We need a new environmentalism
Foreword:
I’ll start by noting that this is a looooong essay (an hour read according to Medium). It’s probably a dip in and out kind of thing. It’s long because I’ve written various short pieces on this same subject and they’ve always felt a bit piecemeal. This topic is Big and I wanted to go deep.
Who is it written for? I started writing it after a lot of online discussions with friends. I find a lot of folk care about this stuff but my strong opposition to lifestyle-focused environmentalism regularly rubs people the wrong way and discussions can get heated. This is written for people who understand the deep challenges we face at a fundamental level and yet feel uncertain about how they can make a difference beyond their own lifestyle choices. It’s written for the people who grapple with eco-guilt because they feel that their actions continually misalign with environmental prerogatives. It’s written for people who feel that activism is too hard or inaccessible for ‘ordinary people’. Most of all, it’s written to try and give people who care some new ways of looking at the challenges and solutions in front of us. I’m not claiming to be an authority on any of this stuff. I’m just one person sharing my thoughts on a very complex world. I’ll be off the mark in places. I hope at the very least I spark some new discussions and actions.
Contents
To help navigate, here are some quick links :-)
Part 1 — The history of the environment movement and why I think it’s broken
Part 2: On austerity and obligation — literally the worst motivators ever!
Part 3: On individual vs collective action and the nature of systemic change
Part 4: Examples of how capitalism has co-opted environmental discourse
Part 5: Building a new environmentalism (the positive bit)
- Build collective power wherever you can, by organising locally to meet your needs
- Educate and up-skill for autonomy and empowerment
- Get tech-literate, learn to code — or encourage your kids to
- Support local movements for environmental justice
- Focus your energy on helping those with less power and autonomy than yourself and learn the importance of intersectionality
- Participate in your democracy — particularly at a local municipal level
- Dig where you stand: find agency in your work and daily life
- Reclaim the framing: it’s time to get on the front foot
- Design out dysfunction
- Ditch dystopia and create a positive long-term vision of the future
Introduction
Modern environmentalism is broken and we need to fix it. Environmental action has largely been reduced to a collection of personal consumption and lifestyle choices while the world catches on fire. I believe that we are at a point in human history where it has never been more crucial for people to engage with radically disruptive ideas. However, this is not a call for old-school militant radicalisation with burning barricades in the streets. It is a call to reclaim a discourse from capital but it is also, most importantly, a call to change the story we are telling and the language we are telling it in. This is not a dismissal of individual efforts but it is a challenge to the people telling the stories and organising for change.
We can and must have a better world and I do not believe that we get there through a collection of aligned consumption choices. We have to stop building all environmental discourse around personal responsibility, consumption, austerity and obligation. It’s seriously problematic, elitist and fundamentally fails to challenge the higher framework defined by capital and material culture.
I want to see a world where sustainability is no longer couched in terms of personal responsibility. I want to see a world where we talk about designing better systems, from a grassroots level up, in ways that are accessible and inclusive. I want to see a world where people understand and have power over technology, rather than fearing and mistrusting it. I want to see a world where being involved with shaping the solutions that serve us, from food, to transport to housing to public services to the jobs we work in is not seen as a luxury of time or circumstance but as normal. I want a world where the economy is not a dirty word, because it means thriving localities and community autonomy.
All of this is possible but I know one thing — the current mainstream approach to environmental issues is broken and we have to start talking about stuff differently.
This is an essay in a few parts. Later I will go into a little more depth about where we are at and some of the statements in this opening paragraph. First however, I feel that it is important to explore a potted history of the environment movement because I believe that it is important to bear in mind if we are talking about where we now stand. I won’t claim that what follows is a perfect overview but hopefully it gets the point across adequately.
Part 1 — The history of the environment movement and why I think it’s broken
Environmental ethics and the broader history of the environment movement have always been of great interest to me. The modern environmental movement really began through place-based opposition to unregulated corporate power and it saw the emergence of mass movements of ordinary people in the 60s and 70s. The iconic cases were Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring drew attention to the widespread use of carcinogenic pesticides like DDT, which accumulate up food chains. They killed wildlife and they made people sick and the public pushback was powerful. People responded to localised spraying but Carson catalysed a movement — one which saw people banding together and forcing change through numbers. It captured hearts and minds and tied together impacts people saw in their own neighbourhoods with a growing global consciousness. The old adage of ‘think local, act global’ was born in part out of that early movement. It was not by any stretch a middle class concern (as the modern movement largely is today); indeed it was far more of a working class issue, linked directly with social justice.
In Australia in the 1970s we had the Franklin River campaign in Tasmania, while movements against roads and deforestation took off across the world. Environmentalism in these early decades was never about consumerism because the market had not become sophisticated enough to colonise the space — that came much later.
I should also note that another greatly influential discourse that arose at that time was Paul Erhlich’s 1968 book ‘The Population Bomb’, a revival of the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who believed that humanity was ultimately doomed due to population growth in a finite system. I could write a whole separate essay on why Erhlich’s ideas are deeply problematic and wrong but one cannot understand where the modern environmental movement is at now without being aware of his enormous influence. More on Ehrlich later.
In the 90s, as the iron curtain fell and neoliberalism emerged from a decade of Thatcher and Reagan-led hyper-materialist politics, Francis Fukuyama declared ‘The End of History’. Around the world, the free market expanded into every imaginable facet of our lives, breaking apart traditional social and economic structures and wreaking havoc.
In response, the 90’s saw the birth of the anti-globalisation movement, which came of age in Seattle in 1999, peaked through the early 2000s and in many ways died in 2008, or at least metamorphosed. The 90s saw the weaponisation of grassroots social movements against capital itself, and it ceased to be a western thing. Very real battles were fought the world over, on farms, in cities, in forests and in desserts. At this time, everyday people began to get messages about how the plight of the global environment and the power of global capital were inextricably linked. Names like the World Trade Organisation or Monsanto or NAFTA entered dinner-table conversation from middle American dinner tables through to Mexican union workers, Thai fishermen and Kenyan coffee growers. As capital exploded, the environmental impact did too. It took the 90s to drain the Aral Sea as global fast fashion demanded cheap cotton, sucking it dry for irrigation and destroying the fragile geopolitics of the region in the process. We saw the opening up of vast new oil fields and the acceleration of deforestation from the Amazon to Indonesia on a scale previously unimaginable. Environmentalism had become entwined with an awareness of and a growing opposition to global capital. However, the market was fighting back, and its next move was about to change everything.
A fascinating read at some point is the history of modern advertising. There are plenty of great books on the subject — I personally got to grips with it through a book called Hell and High Water by my old Human Ecology tutor Alastair Macintosh, a maverick and all round legend from the Scottish Isle of Lewis, who is largely responsible for starting the modern Scottish land rights movement. I learnt a lot from Alastair and I often imagine his critical voice in my mind as I grapple with the unfolding challenges of the world. Anyway, advertising is the name we give to a much larger enterprise bound up in mass media, one that (after Noam Chomsky) manufactures our consent. We are taught, indeed subtly manipulated, to desire things that we can consume. Our lives are saturated with this messaging. Identity itself has become commodified and there is essentially no escape.
Now I bring this up because of what happened to environmentalism in the late 90s and early 2000s. Up until then, environmental agendas had been largely positioned as opposed to the corporate status quo. But at some point (and there are probably multiple books and PhDs on exactly when and how this occurred), environmentalism got commodified. This next example won’t be the first instance of this but it is the one that sticks in my own mind.
It’s 2003, I’m in my first year at Edinburgh University and there is movement, of which I was a vocal part, to get the university to support Fair Trade tea and coffee. I have friends who were subsequently involved in the Fair Trade movement and I do not wish to dismiss that work or indeed what Fair Trade fundamentally is, which is the investment of farmers with some degree of direct economic bargaining power in western markets. However, what was happening, just as with the parallel explosion of the organic movement at this time, was the commodification of environmental and social values. Now, supported by a vast and growing mass marketing campaign, you could buy ‘ethical’. More importantly, you could be judged for failing to do so. You were suddenly, somehow, if only in a small way, a worse person if you kept on drinking PG Tips. There was no doubt a degree of green and ethical consumerism for some time before this but from what I can tell, it was the turn of the millennium when it really came online in a big way.
While Fair Trade and Organic labels had humble grassroots origins, they quickly became the basis of multi-billion dollar global industries. What followed was the first wave of eco-lifestyle positioning to the mainstream. It should hardly be a surprise that this happened when it did. Capital invades and commodifies all spaces, especially spaces and discourses that threaten it. Just as the anti-globalisation movement was peaking and people were seriously questioning corporate power at a systemic level, the very framework of the critique got shifted sideways and suddenly, we had a new option in front of us — we could consume our way to a better world. This began organically but quickly the mass marketing machine moved into gear and things got serious. I think it was around 2004 that I first heard the term ‘greenwash’.
It was also the early 2000s that climate change hit the mainstream in a really big way, and suddenly environmentalism got a whole lot more serious and existential then ever before. The fact that this happened at the same time as the emergence of green consumerism could mean everything and nothing — a quirk of history perhaps. Or perhaps a profound linkage with our subsequent action, or lack there-of. Anyway, the point is that climate change, the defining environmental crisis of our time, rose to prominence alongside a discourse that told us that the fate of the environment rests on our consumption choices as individuals.
Buy our super ethical thing! It’s better than the other things! If you buy it then you are better too — a better person than those around you. Doesn’t that make you feel good?
