We Can't Do It Ourselves

SUBHEAD: Mostly we're locked into unsustainability by being connected to the grid, driving cars and eating meat.

By Kris DeDecker on 5 July 2018 for Low Tech Magazine -
(http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/07/we-cant-do-it-ourselves.html)


Image above: Evening rush hour interstate traffic jam in Los Angeles. From (https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/27/americas/los-angeles-traffic/index.html).

How to live a more sustainable life? This question generates a lot of debate that is focused on what individuals can do in order to address problems like climate change.

For example, people are encouraged to shop locally, to buy organic food, to install home insulation, or to cycle more often.

But how effective is individual action when it is systemic social change that is needed? Individuals do make choices, but these are facilitated and constrained by the society in which they live.

Therefore, it may be more useful to question the system that requires many of us to travel and consume energy as we do.

Climate Change Policies

Policies to address climate change and other environmental problems are threefold: decarbonisation policies (encouraging renewable energy sources, electric cars, heat pumps), energy efficiency policies (decreasing energy input/output ratio of appliances, vehicles, buildings), and behavioural change policies (encouraging people to consume and behave more sustainably, for instance by adopting the technologies promoted by the two other policies).

The first two strategies aim to make existing patterns of consumption less resource-intensive through technical innovation alone. These policies ignore related processes of social change, which perhaps explains why they have not led to a significant decrease in energy demand or CO2-emissions.

Advances in energy efficiency have not resulted in lower energy demand, because they don’t address new and more resource-intensive consumption patterns that often emerge from more energy efficient technologies. [1] [2]

Likewise, renewable energy sources have not led to a decarbonisation of the energy infrastructure, because (total and per capita) energy demand is increasing faster than renewable energy sources are added. [3]

Consequently, the only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to focus more on social change. Energy efficiency and decarbonisation policies need to be combined with “social innovation” if we want energy use and carbon emissions to go down.

This is where behavioural change policies come in. The third pillar of climate change policy tries to steer consumer choices and behaviours in a more sustainable direction.

Behavioural Change Policies

Instruments and policy packages designed to achieve behaviour change vary greatly, but most can be categorised either as “carrots, sticks, or sermons”. [4]

They can be economic incentives (such as grants for “green” products, energy taxes, soft loans), standards and regulations (such as building codes or vehicle emission standards), or the provisioning of information (more detailed energy bills, smart meters, awareness campaigns).

All these policy instruments are focused on what are thought to be the determinants of individual behaviours. [5-9] They assume that either individuals take rational decisions based on product price and information (the homo economicus model), or that behaviours are the outcomes of beliefs, attitudes and values (various value-belief models).

According to these dominant social theories, people engage in pro-environmental behaviour for self-interested reasons (because it is enjoyable or saves money), or for normative reasons (because they think it’s the right thing to do).

However, many pro-environmental actions involve a conflict between self-interested and normative reasons. Pro-environmental behaviour is often considered to be less profitable, less pleasurable, and/or more time-consuming.

Consequently, people need to make an effort to benefit the environment, and this is why, according to behavioural change researchers, pro-environmental values and attitudes are not necessarily matched by individuals’ behaviours – a phenomenon they call the “value-action gap”.

To close this gap, two strategies are proposed.

The first is to make normative goals more compatible with self-interested goals, either by decreasing the costs of pro-environmental actions, or by increasing the costs of harmful actions.

The second strategy is to strengthen normative goals, in the hope that people will engage in pro-environmental behaviour even if it is more expensive or effortful. This is usually pursued through awareness campaigns.

Individual Choice

However, the results of behavioural change policies have been disappointing so far. Two decades of climate-change related awareness campaigns have not decreased energy demand and carbon emissions in a significant way. The reason for this limited success is that existing attempts to change behaviour rest on a very narrow view of the social world. [10]

Behavioural change policies are based on the widespread agreement that what people do is in essence a matter of individual choice. [4] [11] [12] For example, whether people pick one mode of travel or another, is positioned as a matter of personal preference. [4] It follows that agency (the power to change) and responsibility for energy demand, consumption, and climate change are ultimately thought to lie within individual persons.

It is this concept of choice that lies behind strategies of intervention (persuasion, pricing, advice). Given better information or more appropriate incentives, “badly behaving” individuals are expected to change their minds and choose to adopt pro-environmental behaviours. [11]

Obviously, individuals do make choices about what they do and some of these are based on values and attitudes. For example, some people don’t eat meat, while others don’t drive cars, and still others live entirely off-the-grid.

However, the fact that most people do eat meat, do drive cars, and are connected to the electric grid is not simply an isolated matter of choice. Individuals do not exist in a vacuum. What people do is also conditioned, facilitated and constrained by societal norms, political institutions, public policies, infrastructures, technologies, markets and culture. [10] [13] [14]

The Limits of Individual Choice

As individuals, we may have degrees of choice, but our autonomy is always limited. [13] [14]

For example, we can buy a more energy efficient car, but we can’t provide our own cycling infrastructure, or make car drivers respect cyclists.

The Dutch and the Danish cycle a lot more than people in other industrialised nations, but that’s not because they are more environmentally conscious.

Rather, they cycle in part because there’s an excellent infrastructure of dedicated cycle lanes and parking spaces, because it is socially acceptable to be seen on a bike, even in office wear, and because car drivers have the skills and culture to deal with cyclists.

For example, Dutch drivers are taught that when they get out of the car, they should reach for the door handle using their right hand – forcing them to turn around so that they can see if there is a cyclist coming from behind.

Furthermore, in case of an accident between a car driver and a cyclist, the car driver is always considered responsible, even if the cyclist made a mistake.

Obviously, an individual in the UK or the US can decide to go cycling without this supporting infrastructure, culture, and legal framework, but it is less likely that large numbers of people will follow their example.

People in industrialised countries are often locked into unsustainable lifestyles, whether they like it or not. Without a smartphone and always-on internet, for example, it is becoming difficult to take part in modern society, as more and more daily chores depend on these technologies.

Once the connected smartphone is established as a ‘necessity’, an individual can still choose to buy an energy efficient device, but he or she can’t do anything about the fact that it will probably stop working after three years, and that it cannot be repaired.

Neither do have individuals the power to change the ever increasing bit rates on the internet, which systematically add to the energy use in data centers and network infrastructure because content providers keep “innovating”. [15]

An individual can try to consume as little as possible, but he or she shouldn’t expect too much help because the dominant economic system requires growth in order to survive.

Blaming Each Other

In sum, individuals can make pro-environmental choices based on attitudes and values, and they may inspire others to do the same, but there are so many other things involved that focusing on changing individual “behaviour” seems to miss the point. [4]

Trying to persuade people to live sustainably through individual behaviour change programmes will not address the larger and more significant structures and ideas that facilitate and limit their options.

In fact, by placing responsibility – and guilt – squarely on the individuals, attention is deflected away from the many institutions involved in structuring possible courses of action, and in making some very much more likely than others. [11]

The discourse of sustainable “behaviour” holds consumers collectively responsible for political and economic decisions, rather than politicians and economic actors themselves.

This makes pro-environmental “behaviour” policies rather divisive – it is the other individuals (for example meat eaters or car drivers) who are at fault for failing to consume or behave in line with particular values, rather than politicians, institutions and providers which enable unsustainable food and transport systems to develop and thrive.

As this example makes clear, individual behaviour change is not just a theoretical position, it is also a political position. Focusing on individual responsibility is in line with neoliberalism and often serves to suppress a systemic critique of political, economic and tech

Beyond Individual Behaviour

If significant societal transformations are required, it makes more sense to decenter individuals from the analysis and look at the whole picture.

Other approaches in social theory suggest that rather than being the expression of an individual’s values and attitudes, individual behaviour is in fact the observable expression of the social world, including socially shared tastes and meanings, knowledge and skills, and technology, infrastructure and institutions.

As such, behaviour is just the “tip of the iceberg”, and the effects of intervening in behaviour are limited accordingly.

A much better target for sustainability is the socially embedded underpinning of behaviour – the larger part of the iceberg that is under water. [13]

This might entail focusing not on individuals and choices but on the social organisation of everyday practices such as cooking, washing, shopping, or playing sports. How people perform these practices depends not only on individual choice, but also on the material, social and cultural context. [10] [13]

If social practices are taken to be the core units of analysis, rather than the individuals who perform them, it becomes possible to analyse and steer social change in a much more meaningful way. [10] [13]

By shifting the focus away from individual choice, it becomes clear that individual behaviour change policies only represent incremental, minimal or marginal shifts at the level of a practice. At the same time, it reveals the extent to which state and other actors configure daily life.

For example, the idea that a car equals personal freedom is a recurrent theme in car advertisements, which are much more numerous than campaigns to promote cycling.

And because different modes of transport compete for the same roadspace, it is governments and local authorities that decide which forms get priority depending on the infrastructures they build.

When the focus is on practices, the so-called “value-action gap” can no longer be interpreted as evidence of individual ethical shortcomings or individual inertia. Rather, the gap between people’s attitudes and their “behaviour” is due to systemic issues: individuals live in a society that makes many pro-environmental arrangements rather unlikely.

The New Normal

In conclusion, although individual behavioural change policies purport to address social and not just technological change, they do so in a very limited way.

As a result, they have exactly the same shortcomings as the other strategies, which are focused on efficiency and innovation. [2] Like energy efficiency and decarbonisation policies, behaviour change policies don’t challenge unsustainable social conventions or infrastructures.

They don’t consider wider-ranging system level changes which would radically transform the way we live – and that could potentially achieve much more significant reductions in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, recycling garbage does not question the production of waste in the first place, and even legitimizes it. By diverting attention away from systemic issues that drive energy demand, behavioural change policies frequently reinforce the status quo. [11-13]

In contrast to policies aimed at individuals, policies that frame sustainability as a systemic, institutional challenge can bring about the many forms of innovation that are needed to address problems like climate change.

