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Blah, blah, blah, yay: Another epic fail for the COP, but seeds of growth for our movements

December 2, 2021

Blah, blah, blah, yay: Another epic fail for the COP, but seeds of growth for our movements

Introduction

As COP 26 began, Greta Thunberg summed up the whole thing quite succinctly using just one word, three times:  Blah blah blah.

And as it ended two weeks later, she tweeted:

The #COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, blah, blah. But the real work continues outside these halls. And we will never give up, ever [emphasis added].

And indeed, COP 26 was an epic fail, even by the dismal standards of the 25 COPs that preceded it, but at the same time, the global climate justice movement made some much needed forward progress.

COP26

Source:  Flickr

Why this COP was an epic fail

The process leading up to the COP was a blatant act of climate injustice

Starting with the process leading up till COP 26, we might well ask why was it held at all, under the conditions of COVID?

Large numbers of delegates and civil society, in its attempts to presence the world’s people, could not get to this summit, and this is beyond the usual exclusiveness of all COPs due to ordinary people and activists not having the means to travel, to be lodged, to miss work and income, and so on.  This was built in by the ineptitude and lack of sincerity of the UK hosts, who had promised to make vaccines and entry requirements doable for those who wished to attend.  So this can be called the COVID COP, to connect two of the many global crises that beset us.

Or we might call it the apartheid COP, to connect the climate crisis to the existing cultures of violence the world suffers, from local policing to national-level militarism (both led by the U.S., of course, the undisputed world number one in military spending and murderous police forces).

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Finding Pathways to a Better Future

December 14, 2017

Finding Pathways to a Better Future

Part 1:  Where Have We Been?

Unlike other ecosocialists, I have long argued that the path to radical social transformation called for the formation of the most inventive social movement the world has ever seen.  But as a scholar of twentieth-century revolutions and twenty-first century movements for radical social change, I have started to come around to the idea that the urgency of the crisis in which we find ourselves, and the lack of adequate action on all sides (myself very much included) means that we need to consider the necessity of imagining something akin to a new kind of party.  What if we rejected the binary between movement and party, elections and direct action, acted upon the urgency of the mandate for thinking in new ways, and embraced a creative synthesis of the two?  This essay will explore our predicament and the prospects for ways out of it along these lines.

The world as we know it is crashing around us.  The signs are evident, and they are everywhere:  intense, extreme storms, floods, drought, heat, rain, fire, and winds – nothing is as it was.  Politicians don’t know what to do, and the actions of so many of them seem downright cruel, vacuous, or incompetent.  The devastation of war, military operations, policing, lethal drones, and physical attacks roll over populations entirely innocent of any crime.  The slow grind of debt, privation, and daily exploitation wears on more than half of Earth’s human inhabitants.  Non-human creatures are dying out in record numbers as Earth’s systems are polluted, contaminated, and wracked by the endless extraction of fossil fuels, minerals, and the loss of healthy soil and water.

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Sleepwalking is a Death Sentence for Humanity

October 3, 2017

Sleepwalking is a Death Sentence for Humanity

Manifesto for a Sociology of the Climate Crisis and of Climate Justice

Ed. note: The following is Chapter 14 of the new book: Cimate Futures:  Re-imagining Global Climate Justice, edited by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya Kurian, and Debashish Munshi (Berkeley:  UC Press/Luminos)

Many intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities do not concede that Earth scientists have anything to say that could impinge on their understanding of the world, because the “world” consists only of humans engaging with humans, with nature no more than a passive backdrop to draw on as we please.– Clive Hamilton (2017)

New realities have always called for new paradigms, and sociology – the study of how societies are structured by inequalities and how they might change – is built on the foundational work of giants like Karl Marx and Max Weber, who grappled with explaining the rise, functioning, and possible future of capitalism as it burst onto the scene in the nineteenth century. The most original and critical works of 20th-century sociology did a decent job of keeping up with the great changes that followed: corporate control of the global economy, the great social revolutions and other attempts to make societies fairer and more just, the rise of social movements demanding rights for women, for people of color, for gendered others, for all humans’ rights generally, and now humans’ responsibilities toward animals, the planet, and the very future we hope to have.

But even while doing so, much of the discipline lost its critical punch, and nowhere has this been so dramatic and fateful as in the inattention of both mainstream and critical sociologists alike to issues of environmental and climate-induced destruction as the 21st century has rolled into being, and as their effects have inexorably become inescapable realities.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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