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New Compass is Camilla Svendsen Skriung, Sveinung Legard, Eirik Eiglad, Peter Munsterman, Kristian Widqvist, Lisa Roth, Camilla Hansen, Jakob Zethelius.

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Template:Anchor Template:Anchor BRIAN TOKAR

Template:Anchor TOWARD CLIMATE JUSTICE

Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change

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Template:Anchor Template:Anchor Template:Anchor Foreword

Global warming is the most immediate and vexing ecological challenge facing humanity. Only a few degrees increase in temperature may have far-reaching and dire consequences for biological diversity, ecosystem stability, and human demography.

Since the UN-initiated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its fourth comprehensive report in 2007, a general acceptance of an impending climate crisis has spread from scientific circles into the mainstream media. Now it is widely acknowledged that not only is our planet faced with the immediate threat of global warming, but that these climate changes are man-made.

The fact that global warming is caused by human activity does not mean that we are all equally to blame. The greenhouse gas emissions from the industrialized “North” have been disproportionate, and continue to be so. Indeed, the countries of the North have to a great extent developed their technological assets and global hegemony precisely through the intensive burning of fossil fuels. Paradoxically, however, the intensification of the climate crisis is likely to have the most devastating effects on people in the impoverished and underdeveloped “South.” Globally, the people who have contributed the least to climate-altering emissions will not only be hit hardest by increasing weather chaos and rising sea levels, but are the least prepared technologically to face the ordeals of the coming decades. Therefore, the climate crisis not only poses a challenge to our societies in a general sense, but it also challenges our sense of social justice. There is something fundamentally unfair about the fact that those populations who will be hit the hardest are those least responsible for causing the crisis in the first place. This simple recognition strikes at the heart of the climate justice issue.

As we see it, the issue of global warming and social justice may well prove to be the crucial battle for the ecology movement in the years ahead. A movement for climate justice is bound to touch upon and confront all issues regarding fair distribution, energy use, technology, infrastructure, urban reorganization, and agrarian reform, as well as the reclaiming of the commons and the potential for a participatory politics.

On a superficial level, to be sure, ecological concerns that were rightfully considered politically subversive only decades ago now have become common wisdom. However, in order to properly confront the crises of our time, we need to recover the radical messages of the ecology movement. In an immediate, practical sense, we need to look at what concrete solutions are available from a sustainable, ecological perspective. How can we act swiftly to reduce our societies’ dependence on fossil fuels and reduce harmful emissions? On a most practical level, new technologies—as well as more extensive and more efficient use of existing eco-technology—can ameliorate the impact of global warming, and ultimately help reverse the path that we are on.

However, we need to go beyond the very idea that new technologies will solve the ecological crisis. There are no simple solutions and there is no “technical fix.” If current political structures and economic imperatives remain intact, we will still have a wasteful and highly energy-demanding—indeed, anti-ecological and unjust—social order. For this reason, there is an urgent need to start defining what the outlines of an ecological society will actually look like; our answers to this question will inform how we will make full use of the liberatory potential of new technologies. Arguably it is only in a non-exploitative and liberatory social context that we can assure that the whole of society—on a global scale—will benefit from technological and scientific advances. Indeed, the adaptation of new ecological technologies requires a drastic decentralization of energy use and food production, as well as of infrastructures and political decision-making.

Further, we need to create a new global ecological movement able to define the outlines of an ecological society and struggle to actualize it. Such a movement must seek to bridge the economic and political gaps between the North and the South. Indeed, in confronting these issues the ecology movement must become truly global in its perspectives and outreach, and strive to make new bonds between activists all over the world. Importantly, we must work to compensate for the economic disadvantages forced on peasants and producers in the global South. At the same time, such a movement must develop real local political foundations, and strive to bridge the gaps between the rich and the poor in all communities, strengthen municipal political life, encourage regional ecological production, and foster communal sensibilities—by empowering common people as responsible citizens.