Our sense of morality was harnessed to sell products. And man did they sell! By doing this, our personal choices took centre stage because it was our personal choices that impacted sales. Collective action on the environment, which had grown over 40 years and was merging with a broader criticism of global finance while becoming increasingly mainstream, was at last outpaced and outmanoeuvred by capital. It was against this backdrop that talk of personal footprints entered the mainstream and on climate, we began to have our worth measured, as individuals, in terms of the carbon we did or did not conspicuously emit by way of our lifestyles. As companies began to work out how to generate profit out of environmental and social concern, we saw a paradigm shift in business with the birth of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), circa 2002. CSR, ostensibly a way of getting corporations to be more responsible, was in reality little more than an extension of their marketing activities.
Cut to the 2008 global financial crisis, which as I noted earlier was kind of the end for the anti-globalisation movement as it stood and a significant pivot point in history, on many levels. For the purpose of this discussion it was the moment where the veneer of total control by the neo-liberal capitalist agenda cracked and Fukuyama’s End of History fantasy came crashing down. The general public saw the dirty innards of a broken system and looked around in somewhat stunned disbelief. Since then of course, capital has picked itself up, dusted itself off and carried on pretty much as usual. However there is another world-changing thing that happened back in 2008. The world fell in love with smart phones and social media stepped up to rule the world.
If green and ethical consumerism was born in the early 2000s, birthing a global market and shifting the discourse from the collective to the individual, then it was social media and smart phones that put it on steroids and built a global industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
i-culture is the crowning achievement of libertarian individualist ideals, which are the engine of modern capitalism. I mentioned earlier that capital has commodified identity itself and nowhere is this more starkly obvious than on social media. The boundaries between who we are, our identities and what we consume have been eroded to a point where it is increasingly impossible to separate the three. A vast majority of mainstream environmental discourse is framed entirely by the consumption paradigm. Individual actions that are consumption orientated, however virtuous they may seem, are all taken within a frame of reference that has been constructed by capital. Yet, it is capital that drives virtually all environmental dysfunction. Not all capital is part of the problem, but virtually all of the problems are connected to capital. Our ability to oppose capital has been almost entirely removed because the environmental discourse that once emphasised collective action by working class people challenging corporate power has now been largely neutered and pacified.
And so here we are today, and as I said at the start of this essay, I believe we have a big problem on our hands. Which leads me to the second part of this essay, where I’ll talk about austerity and obligation, which alongside the commodification of environmentalism, are what I see as heart of the issue here.
Part 2: On austerity and obligation — literally the worst motivators ever!
Austerity and obligation are in many ways the two fundamental driving forces of the environmental movement, not just of late but going right back to the 60s. No sooner had Rachel Carson built a radical critique of corporate power in defence of the earth than you had hippies dropping out and preaching the virtues of a simpler life away from the rat-race and the first mainstream austerity discourse was born. We were told ‘go without, live simply, tread lightly and you will not only be happy but also virtuous’.
Then in the 1970s, Paul Ehrlich, drawing upon a rich plethora of western philosophy and religious mythologies about humanity being fundamentally sinful, amped things up further. Now human nature itself was the cause of environmental destruction. We were poor dumb primates doomed to ruin paradise and the only sensible response for an individual was to do everything you could to reduce your footprint on the earth. Rather than critically evaluate the human systems that created impact, our impact was reduced to our own physical animal presence on the earth and subsequently our personal choices became the defining focus for addressing human impact.
If austerity was a threat to ‘take away all your nice things’ then obligation was a follow-through promise to force you to do a bunch of stuff you didn’t want to do, like some sort of naughty child. In austerity and obligation are the roots of personal guilt, which perhaps more than anything else lies at the heart of modern environmental thought as we know it.
Think about it. We tell people to reduce their personal carbon footprint because we must all ‘do our bit’. We strive to feel relevant in an individualist culture that demands our relevance, so we act in the only way that is left for us to easily grasp and we make an ‘ethical’ consumption choice. If we do not, we are guilty because we made the wrong choice, the selfish choice. Middle class people have more freedom and access to making the ‘right’ choices of course. People with less money, less time, less education, are less likely to have access to the right choices. And by the rules of the game, that makes them guilty. ‘If only they were educated and made the right consumption choices’ we say. Then they’d be less guilty. They’d be better people.
This is literally how almost all modern environmentalism works and a vast majority of people switch off to it because they hear ‘we’re going to take away all your nice things and make you do stuff you don’t want to do’. It’s massively elitist and apart from anything else, just terrible tactics.
For fifty years, the environment movement has been powered by the twin engines of austerity and obligation, literally the two worst PR concepts ever. You know how older more cynical folk who have been at this for a while often throw up their hands and bemoan that change simply hasn’t emerged and the world is going to shit? Well I often have this feeling that a lot of it may be because the environmental movement has been so utterly terrible at engaging people with positive and creative language.
Environmentalism is broken because almost the entire discourse is focused on austerity, obligation, individualism and guilt and its entire mode of engagement has been shifted inside a frame of reference constructed by capital. If this is the story of where this movement came from and where it’s ended up, the next thing we need to look at is the nature of agency and systemic change itself. After that I promise I’ll get to the positive constructive bit, which is good because I’ve already been complaining for like twenty paragraphs and its about time I stopped whinging and offered up something useful. But first…
Part 3: On individual vs collective action and the nature of systemic change
The most common refrain I get from people when I criticise lifestyle and consumption-focused environmental discourse is that it’s accessible and that I should not shut down people for trying, in their small way, in their busy lives, to make a difference. If only we could educate people, ‘enlighten’ them and ‘switch them on’ to ‘doing the right thing’. Bit by bit, person by person, the thinking goes, we can change hearts and minds, build new cultural norms, and change the world.
Now I’m all for changing hearts and minds to leverage social change and build a better world. But what I want when I say that and what most people think of when they hear that are two quite different things. The idea I’m critiquing here is the one that says: ‘what if everyone just chose not to use a plastic bag at the shop’; ‘what if everyone just picked up some rubbish at the beach’; ‘what if everyone [insert virtuous ethical/environmental act here]?’
My problem with this way of looking at things is that it places all responsibility for the current and future state of the world on individuals. The ‘everyone’ in these statements is not a collective that organises or acts as something greater than the sum of its parts. It is simply a vast collection of one plus one plus one plus one, which adds up to… a multitude of ones. This can sometimes force change in industry but it is not the same as a movement and it affords far less agency. A movement does add up to more than the sum of its parts and is characterised by internal organisation. Often you have numerous small local groups, working as part of a broader collective of groups with a roughly shared language, vision and set of demands. To refer to part one of this essay, that is pretty much how environmentalism worked, on multiple issues, in multiple contexts, for about 40 years. And when I talk about capital co-opting that space, what I mean is that it very successfully changed our idea of a movement from being an organised collective, to a collection of individuals. Whether those individuals consume or do not consume a thing is neither here nor there because the important thing is that they are thinking and acting primarily as individuals. The power of the collective, the only true power there is at a socio-cultural level, was largely stripped away.
What drives systemic change?
I want to now turn to discussion of systemic change. Our world is ruled by systems so to change the world we have to be in the business of changing systems. I hope everyone can largely agree on that. The question then is how systemic change can be achieved. Many people often argue that changing ourselves and influencing others to do likewise can add up to systemic change. I think I’ve already explained as well as I can why I think that approach is flawed. But if you’re not convinced, let’s take a look at the mechanics of systemic or structural change at an economic, social and political level. I think that by and large, such changes usually fall into one or more of three categories:
1) Systemic change as a response to scarcity
Scarcity drives economic, political and social change. If we consider resources, oil is becoming scarce, oil prices are going up, renewable energy is becoming more attractive, governments support renewables, and individuals and markets invest in renewables.
In this framework though, the concept of scarcity covers not only absolute scarcity (i.e. total remaining global reserves of a resource) but also relative scarcity (i.e. local or group-specific access to a resource), which is of course artificially manipulated by capital. Furthermore, scarcity can extend from just being about physical resources to being about services, or security, or anything else that people want or need. As such I would group structural change tied to recession and austerity (e.g. some of the structural changes that we have seen in Europe since the GFC) under the broader grouping of scarcity-driven change.
2) Systemic change as a response to technology
Technology drives economic, political and social change. For example, evolving clean energy technologies become more efficient and disrupt incumbent industries like coal, oil and gas. As markets for clean tech grow, governments support the industry and offer consumers incentives to invest. As renewables become more accessible, more people in general support them and concurrently support broader action on climate change, including tougher controls on incumbent fossil fuel industries. Technological change is, I think, also a major reason why capital is not homogeneous but rather very much at war with itself — thus capitalism is itself one of the most significant change agents.
3) Systemic change as a response to social action
Social action responds to and challenges the economic, political and social changes wrought by scarcity and technology as well as the broader powers inherent in society, be they capital, religion, patriarchy or anything else. Essentially, ‘we the people’ hold everything to account, or at least, that’s the idea. This is supposed to happen through democracy and in many ways it does. However, representative democracy is also pretty limited and the system is open to abuse, thus existing power wields influence and stuff happens that is less than ideal if social and environmental wellbeing are our goals. As a result, social action extends well beyond the core exercise of democratic rights to include a range of social movements and grassroots collectives, with all their related tactics. Broadly speaking, these activities are either coordinated efforts to leverage legislative change (e.g. marriage equality, ban toxic pesticides, regulate Uber in our city), or they are exercises in grassroots self-determination (e.g. collective commons management, workers cooperatives, etc.).
