Glimmers of Hope
In a world on fire we want to talk about the power of resistance
When we think about climate change we usually focus on worsening impacts — the droughts, fires, famines, and floods that sometimes make the headlines. What we tend to think of less frequently are the countless efforts of people from all walks of life to make the world a better place. But as Paul Hawken wrote in his book Blessed Unrest, “If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t have the correct data. If you meet people in this unnamed movement and aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a heart.”
So while we have rightly focused on bearing witness to the unfolding horror of a 1℃ warmer world, and have spent much of the past 9 months since our previous bulletin doing just that, we must also keep in mind the undying possibility of change. We must keep alive in our hearts the hope that, together, we can breathe life into the old slogan that another world is possible. Even in the darkest moments we still have a choice, both personal and political, about how we want to live together and what sort of a world we want to leave behind.
We choose life over death and hope over despair. And we have chosen, in this bulletin, to share with you some stories which may inspire you to do the same.
The Defence of Life
Late August last year when mega-storm Harvey hit Texas — the largest rain event in US history — some landlords demanded rents in unlivable flooded properties and some of the famous big evangelical churches closed their doors. But people on the ground and grassroots religious institutions were quickly helping people: community mosques and churches opened their doors to become shelters, and staff at a Mexican bakery handed out hundreds of loaves to those fleeing the storm. People banded together and reached out to pull strangers from the rising waters.
This type of support is not charity. It’s not about one set of people “saving” another. It is about mutual aid: an essential trait of our species. This is in sharp contrast to certain types of “aid” which often fails to truly help people even in the short-term.
We know that as well as helping one another and acting in love, we must also resist the systems which harm people and planet.
Sometimes fighting climate change means breaking the law, and direct action in the name of climate justice is on the rise around the world. Because we are fast running out of time we must escalate our actions in every sense — something that organisers in the U.S. made clear with their 60 days of #ClimateCountdown mobilizations earlier this year.
It was the same motivation that last August saw thousands of people say Ende Gelande, “here and no further”, putting their bodies on the line to shut down massive coal mines in Germany’s Rhineland. This year organizers have expanded their focus to include the Czech Republic and Holland.
In Bangladesh, communities of landless peoples are also fighting tooth and nail against the coal industry while under heavy state surveillance and repression, and in the Peruvian Amazon the Achuar, Kichwa, and Quechua peoples are maintaining their decades-long opposition to oil extraction on their lands.
While fossil fuel projects may be the obvious villains, Indigenous communities around the world are also facing down other forms of “bad development.” In Cambodia, the Cambodia Indigenous Peoples Alliance are coordinating with local communities who refuse to leave their ancestral lands to make way for a mega-dam project, while in Indonesia, agrarian communities are resisting bad development projects like mining and cement factories.
In Mexico, where narco-state violence is rife, Indigenous Náhuatl people in the Zongolica region of Veracruz defend themselves through a system of well-organised communitary defence forces, 40% women. Around the world, it is women on the frontline in the defence of human rights, and human life.
In British Columbia, Canada, it was Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, who was arrested at a Trans Mountain pipeline protest. Even nuns in Pennsylvania have taken direct action against a proposed fracked gas pipeline by building a chapel along the suggested route. Their protest adds to the actions being taken in Texas, New York, Germany, France, and Ireland to #BreakTheFrackingCycle as well as the irrepressible resistance of the community at Preston New Road in Lancashire, England, who undertook a 3-day “Block around the Clock” protest at the drill site where they have maintained a presence since January of last year. October this year will see worldwide anti-fracking action with the 6th Global Frack Down.
Meanwhile, a new global network has been launched to combat and coordinate action against the frightening expansion plans of the aviation industry. As they point out, the vast surge in airport expansion is driven not by the needs of most people but rather by “the super-rich flying increasingly frequently to their tax havens.” In response, the global anti-airtropolis movement is growing too.
Though each battle is immensely important for the affected communities, no one victory by itself will ever be enough. This makes each struggle as important as any other — something that can be both empowering and demoralising. But like any challenge in life, focusing on the enormity will get you nowhere. As Creighton Abrams noted, the best way to eat an elephant is one piece at a time.