Relevant societal innovation is that in which contemporary rules of the game are eroded, in which the status quo is called into question, and in which more sustainable practices take hold across all domains of daily life. [11]

Social change is about transforming what counts as “normal” – as in smoke-free pubs or wearing seat belts. We only need to look back a few decades to see that practices are constantly and often radically changing. A systemic approach to sustainability encourages us to imagine what the “new normal” of everyday sustainability might look like. [13]

A sustainability policy that focuses on systemic issues reframes the question from “how do we change individuals’ behaviours so that they are more sustainable?” to “how do we change the way society works?”. This leads to very different kinds of interventions.

Addressing the sociotechnical underpinnings of “behaviour” involves attempting to create new infrastructures and institutions that facilitate sustainable lifestyles, attempting to shift cultural conventions that underpin different activities, and attempting to encourage new competences that are required to perform new ways of doing things. As a result of these changes, what we think of as individual “behaviours” will also change.

• This article was written for the UK's Demand Centre. Check out their movie series about the making and evolution of energy demand. 

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References:

[1] Shove, Elizabeth. "What is wrong with energy efficiency?." Building Research & Information (2017): 1-11.

[2] Labanca, Nicola, and Paolo Bertoldi. "Beyond energy efficiency and individual behaviours: policy insights from social practice theories." Energy Policy 115 (2018): 494-502.

[3] De Decker, Kris. “How (not) to resolve the energy crisis.” Low-tech Magazine, 2009

[4] Shove, Elizabeth, Mika Pantzar, and Matt Watson. The dynamics of social practice: Everyday life and how it changes. Sage, 2012.

[5] Martiskainen, Mari. "Affecting consumer behaviour on energy demand." (2007).

[6] Steg, Linda, et al. "An integrated framework for encouraging pro-environmental behaviour: The role of values, situational factors and goals." Journal of Environmental Psychology 38 (2014): 104-115.

[7] Evans, Laurel, et al. "Self-interest and pro-environmental behaviour." Nature Climate Change 3.2 (2013): 122.

[8] Turaga, Rama Mohana R., Richard B. Howarth, and Mark E. Borsuk. "Pro‐environmental behavior." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1185.1 (2010): 211-224.

[9] Kollmuss, Anja, and Julian Agyeman. "Mind the gap: why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behavior?." Environmental education research 8.3 (2002): 239-260.

[10] Hargreaves, Tom. "Practice-ing behaviour change: Applying social practice theory to pro-environmental behaviour change." Journal of consumer culture 11.1 (2011): 79-99.

[11] Shove, Elizabeth. "Beyond the ABC: climate change policy and theories of social change." Environment and planning A 42.6 (2010): 1273-1285.

[12] Southerton, Dale, Andrew McMeekin, and David Evans. International review of behaviour change initiatives: Climate change behaviours research programme. Scottish Government Social Research, 2011.

[13] Spurling, Nicola Jane, et al. "Interventions in practice: Reframing policy approaches to consumer behaviour." (2013).

[14] Mattioli, Giulio. "Transport needs in a climate-constrained world. A novel framework to reconcile social and environmental sustainability in transport." Energy Research & Social Science 18 (2016): 118-128.

[15] De Decker, Kris. "Why we need a speed limit for the Internet." Low Tech Magazine. (2015).
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Review of 'Dangerous Years'

SUBHEAD: David W. Orr he demolishes the lies of climate crisis denial, and a  minimalist response to this emergency.

By Gene Marshall on 28 July 2017 in Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-07-28/dangerous-years-a-conversation-with-david-orr/)


Image above: Apocalyptic vision of buildings sinking into landscape. From original article.

[Resilience Editor's note: This piece was originally published in the Realistic Living newsletter. More information about the work of Realistic Living can be found on their website.

I started to write a brief review of David W. Orr’s 2016 book Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward. I found, however, that a longer “essay” was what I felt called to write.

Orr’s book is the best thing I have read on the overall social-change challenges of this century. I am ranking this book, along with the Bible, as something to read over and over for the rest of my life. I recommend that you buy a hard copy, and wear it out over the next decade.

The social content of this book is broad, deep, and on target, and Orr’s prose reads like poetry. His choice of words is beautiful, gripping, and often funny. I am going to quote some examples for you to taste.

First of all, he demolishes the lies of climate crisis denial, as well as the lies of minimalist response to this emergency:

Nearly everything on Earth behaves or works differently at higher temperatures. Ecologies collapse, forests burn, metals expand, concrete runways buckle, rivers dry up, cooling towers fail, and people curse, kill, and terrorize more easily. Climate deniers . . . are doomed to roughly the same status as, say, members of the Flat Earth Society. page 25

The solutions Orr develops begin with a shift in the human will or heart, then move on to a shift in the human mind, and end with real-world, down-and-dirty, power-politics, as well as the year-in-and-year-out local tasks of reconstruction. Here is a quote about the educational care of our social minds:

We would be embarrassed to graduate students who could neither read nor count.  We should be mortified, then, to graduate students who are ecologically illiterate—clueless about the basics of ecology, energetics, systems dynamics—the bedrock conditions for civilization and human life.  page 110

Orr prepares our awakening “hearts,” “wills,” and “minds” for our real-world politics with sentences like these:

And there will be no Deus ex machina, or cavalry, or invisible hand, or miracle technological breakthrough that will rescue us in the nick of time.  It will be up to us to change the odds and the outcomes on our own.  page 144

The next passage I will be reading aloud in my speeches. It is a gem that notices the spirit depth of our call to action:

If humanity is to have a better future it will be a more “empathic civilization,” one better balanced between our most competitive, hard-driving selves and our most harmonious, altruistic traits; one that embraces the yin-yang poles of behavior.  It must be a change sufficiently global to bridge the chasms of ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, and politics and deep enough to shift perceptions, behaviors, and values. The change must enable people to grow from a “having” orientation to a “being” orientation to the world.  It must deepen our appreciation, affiliation, and competence with the natural world, albeit a natural world undergoing accelerating changes.

I do not think, however, that we can simply will ourselves to that empathic new world.  The transition will result from social movements, activism, education, and political changes.  But there is always an X-factor, an inexplicable process of metanoia, a word meaning “penitence; a reorientation of one’s way of life; spiritual conversion.”  It is a change of inner sight.  “I once was blind, but now I see” as the former slave trader John Newton wrote in the hymn “Amazing Grace.”  Metanoia is liberation from bondage—physical, mental, emotional—a total change of perspective. pages 147-8

I view the core of the revolution for a next Christianity to be the creation of metanoia circles, small groupings of people in which our deepest humanness can be nurtured on a regular basis and our compassion and persistence prepared for our wide-world responsibilities.

Orr pictures the role of politics as a “long revolution.” We now need more than small teams and edge movements: we need large structures of action that year-in-and-year-out for decades do all the little and big things that need to be done for this huge transition.

Orr works through our core challenges with thorough analysis and inspiring description of practical options. He also continues to indicate the spirit courage and persistence it is going to take. He deals with sustainable democracy, ecological design, hotter cities, systemic thinking, a new agriculture, and much more.

Orr concludes his book with a description of the Oberlin Project—a multi-committee, local project of community-renewal organized by Orr and others, in Orr’s Oberlin, Ohio home town. He pictures the kind of things that the co-pastors of future Christian Resurgence Circles might envision for their quality action in their local parishes of responsibility. Here is a quote taken from that final chapter:

We need people who make charity and civility the norm.  We need more parks, farmers’ markets, bike trails, baseball teams, book groups, poetry readings, good coffee, conviviality, practical competence, and communities where the word “neighbor” is a verb, not a noun.  We need people who know and love this place and see it whole and see it for what it can be. page 227

Orr is also clear that we need people who lead the global level responses to the climate crisis, economic equity, democratization, campaign financing, racism, sexism, and more.

• Gene Marshall has a long history of participation in Christian renewal and interreligious dialogue. In 1952 he made a decision to leave a mathematics career and attend seminary at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas. In 1962 he joined a religious order of families, the Order Ecumenical, and became a teacher and lecturer of Spirit topics.
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Humans can change rapidly

SUBHEAD: Study indicates we are better at making quick changes than is generally thought. Let's hope so.

By Alex Kirby on 3 May 2017 for Truth Dig -
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/humans_are_better_at_rapid_change_than_we_think_20170503)


Image above: Mostly female workers employed as wipers by the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad take a break for lunch in in Clinton, Iowa, in 1943. Photo by Jack Delano in a book on New Deal photography. From (http://bintphotobooks.blogspot.com/2016/09/views-reviews-introducing-america-to.html).

Human beings often forget that we have an invaluable ability, says a study by two British social scientists: we can change the world around us, and our treatment of it, more quickly and more significantly than we realise.

Beset by wars and rumours of still worse wars, by economic, political and social implosions, by natural disasters and a climate warming faster than we can moderate our impact on it, it is easy to think that changing to a greener and fairer society is beyond us. But rapid, radical transitions are more possible than we suppose, the study says.

Perhaps this sounds like so much wishful thinking. But the authors say their conclusions are firmly based on facts: what we can learn about our capacity for rapid change, they say, comes through examples drawn both from history and from the present day.

The study is published by the New Weather Institute and the STEPS Centre (based at the University of Sussex in the UK) and was funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.

It details 14 stories of the sort of change it believes we need now. The choice is necessarily highly selective – “just a glimpse of where we might look”, as the authors put it.

One story describes the New Deal in 1930s America, which, the study says, “invested an amount similar to that thought needed for low carbon transition today to public relief and federal works programs.

