From Copenhagen to Port-au-Prince

February 15, 2010

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

This is the story of two very different cities. One is a city whose past is steeped in historic achievement, and recent failure. The other is a city whose horrific past has gotten desperately worse, but whose future… well, who knows? Though world’s apart, these places embody a common metaphor for an elusive global possibility.

City of the past: Copenhagen

Copenhagen — the very name is now shorthand for failure. In light of the horrific events in Haiti over these past few weeks, the tragi-comic venture of the climate change conference in December seems so yesterday. But Copenhagen offers enduring lessons.

As I wrote in The Tyee as the conference was getting started, it was doomed from the start, its fate sealed by the competitive statist logic of the “lowest common denominator.” In global negotiations, self-interested governments protect their home advantage, seemingly unable even to conceive of a collective global future.

And so Copenhagen became a theatre of outdated statecraft swirling in the thrall of a vampire global economy. It was the scene of a slow-mo planetary crime, grey and bureaucratic in its execution, but criminal nonetheless.

In the frenzied, last ditch, head-of-state negotiations that produced the pathetic Copenhagen Accord, those “inside the room” point the finger of failure at China. What happened there forebodes a dangerous future. China wanted no targets, and no constraints on its future growth. In the words of one observer, China “didn’t need a deal.”

After all, with Western consumers hooked on cheap Chinese goods and Western banks propped up by China’s boundless investments, and with the dissenting voices of China’s own citizens blanketed by suppression, China had the best of both worlds — authoritarian capitalism. Western governments were more committed to a deal, but the real difference was marginal.

My opposition was to the diversions that an inevitably half -baked (no, quarter-baked) treaty would produce: more years of trying to get parties to sign on and ratify an empty agreement, more bargaining over paper goals, more arguments over the implications (and legitimacy) of the science, more demands for meaningful targets, and increasing frustration as flawed carbon-trading schemes funneled billions of dollars into the stock market and small change for the planet.

Instead, I argued for shifting our energies from mandating ineffective treaty constraints to addressing the urgent and real imperative of getting on with the task of “eco-conversion.” For our trajectory of economic growth has generated a host of problems besides climate change, from biodiversity loss to fisheries collapse. We have a “system failure” here. But as to how we might co-operatively put our shoulders to the wheel of real historical change, there is silence.

More instructive than the battle of Copenhagen was the venue. Here is a richly livable city whose carbon emissions since 1990 went down by some 25 per cent while the rest of the world’s went up by 29 per cent. There are some 350 kilometres of bicycle tracks; 55 per cent of its residents cycling to work and school. It was one of the first cities in the world to launch the free public “city bike,” and it has 110 racks around the city. It holds the world record in level of organic food consumption. Ninety per cent of construction waste is recycled. The list goes on.

These are unimaginable “targets” (let alone realities) for the rest of us even for 2020. And these achievements were a specific response in a specific place. But they could only happen where a citizenry could actually debate its future, and act.

I am reminded of a metaphor coined by the French philosopher Michel Serres. In his book The Natural Contract, Serres describes a clash of two giants, their swords flashing in combat, spectators all around, everyone urging on their champion. Combatants and spectators alike, however, pay no attention to the ground on which they are standing. It is quicksand, and all are sinking out of sight.

Serres’ ecological metaphor characterizes the fractious, decades-long, global negotiation process. For the spectator/activists, it is time (to use another metaphor) to change the channel. The energies being expended in spectacular swordplay are needed elsewhere, in doing the real work. To talk about that entails a much bigger conversation, and much greater possibilities.

City of the future

Within weeks of the din subsiding in Copenhagen, catastrophe struck across the Atlantic in Port-au-Prince. As hundreds of thousands of residents struggle to survive, Copenhagen seems like a distant indulgence.

And unlike Copenhagen, where the rest of the world snoozed, the stories and images from Port-au-Prince mobilized the world in an outpouring of global sympathy (in its true meaning of feeling as one with the other) and collective action. And now there is talk of re-building — but not as if any sympathetic soul could want to “re-build” what was there before.

But if not that, what? And who will say?

Haiti is an infinitely complex place and it is dangerous for outsiders to wade in with easy generalizations. But Haiti does not exist in some other universe; it exists in its relationships, and the shape of Haiti’s future will depend on how the world thinks about, and acts on, these relationships.

For a privileged society like ours, the historical horrors inflicted on Haiti from the outside through centuries of enslavement, military conquest, mass murder, social and environmental exploitation, and political oppression are literally incomprehensible. Haiti’s centuries long plight follows from its grand acts of refusal to colonial enslavement, beginning with its initially successful ousting of its French colonizers in 1794. (For an eye-opening historical perspective of what Haitians have endured, and what they face in their rebuilding, read Andrew Floods short People’s History of Haiti.