Sometimes resistance involves using the master’s tools, so to speak, and 2017 was the year that climate lawsuits became the norm as Juliana Vs. the United States notched an important win for campaigners as the fossil fuel industry was denied the opportunity to join the U.S. government as a defendant.
The fact that 276 cases are being brought in 25 countries around the world points to a growing trend of litigation against climate criminals on the basis of human rights.
Cases have been brought against the Irish government for its inaction in response to climate change, and litigants from 8 countries are attempting to bring a case against the European Parliament and Council for the European Union. The litigants say that the EU’s mitigation targets result in violations of their fundamental rights of life, health, occupation, and property.
Portuguese children affected by last summer’s forest fires are seeking to follow suite by crowdfunding to mount a case in the European court of human rights, accusing multiple European governments of failing to tackle climate change.
As well as governments a number of corporations have been targeted. Campaigners have lodged cases against Shell in both Italian and Dutch courts for their by now well-documented crimes in the Niger Delta, while the U.S. Supreme Court is going to hear a case brought by Indian villagers against the Tata Mundra Power Plant in Gujarat. The coal-fired power plant was funded by the World Bank which is based in the U.S.
The question of whose financial interests are served by our politicians and decision-makers is being asked with more frequency and force around the world — and it is having some results. Without even mentioning the massive impact on public discourse and public investments that the divestment movement has had, recent months have seen the Democratic Party in the U.S. vote to stop receiving donations from fossil fuel corporations, and 25% of European MEPs broke free from the pressure of corporate lobbyists to vote against major gas infrastructure projects. In both cases, the vote went against them but it shows the changing attitudes among politicians who are beginning to respect people power more than corporate power.
In Colombia, communities are taking decisions for themselves and consultas populares have emerged as an important tool allowing many municipalities, like Jesús María, to say no to mining and fossil fuel extraction. At the same time, the Colombian Supreme Court of Justice took an unprecedented move to inhibit those industries from operating by granting the Colombian Amazon the same rights as a citizen. The court was influenced in its decision by the presentation of 25 young people and gave the President and Ministry of Environment 4 months to come up with an action plan.
There is a usefulness in shaping the law as one part of the effort to prevent further destruction of the biosphere as shown in this 30-year review of the Montreal Protocol, which successfully regulated global emissions of substances that deplete the Ozone. This is true of not only individual countries but also at the international level. The aforementioned review claims that the successful approach taken to recover the ozone can be copied to address climate change.
Though direct action and legal approaches have an immediate and practical feel to them, sometimes resistance only needs to be symbolic. In August, Jharkhand tribal women in India tied rakhi to trees in a powerful act of symbolism where they pledged to protect them from logging.
But because resistance is about power, and chiefly the urgent need for those of us who would defend life to grow our collective power, it always requires us to build alliances. When Trump visited the UK, over 250,000 people took to the streets of London for the biggest mobilization since the 2003 protests against the Iraq war. As was evidenced from the range of speakers and their interventions, the Stop Trump coalition was an alliance of many diverse causes coming together with a common purpose — something we will need more of in the years ahead.
2017 was notable for some other inspiring moments in this regard, including when Korean unions called for the phase-out of coal and nuclear power in favour of a just transition in the energy sector. In September the UK Trade Union Congress passed a historic resolution at its annual meeting calling for a mass program for energy conservation and efficiency; the establishment of a “just transition” strategy for affected workers; and, the investigation of long-term risks to pension funds from investments in fossil fuels.
Although sometimes pitted against each other, labour movements and environmental movements share a common cause — there are, after all, no jobs on a dead planet — perhaps best exemplified by the amazing story of Mexican miners who have endured horrific work conditions and exploitation at every turn, only to emerge highly organised and politicised, with a clear demand for climate justice.
Perhaps more than anything else resistance is about imagination and vision. Which is why it is so important that we take seriously the task of explaining the world we want and the path to take us there, even if we don’t always know all the answers.