“The New Deal saw a general drop in income inequality, an improvement in gender equality, a major program of new public housing and significant environmental works.”


Image above: Kurdish YPG fighters, whose experiment with direct democracy is cited in a British study on change includes women fighters. From original article.

A present-day example comes from Kurdish Rojava, at the heart of the Syrian conflict, where the authors say experiments with direct democracy on feminist and ecological principles “show that citizens can work together even in the face of violence and economic collapse”.

They describe the rapid changes that have occurred in renewable energy capacity in countries from Costa Rica to Denmark, and in food systems in Cuba.

They even suggest that the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland in 2010, which halted northern European air travel overnight, prompted businesses and individuals to adapt almost instantly to the loss of a transport link previously thought indispensable.

But while the authors argue that we need drastic change and need it now, they acknowledge that achieving it involves overcoming massive obstacles.

“Much of human society is locked into a high-consumption culture, energy-intensive infrastructure, unequal power relations, and an economic system dominated by finance that fails the poorest and takes infinite growth for granted,” they write.

Other barriers lie more in mindsets and attitudes. “Opponents of radical change argue that it is impossible because of powerful interests, high costs, the lack of a detailed blueprint, or the unwillingness of governments or citizens to act. Others pin their hopes on technology to solve environmental problems.”

The study suggests that these barriers can be overcome, and have been in the past – through grassroots movements, or leadership from governments, or a combination of the two.

It insists that both the costs and the benefits of change must be equally shared. “To be accepted, rapid change must be seen to be fair. This is especially true if and where there is any perceived sacrifice to be made for the greater good.”

One co-author, Andrew Simms of the New Weather Institute, told the Climate News Network there was a secret human history of society achieving extraordinary things during times of upheaval. “It contradicts fears or political excuses that no progress can be made on vital social and environmental challenges because of Brexit, economic uncertainties, conflicts or security threats.

“We need those lessons now as we’re challenged to reverse socially divisive inequality and pull back from the edge of catastrophic, irreversible climate change,” he says.

“There are countless half-buried or forgotten examples that tell us that bold action in times of uncertainty is not only possible but could solve many other problems too.

“The power of past experience is how it shows that far from being powerless we have enormous capacity to adapt and change.”

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No Degrowth without Climate Justice

SUBHEAD: To develop meaningful strategies for political change, degrowth should become more confrontational.

By Matthias Schmelzer on 10 February 2017 for Uneven Earth -
(http://www.unevenearth.org/2017/02/no-degrowth-without-climate-justice/)


Image above: Degrowth Graffiti stating "The Only Sustainable Growth is Degrowth" . From (https://newint.org/blog/2015/05/14/degrowth-federico-demaria/).

Since the 2014 Leipzig Degrowth Conference, the argument that climate justice cannot exist without degrowth has repeatedly been made.

In a keynote at the Degrowth conference in Budapest, in September 2016, I developed this line of thinking further and argued that the opposite is equally important: There is no degrowth without climate justice.

My argument, which I presented as someone involved not only at the theoretical level, but also in concrete efforts to bring degrowth and climate justice together in terms of practices and people, is presented here in a concise way.

After the degrowth conference in Leipzig two years ago, people in the organizational committee were considering next steps that would allow the degrowth community to move forward.

Our analysis was that if we want degrowth to leave the ivory towers of academia and lecture halls, we need to enter into alliances with other social movements; and if we want degrowth to move beyond lofty visions for future societies and towards intervention and action, we need to enter into a conflictual political arena, thus forcing degrowth to take clear stances.

Even though a vision of transformation and a good life for all is important, if degrowth is worth anything, it should make a difference by intervening in political struggles.

Based on this analyses we decided to organize a degrowth summer school in 2015 in cooperation with the Rhineland climate camp. We thus entered a political field, in which concrete opponents – coal companies and their lobbies on the one hand and local communities and climate justice activists on the other – were struggling about the future of coal in the coming years.

The summer school drew 500 people from around Germany and Europe who discussed degrowth and its relations to climate change, extractivism, justice, power, and capitalism.

After the summer school, many participants took part in one of the hitherto largest actions of civil disobedience against lignite coal mining, in which more than 1000 people entered an open cast coal mine and blocked the operation of the huge diggers in Europe’s largest CO2 emitter.

In 2016, Ende Gelände was repeated in Lusatia, and the 3000-participant strong blockade lasted two days. There was again a degrowth summer school under the title “Skills for System Change.”

The summer of 2017 will see another degrowth-inspired summer school and a set of actions in the Rhineland that includes Ende Gelände, but will be much broader and possibly even bigger.

The climate summit Truman show

This decision to enter into alliances with the climate justice movement and into the conflicts around coal already illustrates much of our stance on the Paris Agreement reached at the COP in Paris in 2015.

First, that it proved a disaster precisely because it did not address the real problems, mainly that fossil fuels must largely stay underground and that we need a deep socio-ecological transformation.

Second, that the Paris Agreement could not address these issues, because it largely stayed within the framework of economic growth, extractivism, and accumulation – albeit in a new form.

And finally, that real change must come from stopping the drivers of climate change through concrete policies, public opposition, the building of alternatives, and direct action.

From the perspective of degrowth and climate justice movements, the Paris Agreement was a deceitful spectacle with potentially disastrous effects. What actually happened in Paris in November last year has been adequately described as the climate summit Truman Show: around the world, media headlines were enthusiastically celebrating the deal as ‘historic’ and ‘successful’, as the miracle of Paris, or even as  “31 pages of a recipe for revolution.”

Cameras were showing the chief negotiator French foreign minister Laurent Fabius in tears, the climate advocate Al Gore enthusiastically clapping, and the room of delegates seemed to be in a collective delirium – and with it the entire media circus.

Even many larger NGOs did not want to disturb this picture with their gentle statements, and the online campaigning platform avaaz described it as a “massive turning point in human history.”

Through the technocratic prism of the framework laid out by the UN climate convention, the summit achieved much more than has otherwise been accomplished during the last 20 years and far more than most observers had expected: 195 states actually achieved an agreement; and to the surprise of many in the last minute the 1,5 degree target was included in the final text.

However, this enthusiasm is highly misleading. It only makes sense from a narrow perspective that only focuses on the UN framework of negotiations and not on the broader political and economic context.

One can ignore reality, but this does not make it disappear. Diplomacy and a perfectly staged show do not save the climate – this can only be done by leaving the greater part of fossil fuel reserves in the ground, stopping deforestation, and ending industrialized agriculture. And all of this needs to happen quickly, which requires a set of effective measures and policies.

But the Paris Agreement does not include mechanisms and measures to ensure that this target is met. In fact, the Paris Agreement cements and strengthens the illusion of decoupling growth and emission and of green growth through a new level of utopian technocratic optimism – negative emissions.

In fact, the agreement willingly accepts missing the 1.5-degree target, and it contains many recipes for a new wave of neo-colonialism in the name of green capitalism.

Instead of redefining and changing the economy and the mode of production and consumption that cause climate change, it redefines nature by turning it into a tradable commodity.


Image above: Graph of how many "Earth's" humanity will need for resources if we continue with moderate growth or attempt a rapid reduction in consumption. Note, the last time we were living within the budget of needing only one Earth was back in 1970. From (https://newint.org/features/2015/12/01/alternatives-to-growth/).

The market mechanisms embedded in the agreement serve to enable the continuation of high consumption lifestyles in rich countries, while offsetting this overconsumption in the Global South and thus continuing colonial exploitation.

Beyond green capitalism

Degrowth stands in stark opposition not just to the continuation of a “brown” – fossil fuels-based and extractivist – capitalism, but also to the institutionalization of what seems the most likely alternative – a “green” capitalism based on the massive investment in renewable energies, global carbon trading regimes, and the economization of nature.

For many of us, the belief that there is “no climate justice without degrowth” is a fundamental motivation to engage in the degrowth community or movement. The climate justice perspective can inspire an understanding of degrowth that might be more appealing to some – an understanding of degrowth  as the democratically-led transformation to societies that are not based on the extraction or import of disproportionate amounts of resources and on the disproportionate use of sinks.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that this is only one side of the coin, since it stipulates that degrowth is more fundamental and the necessary precondition to achieve climate justice.

Of course, there is great potential for cooperation and alliances between the two movements.

But in the spirit of what was termed “alliances without subordination” at the Budapest conference in 2016, I want to turn this around and argue that the other side is equally important: There is no degrowth without climate justice, or – more comprehensively – ecological justice or even global justice.

If degrowth is not built on a comprehensive vision for global justice and fails to incorporate key elements that are clearer and more prominent in the climate justice movement than in degrowth discourses, it will not be the emancipatory project many wish it to be. What can the degrowth community learn from the climate justice movement? I want to highlight three key lessons.

Changing structures

First lesson, the focus on deep structural transformations, transformations in the economic, political, mental, and social structures of our societies. Of course, much has been written and said on this in the degrowth discussion – but it could move further. Beatrice Rodriguez Labajos said that activists in the global South generally think that degrowth is not radical enough, because it is not anti-capitalist and mainly focuses on individual lifestyle-change.

Based on the discussions at the recent conferences, a consensus seems to be emerging that degrowth is indeed a proposal to overcome capitalism, and not just a new packaging for business as usual.

Similarly, degrowth could be clearer on how to change political structures (for example in the discussions about global trade regimes such as TTIP and CETA, degrowth is largely absent), mental structures such as extractivism in all its forms, and social structures.

If degrowth is understood as a heterogeneous and evolving social movement in the making, one can understand the great variety of approaches taken by degrowth actors in terms of its main critiques, proposed alternatives and transformational practices – ranging from sufficiency-oriented adepts of voluntary simplicity to social-reformists, anti-capitalists and feminists.