Now, it is my conviction that in this complex world, most processes of change involve a combination of scarcity, technological change and social responses and that these three processes are always in dynamic flux — it’s a sort of rolling convoluted mess and can be tricky to make sense of. That said, there are plenty of examples of changes where a new status quo is achieved and I think the interesting thing to ask is not just how such change is achieved but also how it is maintained. How does a new normal become fixed?
What maintains a new normal?
There are probably many responses to this and I’m not claiming to have a comprehensive grasp of all of them. However, allow me to offer one perspective that I think is pertinent to this discussion of environmentalism, which is after all, about social action. In my estimation, social action, operating against a backdrop of scarcity and technological change, tends to result in a new status quo by leveraging either the banning of things, or the regulation of things. As an aside, there’s a third category, which is ’things that were banned but shouldn’t be’ (e.g. most LGBT rights issues), but it’s less pertinent to this discussion.
Ok, so bans — some things, like DDT pesticides, CFCs in fridges, single use plastic bags and human slavery have no good reason to be in the world and should be banned, end of story. Through various processes and bumpy roads we end up doing a thing, realising better of it and then collectively deciding to not do it anymore. This usually involves social movements and it can often get a bit intense because there are always a bunch of powerful people making a profit out of the thing that is being banned. Obviously bans themselves are flawed and banned things still happen, plus a lot of things that should be banned are not — but I’m sure you get the point; banning things is a pretty common mode of effective change making where people and social movements are involved.
The other way of locking down a ‘new normal’, particularly with the messier and more complex stuff, is to control or regulate the situation, often in response to it first being unregulated and problematic. I use regulate in the broad sense here, rather than just in terms of government regulation, though the latter is a large part of it. I’ve noted bans but it’s the broad approach to regulation that I want to tie into the core of this discussion.
When it comes to structural changes based on regulating or controlling things, they are almost always grounded in three things:
- A social contract
- Legislation that impacts industry and/or levels penalties at individuals who transgress
- A robust infrastructure that supports and reinforces the preferred activity
I’ll refer to these as the three pillars of a new normal because any new status quo needs all three conditions to apply if it is to become stable. I’d like to highlight an example where all of these things are in place:
Everyone wears a seatbelt because there’s a social contract to do so. Vehicle manufacturers have to install them by law, plus if you don’t wear a seat belt then you’ll be fined. And finally, all vehicles have seat belts and they have to be tested regularly as part of the business of keeping a car roadworthy. As a result almost everyone wears a seatbelt and its kind of a non-issue these days.
Now, often we have problems (environmental or otherwise) that are being addressed by one or two of these pillars but not by all three at once. Under these circumstances, a new status quo is hard to achieve. If you have legislation and infrastructure but no social contract then you get a disgruntled populace and politics will be forced into a U-turn. If you have a social contract and legislation but no infrastructure, government will not be able to enforce things, systems will not function correctly and businesses will either transgress or do a bad job of compliance. Finally, if you have a social contract and some sort of infrastructure, but no binding legislation to force everyone (people and business) to comply then you never get universal uptake.
However, there is an other version of events that I want to outline that is closely aligned with the co-option of the environment movement. It is one where all three pillars are in place, but the legislative pillar focuses primarily on penalising individuals, rather than on holding industry to account. This scenario is common and is generally orchestrated by corporate interests exerting influence on government. It is perhaps unsurprising that this occurs so frequently because it is industry that is in a position of relative power within the current political system and is thus able to influence the situation to its advantage.
With this in mind let’s consider two examples where environmental degradation and injustice has been perpetuated precisely because industry has avoided direct accountability. Not only that but the industries in question have expertly co-opted the discussion, taken control of the framing and shifted all attention onto personal responsibility and away from their own destructive activities.
Part 4: Examples of how capitalism has co-opted environmental discourse
Over the past half century, our attention has been purposefully shifted away from blaming corporations for environmental damage and towards a focus on individual responsibility. I’m now going to delve into some case studies that I think do a good job of illustrating how capital has actively and strategically engineered this shift in thinking and has used the power of advertising and marketing psychology to do it.
Example 1: Are you a litterbug?
People by and large know that littering is bad and that recycling is good because there is a social contract that is broadly reinforced. It’s by no means ubiquitous but it’s relatively strong. Public bins are pretty common-place (though certainly lacking in many areas), and there is also significant recycling infrastructure in place that is accessible to most people. So when it comes to preventing litter and encouraging recycling we have a moderate social contract and supporting infrastructure — so far so good. That just leaves legislation, which is where things get trickier. On the recycling front, we need legislation that forces producers to, at the very least, play by some basic rules so that recycling works. Indeed, there are some regulations on packaging, via enforceable standards, and although they aren’t very strong, they do at least make industrial recycling viable. For example, there are minimum grades for PET plastic used in drink bottles that means it can all be chipped up together and an overall quality of recycled material can be assured. However, if you consider how things could be you quickly realise that industry gets a very easy ride. Imagine if coloured plastics were banned and companies were’t allowed to package things in complex laminated materials that cannot be easily separated and processed. The difference it would make to the amount of material that could be effectively recycled would be absolutely phenomenal. Now imagine if companies were required to design products for recapture and reuse; or if they were forced to extend their responsibility for the fate of their products to include the entire product lifecycle. That may sound far-fetched but its part of an idea called circular economy — an idea that might just ‘save the world’. But seeing as we’re talking about legislation that impacts recycling and litter, let’s take a look at something a little more here and now.
Last year (2018), NSW launched a Container Deposit System (CDS) after a 12 year grassroots campaign. QLD, WA and the ACT have all committed to follow and South Australia has had a scheme in place for 30 years. CDS places a small deposit on every bottle or can sold and that deposit is redeemable if you hand the container in, thus tying an economic incentive to recycling. CDS is shown to decrease litter from beverage containers by boosting recycling rates to between 80% and 98% of all containers produced. Outside of blanket bans, there is literally no other workable mechanism that comes close to creating the kind of impact on litter and recycling that we see from CDS. So CDS is a really great regulatory solution and it directly challenges the corporate power at the heart of the plastics industry. Because of this fact it has a very fraught history.
I actually worked on the periphery of the Australian campaign for container deposit legislation from 2013 to 2017 so I had a particular inside view on some of the darker goings on. Many people may know that Coca Cola sued the Northern Territory government for introducing CDS in 2013 and won the case on the grounds that the legislation made a tiny dent in the company’s profit margins. While the NT later fought back and the case was overturned, this kind of dirty politics is only the publicly visible tip of a much nastier war. And war it was, between Coca Cola, Lion and Schweppes on one side and NGOs and activists on the other. None of this is on the record so you’ll have to take my word for it but I know the activists involved and there were phones tapped, goons tailing people in cars and very unsubtle anonymous phone calls threatening violence on individuals. These companies do not mess about and if you look into the history of CDS, which goes right back to 1971 in Oregon in the US, you will find a fraught battlefield and another chapter in the tale of how capital co-opted environmentalism.
If you’re an Australian then you’ve probably heard of a not-for-profit called Keep Australia Beautiful (KAB). Over the 12 years of campaigning for CDS in this country, KAB fought the campaigns, at the grassroots, with misinformation and diversionary tactics that focused attention on littering, rather than on anything that might hold industry to account. They did so with Coca Cola funding, all the while maintaining an image as an upstanding contributor to Australian society. There’s a good chance that the bins at your local beach were sponsored by KAB.
Keep Australia Beautiful are an international extension of Keep America Beautiful (also KAB), which was formed in the 1950s by Coca Cola, a number of other large beverage companies, and the Ad Council of the United States. I spoke before about the history of advertising and I suggested that it was the early 2000s that saw the significant scaling up of eco-consumerism, hand in hand with greenwashing. However, this didn’t just spring out of nowhere and back in the 1950s, Coke and the finest minds in American advertising were gathered round a table trying to work out how to skewer the first attempts to regulate industry as a response to environmental concern. From the 50s onwards, KAB have systematically opposed and killed legislation that would have limited the power of beverage and packaging companies.
Between 1989 and 1994, US campaigners fought for a national CDS scheme, and lost. KAB opposed them the whole way. While these defeats are dismaying, the real impact of KAB and similar industry fronts has been far more subtle and insidious — they have altered the way we think about the problem of waste at a fundamental level by shifting the focus of responsibility away from producers and onto consumers. KAB has led campaigns from the 50s on a platform that targets littering and ‘litterbugs’. Indeed, we have the word ‘litterbug’ in the global lexicon entirely as a result of KAB.
As I’ve said, to create lasting structural change you need a social contract, legislation and infrastructure, which KAB know all too well. As well as just fighting attempts to do this in, shall we say, a more constructive way, they co-opted the three pillars for their own change agenda. A social contract around shaming ‘litterbugs’ was formed, which placed individuals rather than industry squarely in the social consciousness. All attempts to create new waste legislation were steered away from industry and towards heavy fines that penalised individuals. Finally, KAB began to sponsor public bins and used this to build a powerful positive platform for themselves in communities across America; and later of course, in communities across Australia. What they did seemed reasonable and constructive. Opposing them was to be pro-littering. It was marketing genius. It was also very cleverly and cynically calculated to derail and declaw environmental movements.
