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Photo Source Sakeeb Sabakka | CC BY 2.0

…We can’t save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change. Everything needs to change and it has to start today….To all the politicians that pretend to take the climate question seriously, to all of you who know but choose to look the other way every day because you seem more frightened of the changes that can prevent the catastrophic climate change than the catastrophic climate change itself… Please treat the crisis as the crisis it is and give us a future.

— Greta Thunberg, 15 year-old climate activist speaking at the Helsinki climate demonstration, October 20, 2018

When I entered my interdisciplinary environmental graduate program, I already had years of work experience behind me as well as a lifetime of informal environmental education. I recognized the grim ecological picture. Some of my professors, however, were quick to admonish, “We can’t be gloom and doom.” Their other refrain was, “We can’t go back.” They offered no evidence for those two prescriptions with regard to the climate and ecological crises, yet their commands were common among environmental scholars. More than a decade later, we face far more dismal prospects for the future of humanity, but we are still loath to truly address them.

Doom and Gloom

In 1972, the Club of Rome, a consortium of scientists, economists, politicians, diplomats, and industrialists, produced a lengthy scientific report entitled Limits to Growth. Their work predicted a collapse of the human population due to our unchecked economic growth and resource depletion. While their estimates were condemned as alarmist and overreaching, independent researchers have updated the report for the 50^thanniversary of the club’s inception, and have largely found that the conclusions from the original still hold.

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Excerpt From “De-growth in the Suburbs, A Radical Urban Imaginary.”

October 24, 2018

EXCERPT FROM “DE-GROWTH IN THE SUBURBS, A RADICAL URBAN IMAGINARY.”

Over the next 4 weeks we will be sharing with you excerpt from Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson’s new book, “Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary”.

This book addresses a central dilemma of the urban age: how to make suburban landscapes sustainable in the face of planetary ecological crisis. The authors argue that degrowth, a planned contraction of overgrown economies, is the most coherent paradigm for suburban renewal. They depart from the anti-suburban sentiment of much environmentalism to show that existing suburbia can be the centre-ground of transition to a new social dispensation based on the principle of enlightened material and energy restraint.

Prelude: The Great Resettlement

This book opens, as it must, by acknowledging that the human species stands at the precipice of self-made destruction. At the very hour when modern humanity arrived at the pinnacle of triumph – a global market economy promising riches for all—the skies have been darkened by the terrible spectres of ecological and social threat. Global warming is only one of these storm clouds, but this alone has the potential to lay waste to our species, as well as most others. At the same time, vast oceans of debilitating poverty surround small islands of unfathomable plenty, exposing the violent betrayal of the growth agenda, euphemistically (or just deceptively) known in public discourse as ‘sustainable development’. This is a race leading towards an abyss, both enabled and entrenched by a sterility of imagination.

The late German scholar Ulrich Beck spoke of how triumph and crisis simultaneously emerge and remerge in a world pervasively and con- tinuously remade by capitalist modernisation.

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The Ecological Crisis is a Political Crisis

September 25, 2018

The Ecological Crisis is a Political Crisis

Protestors holding a sign

Dakota Access Pipeline protestors by John Whathen

With each passing day, reports on global climate change become increasingly bleak. Recent research has affirmed that the glaciers are melting faster than anticipated¹, and that acidification, with its catastrophic effect on ocean ecosystems, is also proceeding faster than feared². As the concentration of atmospheric carbon continues to rise, so does the likelihood we’ve passed the tipping point for irreversible climate change.³

When one looks at other critical earth ecosystems, the danger is equally apparent. Soil is being destroyed.⁴ Fresh water shortages are wracking several continents and leaving billions of people without reliable access to clean drinking water.⁵ Fish stocks are plummeting.⁶ Oceans are clogged with plastic garbage.⁷ Biodiversity is disappearing at an alarming rate.⁸ In the face of this full-spectrum ecological assault, a growing number of scientists have been saying that the collapse of civilization is now unavoidable.⁹

Stopping the destructive effects of industrial, capitalist civilization has now become the defining challenge of our age. If we don’t radically change our society’s course within the next 30 years, then a deep collapse and protracted Dark Age are all but assured. In order to confront this challenge, we need to understand what is causing civilization’s crisis, and most importantly, how the crisis can be resolved. At stake is nothing less than a viable future on this planet.