The climate justice perspective can help in strengthening those parts of the degrowth community that are not blind to issues of structural transformations.

Opposing hierarchies

Second, the climate justice movement is very strong in articulating and opposing hierarchies and power. Degrowth could learn that opposing all forms of power and domination is key if we want to achieve a more just society.

And because the degrowth community is so strongly homogenous – just look around at the degrowth conferences –, it really needs to listen to and learn from others, both in the North and the South. In fact, climate justice is a movement of some of the least privileged people resisting the immediate loss of their livelihoods.

The term goes back to the notion of environmental justice, and the origin of this term is highly illuminating.

When the largely white and privileged American environmental activists resisted the dumping of industrial waste in the 1960s, they basically only cared about their own communities.

This resulted in pushing the environmental costs down the social ladder, onto communities of color and the poor. In opposing this, these communities used the term “environmental racism” and “demanded environmental justice.” And in the 1990s, the term was then also used for the global problem of climate change.

In contrast to this, degrowth is a concept largely supported by some of the most privileged people on this planet – largely white, well-educated, middle-class people with Western passports  (on this, see a forthcoming study on the participants of the Leipzig Degrowth conference). It can even be conceptualized as the self-problematization of privileges in the context of what Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen have called “the imperial mode of living”.

Because of this privileged homogeneity, degrowth needs to be particularly careful not to reproduce hierarchies, unequal distribution of power, and domination.

We do not only need a decolonization of the economic imaginary – on which degrowth focuses – but, since they are all connected, we also need this decolonization in terms of sex and gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and all other forms of division and exclusion.

How these and other hierarchies of the current capitalist, patriarchal, and (post)colonial societies can be overcome in a degrowth alternative and what they imply for degrowth strategies should be at the center of future degrowth and post-growth debates.

To do this, degrowth needs to listen to and build alliances with the less privileged, not only in the global South, but also in the global North. In short, degrowth needs to become more intersectional and diverse.

Let’s look at two examples: In a recent project called “Degrowth in movements” we collaborated with protagonists from more than 30 other social movements and alternative economic approaches to discuss their relation to degrowth and how from their perspective degrowth should develop.

The resultant essays provide fascinating insights – for example from the perspective of refugee movements, queer-feminism, trade unions, care, or food sovereignty -, which provide some entry points for degrowth to enter into broader alliances, reach out to new social groups, and strengthen its own critique of power and hierarchies.

In another project – which was actually one of the outcomes of the degrowth summer schools in 2015 and 2016 – the Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie will be organizing a conference together with the transnational refugee activist network Afrique-Europe-Interact that will bring degrowth and refugee activists together in October 2017 to discuss the connections between flight and migration, self-determined development, and ecological crises from a practical and political perspective.

Embracing struggles

The third lesson seems to me to be the most important one. Degrowth can learn from climate justice the struggle. So far, degrowth is largely an academic endeavor to formulate and debate about alternatives, and grassroots efforts to strengthen low-impact lifestyles here and now.

Both are vitally important.

However, degrowth sometimes appears to be somewhat vague on key political questions, in particular in terms of what the necessary struggles that need to be fought to achieve degrowth are, what this would entail, and who are allies and enemies.

To develop meaningful strategies for political change, degrowth should become more confrontational. Degrowth should not shy away from but rather face and embrace the conflicts that are necessary to achieve its goals.

One very concrete situation that the degrowth-climate justice alliance needs to organize against is that, while global carbon majors – the largest oil, gas, and coal companies worldwide – own 5 times more reserves of fossil fuels that are still in the ground than those that can be burned if humanity wants to achieve only the less ambitious 2 degree target, these reserves have largely already been turned into financial assets that are owned by companies and traded on international markets.

Thus, alleviating climate change – and thus achieving one key basis for a degrowth transformation – is only possible if these companies are expropriated of these assets. They’ll do anything to avoid this. What does this mean for degrowth strategies? Also in this regard, the climate justice movement is showing the way.

One great example is the Break Free campaign in May 2016, in which tens of thousands of people on 6 continents did something that politicians did not: they took bold, courageous action to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Degrowth should strive to engage more with on-the-ground struggles.

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Next Tango in Paris

SUBHEAD: When things get bad enough, the meme can move from niche to mainstream. It is already all ready.

By Alan Bates on 31 October 2015 for The Great Change -
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-next-tango-in-paris.html)


Image above: Photo of French Resistance fighters defending a corner in Paris during WWII overlaid over same corner today. From (http://golem13.fr/70-ans-liberation-de-paris/).

"Sweden has decided to decommission all its nuclear plants but has yet to propose a similar program to phase out its wind turbines."

"Carbon-neutral is so 20th century. We really need to get beyond zero. That is what ecovillages can offer."

We were just concluding a conference call for Global Ecovillage Network delegates in the run-up to the UN climate summit one month from now in Paris when we said that. The discussion had turned to what our message should be. There is a very good program initiated by ten European ecovillages, called the Fossil-Fuel Free Community Challenge. It is very ambitious, and tracks what Sweden, already carbon-neutral, has recently pledged.

It is one thing to gradually wean yourself from fossil energy by increments, such as by putting a tax on carbon at the source, as Al Gore tried unsuccessfully to do in 1992, or to strip the fossil industry of its obscene subsidies, as Bill McKibben urges. It is quite another to go cold turkey.

Costa Rica met its entire national power demand using renewable energy for 75 consecutive days this year, but that was only electricity, and anyway, it was Costa Rica. On a spectacularly windy day this past July, Denmark generated 140% of its electrical power from wind alone.

A recent study by Mark Jacobson, David Blittersdorf, and Tom Murphy, originally published by Energy XChange September 28, 2015, shows it is quite possible to switch the whole world to renewables right now, at no net cost.

To get off carbon, Sweden will have to close its nuclear plants, which have a huge carbon footprint, about 16 kg CO2e per MWh despite what technophiles James Hansen, George Monbiot or James Lovelock may tell you after having drunk the Atomic Kool Aid. Wind power, by contrast, generates 10 kg per MWh. Sweden has decided to decommission all its nuclear plants, but has yet to propose a similar program to phase out wind turbines.

Personally we have no problem endorsing a massive switch to renewables and the sooner the better, but one also needs to place a caveat under that about it not exactly replacing fossil fuels. Nor will it salvage consumer culture.

If one were to think of it in terms of megajoules of energy, we were living off a current account of sunlight up until about 200 years ago, when we discovered that earth had been frugally putting aside a billion-year pension account all this time. That was supposed to help the planet go nova when the Sun runs out of hydrogen.

What did we do? We started withdrawing, gradually at first, then faster, and now as fast as we possibly can. We have withdrawn a little more than half of that inheritance now, mainly the easy to reach part.

We can't withdraw the remainder because (a) it costs more than we can afford to spend; and (b) it would fry the planet. So we are slowly coming to the realization that we may have to return to our former mainstay, the current income account; you know, the sunlight.

The savings account was a very rich endowment, though. Eating through 500 million years of fossil sunlight in 200 years enabled each of us to have hundreds of energy slaves at our beck and call. As Richard Heinberg says, a cup of gasoline can take a 2-ton truck over a mountain. How many horses would have to be fed how much grain to accomplish the same task? How many hours of wind generators charging batteries? Heinberg points out:

Making pig iron—the main ingredient in steel—requires blast furnaces. Making cement requires 100-meter-long kilns that operate at 1500 degrees C. In principle it is possible to produce high heat for these purposes with electricity or giant solar collectors, but nobody does it that way now because it would be much more expensive than burning coal or natural gas.

Crucially, current manufacturing processes for building solar panels and wind turbines also depend upon high-temperature industrial processes fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas. Again, alternative ways of producing this heat are feasible in principle—but the result would probably be significantly higher-cost solar and wind power. And there are no demonstration projects to show us just how easy or hard this would be.

Zero carbon power, or zero fossil fuels, while a wonderful goal, and one put out by Greenpeace USA  and 350.org, will entail more sacrifice than many people, including even the Swedes, understand. For one thing, the energy return on invested energy (EROIE) is less than 4:1 for wind, which is marginal and produces only electricity, unless you are pumping water.

Biofuels are 1:1.4, or negative return. Corn ethanol costs more Btu — and horsepower — to make than it can provide when combusted. Contrast fossil fuels at historical returns of 100:1 to 40:1 (although falling off the precipice now as we spend more to obtain less).

Electrification of all sectors — heating, cooling, industrial processes, and transportation — would be implicit to an all-renewable economy. But we would need to reduce total energy use by approximately 70 percent, maybe more, to make that switch. Efficiency improvements could potentially take us part way but not all the way.

If there is one thing ecovillages should be good at, it should be making crisis mitigation fun. We weary of the hair shirt approach to mitigating climate change. We can cut consumption and party too. But then Europe, particularly the Scandinavian countries, have a "set an impossible goal and lead by example" culture when it comes to climate negotiations.

Not only have they not gotten any other countries to go along, but their own populations have balked at the austerity required, throwing out progressive governments and replacing them with conservatives, who are anything but conservers, Ponzi'ing up bigger mountains of debt and fattening the larders of banksters with the proceeds of liquidated public assets.

Sure, we have some great fossil-fuel free islands in Denmark and a bicycle autobahn in Germany, but honestly, how many businessmen do you know that would garage the BMW in favor of a 15-speed Hase Spezialräder for that meeting in Bonn, especially in winter?

The alternative we have proposed is to net sequester – go beyond zero – at the home, village and regional scale. The tools we have for accomplishing this are many – carbon farming, eco-agroforestry, biomass energy with carbon capture, and biochar in everything from clothing to buildings.