Example 2: Heavy metal mendacity
Environmental justice is a term that refers to the intersection of social justice and environmental impacts. It is almost always place based and tends to revolve around the activities of a particular industry or industrial facility and its impact upon a nearby community. When communities next to coal mines are choked with dust and people get sick or when chemical plants are built in poor areas on the outskirts of cities and spew toxic smoke into residential neighbourhoods that lack the political clout to fight back — that’s a discussion about environmental justice. It impacts poorer communities, communities of colour and indigenous communities hardest. The people with the least power in society have their relative powerlessness directly taken advantage of by corporate agendas.
Mt Isa in north west QLD has been a significant mining town since the 1930s, producing copper, zinc and lead. If you visit Mt Isa, which I did back in 2016, you will be struck by the shear enormity of the mine and smelter. A classic ‘tourist attraction’ is to go up Mt Isa Lookout at dusk and behold the twinkling lights and silhouetted smoke stacks of the vast facility. The town exists because of mining and is the engine of the regional economy, with obvious strong support from the QLD government. Unfortunately it turns out that all that lead mining has contaminated the soil, air and water for miles around and it’s been poisoning children. To put a figure on that, we’re talking around 290 tonnes of airborne lead released from the smelter each year. You read that figure correctly. Also consider that lead is very heavy and so it doesn’t travel far from the smoke stacks before falling to earth, blanketing the residential neighbourhoods of Mt Isa. It’s in the air people breath and the soils are contaminated with decades of lead fallout. Any dust disturbed, whether from kids playing in the back yard or from vehicles driving on dirt roads, throws concentrated lead back into the air. Rain washes contaminated dust into local waterways. Rainwater tanks are actually banned in Mt Isa for this reason. The mining industry does freely admit that there is lead in the environment around Mt Isa, they just have a different story about where it comes from. It is, they say, largely naturally occurring, linked to the geology of the area, hence why mining exists in the first place. The lead from their stacks is ignored. This line is a familiar one in mining communities around the world, is entirely discredited, and has been dubbed ‘the miners myth’.
In 2010, responding to community health concerns, the state health authority Queensland Health released a report which found that 11% of Mt Isa’s children had dangerously high levels of lead in their blood. Xstrata (the mining company that was running the smelter at the time) claimed that the issue related to naturally occurring levels of lead in the area. A previous report from 2007 also found that indigenous children were significantly more likely to be impacted. The 2010 report highlighted two particular local children, Sidney Body (5) and Bethany Sanders (4) who made headlines due to having nearly six times the international safe limit of lead in their blood (31.5 and 27.4 micrograms per decilitre respectively). These levels of lead were shown to have caused significant ‘mental retardation’ in both children. More broadly, children in their first year of school in Mt Isa have been shown to be performing well below the national average in standardised testing, with children in North Mt Isa (the areas closest to the smelter) doing worse than children living in other areas of the town.
In response to the reports, Xstrata Copper North Queensland’s chief operating officer, Steve de Kruijff denied a link with the smelter, saying “we know there is lead in Mount Isa, but what these reports cannot say is the cause of the lead levels in these children”. He added that “Xstrata has never exceeded regulatory limits for respirable lead at any air monitor in the Mount Isa community since acquiring Mount Isa Mines in 2003.”
The limits, it seems, were set to suit industry, rather than to suit public health. In the 80 year history of the mine, from its beginnings in 1930 to the 2007/10 reports, public health checks and air quality monitoring had not been mandatory. To quote The Australian back in 2006, ‘a senior manager at the state’s Environment Protection Agency said political considerations [my emphasis] had stopped the introduction of air-quality monitoring and mandatory community health checks at Mt Isa’s two smelters — the largest source of lead emissions in Australia’. It seemed that politics was working on the side of the mining industry, protecting its operations at all costs.
I highlight the Mt Isa lead story because of the way that capital has exerted influence over politics to shift the blame for environmental pollution away from the corporations producing it and onto the community. The issue of public health and child safety has been framed as one of parental responsibility, with government and industry adopting a paternalistic ‘do the right thing’ position, shot through with racism against indigenous people. Here’s how it unfolded.
In 2008, in direct response to the first health reports and widespread media attention, a new initiative called the Living with Lead Alliance was founded by Xstrata (which later merged with international mining giant Glencore), bringing together local and state government representatives with mining interests to provide a local public relations body on the issue, geared of course towards Xstrata interests. The Living with Lead Alliance released a series of fact sheets [1] [2] and a website to ‘develop and deliver an extensive and ongoing public education campaign to ensure the health of Mount Isa residents’. The focus is on ‘living safely with lead’.
The Alliance accepts that Lead is present in the Mt Isa environment but conveniently avoids acknowledging any direct links with the mine and smelter. Instead, the emphasis is squarely placed on personal behaviour and responsibility, with the stated aim of driving ‘practical, evidence-based behavioural changes to limit exposure to lead’. Parents are encouraged to ‘wet wipe’ their homes to clean up dust, continuously wash their children’s hands and toys, and to thoroughly wash and peel vegetables grown in backyard soil. They are encouraged to feed their children ‘healthy snacks’ so that the lead already in their ‘tummies’ is less likely to be absorbed, and to help their bodies get rid of lead that they have already absorbed. The overarching message is that lead is natural and manageable, Mt Isa is safe, and that if there are any issues that arise it is because you, as an individual, made bad choices.
The makeup of the Living with Lead Alliance committee is telling, with various local state members, councillors, mayors and public health managers sitting alongside Xstrata/Glencore executives and CEOs. Working in tandem with the Alliance, the Queensland state government formed the Mount Isa Lead Health Management Committee in 2012, to ‘strengthen health management strategies’ in the area. At the time of writing, the latter committee includes all members of the Living with Lead Alliance, plus executives from Queensland Health, Queensland Family and Child Commission, Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines and none other than federal MP Bob Katter. These committees, and the bodies they represent, control every aspect of mining operations, environmental law, public health, air quality testing, data disclosure and official reporting on the issue in Mt Isa. It is hard to conceive of a scenario where mining interests could benefit from more direct government support. Indeed, the agenda of blame shifting goes all the way to the state premier. In 2010, QLD premier Anna Bligh stated, “what’s important in this debate is we get accurate information to parents, that we help them to keep their children healthy”.
It’s not just me that thinks that this all sounds a bit off. In 2016, academics at the University of NSW, Marianne Sullivan and Donna Green, published a paper titled ‘Misled about lead: an assessment of online public health education material from Australia’s lead mining and smelting towns’, which was peer reviewed and published in international Journal Environmental Health. You can read a summary of the paper here. The pair reviewed 14 studies conducted into three Australian mining communities (of which Mt Isa was one) and concluded that there was no evidence to support the idea that health education campaigns can protect children from lead exposure. They found that “educational and dust control interventions are not effective in reducing blood lead levels of young children”. They also concluded that there was “insufficient evidence” to show that reducing children’s exposure to contaminated soil would reduce blood lead levels. The paper emphasises the World Health Organisation statement that there is no safe level exposure and is unambiguous about the need to shift focus away from personal responsibility and back onto industry.
‘Lead pollution is not a problem that parents can solve on their own. Reducing or eliminating lead emissions, removing children from the sources of exposure, and cleaning up environmental contamination is critical’ (Sullivan and Green, 2016).
As Environmental Scientist Mark Taylor put it in The Conversation in 2016,
“if there were no industrial lead in the community, there would be no problem at all. The root cause of the issue is not the natural hand-to-mouth behaviours of children but the pervasive, persistent and permanent arsenic, cadmium and lead contamination that penetrates everything they touch: clothes, toys, food, floors and furnishings”.
In a 2018 interview with the Northwest Star, Taylor said that Mt Isa residents are
“subject to significant environmental injustices due to the massive lead exposures they continue to be subjected to”,
noting that half of all children living in Mount Isa in 2018 had blood lead levels above the safe level of five micrograms per decilitre (an agreed ’safe’ level half that of the ten micrograms per decilitre used in the 2008 study referred to above, revised following new WHO research). Professor Taylor said Indigenous children in Mount Isa are worse off, with as many as 70 per cent having levels above the upper limit.
“The Australian public should be incredulous that we have permitted such blatant injustices to be imposed upon sensitive populations (children), for which the effects will not fully bear fruit until their later years”.
The two examples, of beverage litter and Lead poisoning, I hope serve as a useful illustration of how capital has actively co-opted environmental discourse and shifted focus and blame for environmental issues away from capital and corporate interests and onto individuals and communities.
Let’s now step back once more to look at the bigger picture. The thing is, if we accept that lasting systemic change ideally requires the building of a new social contract, tough legislation that targets industry and a widespread supportive infrastructure, then we have something of a task on our hands. While personal actions may, I freely admit, play an important role in building new social contracts, they cannot do so in isolation of a wider social movement. Furthermore, to be effective, that social movement must leverage legislation that regulates industry and ensures that robust infrastructure and systems are in put place to support a new status quo that puts people and the environment first.
The response to pointing this sort of thing out is of course fairly predictable: ‘so you want everyone to become a dedicated activist do you? You know how inaccessible that is for a majority of people right?’. Yes, it is. And no, I do not think everyone should become an activist. That would be ridiculous. For what it’s worth, I actually think the concept of ‘activism’ as it currently stands is itself pretty problematic because it creates a class of people who distinguish themselves from others and while their actions may very well be laudable, it does alienate a lot of folk. The main reason environmental activism alienates people is because it is fundamentally concerned with… austerity and obligation. And as I’ve noted, people hate that and it makes them feel guilty or not good enough.
