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Amy Goodman at the “Global Triple Crisis” teach-in (Korten & Shiva)
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now
The International Forum on Globalization and Institute for Policy Studies is hosting a three day teach-in this weekend titled “Confronting the Global Triple Crisis: Climate Change, Peak Oil (The End of Cheap Energy) and Global Resource Depletion & Extinction.”
We speak with, among others, David Korten – publisher of the magazine YES! A Journal of Positive Futures and author of “The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.”
…DAVID KORTEN: … the basic theme of the conference, that we humans have come up at a defining moment in our experience, in which we’re confronting the limits of the ecosystem at a time when we are in a condition of extreme inequality between the rich and the poor, and we’re dependent on an economic infrastructure that, in turn, depends on the assumption of everlasting cheap oil. Now, we’ve essentially come up to the limits.
…JUAN GONZALEZ: …You talk about the prosperity narrative and how the prosperity narrative distorts the reality of what’s happening with global warming. Could you talk about that?
DAVID KORTEN: Yes. Part of breaking out of this, breaking out of what I call the cultural trance of empire, is to recognize the stories, essentially the lies, that the system feeds us to keep us locked into this trance. And the key in the empire prosperity story is the idea that money is wealth, that economic growth is the key to prosperity, that when people are making money, they are creating wealth, and the idea that inequality is essential to growth because the rich people have the money to invest, and so we should honor rich people, we should welcome inequality, because in the end it makes us all better off. Now, we’re seeing that play out, of course, in the corporations now, you know: we’re benevolent, and so forth.
But the thing that — you know, I spent thirty years of my life working on third world development, on the effort to end poverty in low-income countries. And it took me a long time, but I finally came to realize that mostly what economic growth is about is rich people expropriating the resources of poor people to turn them into the garbage of the consumer system in an accelerating rate in order to make money, which increases the power of people who — for people who already have more than they need.
…AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva, talk about how this plays out on the ground in places like, well, your home country, India.
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, the triple crisis is really seriously converging on India, India being one of the preferred spots for outsourcing of all the pollution and energy-intensive production of the world. We hear of outsourcing of jobs in the information technology sector. We don’t often enough hear about the outsourcing of pollution to the third world, the resource-intensive, resource-hungry industry like steel and iron and aluminum and automobile manufacture. India now is going to be the home of making cheap cars for the rest of the world. But every car then requires land, which is grabbed from tribals, peasants. It requires aluminum and steel, which needs to be mined. It requires coal, which needs to be mined.
(14 September 2007)
10 things we can do: Rebuilding civil society
David Roberts, Gristmill
It’s not that individuals can’t do anything about climate — they just can’t do it by themselves
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I’ve been thinking about this debate over voluntary individual action and its place in the larger fight for sustainability (see here, here, and here). It’s missing something.
A huge gulf has developed in America between public and private life. This has put green activism — all of progressivism, actually — on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, private life has become all but coextensive with consumerism — what we choose to buy. Shifting consumer dollars around isn’t a sufficient solution to any substantial problem. On the other hand, the levers that control the state are out of reach of the average citizen, even in a democracy. Most people are no longer accustomed to being actively involved in self-government.
To tackle environmental problems, we know we need governments to make big changes, but it’s difficult to tell individuals what they should do about that. (Call their representatives? Vote? Then what?) We know individual changes will never add up to the societal shift we need, yet individual changes tend to be the ones that motivate, you know, individuals. We’re reduced to hoping that small, ultimately ineffectual personal changes will open hearts and minds, leading to … something.
Neither position is satisfying. What’s missing is the middle ground, the space that used to mediate between private individuals and states. I’m talking about civil society: church groups, NGOs, professional associations, unions, affinity groups, etc.
It is in civil society that action can be personal but not private. It can leverage large numbers of people but still be individually meaningful.
(13 September 2007)
The power of voluntary actions
22 social scientists, Gristmill
The following is a guest essay in response to Mike Tidwell’s recent piece on Grist, “Consider using the N-word less.” It is signed by a collection of social scientists, mostly psychologists. Their names are listed at the bottom.
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We agree that institutional and policy changes are needed in addition to personal behavior changes, and that some pro-environmental behaviors being promoted aren’t the ones that have the most impact. Unfortunately, Tidwell implies that voluntary behavior change and policy change are mutually exclusive options, and that the only personal behavior that matters for the environment is political action.