As we have posted previously, these simple changes can switch civilization from its current trajectory – one that ensures near term human extinction (“NTHE”) — to something we have been calling Civilization 2.0, which returns the planet to something approximating the comfortable Holocene in which we evolved, within a reasonable time. The time variable is the unknown here, because it is unlikely that COP-21, with its low ambition, will do much to speed the necessary conversion.

Will it be possible to live in the high style of consumer culture in our Civilization 2.0? No chance. But we can continue living, and have quite abundant, happy lives, and that is no small deal. The alternative really is NTHE.

George Monbiot writes:

Governments ignore issues when the media ignores them. And the media ignores them because … well there’s a question with a thousand answers, many of which involve power. But one reason is the complete failure of perspective in a de-skilled industry dominated by corporate press releases, photo ops and fashion shoots, where everyone seems to be waiting for everyone else to take a lead. The media makes a collective non-decision to treat this catastrophe as a non-issue, and we all carry on as if it’s not happening.

At the climate summit in Paris in December, the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?

Rob Hopkins writes:

Change happens in interesting ways.  For example, recently, a community campaign where I live challenged a large local charitable landowner's land use decisions, in particular its decision to submit large swathes of land for development.  The community campaign questioned the link between the organization's stated values and its actions. 

Looking back in hindsight, it's interesting to see how the change unfolded, and how there is no one single Great Change Moment to point to.  But at the moment when the then CEO of the organization was brazening it out, telling everyone how the organization was listening and responding when it was clear that he really wasn't, actually the ground had been eaten away from under him, and it was empty words, and a month later he had stood down.  Events were moving, the world around him was changing, he had been left behind.

Similarly the GDR, East Germany, looked to be robust, powerful and permanent in the days before the Berlin Wall came down.  In reality, we now know, it was holed below the waterline, undermined by the number of young people defecting to the West, corruption, rigged elections and much more.

But until the Wall came down, you'd never have known.  So how can we know, in the moment, which point in time we might point to as the moment when the change actually happened?

While Paris looks likely to not be that Great Change Moment, perhaps it is we who need to take a different approach here.

Our role in Paris, or during that time, in my opinion, is not to see this event as a Great Change Moment, rather as just yet another important step in the ongoing – and of course massively urgent - building of a new, low carbon world.  Instead, we should focus, during that time, on celebrating what is already happening.  And there is much to celebrate.

We travel to these fetes and hang out our wares so that passersby can notice and lodge our new meme somewhere in the back of their collective brain. When things get bad enough, the meme can move from niche to mainstream. It is already all ready.


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Transitioning for All

SUBHEAD: Diversification of the Transition movement indicates how prepared we really are to face the future.

By Pamela Boyce Simms on 15 August 2014 for Transition US -
(http://transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-%E2%80%93-deep-outreach-resilience-whom-and-what-end-%E2%80%9Ctransitioning-all%E2%80%9D)


Image above: From Aerial view of historic waterside buildings in a thriving part of Kingston, NY. From original article. More images there.

In a recent critique, The Transition Movement: Questions of Diversity, Power and Affluence, the Simplicity Institute exhorted Transitioners to: 1) pay more attention to community power dynamics conditioned by the racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic stratification that shape relationships, and, 2) work to ensure that Transition isn’t primarily a pleasurable movement for predominantly white, educated, post-materialist, middle class small community people (learn more in an upcoming teleseminar with the Mid-Atlantic Transition Hub). Acting on either suggestion requires courage and commitment.

Transition groups are indeed for the most part, white and middle class. Transitioners in towns like Kingston where people of color comprise a full 35% of a population of 23,700, puzzle over how to racially and socioeconomically diversify their groups. The Simplicity Institute critique pointedly urges the Transition movement to self-observe, probe deeply, and determine, “Whose resilience are we concerned about, and to what end?”

Climate change impacts us all. No particular group is exempt from the ravages of gale force storm winds, extended power outages, and drought-induced food shortages. Yet few Transition initiatives consistently focus on understanding the deeper community economic and power dynamics that generate their homogenous groups. How might Transitioners take up this extremely uncomfortable task? Should Transition be more explicitly concerned with social justice?

First, Transition outreach planning might pose deeper questions than, “Why don’t people of color come to our friendly, welcoming potlucks?” Sincere interest in “Transition for all” compels groups to ponder as a baseline: 

WHO has historically, and currently lives in which areas of our town and why?  
WHAT social circles, institutions, economic engines and patterns drive commerce and employment in town?  
WHERE, if at all do people of diverse ethnic, racial, age, gender and socioeconomic backgrounds intersect in town? 

Transitioners might then conduct an internal inventory of their own motivations, skills-sets; emotional, psychological, spiritual/humanitarian resources and preparedness as they embark on any diversity journey of depth that values authenticity.

Those who seek to Transition Kingston immediately note that like many towns, Kingston encompasses several distinct micro-environments that rarely intersect. Walkable Uptown, which witnessed an influx of “more stable” retailers over the past five years, exemplifies one dimension of a Transitioner’s localization dream. One can shop at the farmers market, get a haircut and aromatherapy massage, stop at the bank, visit the doctor and sample a variety of cuisines on foot.

Vegetarian restaurants serve locally sourced foods, niche retailers abound, loft spaces are available in revamped industrial spaces, and one can find everything from grass-fed beef to exotic fair trade chocolates.

Kingston’s Rondout area offers a scenic stroll along the city’s historic deep water dock. A holistic health center, galleries and waterfront restaurants hold out the promise of similar business and exciting real estate development opportunities to come.


Image above: Boarded up windows on dilapidated buildings in Kingston's red Zone. From original article.

A radically different economic flow pattern is operative in Kingston’s high storefront-vacancy Midtown area: the corridor which includes the “red zone” from Franklin and Broadway to Wall Street. Cyclical “tough on crime” raids in this part of town provide the economic fodder and foundation for the mortgages, purchasing power, and lifestyles of thousands of New Yorkers employed by Eastern, Shawngunk, Wallkill, Fishkill, Hudson, Coxsackie, Greenhaven, and Green Prisons to name but a few of many penal institutions and all of the attendant branches of the NYS criminal justice system.

New Progressive Baptist Pastor Modele Clarke shepherds a Midtown Kingston congregation consisting of 80% “returned citizens,” that is, residents who have returned home following incarceration or drug rehabilitation. On certain blocks in Kingston’s Midtown there are only three addresses that are not under some form of legal supervision.

As anyone who has attended an ENJAN (End the New Jim Crow Action Network) meeting at Pastor Clarke’s church can attest, the imperative that NYS prison beds must be kept full at all costs is widely recognized.

The enforced economic contribution to the NYS economy of Kingston’s “red zone,” according to a white ENJAN activist who served five years in Ulster County Prisons, is an ensured cell-block head count. She posits that parole policies to which she is subject make it next to impossible to find meaningful employment (for which she is highly qualified) that would help halt the circular conveyor belt back into the system.

As one of only four white women in her prison “pod” of 48 women, she knows the picture is exponentially more abysmal for people of color.

The lasting impact of movements, whether environmental or social, hinges upon the extent to which the movement emerges from the ranks of those most deeply affected. Similar to the Transition demographic make-up, social justice circles in Kingston draw white middle class activists with connections to the Peace, Civil and Women’s Rights movements of the 60’s and 70’s. ENJAN meeting participants, for example, are overwhelmingly white.

A practical reason for this might be that at any given point in time 50% of Midtown residents are on parole curfews and cannot be out of their homes after 8:00 PM to attend meetings.

Further exacerbating the non-intersection of Kingston demographic circles, Pastor Clarke observes that middle class people of color diligently maintain the same distance from those struggling financially in Midtown as their white non-activist counterparts. How might Transition initiatives bridge chasms of this magnitude, mirrored in towns and cities throughout the country?

Meanwhile, as climate change indifferently accelerates, resilience as measured by extreme weather recovery speed is extremely group specific. We’ve repeatedly seen throughout the state in the wake of Irene and Sandy, that electricity is restored much faster in networked neighborhoods with connections to resource persons who can turn on the lights, attend to the roads, and cut through insurance red tape.  
How will Transitioners address the fact that:

1. resource depletion and climate change will effect various groups in different ways?
2. relocalization may not be equally as applicable to everyone?
3. some people are more adaptable than others given aspects of change that have more to do with historical power than place?

Diversification of the Transition movement is a litmus test that can indicate how prepared we really are to embrace a future transformed by climate change in which the old navigation coordinates will have evaporated. The degree to which we can calm the discomfort that often grips us when among people who appear to be radically different from us, is the degree to which we can truly deepen our resilience as we wade into the unknown.

The Mid-Atlantic Transition Hub (MATH) will offer a webinar series entitled:"The Maturation of a Social Movement: A Regional Response to a Critique of the Transition Movement" on the Transition US website. The series will explore diversity in Transitioning among other issues raised in the Simplicity Institute critique. The first webinar session will be offered November 6, 2014, 2:00 PM ET. Register and be part of the conversation: bit.ly/mathresponse

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Ferguson and Climate Change

SUBHEAD: This is the result of my experience of growing up black in America, and growing up in drought ravagved New Mexico.

By Deidre Smith on 21 August 2014 for 350.org -
(http://350.org/how-racial-justice-is-integral-to-confronting-climate-crisis/)


Image above: Scene of recent confrontation between unarmed civilian and military equipped police in Ferguson, Missouri.  From original article
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It was not hard for me to make the connection between the tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, and the catalyst for my work to stop the climate crisis.
It’s all over the news: images of police in military gear pointing war zone weapons at unarmed black people with their hands in the air. These scenes made my heart race in an all-to-familiar way. I was devastated for Mike Brown, his family and the people of Ferguson. Almost immediately, I closed my eyes and remembered the same fear for my own family that pangs many times over a given year.