To fulfill the promises of climate justice we need to ask ourselves even more questions. How can we see beyond the current environmental focus on the major climate summits (like COP 15 in Copenhagen and COP 16 in Cancún), important as they may be, and understand why they have failed to take decisive action? How can we discern and expose the fashionable “false solutions” propagated by the profit-hungry corporations and their lobbies? What can we learn from the escalated calls for climate justice, and how can we act accordingly? How can we work to strengthen this global movement, and make sure it lives up to its far-reaching ideals? And what may this movement learn from the theory and practice of social ecology? Brian Tokar touches upon all these questions, and more, in this book.

Brian Tokar is a seasoned activist with a long commitment to peace, justice and environmental concerns. Tokar was introduced to radical activism in New York City in the early 1970s, first in anti-war work, and then in the powerful antinuclear movement. In 1980, inspired by the ideas of social ecologist Murray Bookchin, he moved to Vermont to work with the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE), and got increasingly involved in Green politics and environmental justice. Tokar has been a key coordinator of resistance against biotechnology and genetic engineering in New England, and he founded the ISE’s Climate Justice Project in 2006. He is currently the director of the ISE and an instructor in environmental studies at the University of Vermont.

Brian Tokar’s authorship reflects this engagement with radical ecology, and his major publications include The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future (San Pedro: R. & E. Miles, 1987; Revised edition 1992), and Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash (Boston: South End Press, 1997). Tokar has also edited books such as Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (London: Zed Books, 2001), and Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade, and the Globalization of Hunger (Burlington: Toward Freedom, 2004). His most recent book on food politics, edited with Fred Magdoff, is titled Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal (New York: Monthly Review, 2010). These publications all point to Tokar’s long-standing involvement with the ecology movement. Tokar also has written numerous essays and articles throughout the decades, engaging with the pressing environmental issues of the day.

The original edition of Toward Climate Justice (2010) was substantially based on a series of essays that first appeared in various journals. The author and publishers would like to thank the editors of Z Magazine, the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Communalism: A Social Ecology Journal, Capitalism Nature Socialism, the websites ZNet, Counterpunch, Toward Freedom and AlterNet, and (for this revised edition) the Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement for originally publishing those essays, portions of which were adapted and reworked for this volume. Brian Tokar’s essays have aimed to explain, encourage, and influence the emerging climate justice movement since early 2008. Now thoroughly updated and revised, this book seeks to offer a comprehensive overview of the movement and its challenges.

While ecological concerns today are publicly acknowledged and debated, mainstream media tend to go to great lengths to downplay their radical underlying messages. Still, the intensifying climate crisis—with its prospects for global warming and meteorological chaos—requires creative social alternatives as well as bold political action. As a social ecologist, Brian Tokar urges us to go to the roots of the ecological crisis and propose new social alternatives. That such solutions are needed is an understatement.

It remains, however, to see whether this emerging movement for climate justice will succeed in bridging the economic and political gaps between the North and the South—the affluent and the impoverished—into a new responsible politics for civic empowerment and global solidarity. But this movement aspires to do so, and we all need to help it live up to its potential.

Our choices and actions today—for better or worse—will have defining consequences for future generations.

Eirik EigladJune 2010

Template:Anchor Template:Anchor Template:Anchor Preface to the Revised Edition

Just a few short years ago, as the research for this book was beginning to take shape, public discussions of the emerging global climate crisis were far different than today’s. Global warming was generally depicted as an esoteric scientific issue with impacts that would be felt in a somewhat distant future. Efforts to engage the public, especially in the United States, were generally limited to explaining the science of global warming and emphatically making the case that the phenomenon was real. Environmentalists embraced images of polar bears stranded on shrinking ice floes, and occasionally referenced the experiences of island dwellers concerned about the loss of their homes to rising sea levels. For the most part, climate issues were something for future generations to grapple with. For the present, people could be consumed with more immediate concerns.

