Why the time for climate action is now
For Actionable and On Purpose’s event on how to get your organisation to declare a Climate Emergency — https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-climate-emergency-from-declarations-to-action-tickets-97144324289
As I walk the streets of an empty Manhattan, I breathe air which feels clean, the smog having lifted in days, as it has above LA and London and many other areas which before had been breaking UN conventions for poor air quality. At 7pm, as the din of residents uniting in thanks to first responders begins to rise, I lean my head outside my window and look up at the neighbouring buildings, which before I had understood architecturally, brick and mortar structures, occupying space. I had forgotten these buildings are teeming with people. Are built for people. Our cities heave with life, yet so often we forget every life but our own, surrounded as we are but adrift, undulating in a sea of personal goals, troubles, possessions. Looking out of my window, perhaps for the first time in my life, I did not see tower blocks, but people-holding blocks. And when a block of concrete becomes a block of people, that old concept ‘community’ begins to drift into consciousness. I dimly perceive what that might mean, for those few minutes that the pots clatter.
Well, fine, you might say. How nice that vestiges of community spirit are sputtering up across our urban centres. But this only highlights how dislocated things are right now, how transitional; it is not the time to be distracted by that old enemy in the distance climate change, not time to focus on constructing the future when we are struggling to cope in the present [Tom Rippin, CEO and Founder of On Purpose, encapsulates this need for our presence in the moment in his recent letter].
But what if adequately coping in the present meant preparing for the future? What if the only way that we can avoid the worst of this current crisis is by remodelling our societies in a way which also happens to be necessary to avoid runaway climate change? And what if failing to do so would mean that we are condemning ourselves to a future where the resources made scarce by climate disruption flow directly into the hands of politicians and elites who exploited this moment of flux to establish laws and rights which they would never be able to pass under normal circumstances?
These two crises are not separable, not in terms of what they mean for the wellbeing of humankind now and in the future. And thus we should not treat them as such.
So, what connects the climate crisis and the corona crisis, other than alliteration?
Firstly, who the crises will affect. As GDP drops and society grinds to a halt, the most at risk are those millions who work on the unsupported fringes of our economy, the gig workers, zero-hours contractors and freelancers, with a dearth of social security measures and employee rights generally; those who are sick but cannot afford healthcare in countries without a national health service; those who do not earn enough to live in adequately sized housing with their families, now condemned to confinement indefinitely. These people were not the ones responsible for the climate crisis, not the ones accountable for a toweringly disproportionate percentage of carbon emissions as the richest in our society are, but will still be its chief victims as economies buckle under the strain of rampant immigration and resource scarcity (predicted even if warming is contained to just 1.5% *). In the same way, they are now bearing the brunt of this crisis because of the place they occupy within an exploitative economic system which does not value or care for them.
Secondly, in terms of the underlying and fundamental causes of the two crises. We have known about the risks of pandemics and even a corona-based pandemic for years. Figures as high profile as Bill Gates have given talks and campaigned for preventative government action. Why were we not prepared? As Chomsky argues, because we leave these decisions in the hands of private companies — unaccountable to the public — for whom making new vanity products creates easier, shorter-term profit to satisfy their shareholders, who operating in the manner they do no now have no concept of stewardship or planetary and economic resilience, only a hunger for immediate gain.
According to systems thinking — and how clearly we now see that our planet is indeed one interconnected system — efficiency is dichotomously opposed to resilience, especially when efficiency is understood as it really is in our modern economy, viz, speed. The more you squeeze the productivity out of something, the more you have to cut corners; the more fat you have to trim off which could be saved up for a rainy (or quarantined) day. If you want to build a factory efficiently, you build it with the first materials you find, as quickly as you can, without spending the time or resources considering the safety or wellbeing of those who will work in it for example. Similarly, under the same principles, you construct a health service such that hospitals alternate between near and full capacity at all times, because it does not make sense under a model of efficiency to have empty hospitals and idle doctors, waiting around ‘just in case’.
Thirdly, the implications both crises have in terms of our systems of value and how we understand the world. To continue my previous point, in reality, nature knows no efficiency, if efficiency is understood as a shortcut, or a way of elevating one particular area of growth or progress above another. Nature works holistically, because it is the whole. If any concept of efficiency does exist, it is one which works towards the health of the whole: an absolute efficiency. Everything is part of the whole and so is subsumed back into it once its ostensible purpose has expired, just as dead leaves become mulch become what feeds the trees from which the leaves fall. We operate under the illusion of efficiency, calling the extraneous consequences of our productivity ‘externalities’. But there are no externalities in life: one person’s externalities are another’s life and death, just as the profit reaped by oil and gas companies comes at the expense of those — us — who breathe dirtier air, experience rising sea levels and simultaneous drought, and deal with the consequences of a resource-scarce world; or just as that of unregulated pharmaceutical companies sends the cost of medical care higher, punishing the poorest and, ironically, governments themselves worldwide, making them unable to respond in times of crisis.