 

In the wake of the climate disaster that was Hurricane Katrina almost ten years ago, I saw the same images of police, pointing war-zone weapons at unarmed black people with their hands in the air. In the name of “restoring order,” my family and their community were demonized as “looters” and “dangerous.” When crisis hits, the underlying racism in our society comes to the surface in very clear ways. Climate change is bringing nothing if not clarity to the persistent and overlapping crises of our time.

I was outraged by Mike Brown’s murder, and at the same time wondered why people were so surprised; this is sadly a common experience of black life in America. In 2012, an unarmed black man was killed by authorities every 28 hours (when divided evenly across the year), and it has increased since then. I think about my brother, my nephew, and my brothers and sisters who will continue to have to fight for respect and empathy, and may lose their homes or even their lives at the hands of injustice.

To me, the connection between militarized state violence, racism, and climate change was common-sense and intuitive.
Quickly understanding interdependence and connectedness here, and often elsewhere is, in part, the result of my experience of growing up black in America, and growing up in New Mexico, a place ravaged by climate impacts. New Mexico is, as Oscar Olivera noted, showing the early signs of what sparked the Cochabamba Water Wars, yet another example of how oppression and extreme weather combine to “incite” militarized violence.

The problems of Cochabamba and Katrina are not just about the hurricane or the drought – it’s what happened after. It is the institutional neglect of vulnerable communities in crisis, the criminalization of our people met with state violence, the ongoing displacement of New Orleans’ black residents through the demolition of affordable housing for high-rise condos — that all adds up to corporations exploiting our tragedy using the tools of racism, division, and dehumanization. (Naomi Klein calls it the Shock Doctrine.)

And it’s also about what happened before too: how black and brown communities have coal refineries, tar sands, and gas wells in their back yards to extract fossil fuels in the first place.

These divisions imposed on us prevent us from building the movement we need to create a new future for ourselves, a future where we have clean energy that doesn’t kill us, and creates jobs that provide dignity and a living. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, black and brown people were seen as “disposable,” and the powers-that-be sought to divide us by once again painting the victims and heroes as villains.

The hashtag #iftheygunnedmedown trended during the past week in reaction to the media’s portrayal of Mike Brown and countless other victims. Black folks asked: if I was killed by police, how would I be portrayed? It illustrated how a racist and victim-blaming cultural narrative is central to how the media responds to the victimization of a vulnerable community in crisis.

A discourse that dehumanizes and blames the victims makes black and brown communities even more vulnerable than they already are in the wake of climate disasters. If extreme weather is about droughts, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires, the way people get treated in the wake of disaster is about power.
Demonization and the illusion of the “other” allows mainstream US to feel unaffected and disconnected to the employment of unacceptable and institutionally supported militarized violence. If we hope to build anything together and employ our combined power we must deny that anyone is an “other” – denying this pervasive cultural norm isn’t easy but it’s a central challenge we face.

We’re all impacted by climate change, but we’re not all impacted equally.
Communities of color and poor communities are hit hardest by fossil fuel extraction, as well as neglected by the state in the wake of crisis. People of color also disproportionately live in climate-vulnerable areas. Similarly, state violence should concern us all, but the experience of young black men in particular in this country is unique.

Those of us who are not young black men must step up to the challenge of understanding that we will likely never experience that level of demonization. That kind of solidarity is what it takes to build real people power — the kind of power that stands up unflinchingly to injustice, and helps us all win our battles by standing together.

This is difficult work. Some of it requires listening and working with racial justice organizations, and some of it requires introspection, questioning what we have been taught, and healing from internal oppression. Part of that work involves climate organizers acknowledging and understanding that our fight is not simply with the carbon in the sky, but with the powers on the ground.

Many people have pointed out that the climate movement needs to understand our internal disparity of power too: between mainstream and grassroots organizations, between people of color and white folks, between the global north and the global south. We need to account for these things if we truly want to build the diverse movement leadership that we will need to win.

The events in Ferguson offer an important moment if you’re a climate organizer, looking around the room, wondering where the “people of color” are. It’s a time to to dig deep and ask yourself if you really care why – and if you are committed to the deep work, solidarity, and learning that it will take to bring more “diversity” to our movement. Personally, I think the climate movement is up to this necessary challenge.

It isn’t incidental, it’s institutional, and it’s rooted in history. 
I can’t stress enough how important it is for me, as a black climate justice advocate, as well as for my people, to see the climate movement show solidarity right now with the people of Ferguson and with black communities around the country striving for justice.

Other movements are stepping up to the plate: labor, GLBTQ, and immigrant rights groups have all taken a firm stand that they have the backs of the black community. Threats to civil dissent are a threat to us all.

We’ve seen this kind of militarized police violence in the environmental movement before: in the repression of the Global Justice Movement, pioneered by police with tanks on the streets of Miami during the Free Trade Area of the Americas protests in 2003, to name just one example.

It has happened to our movements before, and it will happen again. As James Baldwin expressed, “if they come for you in the morning, they will come for us at night.” But solidarity and allyship is important in and of itself. The fossil fuel industry would love to see us siloed into believing that wecan each win by ourselves on “single issues.”

Now it’s time for the climate movement to show up– to show that we will not stand for the “otherizing” of the black community here in America, or anyone else.

We have a lot of learning to do about how to come together, but we are in process of learning how our fights are bound together at their roots. If we knew everything we needed to know about navigating the climate and ecological crises, we would have done it already. Now is a time to stand with and listen to the wisdom of our allies in movements that are co-creating the world we all want to live in.


As crisis escalates, as climate change gets worse, we better get ready to see a whole lot more state violence and repression, unless we organize to change it now.

The first step to understanding is listening. The second step is digging.
I could tell you all day about the brilliant and strategic analysis and leaders that exist in historically oppressed communities. I could tell you…but your path to understanding why solidarity is important is your own. Don’t miss this opportunity to dig in and show up. Don’t miss this opportunity to leverage our power together.

If we mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis it, will be because we understood our enemies and leveraged our collective power to take them down and let our vision spring up. Take a moment today to read the demands of the Dream Defenders, Freedomside, and Organizing Black Struggle. Read about solidarity and white allyship, and identify anti-blackness showing up in your spaces.

Take a moment today to really think about how we really should confront the climate crisis and ask yourself if you’re willing to dive into the long haul and complex work it will take.

I believe in us. 
I am grateful that amidst all my anger, frustration, sadness, determination, and exhaustion that I am left with one resounding thought: I believe in us.

Doing climate work takes a lot of courage, and I am endlessly inspired by my comrades’ and colleagues’ abilities hold the contradictions, complexity, and overwhelming reality it is to take on this challenge. I am excited by the deepening and aligning I’ve been seeing happening in cross-sector movement spaces over the past year especially.

The more complex (and less comfortable) we allow ourselves to be, the more simple things actually become: we are in this together and our fights are connected. We don’t know everything by ourselves, but together we know enough.

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Reshowing of "Shift Change"

SUBHEAD: Take a glimpse into an alternative and horizontally controlled democratic economic system.

By Sandra Herndon on 14 August 2013 in Island Breath  -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/09/presentatin-of-shift-change.html)


Image above: Detail of poster for "Shift Change" Click for full enlargement.

WHAT:
Presenting movie "Shift Change"
Free Admission - Q & A after film presentation

WHEN:
 Saturday January 18, 2014 at 6:30pm

WHERE:
Waimea Neighborhood Center
4556 Makeke Road
Waimea, HI 96796

CONTACT:
Fred Dente
Phone 808-651-2815   
Email: koikoi1@hawaii.rr.com

SPONSER:
The event is presented by Kauai Alliance for Peace and Social Justice.

The Kauai Alliance for Peace and Social Justice will be showing SHIFT CHANGE at the Storybook Theatre in Hanapepe on Wednesday, September 18, 2013 @ 6:30pm.  There will be community input and discussion afterward. 

The movie documents successful worker-owned cooperatives in Mondragon, Spain, and in San Francisco, and other American cities.  It presents the case that everyday working class people can take greater control of their lives and livelyhoods by being part of the ownership and democratic management of their workplaces.  It has long been a utopian dream of the working class to have more control and a consensus vote in how our labor and skills are utilized and how how we are paid for that labor.

That progressive model is working today in the Basque region of Spain and in many other locations around the world.  It seems to follow that local cooperative ownership of businesses here on Kaua`i could be a great way to sustainably support ourselves into the near future, and for generations to come.  Co-ops could provide a great solution to the question of how to help provide meaningful and safe and gainful employment for the chemical/seed company employees, when and if those mega corporations leave these shores.

And, co-operative ownership of all other types of businesses could help get us off the dependency on barging in practically everything we consume, and the giant global companies who employ us, and flying most of the profits off to corporate headquarters and stockholders on Turtle Island.  Let's keep the fruits of our labor here in our own backyard, just like the Home Rule of our politics.  

Please come and take a glimpse into an alternative, very promising and horizontally controlled democratic economic system, which exists today in other places, and which could exist tomorrow on our economically challenging island of Beautiful Kauai.

Online: www.shiftchange.org  
Facebook: www.facebook.com/shiftchangemovie

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Review of 'Shift Change"

By Richard Smaby on 7 February 2013 for the Pierce Progressive
(http://www.thepierceprogressive.org/shiftchangereview)


Video above: Trailer for "Shift Change". From (http://youtu.be/NK9SjSpRCcQ).