Now we have unambiguously entered the age of extreme weather. Unprecedented droughts, storms and wildfires are almost constantly in the news, even in the relatively sheltered communities of North America. Uniquely powerful hurricanes and tornadoes have devastated communities throughout the East and South, and unprecedented droughts and wildfires continually plague the West. Images of devastating storm damage from other parts of the world paint an even more severe image of our current reality. While mainstream commentators persist in attributing such incidents to short-term weather phenomena like El Niño currents and polar vortices, it is clear that something has dramatically shifted in our day-to-day experience of life on this planet. When established authors on climate change like James Hansen and Bill McKibben write that today’s earth no longer resembles the one on which civilizations emerged, it is not merely an artistic flourish, but a central fact of our daily lived experience.

The relationship between extreme weather and longer-term, human-induced changes to the global climate remains an area of legitimate scientific controversy. The underlying processes are complex, and it’s difficult to be sure about the links between climate and weather, even as we are now effectively certain that human activities such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down the world’s forests are disrupting the climate system and warming the earth. But a few things are well understood.

First, warm air simply holds more moisture, a straight-forward physical phenomenon. In a warming climate, clouds accumulate more water over a longer period of time and have more water to unload when conditions are finally ripe for rainfall. The 2014 US National Climate Assessment reports that a consistently higher proportion of precipitation now falls in the form of very heavy storms, up to a 71 percent increase in the northeastern US from 20[th] century norms.[1]

Secondly, we know that the turbulent weather we are experiencing is precisely what increasingly sophisticated models of the global climate have long predicted. The entire system is shifting ever farther from the relatively stable state that prevailed for much of human history—over hundreds, and likely thousands, of years. The current instability of Arctic and Antarctic ice is one key indicator. Climatologist James Hansen describes these shifts in the climate as analogous to playing a game with loaded dice. For quite a long time, the odds of relatively normal temperature, below normal temperature, and above normal temperature were about equal, as if each of these conditions were represented by two sides of a six-sided cube. To portray today’s realities, the cube-shaped dice would have to be reimagined, such that four of the six sides represent warmer than normal conditions, and more than half a “side” (to stretch the analogy somewhat) would have to represent weather that is statistically far warmer than normal.[2] As of this writing, twenty nine years have passed since the world as a whole last experienced a single month that averaged below normal in temperature by 20[th] century standards.[3] These observations, given the parallel and consistent predictions of climate models, strengthen the case that extreme weather is significantly attributable to the shifting climate.

Finally, a few studies have sought to measure the specific role of climate change in causing individual extreme weather events. One of the most detailed studies, which appeared in the prestigious journal Nature in early 2011, sought to measure how much climate changes contributed to a series of catastrophic flooding events in England and Wales during the autumn of 2000. The study took ten years to complete and mobilized a vast network of volunteers to offer surplus time on their home and office computers in order to run thousands of forecast scenarios and complete the required calculations. In the end, the researchers determined that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions made those severe storms 90 percent more likely in two out of three climate model scenarios. In 90 percent of scenarios, the severity of the storms was at least 20% attributable to greenhouse gases. Such precision is technically possible, but in fact only serves to confirm the conclusions that climate scientists have been discussing in more general terms for a very long time.[4]

Another important factor that has changed dramatically since the chapters of this book first began to be drafted during 2007-09 is the character of the climate change movement.[5] From 2007 onward, representatives of civil society organizations have converged annually at the site of various UN climate negotiations, seeking to urge stronger global policies to curtail excess emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Many representatives of indigenous and other land-based peoples from around the world have made a compelling case that the climate crisis is not just another environmental issue, but one with profound implications for human rights and human survival. This is especially true for the most marginalized communities in the global South, who have been experiencing the consequences of extreme weather and a destabilized climate for well over a decade.

In the lead-up to the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the new “350.org” network began staging symbolic but highly visible demonstrations around the world to dramatize the need to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million. These were relatively early, somewhat cautious stirrings of a rising public awareness of the severity of the climate crisis. In Copenhagen itself, as many as 100,000 people took to the streets to demand a comprehensive global climate agreement that was not to be. But after a short hiatus, concerned people around the world are again on the march, and the contrast is especially noteworthy in the US. A thousand people were arrested outside the White House in the late summer of 2012 protesting the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline and nearly 40,000 demonstrated in Washington in the winter of 2014. As of this writing, a significantly larger public event was being planned in New York City to coincide with a special meeting called by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to urge heads of state to make good on the promise of a new international climate agreement by 2015.