Some answers we do already know include the basic truth that to address climate change we must address inequality which is not only a product of the climate crisis but a driver as well, as a recent report by the Roosevelt Institute makes clear. This inequality refers to the vast gaps of wealth and power that exist between people along the fault lines of class, race, and gender but also the gaps of wealth of power that exist between countries, which strikes at the heart of the difficulty in international climate change negotiations. The wealthy and powerful people and countries who cause climate change have no interest in changing their ways. They would rather force austerity on the rest of us while making their own preparations for the inevitable climate disasters to come.
Fortunately, we are many, and they are few. And we are sharing our ideas, analysis, and strategies with each other almost non-stop in the internet era through (nearly) carbon-neutral conferences. While some of our efforts are naturally in pursuit of utopian visions, many take up the challenge laid out by Christian Parenti that “in the short-term, realistic climate politics are reformist politics, even if they are conceived of as part of a longer-term anti-capitalist project of totally economic re-organization.”
We are coming together to form the first EcoSocialist International, and penning our demands and ambitions in work like the Lofoten Declaration (a global call for a managed decline of fossil fuel production). We are proposing radical ideas such as universal basic income and rewilding. And we are getting some people, like New York’s Democratic Socialist, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, into the fray of mainstream politics where they can champion movement demands such as 100% renewable energy by 2035.
And, yes, we are also re-imagining what kind of economic system we want to live by, thinking beyond growth, and sharing strategies for how to bring about a just transition to an equitable, low-carbon economy that leaves no one behind. We are outlining political pathways towards a better world, where power is generated in the “intersections of deeply democratic social movements and equally diverse and committed new types of parties and political coalitions.”
People-led Solutions
As well as taking direct action and legal challenges, as well as finding and forging alliances, and as well as setting out a positive vision for the future, resistance is about finding our own solutions in the here and now. This is happening in every corner of the world, as the Atlas of Utopia clearly shows. There is no shortage of existing solutions to the crisis of climate change.
In Alaska, small villages have been turning to off-grid renewable energy, with remarkable results. The same is true across Africa and Asia where decentralised approaches are being taken to bring electricity to the 1 billion people who are still going without. And in the Amazon, Indigenous Peoples — long the victims of bad development projects such as mega-dams — are beginning to put together renewable energy plans of their own.
Inhabitants of El Cua, Nicaragua, have for 30 years been quietly undertaking an energy revolution to a “solidarity-driven, community-focused development model that was designed collectively — through trial and error and numerous rounds of consultation — by local engineers, builders and community members.” In the U.K. energy poverty is also being confronted from the bottom-up by groups such as Greater Manchester Community Renewables who aim to put energy ownership back in the hands of communities.
This is the same objective as global campaigns such as Reclaim Power, which aim to build a fossil-free world in a very short amount of time.
While national governments generally lack the political will to do what it takes to find solutions to climate change, municipalities have emerged as beacons of hope, with cities like Berlin yielding to citizen pressure to divest hundreds of millions of Euros worth of pension funds from fossil fuel stock.
The Spanish cities of Barcelona, Cádiz, Madrid, Pamplona y Zaragoza have declared themselves cities for a just and democratic energy transition and launched a communication effort to share what initiatives they have already developed as part of a process to normalise community renewable energy.
While it has been obvious to many people for a long time that there are myriad ways in which good development policies both mitigate drivers of climate change and also address social inequities, the evidence is now there for all to see, as a new review of 700 papers evidences.
The results “clearly shows that low-carbon measures can help to achieve a range of development priorities, such as job creation, improved public health, social inclusion, and improved accessibility.”
While it is affirming to have peer-reviewed papers supporting this idea, the evidence for it is all around us. In Hungary, environmental NGOs are collaborating with municipalities to address the country’s 40% fuel poverty through a Straw Bale Housing Programme which uses the simple, cheap, sustainable technique of straw insulation to help the 70% of households that are improperly insulated.
In Estonia, the government is seeking to take free public transport, already a reality for residents of Tallinn, to the rest of the nation. This would make Estonia the world’s first free public transport nation. The next step is to decarbonise transport. Helpfully, a new tool developed by the World Wildlife Fund along with partners in the transport industry allows companies to align their efforts to reduce emissions with a global attempt to stay within 2℃ warming.