The Five Horsemen of the Modern Day Apocalypse

In my book, Radical Transformation: Oligarchy, Collapse, and the Crisis of Civilization, I argue that industrial civilization is being driven toward collapse by five key forces – related to terminal dysfunction within its ecological, economic, socio-cultural, and political sub-systems:

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Conservativism Now? Market Economies and the Liberal Anti-Culture

June 19, 2018

Conservativism Now? Market Economies and the Liberal Anti-Culture

The persistent purpose of my writing over the past decade has been to reflect in a hopefully complex manner on the sort of culture necessary to “solve” the climate and ecological crisis and create a truly sustainable way of life.

One of my main themes has been that neither liberalism (nor Liberalism[i] ) is suited to that task, in large part because it is fundamentally growthist, requiring for social stability the “simple requirement,” as Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, of “the enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.” As David Fleming wrote, “starting some three centuries ago, the market economy has, with growing confidence, been the source and framework for a loose and easy-going but effective civil society and social order” (85). Expansion, growth, and the promise of limitless possibility are the foundation of the “effectiveness” mentioned by Fleming. Growth is the social glue that has held liberal industrial societies together, which is one of several connected reasons why we won’t address our relationship to our natural ecology by becoming “more liberal” or “more progressive.” Sustainability, then, is neither liberal nor progressive.

But, one might ask, why so persistent a critique of our liberal friends? After all, they (we) seem the most inclined to pay attention to the environment, and to show care and concern for our connection to nature. One might imagine a story about a contradiction in progressive attitudes, torn between concern and empathy, on the one hand, and growth and prosperity on the other, happily resolved as the empathetic side prevails in the face of growing awareness of the collateral damage of growth and prosperity. Perhaps.

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Austerity and degrowth – dealing with the economic crisis and the ecological crisis together

August 16, 2015

Austerity and degrowth – dealing with the economic crisis and the ecological crisis together

This article arises from increasing frustration and irritation about the way that the debate about Greece, and in general about austerity, is framed. My frustration is not only with the policy thugs who are implementing austerity, but also, to a degree, with their critics – which includes the failure of most of the critics of growth to actually get involved in this controversy and argue their own point of view. There have been attempts, for example by Nicola Hinton of the Post Growth Institute. It seems like a tough one to argue for degrowth in the context of the Greek crisis and as an alternative to austerity – but then all the more reason to try. Otherwise a movement for degrowth will never get out of the university lecture rooms into the real world. It will never become a guide or a narrative for the future of society to be realised in practical and popular politics.

Austerity – elite terrorism against ordinary people

So let’s start by reframing the debate about austerity. When Yanis Varoufakis describes what has happened to Greece as “Fiscal Waterboarding” he is part way in the direction that I mean. His description of austerity as a form of terrorism is also right.

The purpose of austerity is to create insecurity and instill fear in the general population in order to protect the finance and banking sector from popular rage against the crimes the participants of this sector have committed against ordinary people. This rage ought to have given rise a long time ago to legal actions and desperately needed fundamental reforms to take away from bankers the right to create money, a right which they have abused at tremendous cost to ordinary people.

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Ecological Crisis and the Tragedy of the Commodity

July 21, 2015

Ecological Crisis and the Tragedy of the Commodity

We live in an era of ecological crisis, which is a direct result of human actions. Natural scientists have been debating whether the current historical epoch should be called the Anthropocene, in order to mark the period in which human activities became the primary driver of global ecological change.^[1]

Initially, it was proposed that this new epoch, corresponding with the rise of modern capitalist and industrial development, began in the eighteenth century. The growth imperative of capitalism, as well as other sociocultural changes, is a primary factor generating major environmental problems that culminate in ecological crisis.^[2]

It has become increasingly clear that humans face an existential crisis. The environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben explains:

Earth has changed in profound ways, ways that have already taken us out of the sweet spot where humans so long thrived…. The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has—even if we don’t quite know it yet. We imagine we still live back on that old planet, that the disturbances we see around us are the old random and freakish kind. But they’re not. It’s a different place. A different planet…. This is one of those rare moments, the start of a change far larger and more thoroughgoing than anything we can read in the records of man, on a par with the biggest dangers we can read in the records of rock and ice.^[3]

Many modern ecological problems are referred to as a tragedy of the commons, a concept developed by Garrett Hardin in the 1960s to describe the overexploitation or despoliation of natural resources.^[4]We contend that they are actually associated with the tragedy of the commodity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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