Even more significantly, people around the world have been organizing to resist what the New York Times has called the largest expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure since the 1950s. With readily accessible sources of oil and gas reaching their limits worldwide, fossil fuel producers are going to great lengths to tap into so-called “unconventional” sources of oil and gas—such as tar sands, previously impenetrable shale formations, and oil deposits lying miles beneath the oceans, including in the far reaches of the Arctic. Michael Klare, a long-time analyst of energy geopolitics, describes this as the age of “extreme energy,” as most new sources of oil and gas now require energy companies “to drill in extreme temperatures or extreme weather, or use extreme pressures, or operate under extreme danger—or some combination of all of these.”[6] Extreme energy extraction is far more threatening to ecosystems and human communities than conventional oil drilling, and the organized opposition of those communities has significantly reshaped the climate movement’s understanding of the local impacts of climate-destroying activities.[7]

In recent years, we have seen a widespread uprising of First Nations indigenous communities across Canada, objecting to the exceptionally destructive extraction of oil from the Alberta Tar Sands, as well as the construction of new and expanded pipelines across the continent to facilitate exports of tar sands bitumen. Opposition to hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) of underground shale formations to extract oil and gas has arisen throughout North America, as well as in the UK, Eastern Europe, and as far afield as South Africa. Iñupiat communities in Alaska have been at the forefront of opposition to oil drilling in newly navigable but uniquely hazardous Arctic waters, and environmentalists everywhere breathed a sigh of relief when Shell Oil withdrew its damaged drilling vessels from Alaskan waters in early 2013.[8] In the historic coal mining regions of the eastern US an unprecedented alliance of long-time local residents and youthful forest activists seeks to end the most extreme form of strip-mining for coal, appropriately described as “mountaintop-removal” mining.[9] All these developments speak to the potential for a heightened sense of immediacy in today’s climate movements, and an increased awareness of the energy industry’s local, as well as global impacts.

The core underlying message of climate justice—that those who contribute least to excess greenhouse gas emissions are disproportionately impacted by climate changes—is now embraced by a wide variety of distinct but complementary popular movements from around the world. The most urgent voices continue to be those of indigenous and other land-based peoples, especially in the global South, whose communities have felt the impacts of climate disruptions that threaten their lands and their entire way of life. In the North, climate justice has continued the evolution of a variety of global justice movements that emerged in response to the rise of international financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization during the late 1990s and early 2000s. This includes the youthful Rising Tide network, which was founded in Europe, sprouted chapters throughout the US, Canada and Australia, and has staged dramatic direct actions to challenge numerous false solutions to the climate crisis, as well as the expansion of extreme energy. In the US, the leading voices for climate justice are often from communities of color that have been organizing for decades in response to their disproportionate exposure to a wide variety of environmental hazards. These environmental justice communities continue the legacy of the civil rights movement in the US as they resist environmental racism and seek a transition to a more just and sustainable future. This unique constellation of voices from around the world has proved central to our understanding of the profound social justice and human rights implications of the unfolding climate crisis.