Declaring a climate emergency has always been about more than the climate. This was understood from the first systematic climate change deniers who emerged in the USA in the 1960s, ex-army and government officials who had a pathological fear of communism and socialism and saw the egalitarian politics necessitated by a climate revolution as a backdoor into either or both. (I am not saying climate change advocacy is advocacy for socialism, just that the broader economic and political implications of an adequate response to the problem have been understood since its very origins).
Declaring a climate emergency is also about declaring a social emergency, where relationships have broken down such that we no longer feel accountable to those we are not forced to encounter face-to-face; it is about declaring a moral emergency, where the concepts of hierarchy and who matters in society has been distorted by fetishisation of celebrity and wealth, seen by the rise of vanity, bigotry and callousness to our very highest offices; it is about declaring an economic emergency, having seen that a rapacious and highly ideological (which is to say entirely abstractly based, rather than coherent with the principles of nature ie the world in itself) economic framework has been forced down our throats, or rather drip fed us, for the last forty years.
The corona crisis represents a call to arms to these emergencies: to the social emergency, by showing that through protecting the very weakest in our society, the homeless, we protect ourselves, since this group, through a combination of low health education, high interpersonal contact and unrestricted movement, is synonymous with superspreaders (inverting our conception of ‘importance’ perhaps); to the moral emergency, by reminding us of our society’s true responsibilities: safeguarding the health, education and food security of all of its residents, and reminding us of what we value through what we miss and now cling to: freedom, nature and relationship; to the economic emergency, by showing us that our economy can indeed function for the good of the many when it needs to. (And if money is in short supply, we are reminded that we need look no further than the tax-avoiding pockets of the big tech companies currently exhibiting exactly how powerful and wealthy they have become, from Amazon’s booming delivery and logistics services to Facebook’s planetary reach as a tool for virtual contact and contact-tracing).
The time for action is now. We have the momentum. We have begun to see the common thread of our humanity which has been there all along. We have begun to see new, positive news stories, which before had seemed like a contradiction in terms: of impromptu community groups set up to provide for the most vulnerable, of spontaneous and then national outbursts of celebration and thanks for our frontline workers, of supermarkets and businesses offering slots reserved for the elderly; animals returning to their habitats, water sources becoming swimmable again. And underneath the hubbub, the UK Transport Secretary has announced the Transport Decarbonisation Plan — a clearer roadmap than ever for coordinated national climate action, whose aims and means of achieving them can no longer be dismissed as unrealistic or unnecessary. It is not enough, but it is a start.
We see the possibility for the type of world we want to see hidden behind the thinnest of curtains, hidden behind something as slender as a moment in time, which we can indeed reach out to touch.
Eventually, this pandemic will shift. The same old entrenched personal interests will attempt to convince us that we must return to ‘business as usual’. That the disruption caused by the virus can only be righted by quickly returning to the pursuit of growth at maximum efficiency. It will require all of us to listen to these voices with full attention and tell them that we know, finally, that what they say is untrue. That what we are fed as the truth is just one political ideology, one story. That it is possible to deploy resources and structure our societies in different, more equitable ways. And that we do not need to fly, consume and do whatever the first thing that strikes our fancy is, but can give primacy to higher ideals in service to all of humanity, and find great joy and purpose in this.
As active members of organisations, we leverage our impact to its highest effect, drawing on the strength of the collective, yet not lost in a sea of voices. We are seeing organisations and communities across the world respond. Let’s use this opportunity to turn that response into a movement.
First we react. Then we build.
Please join our event on April 23rd: How to Get your Organization to Declare a Climate Emergency’ to see how you can be a part of it:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-climate-emergency-from-declarations-to-action-tickets-97144324289
And look out for details for our follow up event on April 30th, Helping me helps you: how to respond positively during the corona crisis, looking at how in this time we can survive, thrive and bring a better world alive
* The current trajectory is 2.8 degrees if all pledges as of December 2019 are adhered to, likely between 4.1–4.8 degrees) https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/
