotes
[1] Dimitrios Roussopoulos in Political Ecology: Beyond Environmentalism (2015), New Compass Press, pp 117/131
[2] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/un-report-climate-change-will-deepen-poverty-hunger/
[3] https://www.google.gr/amp/relay.nationalgeographic.com/proxy/distribution/public/amp/2015/12/151201-datapoints-climate-change-poverty-agriculture
[4] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/climate-refugee/
[5] http://climate.org/climate-refugees-exposing-the-protection-gap-in-international-law/

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