In conventional environmental policy circles, however, very little has changed since this book first appeared in 2010. Significant numbers of environmental policy advocates continue to accept inadequate and short-sighted approaches to curtailing climate-related pollution in the name of a misdirected political “realism.” International negotiators at the UN level continue to advance the notion of “voluntary” national pledges as the most viable way to achieve global reductions of greenhouse gases, and policymakers persist in implementing proposed reductions through the market-based trading of carbon emissions allowances. The focus on emissions trading contributed greatly to the failings of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, as we will see, and remains a central focus of climate policy discussions in the US and Europe, including the Obama administration’s latest efforts to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Energy industries and policymakers continue to persist in promoting numerous false solutions to the climate crisis. Not only carbon markets, but also various forms of large-scale experimentation with the atmosphere—termed “geoengineering”—are actively promoted by those who are unwilling to consider the necessary changes to energy production and the structures of the economic system. Environmentally destructive and uncertain energy technologies, including nuclear power, carbon sequestration from coal plants, and the large scale combustion of biomass for energy, are widely depicted as part of the solution rather than as merely perpetuating existing problems. The expansion of hydraulic fracturing of shale formations as a means to extract previously unreachable deposits of oil and gas has served to reinforce the long-standing myth that natural gas can serve as a “bridge fuel” to a more sustainable future.

The use of more genuinely renewable energy sources is also growing rapidly, but its course of development under a system of corporate control and financial speculation has raised many questions of its own. Many analysts point out that power from the sun and wind are now the fastest growing energy sources, surpassing new fossil fuel projects in much of the US and Europe. Countries like Denmark, Spain, Portugal and Germany are in the forefront, and even some US states are approaching 20 percent renewable electricity. But these projects still represent a small fraction of overall consumption, and many renewables are adding to, rather than replacing, existing capacity. Community controlled models of wind power development, as pioneered in Denmark, are increasingly superseded by larger, corporate-owned projects, raising heightened concerns over the impacts on ecosystems and communities, even in regions where support for climate mitigation measures is strong.

We know that technologies exist to meet our essential needs with far less energy, and to permit a conversion to non-fossil, non-nuclear energy sources by mid-century or sooner.[10] The main obstacles, as we shall see, are the entrenched political power of the fossil fuel industries, their continued excessive profitability as prices rise, and the widespread disinterest in renewable energy on the part of global capital. Questions about future energy sources are, above all, questions about what kind of society we want to live in, a topic we will return to in this book’s later chapters.

Readers familiar with the original 2010 edition of this book may notice rather substantial changes and revisions on nearly every page. I’ve attempted to update every chapter with new information and analysis on recent developments in climate science and politics. The most substantial changes are in Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 incorporates the discussion of the origins of climate justice that originally appeared in Chapter 2, and includes material from three other articles I’ve written since 2012 chronicling the climate justice movement. Chapter 4, on carbon markets and the other corporate-driven false solutions to the climate crisis, combines portions of the original chapters 2 and 4 and updates the story of the evolution of US climate policies.

Whereas the first three chapters of the original book were largely based on a series of magazine articles that reviewed the broad scope of developments in climate justice over a period of years, leading up to the UN conference in Copenhagen and its immediate aftermath, I believe the new chapters 1-4 are all substantially more coherent and topical, each now addressing a specific aspect of the evolving climate justice story. The last two chapters are substantially unchanged in structure (except for the removal of the false solutions discussions from Chapter 5), though a summary of my further research on current utopian thought—a portion of which was added to the social ecology chapter at the last moment in 2010—is now placed where it properly belongs in Chapter 5.

I am grateful to my students at the University of Vermont for their thoughtful comments and questions on these chapters over the past few years, and especially to Rachel Smolker, who reviewed drafts of the revised chapters and offered her incomparable insights and suggestions. Eirik Eiglad of The New Compass has demonstrated an exceptional patience and diligence throughout the many stages of this project. I also credit the unfailing energy and inspiration of my colleagues on the board of 350Vermont and the youthful activists of Rising Tide Vermont for helping sustain my confidence that we can create a better world.

Brian TokarEast Montpelier, VermontJune 2014

Template:Anchor Template:Anchor Template:Anchor 1. Global Warming and the Struggle for Justice

How can we give voice to a more justice-centered approach to the global climate crisis? This question was raised by activists from around the world during the lead-up to the landmark 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. As calls for climate justice rang through the streets of Copenhagen that chilly December, both participants and careful observers came to discover the vastly disproportionate human impacts of global climate changes. Until relatively recently, the warming of the earth’s climate was most often viewed as a rather esoteric scientific concern, with consequences that would be felt at some indefinite future time and mostly affect the non-human inhabitants of remote and uniquely endangered ecosystems. The most iconic symbol of the wave of climate activism that flourished prior to Copenhagen was the polar bear, struggling to stand its ground amidst shrinking ice flows in the Arctic north.