"Shift Change" the movie suggests a direction for positive change in our business world—worker cooperatives and workplace democracy. It interviews worker-owners from thriving cooperative businesses in the U.S. and Spain. On Feb. 6 Shift Change producer Melissa Young and director Mark Dworkin from Whidbey Island attended a screening of their film at the Grand Cinema in Tacoma, together with Alison Booth, who appears in the film as manager of the Equal Exchange Espresso Bar in Ballard. They answered questions from a packed audience.

The documentary starts with some of the most successful examples of democratic cooperatives—the Mondragon cooperatives in Basque Spain. These are very large and successful businesses that are changing the whole Basque community. The cooperative businesses established a cooperative investment bank and a highly respected research university embedding the values of cooperatives in the fabric of the university experience. The citizen on the street has a connection to cooperative business.

It then moves to examples from Cleveland, Madison, San Francisco, and Massachusetts. Cleveland hosts a number of worker cooperatives under the Evergreen Cooperatives umbrella. Evergreen Cooperative Laundry is an industrial laundry serving local hospitals, hotels, and other institutions. Ohio Cooperative Solar sells to and services Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve University, City of Cleveland, and the Cleveland Housing Network.

An key aspect of Evergreen Cooperatives’ success is the support it receives from the Cleveland community. Madison, Wisconsin hosts Union Cab Cooperative and Isthmus Engineering and Manufacturing. San Francisco has Arizmendi Bakery. West Bridgewater, Massachusetts has Equal Exchange.

Workers interviewed in the film stressed that a worker owned cooperative requires an extra commitment by its worker owners. Democratic governance requires meeting together to design the work process and to decide policy.

People who simply want to work 9 to 5 and pick up a paycheck are not well suited to such a cooperative. In all these cooperatives the workers, including the managers, express excitement about  creating something together. It can be stressful to argue and compromise.

But it is a stress that promises positive things. Some workers appreciate the promise. Worker members prefer this stress over the stress of working a job where you have little or no say about what you are assigned to do.

The documentary inspired the audience to action. People were excited to start their own democratic worker cooperatives. One member of the audience asked where she could get help; she has plans for starting two cooperatives. Alison Booth recommended the Northwest Cooperative Development Center in Olympia. Another resource is the Democracy At Work Network (DAWN), a network of certified peer advisors, who provide online technical assistance services to worker cooperatives.
Another member of the audience asked Alison Booth how one could start a worker owned cooperative. She repeated principles described in the film.

• There must be a committed core group willing to devote themselves to the business.
• They must have a solid business plan and do a feasibility study. They have to figure out how to make money. It is not enough to have a group that enjoys being together.
• They will need a consultant and all the help they can get.

Alison Booth pointed out that there are many versions of cooperatives and worker ownership; not all of them involve all their members in all decisions. But even cooperatives that have hierarchical management require that all members are involved in major decisions like relocation and that all decisions by management are transparent.

One questioner related his father’s experience with the plywood cooperatives being eliminated by the big corporations and suggested that the law favored the big non-cooperative companies. Melissa Young and Alison Booth pointed out that each state makes its own laws affecting cooperatives.;

California law, for instance, assumes that managers and employees are adversaries, which makes it difficult for cooperatives to establish their legal status as a democratic worker cooperative. 

On the other hand, Wisconsin has laws favorable to cooperatives. Unlike commercial banks credit unions are limited to loaning only a small fraction of their assets to businesses, which limits their ability to support cooperative businesses.

The Small Business Administration historically was not allowed to lend to cooperatives. But beginning two years ago it has been aiding cooperatives in a variety of ways.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Presentation of "Shift Change" 9/15/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Hawaii Premier of "Shift Change" 6/5/13
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Green, Red, Black and Female

SUBHEAD: The future of the human species - if there is to be a future - must be radically green, red, black and female.

By Robert Jensen on 7 November 2013 for Truth-Out.org -
(http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19804-the-future-must-be-green-red-black-and-female)


Image above: Crowd of people photo by James Cridland / Flickr. From original article.

[Author's note: The human species must acknowledge that any future that allows us to retain our humanity will jettison capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy - and be based on an ecological worldview.

These remarks were prepared for a private conference on sustainability, where the participants critiqued corporate farming, "big ag," and "big pharma" and industrialized medicine. There was agreement about the need for fundamental change in economic/political/social systems, but no consensus on the appropriate analysis of those systems and their interaction.]

The future of the human species - if there is to be a future - must be radically green, red, black and female.

If we take this seriously - a human future, that is, if we really care about whether there will be a human future - each one of us who claims to care has to be willing to be challenged, radically. How we think, feel, and act - it's all open to critique, and no one gets off easy, because everyone has failed. Individually and collectively, we have failed to create just societies or a sustainable human presence on the planet. That failure may have been inevitable - the human with the big brain may be an evolutionary dead-end - but still it remains our failure. So, let's deal with it, individually and collectively.

We can start by looking honestly at the data about the health of the ecosphere, in the context of what we know about human economic/political/social systems. My conclusion: There is no way to magically solve the fundamental problems that result from too many people consuming too much and producing too much waste, under conditions of unconscionable inequality in wealth and power.

If today, everywhere on the planet, everyone made a commitment to the research and organizing necessary to ramp down the demands that the human project places on ecosystems, we could possibly create a plan for a sustainable human presence on the planet, with a dramatic reduction in consumption and a gradual reduction of population. But when we reflect on our history as a species and the nature of the systems that govern our lives today, the sensible conclusion is that the steps we need to take won't be taken, at least not in the time frame available for meaningful change.

This is not defeatist. This is not cowardly. This is not self-indulgent.

This is reality, and sensible planning should be reality-based.

Let's Not Deny, Avoid, Evade
So, for all the hard-nosed logical folks who regularly complain that so many people in contemporary culture deny, avoid, evade crucial issues; that so many Americans slip past science when that science has bad news; that so many other people won't face tough truths, I have a suggestion: Let's demand of ourselves the rigor we demand of others. Let's not deny, avoid, evade any aspect of reality.

Another way of saying this: The "things-can't-be-that-bad" card that so much of the general public plays to trump difficult data is a dead-end, but so is the "we-have-to-have-hope" card that is used to avoid the logical conclusions of our own analysis.

Hope is for the lazy. Now is not the time for hope. Let's put hope aside and get to the real work of our understanding our historical moment so that our actions are grounded in reality.

My thesis:
Our task today is not to scurry around trying to hold onto the world as we know it, but to focus on how we can hold onto our humanity as we enter a distinctly different era of the human presence on the planet, an era that will challenge our resolve and reserves. Call it collapse or the apocalypse or the Age of Aquarius - whatever the name, it will not look like anything we have known.

It is not just the fall of an empire or a localized plague or the demise of a specific ecosystem. The future will be defined by the continuing drawdown of the ecological capital of the planet well beyond replacement levels and rising levels of toxicity, with the resulting social conflict exacerbated by rapid climate destabilization in ways we cannot predict specifically, but that will be destructive to human well-being, perhaps even to human survival.

The thesis, restated: For most of my life, my elders told me that the moral challenge to my generation was how to feed 5 billion, 6 billion, 7 billion, maybe one day, 10 billion people. Today our moral challenge is how to live on a planet of 4 billion, 3 billion, 2 billion, maybe less. How are we going to understand and experience ourselves as human beings - as moral beings, the kind of creatures we've always claimed to be - in the midst a long-term human die-off for which there is no precedent?

What will it mean to be human when we know that around the world, maybe even down the block, other human beings - creatures exactly the same as us - are dying in large numbers not because of something outside human control, but instead because of things we humans chose to do and keep choosing, keep doing?

If you think this is too extreme, alarmist, hysterical, then tell a different story of the future, one that doesn't depend on magic, one that doesn't include some version of, "We will invent solar panels that give us endless clean energy," or "We will find ways to grow even more food on even less soil with declining natural fertility," or perhaps, "We will invent a perpetual motion machine." If I'm wrong, explain to me where I'm wrong.

But, comes the inevitable rejoinder, even if we can't write that more hopeful story today, can't we trust that such a story will emerge? Is not necessity the mother of invention? Have not humans faced big problems before and found solutions through reason and creativity, in science and technology? Doesn't our success in the past suggest we will overcome problems in the present and future?

That response is understandable, but brings to mind the old joke about the fellow who jumps off a 100-story building and, when asked how things are going 90 floors down, says, "Great so far." Advanced technology based on abundant and cheap supplies of concentrated energy has taken us a long way on a curious ride, but there is no guarantee that advanced technology can solve problems in the future, especially when the most easily accessible sources of that concentrated energy are dwindling and the life-threatening consequences of burning all that fuel are now unavoidable.

Reality-Rejection Stories
Necessity may have been the mother of much invention, but that doesn't mean mother will always be there to protect us. The technological fundamentalist story of transcendence through endless invention is no more helpful than a religious fundamentalist story of transcendence through divine intervention. The two approaches, while very different on the surface, are popular for the same reason: Both allow us to deny, avoid, evade. They are both reality-rejection stories.

Our chances for a decent future depend in part on our ability to develop more sustainable technology that draws on the best of our science and on our ability to hold onto traditional ideas of shared humanity that are at the core of religious traditions. Technology and religion matter. But their fundamentalist versions are impediments to honest assessment and healthy practice.

If one agrees with all this, there is one more common evasive technique - the assertion, as one media researcher recently put it, that "disaster messages can be a turnoff." Since most people don't enjoy pondering these things, it's tempting to argue that we should avoid presenting the questions in stark form, lest some people be turned off. We should not give in to that temptation.

First, these observations and conclusions are a good-faith attempt to deal with reality. To dismiss these issues because people allegedly don't like disaster messages is akin to telling people in the path of a tornado to ignore the weather forecast because disaster messages are a turnoff. Just as we can't predict exactly the path of a tornado, we can't predict exactly the nature of a complex process of collapse. But we can know something is coming our way, and we can best prepare for it.