As well as obvious sectors of the economy such as housing, energy, and transport, the land and agriculture sectors require urgent attention both to be less damaging to the earth but also to better serve communities. While some adjustments could be made at the individual level by consumers — going vegan is frequently touted as being the most impactful — the more important change needs to be to the system.
Officials in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh have announced that they will be following a Zero Budget Natural Farming, a pesticide and fertiliser-free approach to agriculture that has been shown to improve crop yields and rejuvenate soils.
Meanwhile, WWF have launched a 30x30 Forests, Food, and Land challenge which calls on governments at all levels, as well as businesses and consumers to take the following actions by 2030: “Halve food loss and waste and consume conscientiously; Sequester 1 gigaton of carbon each year in forests, soil and other natural and working lands; and Enable better consumption and production of food and fiber through finance, transparency, public-private collaboration and protecting local rights.”
Deforestation is a significant contributor to climate change. In some parts of the world, such as Bangladesh, the loss of mangrove forests presents both immediate and long-term problems which is why it is so forward-thinking of these youth to plant over 300 mangrove saplings to act as a natural cyclone barrier and carbon sink.
In Bolivia, Indigenous Tacana and Lecos communities are managing their forests, nourishing livelihoods, and defending against deforestation. Such approaches to tackling deforestation are the most effective. When the communities in Bolivia took back control over their territories and assumed responsibility for the management of its resources they reduced deforestation four times more than surrounding areas.
That Indigenous Peoples’ cultures and traditions are often “closely aligned with safeguarding critical ecosystems and endemic species” was also a finding of a global report by the Community Conservation Resilience Initiative, published in June. We have always known that Indigenous Peoples are fighting not only for their right to self-determination but also that the rest of humanity may have a livable planet. Their struggles, and their victories, often go unmentioned even in alternative media. Standing Rock was an emblematic site battle which captured the world’s attention, but 2017 saw a slew of other major victories after long-standing struggles by Indigenous Peoples in Indonesia, New Zealand, Peru, Canada, Ecuador, Kenya, and Australia.
There are some 5000 Indigenous Peoples around the world — composed of 370 million individuals speaking 4000 languages — many of whom are preserving traditional knowledge about plants, animals, weather, and how to live in harmony with the natural world. If we are to have any hope of weathering or averting the coming storms we must listen to and learn from Indigenous Peoples. Such efforts are already underway, such as the Local Environmental Observer Network in Alaska which marries science and digital technology with traditional knowledge and observation to understand environmental change.
It is not only with regards to ecology that we have much to learn but also with regards to some of the threads that stitch the social fabric together, such as spirituality. Climate science is particularly focused on data, records, probabilities, and evidence. But one key lesson in change-making that has been hammered home in recent years is that it doesn’t matter if you are right, it matters how you make people feel. Unless we radically change how we feel about and relate to the world around us, unless we can develop a “spiritual ecology,” we will continue to imperil all life on earth.
Thankfully, life itself may be stepping in. Recent evidence has shown what forest ecologists have long suspected — that in the Amazon, trees actually spur the formation of rain clouds above the forest by releasing salt particles and moisture they have drawn up from the soil. The change in atmospheric conditions then drives circulation, meaning moist air from the oceans moves in.
In fact, new research also indicates that plants are increasingly absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — which may just give us homo sapiens enough breathing space (literally) to transition away from our unjust, unhealthy, and unsustainable carbon economy.
On Winning
“There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up” — Tony Benn
With the scale of the challenge so unprecedented, the window of opportunity so small, and the odds either so unfavourable or so unknown as to be of little use in terms of reassurance, sometimes it is hard to appreciate the little victories. We fixate on loss. But there are gains being made each and every day. And it would do us good to remind ourselves that, as Raymond Williams said,
“to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”
It is therefore worth noting that countries are now pledging to end the era of fossil fuels whereas a few years ago they were vocally committed to the mantra of drill, baby, drill. Sri Lanka has said it will have no more coal-fired power plants starting from 2037. The UK has pledged to end coal by 2025. Costa Rica is set to ban fossil fuels and become the world’s first decarbonised society. Ireland made history by becoming the first nation to divest from fossil fuels. Universities alone have already divested $80 billion globally.