As tens of thousands of people converged in Copenhagen, a different kind of climate movement had already begun to emerge. While some activists still featured polar bears in their imagery, and many others aimed quite sensibly to focus the world’s attention on the need to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to a maximum of 350 parts per million, a far more urgent outlook on the climate crisis was gradually beginning to capture the world’s attention. The outlook known as climate justice is rooted in vulnerable communities around the world that have for many years experienced severe and destabilizing climate-related disruptions to their lives and livelihoods. As we will see, climate justice embodies the fundamental understanding that those who contribute the least to the excess of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere consistently and disproportionately experience the most severe and disruptive consequences of global warming, and are often the least prepared to cope with its consequences.

In the United States, a marked shift in public perceptions was experienced briefly in 2005-06, when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes. Many residents of the most impoverished neighborhoods were left behind in the floods; others were never able to return. Soon afterward, the success of Al Gore’s award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, spurred some substantive changes in public attitudes toward global climate disruptions, but the film advocated only the most superficial and shallow solutions, symbolized by the huge new wave of green products and corporate greenwashing that emerged during the late 2000s. In 2007, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared the evidence for human-caused global warming “unequivocal,” and the disturbing, and sometimes catastrophic, reality of worldwide climate disruptions was beginning to affect many people’s daily lives, even in the earth’s hitherto sheltered temperate zones.

For much of the 1980s and nineties, the minds of a media-dazzled American public seemed to be firmly lodged in the sand with respect to the emerging changes in the global climate. But by the end of the first decade of the 21[st] century, disturbing changes in our weather and in the once-familiar patterns of the seasons had become difficult to ignore. Initially, the changes were subtle. Spring would begin a couple of weeks or more earlier than it used to, and fall would start later. Unseasonably warm weather would appear sporadically throughout the year, while cold spells were more sudden, severe, and relatively short-lived. Rainfall in some areas increased markedly, while in other regions it became increasingly sparse, and arrived more often in rapid, concentrated deluges, often accompanied by catastrophic flooding.

These were noticeable, but far from catastrophic changes, making it easier for Americans to remain oblivious to what was happening in other parts of the world. The catastrophic European heat wave of 2003, which killed more than 50,000 people, was barely reported in the US news media, and massive flooding in Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere was almost never reported as a climate-related story. Even unprecedented droughts and wildfires, from the Great Plains of the upper Midwest to much of the US southern tier, from Georgia through Texas and Arizona, were generally attributed to short-term weather patterns such the tropical ocean current known as El Niño. When parts of Alabama and Tennessee experienced their driest weather in over a century during 2007, and summer temperatures in Arizona—as well as in parts of Greece and Turkey—reached well above 115 degrees Fahrenheit, or around 45 Celsius, it still was difficult to find broadly accessible discussions of the longer-term climatic significance of these events.

Climate denialism thrived in the US even as wildfires swept repeatedly through large, populated areas of Arizona and southern California, and most media outlets barely mentioned that the hurricanes that devastated New Orleans and surroundings in 2005 were intensified by anomalously high sea temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and across the South Atlantic. Even when the reality of the unfolding climate crisis did briefly appear to break through the veils of the corporate media, it was quickly superseded by the severe economic downturn that began in 2008 and even by the sensationalized accusations of scientific misconduct that were disingenuously termed “Climate-gate.”[1] Weather and climate stories made the news again in 2012 when vast reaches of the agricultural Midwest experienced a dry spell that rivaled the catastrophic “Dust Bowl” years of the 1930s, and just a few months later when the remnants of Hurricane Sandy devastated coastal communities in New York, New Jersey and other eastern states. Climate concerns were raised once again in light of the unprecedented drought and wildfires that swept across California two years later. But these stories, too, were soon swept aside by other world events. An unusually cold, snowy winter throughout the northeastern quarter of the US in 2014—partly attributed to climate-related disruptions of the polar jet stream—further aroused the voices of sarcasm and dismissal: “You call this global warming?”

