Boundless Roots Best Reads, July 2020
We share below some of the news and signals we have been seeing in the world in the past month. These have been compiled through conversations with our Boundless Roots community and networks.
Our top 3 reads
Discourses of climate delay
This article lists different climate delay discourses and aims to identify the underlying logic behind these delay discourses to allow them to be more easily recognised and challenged. They follow similar efforts to compile common climate denial claims and provide a reference point for countering misinformation.
They characterize discourses of delay in the four following categories:
1. Redirecting responsibility
- This involves narrowing down the scope of solutions to individual actions, bypassing systemic solutions. An example of this ‘individualism’ is a focus on personal consumption choices while underplaying the role of actors or organisations in shaping those choices.
- The authors suggest a more productive course of action would be to organise collective individual action to push policy and normative changes. There is a focus on ‘whataboutism’ with actors often emphasising their own small contributions to climate change or deflecting attention to bigger actors such as China
- Underlying this is the ‘free rider’ excuse, whereby climate change mitigation by some countries ,would result in the increase of emissions by others taking advantage of any dip in emission.
2. Pushing non-transformative solutions
- Here, policy statements can often promote ineffective solutions and are sometimes characterised by ‘technological optimism’. This is where technological progress such as zero-carbon planes or fusion power are touted as the solution to climate change.
- Often this discourse is accompanied by empirically unsupported claims or faith placed in unknowable timelines for when this technology will be available. It is characterised by setting ambitious targets without instrumental action to make them happen, or pointing to any recent lowering of emissions to show more stringent measures are not needed.
- A discourse of ‘no sticks, just carrots’ argues that we should only pursue voluntary policies or that any more restrictive measures are too paternalistic.
3. Emphasizing the downsides
- This discourse is characterised by an emphasis on the negative consequences of climate action often focusing on topics such as employment, general prosperity and loss of “ways of life”.
- Often this framing resonates for low-income members of society, marginalised communities and developing nations.
- Discussion in this discourse sometimes overemphasises the negative impacts of climate action at the expense of discussing the impact of inaction. It disregards the positive impact of improved public health, regional development and employment opportunities, or greater community resilience.
- It can result in ‘policy perfectionism’ where disproportional caution is used in setting ambitious levels of climate policy in order not to lose public support.
4. Surrender to climate change
This discourse can develop in two ways:
- Claims that policies will impinge on humans and society to the degree that they are doomed to fail — that ‘change is impossible’. The focus here becomes on surrendering or adapting to climate change.
- Its second form is ‘doomism’ arguing that catastrophic climate change is already locked-in and we cannot prevent it. Often such statements result in fear and paralysis of action.
Policy-focused discourses that exploit contemporary discussions on what action should be taken, how fast, who bears responsibility and where costs and benefits should be allocated.
A key feature of these discourses becoming delays arguments is when they either misrepresent, raise adversity, or imply impossibility of action. The authors argue that “pre-emptively warning the public about misinformation can help build resistance and ‘inoculate’ against climate denial”.
While this is important, due to the ever evolving nature of these delay arguments overcoming them will require public deliberation processes, highlighting responsibility, appropriate solutions and addressing climate change.
What does systems change mean in 2020?
Rowan uses the imagery of a landscape, its contours and pathways laid out and shaped by the implications of our past and present actions. Before we move forward with ‘building back better’, Rowan calls on us to reflect on what we want this imagined landscape to look like, and understand how it is shaped by the crises of the last decade.
Rowan shares her memories of the economic crash of 2008, the Occupy Wall Street movement to the Arab Spring, for her leaving clear contours in the landscape we see today:
- One distributary of the economy surged — the capital markets and wealth.
- The other withered to a stream — the real economy and income.
For Rowan a new normal is inevitable and emergence will play a crucial role in systemic change happening.
Rowan gives a guide for how a city should approach systems change:
- Work with communities in small experiments to understand how to approach challenges like climate change. They give the example of Kate Raworth’s doughnut model being used in the City of Amsterdam.
- Rowan encourages leaders to go further than this, using the principles of permaculture, listening, probing, observation, so that they might spot emerging forms of democracy.
- Leaders should use new digital infrastructures to engage with communities and their experiences during the pandemic, both the problems they have faced and their hopes and fears for the future.
Critical for Rowan is also re-imagining economic systems:
- Leaders need to work with indigenous knowledge around the world — environmental impacts and civic life need to be classified as economic activity
- Joanna Macy’s concept of ‘Deep Time’ work should be built into our economic models. Integral here is the idea that there is no beginning or end — there is just the actions that you take now and their ramifications on later generations.
Narrative Collapse
In this article, L. M. Sacasas defines narrative as a technology. Narratives are compared to algorithms — while algorithms work in conjunction with machines and devices, they are processes or sets of rules to be applied to a particular problem or situation as a tool to make sense of the world.
Different types of narratives play different purposes in our lives from our family history, racial or ethnic background, political principals. They provide a guide and understanding of how we situate ourselves in the world around us, and interact with it.
Narratives are a way for us to filter the world around us as ‘we never merely perceive the world, we interpret it’. We are constantly interpreting the world so it fits in to our overall narrative.
Narratives and databases:
- Digital media introduced a new scale, pace, and pattern to human communication, and, in this way, altered how the world is perceived.
- Sacasas highlights how when we interact with digital media we are seeing the end of a process — choices have already been made about how to present information, the narrative chosen by the author, the language they used.
- Sacasas compares the experience of navigating the online world with that of a database — due to the sheer amount of information online we’re interacting with ‘a loosely arranged set of data points whose significance and meaning has not been baked into the form itself’, which in this way counters the narratives we would otherwise normally engage with.
- This online ‘database’ then gives us an infinite amount of data and information to process without comprehensive, integrated and compelling narratives
Potential consequences of the online ‘database’:
- All narratives generated from the database are tenuous and subject to constant revision.
- We normally seek closure on a narrative, but with the online ‘database’ the journey is always open-ended. There is an indefinite amount of new information to incorporate.
- If we are unable to establish a narrative it can cause a sense of flux, unsettledness and instability and cause the impulse to impose order.
Further reading
If you’d like to check out more articles from last month, here are some more we enjoyed reading in July. They range from climate change and renewable energy to exploring innovation in a post COVID-19 world.
- From The Guardian, this piece, looks at the Dutch city of Arnhem preparing for global heating effects.
- This article analyses the UK demand for new vegan food products in lockdown.
- Data shows that COVID-19 has reawakened Europe’s sleeper trains as ‘people don’t want to fly’.
- Renew Economy writes about Australian federal government’s fast tracking of the world’s largest solar and battery power stations.
- Read more about SEEDS, a new form of currency designed to distribute value to initiatives that deliver favourable outcomes for environmental and social regeneration.
- Naresh Giangrande explores the question — is Deep Adaptation good science?
- What can K-Pop stans, Boomers and Zoomers teach us about narrative control?
- CAF and Forster Communications have produced a report exploring what it means to be brave in the field of sustainability.
- “As we seek to make sense of the pandemic, many are pinning their hopes on an “entrepreneurial state” to champion innovation to solve the crisis.” But how we do ensure purpose-driven innovation in a time of COVID-19?
- Bonus video: Old English Custom Finds New Meaning in a London Neighbourhood Willesden Green Wassail revisits an ancient ritual to celebrate diverse neighbourhood in London.
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