So, what to do? How do you get people engaged with the issues that matter in this busy complex world where many of us simply struggle to make ends meet? And am I really trying to tell people that recycling or buying ethically or saying no to a plastic bag is actually a problem rather than a small constructive contribution? Well, no, I’m not. Definitely do those things. And don’t litter. But understand that doing them is not a pathway to real change, it is simply the reinforcement of a status quo where some people make some choices, other people make other choices, and where industry owns the framing and profits from everyone’s preoccupation with their own choices while continuing to suppress any real challenges to their power.
‘Yeah, ok fine’, I hear you say. ‘Perhaps I don’t disagree as such, but where does this get real for ordinary people? If we need a bunch of complex structural change but we’ve all been hoodwinked and environmentalism has been co-opted and personal consumer choices don’t matter then how the hell is the average person supposed to engage with anything in a meaningful way at all? Isn’t this all starting to sound way too hard?!’.
Well, dear frustrated straw man from the last paragraph — I’d be lying if I said that meaningful change is easy. Or that all meaningful change is even in our power to control, because it isn’t. Sometimes technological disruption and scarcity run rampant and all we can do is hold on tight. But plenty of it is in our power and plenty is accessible too. I just think that some of the approaches have fallen by the wayside, while plenty more are still nascent and need nurturing into new modes of social engagement. I have a list of suggestions which is my proposed blueprint for a new environmentalism. Hopefully my ramblings thus far have done a good enough job of setting things up.
Part 5: Building a new environmentalism (the positive bit)
I firmly believe that anyone can play a part in building a better world if that is something that you desire to do. Actions can be as small as you like and still make a difference. This is not about privileged access. It is not about affording the ‘ethical’ or ‘sustainable choice’. It is not about measuring your worth by the consumption choices you do or do not make. It is not about your level of guilt or how much you feel you have to do to reduce it. It is not about taking away all your nice things. It is not about forcing you to do things you do not want to do.
Here’s what I think it is about…
Build collective power wherever you can, by organising locally to meet your needs
Capital seeks to erode collective power by systematically attacking it and emphasising the primacy of the individual. The point at which activism itself became largely framed in terms of individual rather than collective power was when we hit serous problems. The only way to counter corporate power, and indeed the power of governments wielded in undemocratic or harmful ways at the behest of corporate power, is to build collective power — in communities, in workplaces, and at broader national levels
Collective power is the thing most people think of when they consider activism and it tends to bring to mind certain things. While you can give up your time to attend community meetings and protests, or even engage in some form of civil disobedience — and this is certainly a vital component of a healthy democracy — support for collective power in an every day sense is far more accessible and mundane. It is engagement and support for local community initiatives, services and infrastructure. Essentially any collective endeavour that is for and by people in your neighbourhood is a pocket of resistance against a corporate machine that seeks to dismantle and monetise all aspects of our lives. Whether it is a community arts centre, a community childcare group, the local bike coop, a makers space, a solar panel bulk buying scheme, playing on the sports team or joining that book club you always wanted to find time for, getting involved in your community connects you with people, enriches your life, builds support networks and probably saves you money.
It may not feel like engaging with these things can help stop climate change but I honestly believe that it does, because for each one of those things you are choosing not to pay some outside corporation to fulfil your needs. By replacing capital exchange with human connection and shared endeavour you are manifesting an alternative to a capitalist system that is the root cause of the majority the environmental crises we face. Furthermore, I would argue that a connected and thriving community is the best hope we have of defeating corporate attacks on the environment at a local level. Whether it’s some dodgy new development, some move to cut down a pocket of bush or you suddenly discover they want to set up a fracking well under the local park, community resistance is strongest when networks are already in place. Ultimately, building community helps you and directly challenges the powers that maintain the existing system.
Educate and up-skill for autonomy and empowerment
Closely aligned with community initiatives is the need to educate yourself at a practical level to meet your needs, sharing skills and learning them from others. Again, this isn’t time out from your daily grind, but an investment in your own autonomy and wellbeing, plus it will connect you with your community.
The reality of course is that many of us are time poor, however this doesn’t have to be some regular chore. A skill learned once can keep on giving and actually save you time and money later. Whether it’s fixing a leaky tap, sewing a patch on a well loved item of clothing, learning bike maintenance and saving on petrol, or learning how to code, having a solid base of practical skills makes you more resilient and adaptable. Combine that with community organising and you have communities that are able to reclaim space and ideas from corporate control. Again, while this might sound abstractly removed from environmental action I believe that strengthening your local community is the most powerful thing you can do if you wish to help build a more sustainable and hopeful future.
Get tech-literate, learn to code — or encourage your kids to
The role played by technology in shaping our society is growing rapidly. It is one of the most powerful factors in this whole discussion. Technology can be understood as a vast, diverse and dynamic landscape that supports interconnection, agency and, ultimately, power. The bottom line is that if we leave technology in the hands of capital, with tech giants and military industrial complexes, locked behind patent laws and out of reach of communities, then it is clear which powers it will serve.
Technology is becoming ubiquitous in our lives. Many of us instinctively rail against that. We feel that it is disconnecting us from each other and the ‘real world’ and that line is heavily perpetuated in popular media. So-called ‘digital addiction’ is real, but it has been pointed out that many of our worst habits in this area are the product of calculated dark patterns built into the apps, websites and games that we use, designed to sell us more stuff and convert more of our existence into value capture exercises for capital. The massive influence of such dark patterns across almost all of the digital media we engage with is an obvious outcome of leaving so much technology solely in the hands of capital. A new movement called positive computing has sprung up, which draws upon psychology and design practices to reshape technology so that it serves human wellbeing, engagement, cooperation and learning. Proponents are an assortment of academics with a passion for tech, sociology, education and progress. While the ideas are not far reaching at present they do something very important. They clearly show that ubiquitous technology in our lives is not inherently negative. The negative impacts we are seeing in some people do not come from the technology itself, but from the system that controls it. If we change the system, we can change our relationship with technology.
We are all aware that technology is advancing faster all the time. Children born today are entering a world where there is no status quo and rapid advancement is a fact of life. We are approaching a point (arguably we’re already there) where our democratic and legal systems are simply unable to effectively respond to the social, ethical and environmental challenges thrown up by rapidly accelerating technology. This then demands a fundamental restructure of democratic and legal systems so that they can agilely respond to such breakneck advances, which is perhaps one of the great tasks facing humanity this century. However it is also apparent that the power over technology must shift, from the hands of tech giants, into the hands of everyone. Such a shift is not in itself going to solve all of our problems, but I do believe it can provide a foundation for building the kind of progressive vision laid out by ‘positive computing’. If we understand and take more control of technology then we can start to use it in better ways.
A democratisation of technology is also about a democratisation of data, the new lifeblood of global society. Information is power, so open data is the distribution of power to the commons. The ability to share and make use of data lies at the heart of the open source movement, which has taken the design of technology out of the hands of private interests and placed it in the hands of everyone. Some of the most incredible tech advances of recent years have come out of open source design collaboration and the movement has expanded well beyond just software. There are countless inspiring projects worldwide working on everything from open source electric cars to farm machinery to telecommunications to pre-fab homes.
Open data is also about transparency and justice and can be used by communities to fight for environmental justice or to hold companies to account in their operations. There is a lot of naive stuff said about open data, mostly about making all data open. My own work with smart cities is in this space and the short story is that there are a raft of ethical and technical challenges that are still largely unsolved, but which need to be addressed if we are serious about building a true global data commons. We need standardised ways of storing, labelling, accessing and sharing data between different systems and users, but these standards are still largely non-existent. Business is actually quite keen on such standards, but to make them effective and geared towards democratic outcomes I believe the only productive pathway is through a broad coalition of civil society, universities, business and government, working closely with communities and end users.
The real key to democratising technology and data is for enough ordinary people to get tech-literate. We need a majority of society to understand technology and how it can be used to empower us, address real-world problems and strengthen our political causes. That means we should all try to take the time to engage with what technology is and how it works beyond the surface level of being a technology-consumer. I’m not suggesting that everyone joins the Makers Movement and starts programming Arduinos, but we should at least understand what that means and why it is important and relevant for others to do it. And speaking of others, it is vital that kids get to grips with this stuff. Learning the basics of coding is increasingly being recognised as being as important as reading, writing and maths and it is being embedded into school curriculums. Even if you’re never going to learn to code, encourage your kids to. Apart from expanding their mental reasoning skills it will provide them with vital tools for engaging with the technology that shapes their future.
Support local movements for environmental justice
As I outlined in part one of this essay, the original environmentalism was essentially a ‘not-in-my-back-yard’ community response to environmental injustice. The idea of the underdog sticking it to the man is a popular one that resonates deeply with a majority of people across the political spectrum, particularly with the post-colonial frontier identities of Australia and North America. There’s a reason we all know the name Erin Brockovich. Almost regardless of location, the chances are there is an environmental justice issue affecting your area. It might be a polluting industrial facility, a new road, a sewage outfall, a dodgy development, dredging, deforestation or simply the loss of a local park. Where these issues exist, grassroots opposition grows. As I outlined with the example of Mt Isa, the power that must be called out and challenged in such scenarios usually starts with corporate agendas but is backed up into the highest levels of government. Fighting for environmental justice is therefore a very difficult and usually prolonged task. For people directly effected and engaged, this can be utterly exhausting. People can ‘burn out’, or else cave in to pressure and threats. If there is an issue being fought near you then the chances are it’s being fought be people in it for the long haul. The only way they can succeed is through broader community support. You don’t have to be on the front line yourself. Even a small show of solidarity or support can make an enormous difference if you consider the impact of hundreds of your neighbours doing the same.