For people from the Arctic to the subtropics, however, the reality of global climate disruptions has already become an undeniable part of their lived experience. On every continent, the incidence of catastrophic floods, droughts and wildfires has systematically risen. Indigenous Arctic communities experiencing the loss of permafrost and the populations of island nations facing saltwater intrusions from rising seas all face an increasingly imminent need to relocate. Crop failures are increasingly frequent occurrences in many parts of Africa and south Asia, and catastrophic floods have washed away neighborhoods in Jakarta, Bangkok and other major world cities. A persistent and unrelenting drought has contributed greatly to the mass exodus of over a hundred thousand refugees from the continuing political instability in Somalia. The most severe typhoon ever to reach landfall devastated several Philippine islands, right on the eve of the 2013 UN climate conference in Warsaw. While it is a very long and labor-intensive process to precisely measure the climate component of specific weather events, the trends toward more extreme weather consistently match the projections of detailed climate models. It is also clear that these events continue to disproportionately impact indigenous and other land-based communities, as well as poor urban dwellers, and especially the roughly half of the world’s population that currently lives on less than two dollars a day.

The inability of many people in the North to comprehend the links between extreme weather and long-term changes in the climate is partly a result of the organized climate change denial that is both directly and indirectly supported by corporate benefactors from the fossil fuel industry.[2] But it is also the result of a persistent failure on the part of those who regularly communicate to the mainstream public about global warming. Until very recently, the climate crisis has been discussed in the US and Europe as mainly a scientific or technical matter. The hazards may be severe, but are viewed as uncertain and long-range in nature. We can read at length about the optimal level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its correlation to predicted changes in average global temperature, but still considerably less about the persistent real-world effects of climate disruptions. The proposed solutions tend to vary from relatively trivial suggestions like changing light bulbs—as highlighted at the end of Gore’s 2006 film—to disastrous technical fixes like reviving nuclear power, or pumping sun-blocking particulates into the atmosphere. Few commentators address the underlying systemic roots of the problem, much less the need for a sweeping ecological transformation of society.

The persistent framing of the climate crisis as mainly a scientific problem contributed to the disproportionate coverage of the so-called “Climate-gate” scandals on both sides of the Atlantic. While mounting scientific evidence continues to support the most pessimistic predictions for the future of the earth’s climate, leaked emails from British climate scientists and a minor error of interpretation in the IPCC’s 2007 report came to dominate the headlines, just as world leaders were getting ready to attend the climate conference in Copenhagen. While it is easy to pin the blame entirely on the corporate-controlled media, the public response has revealed a profound lack of understanding of the nature of scientific uncertainty and the very nature of scientific debate.

In January of 2010, researchers from Yale and George Mason Universities released the results of a detailed survey of public opinions on global warming in the United States, and their findings are disturbing. They found that twice as many Americans believed that global warming was not happening, compared to two years earlier (20 percent, compared to only 10 percent in 2008), and that nearly a quarter of the population said they don’t know. Only 47 percent of those surveyed said that global warming is caused mainly by human activities, 40 percent believed “there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening,” and only 28 percent (down from 38 percent in 2008) said they thought global warming was already harming people around the world.[3] The BBC reported that barely 26 percent of people in the UK in 2012 accepted that climate change is happening and “largely manmade,” and a poll conducted by Der Spiegel found that fear of global warming in Germany fell from 62 percent to only 42 percent over a period of four years.[4] While climate concerns, as documented by the Yale group and others, have slowly returned to 2007 levels, political polarization around global warming has also increased, especially in the United States. A more recent report from the Yale and George Mason researchers showed that over 60 percent of Americans support either a large or medium-scale effort to reduce climate change, with proportionate economic costs.[5] However, when US opinion is broken down along lines of political affiliation, two-thirds of self-identified Democrats are very concerned about the issue, compared with just over a quarter of self-identified Republicans.[6]