We strongly disagree, and we were surprised to see this argument featured so prominently in Grist, which normally supports voluntary behavior change through helpful columns such as Ask Umbra. To fight global warming, individual and institutional behavior change is needed, whether the change is produced by voluntary action or mandated by legislation.
Dismissing the importance of small personal behavior choices in favor of a sole focus on policy changes is a big mistake.
(13 September 2007)
Can this really save the planet?
George Marshall, Guardian
We are constantly told to switch the TV off standby, recycle our plastic bags and boil less water – but does focusing on the small, easy steps distract us from the bigger picture.
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Why is everyone so keen to believe that tiny actions can prevent climate change? We are given easy household tips by campaigners and the government that will help “save the climate”. You know the kind of thing – recycle your plastic bags, turn your telly off standby, bring your own cup to work. There is usually a little clutch of them attached to the latest grim news about climate change: it’s not all bad news, they plead, you can take these simple steps today and they really do “make a difference”.
But do they? Take the plastic bags, for example. We are pestered to re-use them or use designer “bags for life” instead. People get very worked up about this topic. There are eight online petitions on the No 10 website calling for them to be banned or taxed, Ireland has imposed a special bag tax, and a town in Devon has banned them outright.
Yes, they are ugly, wasteful and deadly to turtles. But their contribution to climate change is miniscule. The average Brit uses 134 plastic bags a year, resulting in just two kilos of the typical 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide he or she will emit in a year. That is one five thousandth of their overall climate impact.
…Governments and businesses are, if anything, even more prone to tokenistic behaviour than individuals. Encouraging small voluntary actions by the public, customers or staff looks good and is much safer than passing restrictive legislation or rethinking your entire business model.
So what we need is a sense of proportion. The great advantage that climate change has over other pressing issues is that the gases that cause it can be measured down to the last gram. People can make informed decisions in the knowledge that, say, a return flight to Australia will have the same climate-change impact as 730,000 plastic bags or 176,000 overfilled kettles.
We also need to rethink the way we talk about climate change. It is insulting to assume that people can only be energised with the pint-sized options. We need to present all lifestyle changes as part of a radical vision for a smart, healthy and just 21st century. And let’s be clear that voluntary action will never be enough – we will need radical political, economic and social change. So let’s start by doing away with that wretched phrase “you can save the planet”
George Marshall is the founder and director of projects at the Climate Outreach and Information Network (coinet.org.uk). Read Bibi van der Zee’s response to this article at blogs.guardian.co.uk/ethicalliving
(13 September 2007)
Don’t Just Be the Change, Mass-Produce It
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
“If our world is really looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?” asked an email I got recently.
I know the standard answer: Be the change.
This motto — shorthand for Gandhi’s instruction that “We must be the change we wish to see in the world” — has become ubiquitous. And while a sensible person will appreciate the essential wisdom behind Gandhi’s words, in the context of sustainability, this shorthand has become associated as well with another idea: that the being the change is a lifestyle choice.
In this context, Be the change in fact usually means Buy the change. It means living a standard consumerist lifestyle, but varying the products one consumes to include “green” clothes, cars and furniture… or at best going without a few things you didn’t need anyways.
…I am not really in the business of giving individuals advice. But it does seem to me that there is one step which applies to everyone: Dream big. Dream about living your one-planet life in a bright green city on a sustainable and thriving planet, and dream about it in the near term.
In dreams begin responsibility, as the man said. I think that vision places on us a burden, that to be able to see the gap between the world as it is and the world as it must become is to be tasked with trying to imagine ways of bridging that gap. But in dreams also begin transformation: having imagined a better future, we gain the ability to work towards designing, building and spreading it.
We don’t need more people living marginally greener lifestyles. We need thousands of people, millions of people, swarming out of their lifestyles and leading worldchanging lives: practicing strategic consumption, sure, but also inventing new answers, changing their companies (or quitting their jobs and starting better companies), running for office, writing books and shooting films, teaching, protesting, investing in change, mobilizing their communities, redesigning their cities, getting up off the couch and going to the meeting, and in every other way making it happen. It is time to live as though the day has come, because it has: tomorrow is too late. One planet, three decades.
Put another way: Don’t just be the change, mass-produce it.
(12 September 2007)
Some comments at Gristmill