Focus your energy on helping those with less power and autonomy than yourself and learn the importance of intersectionality
One major issue with the focus on personal consumption is that it is inherently self-centred. We all want to feel like we can make a difference and ‘do the right thing’ but this mindset is grounded in a powerful individualism. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and that ‘we are all just individuals’. We have been told to look out for number one, with emphasis on personal responsibility and a mythology of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. In the former colonies of Australia and North America, this idea has merged with a colonial frontier mentality, embedded in our national identities, of struggle, the fair go, the American Dream, the self-made man, the quarter acre block, etc. Those ideas existed long before neoliberalism came along but the latter has captured and weaponised them. In doing so, two things have happened. Firstly, individuals striving to get ahead have been positioned as the primary driving force of ever increasing consumption. Secondly, hyper-individualism has directly undermined traditional social structures. Capital seeks to constantly capture and grow new markets. Essentially, any work done by and for community is an untapped resource for capital, which is constantly replacing community based activities and stealing value out of the public sphere. Needs that were once met through community are now accessible only via financial transaction. Apart from making it harder for people to meet their basic needs, this also unravels the basic fabric of community itself because it removes the context for community interaction. Thus people are not only suffering from a lack of basic services but they are also becoming increasingly isolated from their community. This reduces collective power and in turn helps ensure that the ongoing power the corporate agenda remains unchallenged.
I have already emphasised that community organising is essential in a world increasingly dominated by capital. Now consider that the erosion of community hits those on lower incomes, living in more deprived neighbourhoods, far worse than those of us who have even moderate wealth at our disposal. Not only do a great many people lack access to basic services but the traditional social support networks that have existed for generations are breaking down. If we recognise that organising in our communities is a principle form of action against capital and for the environment then we must go further and understand that such action is inseparable from discussions about social justice. Environmentalism has, quite reasonably, been accused of being an elitist concern of the middle classes. As long as this continues we have a major problem. Therefore, any suitably concerned individual should be asking how they can reach out in solidarity to help those less fortunate than themselves. Essentially, this is a challenge to look beyond your immediate bubble, and possibly outside of your previous zone of experience. You’re also going to have to listen and respond to the reality of others, rather trying to figure out some clever solution all on your own. This stuff is tricky and time consuming but unless we build an environmentalism that is inclusive and empowering for all then we’re doing it wrong.
I’ll throw intersectionality into this discussion too. It’s a term that came out of race and gender studies and it emphasises the importance of different social justice movements aligning and providing mutual support. A new progressive environmentalism must be intersectional. A sustainable future must also be a just future and it must apply to everyone, not just a privileged few. When critically reviewing any new initiative done in the name of the environment it is helpful to apply a lense of intersectionality. Does this new idea serve or disadvantage vulnerable people? Does it reinforce the work of social justice movements or does it undermine it? And if I might emphasise one final prerogative: we must do everything we can to support women and girls, particularly those in greatest need of it. It has been shown, categorically, that female empowerment in the form of education, birth control and equal opportunities correlates directly with falling environmental impacts, including reduced carbon emissions.
Participate in your democracy — particularly at a local municipal level
While approximately 50% of the world’s population lives in a democracy it turns out that only 4.5% of us live in what The Economist has classified a ‘full democracy’. Furthermore, democratic rights are in decline worldwide. The point is, if you live in some sort of functional democracy (ok, let’s not dwell overly on how functional) then you are part of a lucky and privileged minority. However rotten your local, regional or national politics may be, engaging in it can only ever be a positive thing and to some extent, you kind of owe it to all those people less fortunate than you who don’t even have the option.
There is a myth of sorts that local government is somehow more democratic, less partisan and more capable of delivering progressive agendas than state or federal government because it is closer to you and therefore more answerable. Of course local government can be just as prone to elites, corporate agendas and outright corruption as any other level of government. That said, there is an encouraging trend that is becoming pretty clear in Australia and around the world; city governments are leading the climate action agenda at a local level with stronger and more progressive policy than state or national governments. Indeed, as national climate policy stalls in Australia and elsewhere, it is local government left holding the torch. Not every local authority is rising to the challenge, but plenty are. The Cities Power Partnership is Australia’s largest alliance of councils for action on climate change, with over 100 member councils representing more than 11 million Australians. A 2018 report by the Climate Council has highlighted how local government is outstripping federal and state action on emissions reduction, renewable energy targets, energy efficient programs and sustainable transport infrastructure. Targets and policies are all very well and they are a vital foundation for local action. However they must be backed up by a clear community mandate and active grassroots participation, holding councils to account and ensuring that things actions follow intentions. At a local level, opportunities for formal democratic participation actually stretch a good deal further than the ballot box. Community concerns can of course place coordinated pressure on councillors, however there are also many opportunities to engage in public consultation processes regarding new developments, strategies and council initiatives. We don’t all have time for such engagement, however many people do and consider that you might not always see eye to eye with them. It’s a simple thing but engaging with local government consultations to forward a progressive agenda can and does make a real difference.
One of the most important legacies of the great social ecology thinker Murray Bookchin was a concept that he called Libertarian Municipalism. Bookchin reacted to the inherent flaws and limitations of centralised government and emphasised the need for non-partisan popular assemblies working at a local level to reclaim municipal politics. In a 2018 interview, Bookchin’s daughter Debbie Bookchin explains that her father’s ideas are grounded in ‘prefigurative’ politics:
“the idea that we must create a new society in the shell of the old by living and practicing the ideals of the society we want to bring into existence. If we want to put power in the hands of everyday people in their cities and towns, we must begin by organising this kind of face-to-face radical democracy now on the local level”.
Bookchin felt that existing parliamentary structures of democracy are inherently limited and that a more equitable and sustainable future requires new forms of organising that sit outside of those structures. The seeds of a better future must grow in the present, at a lived human scale. At higher levels of government we cannot easily engage outside of the status quo but at a local level it is much more accessible. Direct democracy does work best if it is local because the challenges that you are engaging with are immediate and felt directly by you and your neighbours. This sort of Libertarian Municipalism, as envisaged by Bookchin, is very much a rising force in the world. To bridge the gap between what might sound like an abstract political theory and real world action, I’ll note the example of public assemblies in Barcelona, which have reined in Air BnB, municipalised the electricity department and made it more difficult for banks to foreclose. My own work in smart cities looks to community-led ’smart citizen’ initiatives in Barcelona, where communities are fabricating their own IoT devices, deploying them in open networks, collecting and sharing data and addressing complex problems such as air quality, noise pollution, urban heat, and city transport. The Fearless Cities movement is now a global municipalist movement, with annual conferences in Barcelona (as of 2017). What is particularly interesting is that this movement is blurring the lines between local government and grassroots assemblies — the Fearless Cities book is co-written by Debbie Bookchin and Ada Colau, the latter being the mayor of Barcelona. There is so much that I could write here about libertarian municipalism but it’s really a separate essay. Suffice to say, its an idea on the upswing and its one of the most exciting transformational mechanisms at our disposal, coming to a community near you!
Of course, engaging directly with popular assemblies is a time-consuming commitment, as is campaigning for your local progressive councillor or responding to public consultations. Not everyone has that luxury. I have emphasised this area of local political agency because it is undoubtedly a critical part of the puzzle for an effective future environmentalism. That said, my other key message throughout this essay is that this isn’t about how much you can or cannot do. You don’t need to be the person wading into the middle of it all to make a difference. For me, the bottom line is to at least find out about who your local representatives are and what they stand for, then vote at a local level. You could also find the time to become away of any municipalist activity in your area and to support it. A committed core of activity requires broader community support and that bit is on you and your neighbours. Even just talking about the issues with your community is a vital and powerful act.
Dig where you stand: find agency in your work and daily life
Pretty much all of us live and work in a context that is, at a systemic level, less than perfect in terms of social and environmental impact. You might be in a management position at work with the power to bring about significant institutional changes right at the top, or you might be on minimum wage at the bottom of a management hierarchy. Either way, regardless of your position, we all have agency in our work, even if it is quite limited. As concerned agents, our task is to identify the nature of that agency and bring it to bear where we stand. One of the best place to make a difference in the world is in the places you live, work and play because these are places that you know best and (often) most care about.
Breaking this down, we can understand this firstly in terms of the direct impact our industry or practice has on the environment, and secondly in terms of the transformative potential of our work as part of a wider proactive response to the challenges we face.
Let’s consider direct impact first. All industries, no matter what they are, require a sustainability strategy because no area of human activity has zero impact upon the environment. If doesn’t matter if you work in primary industry, manufacturing, services, health, or the knowledge economy, it is guaranteed that things can be done better. Your ability to move things in the right direction could be as simple as chatting about issues with co-workers.