In recent years, the names of Haiti’s U.S.-supported dictators, Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, and that of its murderous death squad, the Tonton Macoutes, are synonymous with vicious power.

This past is cause for concern as the very governments whose vision failed the globe in Copenhagen in December are the ones long implicated in Haiti’s historical plight, from Spain and France to, most recently, the United States. Past colonial states are now positioning themselves as the “Friends of Haiti” who will manage its future.

And, admirably, many have agreed to cancel Haiti’s foreign debt. But in looking to the future, their vision will undoubtedly be more about the “re” than about the “building.” It is all that they know. Copenahagen redux.

And the future is…

Stuck in the quicksand, it is not easy to recognize the “false necessity” that has ensnared our planetary future in the supposedly intractable dictates of the past. To liberate Haiti from its life as a forgotten orphan of exploitation and oppression, and now disaster, will be a Heruclean task. So too will it be to get the industrialized world to pull back the throttle of planetary destruction.

But what if we, ironically, put the two problems together (and they are in fact bred of common parentage) to embrace in Haiti (and beyond) not a “re-building” but a new project of construction that reflects the needs of the future and not the dictates of the past? Could there be promise for Port-au-Prince? Such an effort would be a meaningful legacy, a veritable phoenix out of the ashes of unfathomable loss.

But it would demand that today’s sympathy evolve into a global solidarity for a creative future that completely eluded the world at Copenhagen.

Social activists and eco-visionaries are repeatedly warned of the need to go slow, to make incremental steps, to work within the totalizing frame of our economic mythos, to make sure that proposals can safely bring industry and government and the middle class along. With resource conflicts increasingly central to future growth, the impulse of this false necessity now works overtime in colonizing the world’s environmental groups (it certainly pervades ours at home) and social justice movements. It has already long colonized our political process, and its media.

But the people of Port-au-Prince aren’t trapped by such middle class caution. They understand fully the false promises of a one-sided economic ideology, and the oppressions it brings. That city is home to a huge diversity of active (and persecuted) grassroots social movements. And with its physical infrastructure crushed, the whole place must start anew in any event.

Just the other day, it was reported that out of the rubble of an education system, the talk is not just to rebuild but to “begin over again” and create a revolution (The Globe and Mail, Feb. 3, A12).

Of course, one hesitates to prescribe a future for someone and some place far away, lest the inheritance of colonialism reappear in a green new garb. But others aren’t waiting. A lot of tailors are already at work, and history tells us that the clothing that the “friends” of Haiti will provide will be obediently stitched from old fabric and tracing the only pattern they know — one-size-fits-all. If they follow what Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine,” they will impose once again the same old neo-liberal institutions and processes that were on trial in Copenhagen, and failed.

For Haiti to escape this fate, it needs allies in a new approach, and eco-conversion that is built from the bottom up at ground zero. And it would only be the start.

Rebuilding Haiti: This Time Green (An Eco-Conversion Manifesto)

Haiti’s “friends” now talk about re-building. But their colonial history in Haiti, and their failure at Copenhagen, should give us pause.

Their default position is to rebuild the country to be competitive in the neo-liberal economy. Its advantage is cheap labour and access to a big regional market. So, retool the country and offer good terms and security, and that should attract capital and investment. This is the growth model that sunk Copenhagen.

After we have sent our money to Haiti relief, and the pictures recede, what then? Do we just leave it to the same folks to rebuild the same old economy-as-usual? Is there a better way forward?

This is the challenge of eco-conversion. It is a new vision for Haiti, and beyond. But it confronts a trajectory of globalizing state and corporate power, and it will require new historical forces to make it real and give it momentum.

Port-au-Prince Vert

Many such forces exist on the margins of power — in local and regional governments, small businesses and rural communities, farmers and workers, and the world’s diverse social movements. Although in an inchoate form, this is where one finds the new social movement for a globalization from below.

Its project of re-grounding power may seem unrealistic. But it is backed by a new protagonist — the planet itself. As in Serres’ metaphor of the unnoticed quicksand on which the combatants are fighting, and in which all are sinking, the planet is increasingly assertive, relentless, unconquerable and unforgiving.

The entry of this protagonist is a game changer, and we must learn its rules. This is the commonality of Copenhagen and Port-au-Prince.