Second, let's avoid the cheap trick of displacing our intellectual and/or moral weakness onto the so-called "masses," who allegedly can't or won't deal with this. When people tell me, "I agree that systemic collapse is inevitable, but the masses can't handle it," I assume what they really mean is, "I can't handle it." The attempted diversion is cowardly.

When we come to terms with these challenges - when we face up to the fact that the human species now faces problems that likely have no solutions, at least no solutions that allow us to continue living as we have - then we will not be deterred by the resistance of the culture. We will work at accomplishing whatever we can, where we live, in the time available to us. Which brings me to the future: green, red, black and female.

Green:
The human future, if there is to be a future, will be green, meaning the ecological worldview will be central in all discussions of all of human affairs. We will start all conversations about all decisions we make in all arenas of life by recognizing that we are one species in complex ecosystems that make up a single ecosphere. We will abide by the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, as we understand them today, realizing the ecosystems on which we depend are far more complex than we can understand. As a result of the ecological worldview, we will practice real humility in our interventions into those ecosystems.

Red:
The human future, if there is to be a future, will be red. By that, I mean we must be explicitly anticapitalist. An economic system that magnifies human greed and encourages short-term thinking, while pretending there are no physical limits on human consumption, is a death cult. To endorse capitalism is to sign onto a suicide pact. We need not pretend there exists a fully elaborated plan for a replacement system that we can take off the shelf and implement immediately. But the absence of a fully explicated alternative doesn't justify an economic system that has dramatically intensified the human assault on the larger living world. Capitalism is not the system through which we will craft a sustainable future.

Black:
The human future, if there is to be a future, will be black. By that, I mean we have to reject the pathology of white supremacy that has for five centuries shaped the world in which we live, and continues to shape us. Do not confuse this with shallow "multiculturalism" - I am not suggesting that by celebrating "diversity" we will magically create peace and harmony. Instead, we must recognize that the existing distribution of wealth is the product of a profoundly pathological system of racial hierarchy conceived of, and perpetuated by, white Europe and its offshoots (the United States, Australia, South Africa).

Female:
The human future, if there is to be a future, will be female. By that, I mean we have to reject the pathology of patriarchy that has for several thousand years shaped the world in which we live and continues to shape us. Again, this should not be confused with the tepid liberal and "third wave" versions of feminism that the dominant culture acknowledges. Instead, we must embrace a radical feminism that rejects the hierarchy and violence on which male dominance depends.

My claim is that we must deal with all these systems in a holistic, integrated fashion, that we will not successfully reject one hierarchal system without rejecting all hierarchical systems. Holding onto any system that depends on one group claiming dominance over another undermines our ability to shape a decent future. We should be dismantling any system based on dominator logic.


Green:
Our quest to exploit the larger living world is based on an assumption that humans have a right, rooted in either theological or secular beliefs, to dominate based on our sense of being the superior species. Whether we believe the big brain comes from God or through evolution, in cognitive terms we certainly do rank first among species.

But ask yourself, within the human family, is being smart the only thing of value? Do we rank each other only on cognitive ability? We understand that within our species, no one has a right to dominate another simply because of a claim of being smarter. Yet we treat the world as if that status as the smartest species is all that is needed to dominate everything else.

Red:
If we put aside the fantasies about capitalism found in economics textbooks and deal with the real world, we recognize that capitalism is a wealth-concentrating system that allows a small number of people to dominate not only economic, but also political decision-making - which makes a mockery of our alleged commitment to moral principles rooted in solidarity and political principles rooted in democracy. In capitalism, domination is self-justifying - if one can amass wealth, one can dominate without question, trumping all other values.

Black:
Although the worst legal and social practices that defined and maintained white supremacy for centuries have been eliminated, the white world never settled its accounts with the nonwhite world, preferring to hold onto its disproportionate share of the world's wealth that was extracted violently.

As a result of that moral failing, the material reality and ideological power of white supremacy endures, modified in recent decades to grant some privileges to some of the formerly targeted populations so long as the dominator logic of the system is not challenged. We have not dealt with this because to deal with it, honestly, would mean a dramatic redistribution of wealth, internally within societies and globally, and an even more dramatic shift in the way white people see ourselves.

Female:
It is not surprising that the foundational hierarchy of male domination has remained so intractable - to acknowledge the existence of patriarchy is to recognize that patriarchy's domination/subordination dynamic, which decent people claim to reject, is woven deeply into the fabric of all our lives in every sphere, including sexuality. Taking the feminist critique seriously shakes the foundation of our daily lives. Again, the system's ability to allow a limited number of women into elite circles, as long as they accept the dominator logic, does little to undermine patriarchy.

This sketch of a radical politics does not mean that every person must always be involved in organizing on all of these issues, which would be impossible. Nor does this short summary of systems of domination/subordination capture every relevant question. But, for those who claim to be concerned with social justice and ecological sustainability, I would press simple points: Everyone's analysis must take into account all these aspects of our lives; if your analysis does not do that, then your analysis is incomplete; and an incomplete analysis will not be the basis for substantive and meaningful change. Why?

If the story of a human future is not green, there is no future. If the story is not red, it cannot be green. If we can manage to restructure our world along new understandings of ecology and economics, there is a chance we can salvage something. But we will not be able magically to continue business as usual; our longstanding assumption of endlessly expanding bounty must be abandoned as we reconfigure our expectations.

That means we have to start telling a story about living with dramatically less of everything. The green and red story is a story of limits. If we are to hold onto our humanity in an era of contraction, those limits must be accepted by all, with the burdens shared by all. And that story only works if it is black and female. Without a rejection of the dominator logic of ecological exploitation and capitalism, there is no future at all. Without a rejection of the dominator logic of white supremacy and patriarchy, there is no future worth living in.

When someone says, "All that matters now is focusing on ecological sustainability" (asserting the primacy of green), we must make it clear that such sustainability is impossible within capitalism. When someone says, "All that matters now is steady-state economics" (asserting the primacy of red), we must make it clear that such a steady state is morally unacceptable within white supremacy and patriarchy.

When someone says, "Talking about sustainability doesn't mean much for subordinated people suffering today" (asserting the primacy of black and female), we must make it clear that attaining social justice within a rapidly declining system is a death sentence for future generations.

Anytime someone wants to narrow the scope of our inquiry to make it easier to get through the day, we must make it clear that getting through the day isn't the goal. "One day at a time" may be a useful guide for an individual in recovery from addiction, but it is a dead-end for a species on the brink of dramatic and potentially irreversible changes.

Any time someone wants to think long term but narrow the scope of our inquiry to make it easier to tackle a specific problem, we must make it clear that fixing a specific problem won't save us. "One broken system at a time" may be a sensible short-term political strategy in a stable world in which there is time for a long trajectory of change, but it is a dead-end in the unstable world in which we live.

To be clear: None of these observations are an argument for paralysis or passivity. I am not arguing that there is nothing to do, nothing worth doing, nothing that can be done to make things better. I am saying there is nothing that can be done to avoid a serious shift, a scale of change that is captured by the term "collapse." What can be done will be worth doing only if we accept that reality - instead of asking, "How can we save all this?" we should ask, "How can we hold onto our humanity as all of this changes?"

When relieved of the obligation to conjure up magical solutions, life actually gets simpler, and what can be done is easier to apprehend: Learn to live with less. Give up on empty talk about "conscious capitalism." Cross boundaries of race, ethnicity, class and religion that typically keep people apart. Make sure that both public and private spaces are free from men's violence. Recognize that central to whatever projects one undertakes should be the building of local networks and institutions that enhance resilience.

We Have Done This
If all this seems like too much to bear, that's because it is. No matter how flawed anyone of us may be, none of us did anything to deserve this. We shouldn't have to bear all this. But collectively, we humans have done this. We have done this for a long time, thousands of years, ever since the invention of agriculture took us out of right relationship with the larger living world.

The bad news: The effects of our failures are piling up, and it may be that this time around we can't slip the trap, as humans have done so many times in the past.

The good news: We aren't the first humans who looked honestly at reality and stayed true to the work of returning to right relation.

The story we must tell is a prophetic story, and we have a prophetic tradition on which we can draw. Let's take a lesson from Jeremiah from the Hebrew Bible, who was not afraid to speak of the depth of his sorrow: "My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me" (Jer. 8:18). Nor was he afraid to speak of the severity of the failure that brought on the grief: "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved" (Jer. 8:21)

Along with this prophetic tradition, we also must be willing to draw on the apocalyptic tradition, recognizing that we have strayed too far, that there is no way to return to right relation within the systems in which we live.

The prophetic voice warns the people of our failures within these systems, and the apocalyptic tradition can be understood as a call to abandon any hope for those systems. The stories we have told ourselves about how to be human within those systems must be replaced by stories about how to hold onto our humanity as we search for new systems.

We have to reject stories about last-minute miracles, whether of divine or technological origins. There is nothing to be gained by magical thinking. The new stories require imagination, but an imagination bounded by the ecosphere's physical limits. When we tell stories that lead us to believe that what is unreal can be real, then our stories are delusional, not imaginative. They don't help us understand ourselves and our situation, but instead offer only the illusory comfort of false hope.

One last bit of good news: If your heart is sick and your grief is beyond healing, be thankful. When we feel that grief, it means we have confronted a truth about our fallen world. We are not saved, and we may not be able to save ourselves, but when we face that which is too much to bear, we affirm our humanity. When we face the painful reality that there is no hope, it is in that moment that we earn the right to hope.

• Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of Arguing for Our Lives: A User's Guide to Constructive Dialogue (City Lights, 2013); and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out. His many other books can be found here.
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