Then there’s the transformative potential of your work on the wider world. If you are in a creative industry then congratulations, because your job is literally to spread messages and ideas, make people feel things, talk about things or think in different ways, so pursue opportunities to spread ideas that matter most. If you are a designer or engineer, your have the chance to reshape the material world around us and design out dysfunction. If you deliver services (from medicine to transport to IT) you can help people and systems to function more efficiently, sustainably and justly. Even if you work in retail or hospitality, which might feel fairly limited in this respect, remember that you are interacting with members of the public all day every day and that this is a remarkable opportunity to engage with people. I’m not suggesting that barristers and check-out staff strike up deep conversations about the state of the environment with passing customers (though by all means try!). I refer rather to the complex subtlety of interpersonal interaction in a diverse society. Social ecology tells us that environmental injustice is inextricably tied to social injustice and that to fix the environment, we must also fix society. To truly build a sustainable future we need diverse communities founded on tolerance, mutual support and solidarity. If you can be a friendly face to a refugee or a trans person or someone with a disability, then that makes their day a little better and in a a small way, you just put a brick in the wall of a stronger future society. It might not feel like much, but it’s important.
I am extremely privileged in that my job at a university provides me with the opportunity to work with amazing and inspiring people, at the forefront of sustainability, urbanism and emerging technology, to help co-create significant social and environmental outcomes, delivered directly to communities. I’ve also worked for years in the environmental NGO sector. I’ve had access to a great education, a supportive environment and awesome opportunities and I’ve managed to find myself work that fulfils me both creatively and intellectually while hopefully making the world a slightly better place. I don’t take this privilege for granted for a second. I point out my own situation precisely because it is unusual. Most people don’t work every day in an overtly transformative position. Most jobs outside of senior management afford quite limited personal agency and ultimately, we need to avoid falling into the trap of tying personal responsibility and guilt to how much difference you can or cannot make through your work. If you have the opportunity to make a big impact through your work that’s fantastic. If all you can do is start small conversations with your co-workers, and your agency stretches no further than that, then that is also fantastic. Not everyone has the privilege of high-impact agency and it would be naive and unfair to claim as much. The important thing is to adopt a mindset whereby you recognise that you do have some agency, even if it happens to be small. Once you identify it then you can act upon it. The result is that you will feel, in some small way, more empowered. Of course, if you can start coordinating with co-workers or others in your industry then you can really start to amplify your power and that’s where change really starts to take hold.
I’ll emphasise that this isn’t about lecturing you on ‘finding your purpose‘ in the nauseating and self-entitled style of self-help, start-up culture and so-called ‘conscious capitalism’. By all means, go do your thing and find fulfilment in it if you want to and can. However, I used the phrase ‘dig where you stand’. This is a concept borrowed from Human Ecology that refers to acting in the present by grounding yourself in your existing knowledge, passion and agency. This isn’t about who you might or should become in the future. It’s about who you already are in the present.
Reclaim the framing: it’s time to get on the front foot
A big problem with environmental discourse is that it has historically tended to be very reactive to events. Something is under threat, some new development is coming, some new factory or mine is going to spew out more pollution. While stands against such things do need to be taken, there is an underlying issue here and it is framing. Framing refers to the things that are included and excluded from a discussion. Essentially anything we engage with is framed by someone, and the framer usually holds the power. When you react to someone else’s agenda you are essentially stepping into a sparring ring set up by someone else. In the case of most environmental clashes, the framing of the agenda setter is generally aligned with economic rationalism tied to a deep prevailing modern mythology about the primacy of the open market. How many times have you seen world bashing ideas justified in the name of jobs and growth? Pushing back against such arguments positions you as regressive, ignorant, idealistic and out of touch. You don’t own the framing.
George Lakoff, whose excellent 2004 book ‘Don’t think of an elephant’ explores the language and framing behind right and left-wing discourse in the United States, concludes that on the whole, left wing progressive politics is pretty terrible at taking ownership of discursive framing, while the right, capital and the status quo have it pretty much nailed down. This is true in politics but it’s also the case with environmental issues. Let’s consider that from the perspective of the KAB litterbug story from earlier. If I see litter on the floor I see a problem caused by an unregulated corporation that has been allowed to profit from shoving its products out into the world and has no responsibility for what happens to them. Impacts are shoved on the public and the global commons, while profit is siphoned away. Yet the discursive framing says the blame lies with the individuals who dropped the litter and so any discussion of right and wrong in the context of the litter is shifted onto consumers, rather than onto the corporation that is profiting from the situation. That corporation, and others like it, own the framing.
How then do we take back ownership of the discussion and push our own proactive agenda? The key is to discern and support ideas that posit new ways of doing things. These new approaches must make strong practical and aesthetic sense to people and they must challenge old ways of doing things. The key to owning framing is to turn the tables so that the powers of the status quo are the ones on the back foot. I’ll give you some examples.
Renewable energy and the growing clean technology revolution is probably the strongest proactive agenda we have. There is an inescapable economic argument that shows renewables will out-compete fossil fuels in the next few years. When governments introduce measures that support a growing renewables industry, those measures get viciously attacked by incumbent fossil fuel interests. Consider the assault on Australia’s Renewable Energy Target, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation or the former Climate Commission, not to mention the funding cuts on CSIRO. Whilst such attacks are disheartening and we often see them ‘winning’, I believe that the critical thing to realise is that the framing of the whole discussion lies with the environment movement. It is a progressive agenda and the incumbent powers are the ones that are reacting to it, forced onto the back foot. At a personal level, particularly in Australia, we have rooftop solar. With a couple of million private rooftop arrays there is now a significant political constituency with vested interests in things like feed in tariffs. In 2013, the Western Australian state government (which is very much in the pocket of big mining interests) attempted to halve the feed-in tariff for residential solar, ostensibly to balance the state budget. When tens of thousands of home owners protested, coordinated through a grassroots lobby group called Solar Citizens, the government backed down. This is one of those rare occasions where your consumption choice (buying solar for your home) can actually help leverage systemic change. There is a clear coordinated movement that takes a bunch of consumers and builds a power base that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Another strong proactive movement that we’ve seen in recent years is fossil fuel divestment. Again, the primary action pushes a new agenda, rather than reaching to someone else's. It involves personal consumption choices (e.g. where you put your super) but it is the combined weight of those choices, bound by a single coherent discourse and coordinated social movement that connects your individual action to a force for systemic change.
A third example I’ll give is the open source and makers movement, which is about openly sharing designs, code and skills, delivering everything from free software to DIY farm machinery. It is usually apparent at a community level but differs from other community endeavours because there is a coordinated global movement behind it. The open source movement is about creating and evolving a global commons of ideas, information and design. That movement, in its own way, confronts corporate control of intellectual property and thus pushes back against a system that is destroying life on earth.
Design out dysfunction
If we begin to see environmental dysfunction not as the fault of individuals but as the fault of a dysfunctional system then we can begin to view the challenge that faces us as a design challenge. Put simply, if something doesn’t work and is causing problems, either make some changes to it or replace it with something better altogether. There is actually a relatively new strand of environmentalism that captures this idea pretty well and it’s called ‘bright green’. First coined in the mid noughties by an American called Alex Steffen (check out his ‘World Changing’ books for a great if now slightly dated primer), Bright Green was a response two exisiting types of polarised environmental thought. So-called ‘Light Green’ is consumption focused and can be understood as pretty much the thing this essay is criticising. Meanwhile ‘Dark Green’ is the no-compromise combative eco-defence of deep ecology, green anarchism and the Earth First movement. The former upholds the status quo and the latter, while it may well have its place, is pretty inaccessible for ordinary people and incompatible with any systemic reimagining of global society.
Bright Green environmentalism is thus positioned as a third way. It advocates system change through re-design and weaves together new technologies with progressive politics, community-centred design and radical economics. It dares to imagine a better world that is achievable through creative thinking and collective action. It focuses on solutions and positive agendas rather than simply reacting to bad stuff happening. As an individual it’s hard to see how to engage with an idea like Bright Green. My suggestion is to understand and internalise Bright Green thinking and to use it to shape your thinking about a given environmental issue, as well as the broader trajectory we are on. We all react to the issues around us but many of us react in line with less helpful ways of thinking. I would encourage people to look at a problem and ask ‘how could we do this better?’. Look at a problem and seek its root causes, then consider how we might approach things differently so that the problem never manifests in the first place. Sometimes the solution might not be something that you can directly support, and that’s okay. Sometimes, with some creative thinking, novel new pathways will emerge that you can help to drive. Keep thinking in these terms and stay watchful for opportunities when they arrive.
“We need, in the next twenty-five years or so, to do something never before done. We need to consciously redesign the entire material basis of our civilization. The model we replace it with must be dramatically more ecologically sustainable, offer large increases in prosperity for everyone on the planet, and not only function in areas of chaos and corruption, but also help transform them. That alone is a task of heroic magnitude, but there’s an additional complication: we only get one shot. Change takes time, and time is what we don’t have. . . . Fail to act boldly enough and we may fail completely.”
— Alex Steffen, introduction to Worldchanging
For some excellent further reading on Bright Green that I would say resonates closely with my own journey through more radical modes of engagement, check out this essay by Ross Robertson.
Ditch dystopia and create a positive long-term vision of the future
For me, getting to grips with ideas like Bright Green and system redesign begins with imagination. We need to imagine a future that is brighter, where things work better. Our vision of that future must explore details — new social relationships, new economic co-dependencies, new technologies and the socio-technical realities in which they could exist. This then becomes a discussion about storytelling.
