Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-An open letter to David Cameron’s parents
-Why we need to stop trying to ‘save the planet’ and just realise our place in it
-New Zealand quake: Christchurch ‘to be garden city’
-Riots are no reason to surrender our rights
-Shopocalypse Now
-The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom
-Can the Aftermath of Disaster Be Beautiful?
My title is ambitious and ambiguous: revolution and resistance (which tend to be associated with left politics), revelation and redemption (typically associated with right-wing religion), all framed by a warning about ecological collapse. My goal is to connect these concepts to support an argument for a radical political theology — let me add to the ambiguity here — that can help us claim our power at the moment when we are more powerless than ever, and identify the sources of hope when there is no hope.
The new book GWR: The Global Warming Reader leaves a reader wondering why, given the evidence, there’s not a robust movement to replace the causes of the warming. But the situation is unlike any other that’s arisen, and our historical models of resistance or mobilization may mislead us. Many of these differences are painfully apparent to those trying to build a movement; in the aggregate they are daunting and suggest the need for some additional tactics, including a kind of initiation.
There is a way in which The Tea Party’s uncompromising stance does make sense. Perhaps they are willing to crash the economy not just or only out of ignorance of basic economics—or basic economics as, importantly, it is articulated by liberal academic economists and Wall Street analysts alike. Perhaps they see this crisis as an opportunity to make their stand against a system that cannot continue along its current path. The path to a sustainable future, they seem to suggest, will involve some changes to our expectations about what we deserve and what we can expect.
Most people hardly noticed, but the recent Spanish elections have been troubled by a series of demonstrations. A relatively high number of demonstrators have gathered in major Spanish cities during the months of May and June, demanding radical but curiously unspecific changes in Spanish politics. There have been similar protests in Portugal and in Greece, all of them about the austerity measures taken in those countries in response to the debt crisis. Of course, the French far left has seen in these protests the premises of the revolution it has been waiting for throughout the last fifty years, but what strikes me most about those protests is their pointlessness and their conservative nature. In that, they may well be representative of the political climate of the early decades of energy descent.
Republicans have created a political crisis by refusing to raise the nation’s debt ceiling unless they achieve their priorities of dramatically reducing government spending—primarily on social programs.
A larger context is the fact that the U.S. is still reeling from an epic credit crunch. …
The even bigger, and most important, context is that we are entering a new historic era. … Economic growth—fueled during past decades by cheap energy and raw materials, but also made possible by a stable climate—is coming to an end.
For centuries, the arbitrary use of power by the state against dissidents has been a key threat to freedom. More recently, the concentrated wealth of corporations has emerged as a major impediment to democracy. When those two centers of power decide to come after people, not only do the individuals suffer, but freedom and democracy take a beating. In his debut book, Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement under Siege, independent journalist Will Potter details one such assault on freedom and democracy, the targeting of environmental and animal-rights activists.
At last count there were at least a dozen mega dangers looming on the horizon all of which have the potential to change the nature of global civilization in profound ways. Yet the body politic seems to take little or no notice and concerns itself largely with issues that will soon be swept away by change. These dangers range from the depletion of our fossil fuel and mineral resources, to shrinking food and water supplies, to rising oceans, to political upheavals.
Non-violent direct action is not the most glamorous occupation in the world. Unpaid overtime, long hours, maligned by a biased mainstream media, widely misunderstood by the middle classes and opposed by a heavy state apparatus, who could be blamed for thinking environmental activism to be a mugs game. But when the audience at a London preview of “Just Do It: A Tale of Modern Day Outlaws” was asked if they had been inspired to take up direct action after watching the film, many hands waved in the air.
We will be organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion. There will be less of a lot of things we have come to take for granted (energy and natural resources) and more of other things we’ve been hiding under the rug for a long time (toxic residue and environmental disruption).
That less/more reality in the physical world will no doubt have an effect on our political/economic/social worlds. It may well be that the liberal tolerance that has been hard-won by subordinated groups will evaporate rather quickly with intensified competition to acquire energy resources and avoid toxic disruptions. A willingness to share power and wealth during times of abundance doesn’t automatically endure in times of scarcity. Scapegoating, a time-honored tactic, is especially useful during hard times.
In Follett’s book, you see the hard lives of the Welsh coal miners, the English servants and the Russian peasants. And you see the rulers declaring war, losing millions of lives — usually poor people’s lives. And, of course, as in Victorian novels, the poor people often seem to have more character than the rich.
… It’s not enough to bemoan the decline of democracy or complain about the accumulation of wealth at the top — we need to act. What we learn in Follett’s book is what many of us have learned from experience: There’s nothing so exhilarating or fulfilling as joining with others to fight for what you believe in.
A chart in the World Economic Forum’s “Global Risks 2011” sets out all the risks they see in the world on a matrix which positions the various risks by their perceived impact on the global economy and by the perceived likelihood of their happening. What you might expect to be at the top, given recent media reports, would be the threat of terrorism or perhaps some hideous computer virus that knocks out nuclear power station. But no. There at the top, leading the pack, are climate change, ‘extreme energy price volatility’ and fiscal crises.
