This diary was provoked by a short article in Common Dreams, "On Climate, Humanity Must Rise Up Against 'Collective Shrug of Fatalism," by staff writer Jon Queally.
Overcoming "fatalism" about climate change is of course important -- but a more important goal of climate change activism is to project the right motivation (thus Queally's word, "fatalism") to attract a critical mass of activists and thus to constitute a global movement. Telling people that climate change will result in the doom of civilization is a fair enough thing to do, by itself, but it doesn't provide them with appropriate motivation to seek efficacious solutions or to, in Naomi Klein's words, "save the climate."
Importantly, Queally's short article is more generally about Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything, which contains a number of ideas for providing the appropriate motivation to motivate activists to "save the climate." In that book Klein implies that, as people join social movements and become motivated activists, the movements will at some point come together around the issue of climate change. Thus the climate change movement is to work with already existing motivations of activists.
Here I hope to push Klein's argument a bit further than Klein herself did. I believe that bringing movements together can be facilitated by suggesting a movement goal beyond that of merely improving the character of more capitalism. The movement goal I have in mind starts, but does not end, with the concept of "food sovereignty." I will explain below the fold.
At any rate, Queally's piece in commondreams.org starts by discussing the renewed commitment of The Guardian to publish pieces about climate change, thus to overcome fatalism about it. But Queally's piece is also about a draft version of a movie, currently being made by Klein's husband, as a sort of follow-up to Klein's book This Changes Everything:
According to sentiments shared by Rusbridger (the current editor of The Guardian) and expressed in both the film and the book, Klein and Lewis argue climate change, if properly understood, "could become a galvanising force for humanity" if a more appropriate response can overcome the pervasive denial, fear, and helplessness associated with the issue.Much of the small segment of the movie which is embedded in Queally's piece is about tar sands mining in Alberta. To be fair, the movie segment does recommend, through Klein's voice, a broader goal: that a number of other movements all join together in a climate change movement:
"What if," she asks, "we realized that real disaster response means fighting inequality and building a just economy – that everyone working for a healthy food system is already a climate warrior? So too, are people fighting for public transit in Brazil; housing and immigrant rights in the United States; battling austerity in Europe; extraction in Australia; pollution in China and India; environmental crime in Africa; and the bad trade deals that lock in all these ills everywhere."Klein thusly suggests that we bring together a wide variety of social movements under the climate change banner -- she even wrote a piece on "Black lives matter," titled "Why #BlackLivesMatter Should Transform the Climate Debate."
But not all protest movements are equally effectual. Protest movements are fine. But protests, by themselves, are often relatively ineffectual when placed in relation to the enormous amounts of energy which goes into making them happen. Let's say you can get thousands of people into the streets, all yelling the same thing at once. Then they go home and business as usual continues on its merry way. What was accomplished? Thus Scott Walker: "If I can handle 100,000 protesters, I can defeat ISIS." Attention Walker: it's not that you "handled" them, it's that they didn't achieve what they set out to achieve using the methods they selected.
Electoral campaigns are fine too. But electoral campaigns which merely promote the lesser of two evils are not effective, or even important. From that earlier diary, of 2010:
The problem with "lesser of two evils" voting is that it cedes the high ground that can be gained from having expectations of government. All the "lesser of two evils" really has to do is to be less evil -- actually doing good does not have to be a prerequisite for obtaining (or maintaining) political office. If you vote "lesser of two evils," then, your politicians are beholden to you for nothing.And I don't think it's climate change, moreover, that is the main object of public attitudes of fatalism, or even of the "pervasive denial, fear, and helplessness" cited in Queally's short article as regards abrupt climate change. Rather, it's capitalism that inspires popular fatalism, fatalism that centers around the question of what to do that doesn't just preserve the dichotomy of "capitalism vs. the climate" that is the subheading of This Changes Everything. Or at least this is the fatalism common among those who don't assume that a mild carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme or a cheaper solar panel will solve all our climate change problems (and Naomi Klein is not one of those people).
In this regard it may be useful to invoke the Naomi Klein of This Changes Everything who dared to finger capitalism as the problem. More specifically, we should invoke the Naomi Klein of This Changes Everything who wrote a chapter in opposition to "extractivism," which she described as a "nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking" (169). Creating a world that does not depend upon "extractivism" should be our first task.
So what to do?