Have you ever noticed how so many visions of the future depicted in popular culture are dystopian? Shelly wrote the original tale of science running amuck and from the grimy cyber punk of Bladerunner to the post apocalyptic nightmare of Mad Max, Terminator or a hundred other examples, the idea that humanity screws itself over in a final fit of hubris is very deeply entrenched. Indeed, these myths stretch right back to biblical stories of Babel and Babylon. These ideas are also closely linked to those nasty little misanthropic discourses from people like Paul Erhlich, who think that our fundamental human condition somehow dooms us to a hellish future.
When faced with the reality of climate change, perhaps the most common response is now ‘we’re all screwed’. It used to be denial, and people are somehow jumping en masse from that (where we all get to do nothing because the problem doesn’t exist) to defeatist doomsaying (where we all get to do nothing because failure is a certainty and there’s no point in trying). Do you see the problem there? In both cases, there is no positive vision of the future and therefore no sense of agency. You have to believe in a better future and hold it in your mind before you are capable of acting for transformative change in the present. However, transformative change is, by definition, a challenge to the powers of the status quo. Utopian visions are understood as dangerous because their alternative futures are simultaneously a criticism of the present and a suggestion of how the present might be subverted. Dystopias on the other hand are safe. They reinforce all of the worst popular tropes about humanity — that we are inherently destructive, violent and selfish (the same tropes, by the way, that justify capitalism). Dystopias deny agency and tell us that no matter how bad the present may seem, the future could be so much worse — so stop complaining and accept things as they are.
Our stories of the future are severely lacking in positive utopian visions. Such stories do exist but they rarely make it into the mainstream. Science fiction from Hollywood is almost uniformly dystopian. I’m actually a bit of a science fiction nut and this is something of a bug bear for me because there are in fact whole swathes of literature that are decidedly utopian in their outlook but which never appear on our screens. When I say utopian, I don’t mean that they present a vision of perfection. The complex future presented in these works is often flawed in countless ways. Crucially though, the trajectory of the story is towards a brighter and more hopeful existence and in telling it we explore agency, struggle and hope itself.
For me, one of the most notable examples of this type of work is the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Forget about how realistic the colonisation and terraforming of Mars might be. The story is about very relatable and complex characters navigating extraordinary circumstances in an astoundingly rich exploration of social, economic, political and mythic evolution, with war and death and good old human prejudice featuring strongly. Horrific events unfold as a fledgling Martian society stumbles towards maturity. People compromise, form strange alliances, and ultimately build a society that rises above that of a crumbling Earth, which is ravaged by climate change and destructive economics. By the end of the third book, an independent and thriving young Mars provides Earth with the new technologies and modes of organising that could save it. The final scene is a heartwarming nod to the future of humanity and an acknowledgement of the adversity and flawed processes by which we get there.
I read stories that explore brighter futures and how we might get there. Whether or not you enjoy science fiction, if you are interested in building a better world, I recommend exploring stories that do this. They might be set in the present or even in the past, but seek out stories where the world is changed for the better, despite the odds and the messiness of reality. In doing so, build your own stories about a world worth living in and start to believe in them. Share them with others. Teach them to your children. There is a version of the future where people, technology, culture, mythology, economics, politics, identity and place can function together in much more positive and sustainable ways. It might take you a while to piece your own version of that story together. You may get disheartened along the way. But persevere, because that story is your rock. It is not a naive hope to cling to while ignoring a dark reality. It is a beacon of hope to guide you through that darkness, ward off despair and keep you working with others for a future worth fighting for.
A conclusion (of sorts)
This situation we face, of melting ice caps and rising seas, plastic oceans and mass extinction, is not your fault. We live in a world governed by an economic system that is the ultimate machine for extracting value from the world — from earth’s systems and from us as individuals. Neoliberal capitalism is voracious and has captured virtually every part our existence. It is the driving force behind all of the systemic dysfunction that underlies environmental degradation. It is an idea gone rogue and it must be resisted. Activities that build collective power which sits outside of corporate control are the key to this resistance. To take that one step further, understand that consumption itself is positioned by capitalism as the only true form of agency. It reduces who we are to ‘consumers’ within a system with rules that it sets. Therefore, simply choosing to buy the local non-corporate alternative to a corporate product is not really meaningful agency on your part, though by all means do make that choice. It’s just that the choice has failed to break free of the framing set and controlled by capital. The most meaningful actions you can take to build a better world sit outside of personal consumption choices.
Working with others to meet your own needs, the needs of your community and the needs of people less fortunate than yourself is the most powerful thing you can do to counter the systems of capital that are currently destroying the planet. So, start connecting with people and making things happen that are meaningful and useful to you and stop feeling guilty about every little consumption choice you make. For example, if you need to buy bottled water one time because you’re thirsty then buy the damn bottle, know that we need a future where companies can’t push that crap out into the world for a quick profit, support civil society and grassroots efforts to bring that about, and organise locally to pressure your Council to provide widespread and well-maintained drinking water stations. Whether or not you buy the one bottle makes no difference at all. Challenging the system that allows the bottle to exist does. Here’s a different example. If you have to take a flight then take the flight and don’t hand your money to some bogus tree-planting scheme to offset your consumption guilt. Fly in moderation and don’t feel guilty — civilisation as we know it requires intercontinental travel. Know that we need to work towards a future where global travel can be carbon neutral (it can, though it’s a few years off), and know that air travel emissions are currently a smaller issue and thus lower priority than electricity production, cars and land use (they’re 2% of global emissions and we can indeed afford to wait a few years). Go plant some trees with your local community if you want (that would be a great thing to do) but don’t look on it as a way to offset your consumption guilt by ‘offsetting properly’ because offsetting is a marketing exercise and is not based on climate science. We need to plant trees regardless of how much or litte people fly.
I am not advocating that people live their lives irresponsibly because nothing matters. We have social contracts and systems that ensure sustainable, ethical and practical outcomes and we all have a duty to play our part and uphold them. Beyond this, you have power to build change. It might be at a very modest scale or it might be far-reaching and either is important. Learn to recognise your agency and to activate it however you are able. The point is that we should each make a best effort, based on an understanding of our place in a bigger system, but we should not feel guilty for things we cannot do. That guilt is forced on us by capital and the broader social discourse that capital has created around itself. Guilt has been systematically cultivated to manipulate us, it is very powerful, and we must learn to refuse it.
I’ll also note that people tend to over-emphasise the importance of education in building a better world. If only we can educate people and tell them the facts, the logic goes, then things will change for the better. The thing is, people don’t respond to facts — we can see the evidence of this all around us, from climate change denial to anti-vaxers to disenfranchised people who continually vote for right with governments. People respond to deep-rooted emotional stuff that speaks to their identity and self-interest. The proactive approaches to a new environmentalism that I have outlined here are largely geared towards tangible action and real-world engagement. People need things they can get behind, like those early protests against toxic pesticides impacting communities across the US. If you can work with lived experience then you can find common ground and build bridges between people. Only then can you bring together unlikely allies. Rural movements against fracking, that have seen green activists, conservative farmers and diverse local people of every political stripe band together, are a great case in point. Through such endeavours, people do ‘get educated’, but this follows action rather than preceding it. Such education also extends beyond mere ‘facts’ and sees people exploring new dimensions of social and political interaction that changes them as people.
Contrary to what it might sound like from much of this essay, I am not in fact intent on a glorious anti-capitalist revolution. I believe that capital (that is, the accumulation and subsequent leveraging of wealth) can play a part in shaping the more sustainable and equitable future we need. To do so however, we need new systems that change how that wealth is accumulated and who controls it. We need more cooperative, transparent and communal models for business and government, from workers coops to municipal assemblies that blur the lines between grassroots action and local government. We also need a radical overhaul of democratic systems, from laws governing political donations to electoral reform, with new independent bodies to root out and prevent corruption. We need new environmental sustainability and social justice charters and strategies at local and regional levels that are co-designed by citizens, businesses, local governments and universities. A brighter future is not a shift to the old-style leftist politics of last century. It is a move towards something new and fresh, that brings together unlikely allies, leverages new technologies and explores new ways of organising and relating that were never previously available to us. A brighter future will challenge everyone, regardless of politics, because in the face of unprecedented challenges it demands that we do things radically differently. One might point out that many of the proactive approaches I have promoted above are not really that new. That is quite true, and yet we must find new ways of approaching them. We must find new allies, new ways of engaging people, new framings for our positions, new ways of thinking about the world and our place in it.
I have written this essay over many months, in bits and pieces. It’s an attempt to capture something of the depth and breadth of the challenge I see before us, as we enter a time of worsening environmental and political crises. I have approached the issue in detail because there is indeed a lot of work to do, and yet I want to end on a note of cautious optimism. Environmentalism is in a problematic place lately, that is true. However I see the seeds of change all around us.
Powerful new social movements are sweeping popular discourse, from #metoo to marriage equality, illustrating how massive shifts in popular consciousness are possible in very short periods of time. The rate of social change is actually increasing every year.
Powerful new technologies are arriving, some controlled by vast corporate interests, but many others placing unprecedented power into the hands of communities. From the open source makers movement to community power initiatives, people are taking technology into their own hands and building better models for the future. Meanwhile, we are on the cusp of an energy transition that promises to be more profound than the last industrial revolution. Coupled with advances in computing, robotics and manufacturing, we face a brave new world where almost anything is imaginable (for better or worse).
The freedom to imagine is absolutely critical now. I am not saying this all goes well, but if we can imagine a better future and find new ways of thinking about how to get there then we are already on the right path. I see signs of exactly that all around us, and it fills me with hope.