Haiti is notoriously undemocratic. But so too is a global treaty process where elite state bureaucrats and lobbyists in backrooms carve out a deal between states, not peoples. When important economic issues are at stake, negotiators must be shielded from the people by fences, barbed wire, and phalanxes of truncheon-wielding troops. (Haitians know these troops well.) When politicians emerge into the daylight, their job is to mute broad democratic hopes, and satisfy powerful economic demands.

This is globalization from above. But where democracy is marginalized, so too is economic and social innovation. Haitians and climate activists contend with the same linear model : Exploit from afar and as cheaply as possible to fuel growth at home. There is, we are assured, no other model.

This is the top-down model that the Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith, rebelled against over 200 years ago. The targets of his criticism were big state-chartered trading companies that squelched the potential of small businesses. Smith sought to liberate them with his “free” market. British policies to secure external trade reinforced this corporatist control — and provoked America’s revolution. Smith’s small market triumphed, but as it evolved, it became today’s big one.

Local matters

An eco-conversion revolution shares similarities with Smith’s and America’s revolutions. It demands a new way of thinking, an economy of, by and for the people, and a re-definition of the state. That’s a tall order, but it is also the nature of history. People only appreciate revolutions in hindsight.

So how might one start to implement a new model? Well, in Haiti, those who invest their time and money and expertise would not seek to withdraw big profits or exploit cheap labour, not extract cheap resources or acquire new resort properties for a song. Instead, beyond a fair return, investments would be re-invested in the place and people themselves.

This is the core of eco-conversion as a global strategy—developing a process that can redirect the wealth that has been built up in our extractive linear growth systems into the creation of new circular economic systems. In linear systems, wealth comes from unequal trade, from distant resources and cheap products, and the disposal of wastes somewhere away. In circular systems, wealth is generated and recycled locally, with resources provided and benefits returned from where they came. Only one of these systems is sustainable.

In this transition, we can give humanity an escape route into a workable future. Indeed, the world can extract one thing from Port-au-Prince — lessons in how to do it.

Local practice

Let me give some specific examples. Consider health, probably the key component of real wealth. One of the conditions to create health is good food. In Haiti, eco-conversion would dramatically promote the ability of local communities to produce fresh foods and markets for their own consumption. But Northerners also need such good local foods to combat the growing epidemic of the illnesses of affluence, from strokes to diabetes. Inadequate, poor or bad foods erode the physical wealth (the health) in both places.

In Haiti, the need is obvious. But in the North, our dependence on fast foods and agri-business industries allows them to extract both profits and health. We then make huge payments to medical providers and big Pharma that drain massive health care budgets.

In both places, investing in healthy communities also means displacing unhealthy industries. And there is a big lesson here. Contrary to conventional wisdom, redirecting investments can create healthier and wealthier communities by reducing economic activity. Now that’s a Smithian revolution appropriate to our times.

So take another example in, say, transit, and the need to move from private to public infrastructure by creating high-quality and energy-efficient public systems, car-freed cities, and livable neighbourhoods. Places where healthy residents can safely walk or bike or tram to work; like Copenhagen, a very livable place.

Such an urban vision would certainly suit any poor, traffic-congested Southern city from Jakarta to Port-au-Prince. It would save global resources big time. But Northerners, people like you and me, would also benefit by saving on average $10,000 per year — the cost to buy, maintain, insure and park a single private vehicle. That’s paying less money for a better place to live.

Wildly idealistic? Not

In 1999, Enrique Penalosa was elected mayor of the murder-ridden, traffic-choked, impoverished city of Bogota, Colombia. As he took office, international development agencies demanded that he spend a billion dollars on new freeways. He refused. Instead, he put restrictions on car use, built a state-of-the-art bus system, the Trans Milenio, plus 70 miles of bike routes, 1,200 parks, the largest pedestrian-only street in the world, restrictions on car use, and more.

The eco-conversion of Bogota has seen the murder rate plummet, and the city’s sociability skyrocket. It works for the poor, and it works for the rich. And it was driven not by the constraints of climate targets, though undoubtedly Bogota achieved many.

And it all cost less.

Just conversion

Copenhagen was a downbeat spectacle for those of us watching from afar. But two images repeatedly showed up on the news that made me smile. They were two placards that read: “Change the system, not the climate” and “Climate justice”.

These phrases are not about the industrializing nations who demand that “you rich countries had your turn; now it’s our”. That’s the old model, and it’s an impossible vision. Instead, they point to a system rooted in natural limits and social justice. Today, inequity is actually needed because it drives growth. Remember the mantra of globalization where “a rising tide lifts all boats”, luxury liner and broken skiff alike? Only if we’re all on the way up, can inequity be ignored.

To get past this contradiction, climate justice means giving all citizens meaningful access to land, to capital, to education and economic opportunity, and to the democratic accountability to see that it works.