The details and deadlines attached to these promises still spell climate disaster in that they are too little too late, but governments are increasingly being forced to act with more urgency. Even corporations are being forced to abandon some of their projects. After 5 years, the community of Port Augusta in South Australia won its battle to replace two of the dirtiest coal-fired power stations in the country with a massive solar thermal plant.
A rapid energy transformation from high-carbon to low-carbon sources is begrudgingly moving ahead. India added more solar power in the first half of 2017 than in all of 2016. Real ambition is also being seen in China’s solar industry, where 24 gigawatts of solar were installed in two months alone in the first part of this year, but also worldwide with a record-breaking 98 gigawatts installed in 2017. Renewable energy now generates enough power to run 70% of Australian homes.
New players are entering the game: in late 2017 the Philippines — better known for coal — opened its first solar panel factory, one of the biggest in Asia, employing up to 50,000 people.
There are obviously issues with large-scale renewable energy for the simple reason that industrial civilization itself is unsustainable regardless of what fuels it. The world we want is not this one with wind power instead of coal and solar instead of oil. The interlocking injustices we seek to right do not all come down to how we power the world. But there are immediate material benefits to a shift in energy models which we should not only consider but for which we should also strive and push our governments to work towards.
For example, a new study suggests that wind and solar energy saved the United States $88 billion in health and environmental costs over eight years from 2007–2015. More importantly than money, renewables helped to avoid 12,700 deaths over a 9 year period thanks to the associated reduction in air pollutants from fossil fuels. In the fight for life, that is something.
The Price of Struggle
Tragically, victories such as these don’t come for free. There is always a cost to be borne. Easy for Tony Benn to say toughen up — when it comes to the struggles in defense of life it is usually women, communities of colour, and indigenous peoples who bear the cost.
Such was the case in Pajuiles, Honduras, where community resistance to the construction of a large dam has resulted in arrests, evictions, intimidation, and violence.
The same was true in Madhya Pradesh, India, where last August hunger strikers were arrested during protests against a dam to which 2000 police officers were dispatched. In the southern site of Tamil Nadu, police murdered 11 protestors during demonstrations against the expansion of a British-owned copper smelting plant which residents have identified as a major source of pollution.
In Tanzania, leading anti-poaching activist Wayne Lotter, who battled ivory-trafficking networks, was shot dead in August 2017 following almost a decade of death threats. Three more rangers were killed in Brazil, Mexico, and Mali in a deadly month around the world for wildlife defenders.
Elsewhere, between 8–10 members of a remote Indigenous community were killed by gold prospectors in Brazil’s Javari Valley. Such killings take place against a backdrop of rising brutality across the Amazon; in June, UN rights experts denounced a surge of killings linked to rural land disputes in Brazil.
In the central Peruvian region of Ucayali, six farmers were killed last year by criminal gangs seeking to seize lands and destine them for palm oil cultivation, while in Cauca, Colombia, paramilitaries have been threatening the community that organised itself to secure a consulta popular against mining in their region.
In total, a staggering 197 land and environment defenders were killed in 2017. The number jumps up dramatically if we consider the many activists labelled as “human rights defenders” — in Colombia alone 46 have been murdered already this year.
Where the state cannot easily kill environmental defenders it instead seeks to criminalise them. This is true even in Europe, where one only has to look at the French state’s harsh crackdown on the autonomous area in Notre-Dame-des-Landes popularly known as la ZAD.
With battles for environmental justice around the world heating up — everything from land-grabs to mega-mining, sand mafias to nuclear nightmares, protests over pesticides to fights over fish — organisers, campaigners, and frontline communities will find themselves increasingly targeted by state and corporate legal and extra-legal means.
We hope that some of the norms and institutions we live under actually turn out to help us, like when earlier this year a judge in Boston, USA dropped charges against a dozen activists who blocked a fracking pipeline because she accepted they had done what was necessary to prevent the greater harm of climate change. However, we cannot expect to rely on this. Therefore we must, as ever, look out for ourselves and for one another.
