This is part 8 of A Climate Counternarrative.
The green movement’s calls for less exploitation of the natural world and more social justice are just as perplexing as the technical solutions.
The degrowth and doughnut crowds, for instance, make valid points about natural limits. But then, they invite producers and consumers to fit inside of those instead of pushing them out. Holistic management enables land stewards to do the latter. It yields less than top down management for a given yield, but more abundance overall. Essentially, it revolves around function stacking and reducing input and waste, instead of single-purpose cogs to maximize output. This promotes autonomy, resilience, and lower energy use as side-effects. Scarcity is not inevitable. It is a choice.
These economic solutions make more sense when you remark that human societies mirror their food systems. Tribespeople hunt animals that freely roam lush landscapes. “Developed" societies prefer to live in concentrated animal feeding operations. Going by China’s automated, multi-story pig facilities, the outlook for urbanites is grim. Their calls for climate justice and lower carbon footprints will get them hacked, tracked, packed, and stacked in communal hutches run by algorithms. The ultra rich will be laughing while enjoying their lavish lifestyle in that new age dystopia.
The main beneficiaries of oppression won’t be the losers of top down wealth redistribution that climate justice advocates are calling for. The ultra rich are stashing billions in nature conservancies that stand to control a chunk of the planet and pocket carbon offsets. Trusts are a great way to shield your assets from activists who want to tax the rich out of existence and put a carbon tax regime in place. Safely bet that these tax-exempted non-profits will escape wealth clawbacks and curbs on private property. Their beneficiaries will have the last laugh, make no mistake about that.
This invites asking how to instead address inequalities from the bottom up. Violence begets violence, and revolutionaries only produce new elites, so nonviolent options are the only sensible ones. What more, no one has quibbles with hard working people getting ahead. The assets that actually matter are those that burden or plunder communities. Polluting activities and non-resident landlords in particular. Communities occasionally find ways to tax and regulate those to more tolerable levels. But that leaves unwanted mines around and the top down control apparatus in place.
Sovereign communities that run their own affairs would emerge if the top down control apparatus got defanged. They could redistribute assets as they see fit and return the stolen commons. They’d no doubt organize in confederations for self-defense while the control apparatus decays into irrelevance, and focus on regenerating their communal watersheds. The latter are more sensible administrative units than the borders that power struggles between control freaks have jammed communities into.
A Climate Counternarrative | Next: Dismantling Oppression
About the Author
Denis de Bernardy is the author of A Natural Language. His work exposes environmental big lies and puts solutions in front of the actual problems.
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