Thus would Haitians, not foreigners, do the rebuilding, learning the skills that will benefit those who live there. This entails an emphasis on small-scale production for local use and enjoyment, on land that is available to be widely and fairly owned. Wealth creation would increasingly come from the recirculation of capital locally. This is a model of balance, circular exchange systems providing the foundation upon which new forms of export could be carefully built.

This approach runs counter to decades of growth-driven globalization. But it works. Several years ago the Nobel Peace Prize was bestowed on the highly successful micro-lending innovator, the Grameen Bank in India. This year, the Nobel Prize in Economics went to Elinor Ostrom for her work in showing just how such a commons economy operates.

Revitalizing the commons (and it is a basic part of eco-conversion) would draw on a plethora of global initiatives, from local currencies to worker co-operatives. Liberating such techniques would, unlike Copenhagen, generate real global dialogue and learning from all directions — North to South, South to North, South to South. This is Port-au-Prince not as a victim but as a participant.

Wealth costs

In today’s numbers-oriented, GDP-obsessed world, Westerners have come to equate wealth with money. Wealth comes from a rising stock market; forget what those listed companies actually do. Rising incomes depend on increasing productivity; never mind that a productive (mechanized) factory is also a high-energy one.

But in reality, wealth has real costs. There is indeed no free lunch. But we think there is when we let the real world drop out of sight. As we should have learned from the recent bubble, watch out when financial wealth gets detached from the real economy of land and labour, physical infrastructure and technology.

But what do we think when we see a cheap flight to London? It’s only $349! Do we consider the real costs, that we will use the same amount of fuel, and generate the same impacts? No, to cut carbon emissions, you have to cut flights, and certainly not increase them by making them “cheap.”

The 2008-09 recession saw the first drop in CO2 emissions in decades for a good reason — there was less financial economic activity going on, generating fewer real costs. Now in 2010, the fallacy of costless wealth pervades the stimulus spending on highways and bridges and airports that keeps today’s economy afloat. Building this infrastructure and keeping it going will demand continuous new flows of energy, minerals, labour and money.

The free money fallacy becomes outright delusional with the dream of green growth powered by “clean” energy. Some energy is certainly cleaner than others, but there is no clean way to harness energy. A green economy is a low energy economy. The truth is that we are running out of space for unreal wealth.

Haitians’ impoverished history has taught them to know the real value of things. If someone pulls a nail out to salvage an old board, chances are that they will recycle the nail as well. Our grandparents better appreciated real costs, and they had a level of respect that has almost disappeared from our big money culture. As limited as our recycling systems may be, and as incipient as may be the bike to work week, their successes come from the vestigial remains of this cultural knowledge, and a subtle impulse to get it back.

In short, eco-conversion is about creating a new steady state economy that marries reduced resource flows with increased social benefits. Now what’s an economy for?

The 100-mile economy

Everybody now knows about the 100 Mile Diet that the Tyee series brought to popular attention. This diet is an example of what geographers have long identified as the tension between space and place. Wealth in the north today comes from across such vast space that our dinner that travels 2,000 kilometres from “gate to plate” is essentially placeless. We don’t see the sprawling factory farm at the far end, and have become numbed to the brute urbanism of the supermarket strip mall at our end. And never mind all the truck stops in between.

This triumph of space over place has created what urbanist James Kunstler calls the “geography of nowhere.” To conquer the momentum of growth we must reclaim our somewheres. And to do so we must come full circle by revitalizing place against space, the 100-mile economy over the 1,000-mile, small markets over big, the community over the corporation, democracy over statism.

Such a project was most definitely not on the agenda of Copenhagen. And we will never be able to put it there. We must do it ourselves. When do we start? Where? Why not a green Haiti? Why not a Port-au-Prince Vert? Why not here, there and everywhere? We cannot afford to wait.

Already, practical lessons are everywhere — in the people-centered transportation networks in Curitiba, Brazil and Bogota, Colombia, in the fair trade regimes in Mexico and the co-operative businesses in Bologna, in the permaculture and slow food movements in Australia and Italy and the urban farming experiences in the cities of Cuba. The list is endless.

But to escape from the one-sided, de facto constitution of globalization-from-above, eco-conversion points to a new constitution, one rooted in a diversity of local places, connected across global space but not dominated by it. This is the balanced constitution of what might be called networked localism.

To bring power down to earth will take a vigorous global movement for planet justice. What better place in which to begin to heal a ravaged earth than at the site of its most open and festering sore? Image Removed


Tags: Building Community, Culture & Behavior, Media & Communications