Even a brief review of the actual data, however, leaves little doubt that disturbing patterns of atmospheric heating, highly erratic weather, and cycles of floods and drought are being felt worldwide. These observations closely match the projections of climate modelers going back more than a decade, and recent warming trends can only be rationally explained if human-induced climate changes are taken into account. The 2013 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that this is true for each of the world’s continents and oceans, not just the global average temperature.[7] Interestingly, scientists once predicted that many of the climate changes that we are seeing today would only occur several decades farther into the future.

Several systematic studies, most notably the reports of the IPCC’s second Working Group, which focuses on the consequences of climate change, have begun to map out this latter story in detail, as we will see shortly. Furthermore, impoverished people around the world are also bearing the consequences of the most prevalent false solutions to global warming, including the push for biofuels, expanded gas drilling, and the global market in carbon offsets. A basic concern for justice and equity today leads irrevocably to the conclusion that a thoroughgoing social and economic transformation is necessary if we are to head off the very worst consequences of an increasingly erratic, overheating climate. While business-as-usual scenarios for future energy use and carbon dioxide emissions are often acknowledged to be untenable, so too is the continuation of business-as-usual in the structure of our political and economic institutions.

Template:Anchor Who is affected by global warming?

Since the first Earth Day, close to 45 years ago, there has been a serious divide between those who view environmental issues as fundamentally social and political, and those who focus entirely on the technical aspects of individual problems and on narrow, status-quo solutions. Regulatory agencies and most traditional environmental groups view ecological problems as primarily technical in nature, typically ignoring the larger picture.

As social ecologists have argued since the mid-1960s, however, environmental problems not only have serious human consequences, but are thoroughly social and political in origin.[8] With respect to global climate disruptions, this contrast is now central to understanding where we are and where we may be headed. An understanding of the science and politics of global warming is increasingly shaping how we understand problems of social justice, or war and peace, and how these concerns will play out in the coming decades. A brief look at the evidence should help illuminate this.

One of the first news reports to bring the global justice consequences of global warming to a wide US audience was an insightful piece in the New York Times that appeared fast on the heels of the landmark 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As reporter Andrew Revkin stated, “In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed the least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet. Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest.”[9]

The Times dispatched reporters to cover four widely varying instances of people coping with the consequences of a severely altered climate, illustrating some stark contrasts across different parts of the world. In a village in Malawi, officials struggle to maintain the functioning of a simple weather station, chronically lacking basic supplies like light bulbs and chart paper, while in India, rural villagers can barely cope with the effects of more erratic monsoons and increased flooding on their already fragile life support systems. Meanwhile, Western Australia has built a state-of-the-art water desalinization plant, powered by an array of wind turbines about 100 miles away, and the Dutch have begun building homes attached to huge columns that allow the actual houses to rise and fall by as much as 18 feet with the ebb and flow of tidal waters.

The plight of people in various low-lying Pacific island nations has also attracted some mainstream press attention. With rising sea levels, not only are people having to relocate homes away from the shore, but sources of essential drinking water are becoming brackish due to increasing infiltrations of sea water. Migration of Pacific islanders to New Zealand has quadrupled in recent years, according to The Independent in the UK, as rising numbers of island communities are becoming uninhabitable.[10] Yet island nations, according to the IPCC, are collectively responsible for far less than 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In mid-2009, the New York Times’ Sunday magazine featured a striking profile of the diplomatic efforts by then-President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives to secure a new permanent home for the islands’ population.[11]

Closer to home, Hurricane Katrina first highlighted the extreme inequity in people’s capacity to cope with climate-related disasters. While affluent homes were mostly restored, and travelers soon returned to New Orleans’ unique tourist quarters, roughly a third of the city’s population were unable to return home, and emptied public housing projects were threatened with demolition, despite a relatively low level of storm-related damage. While the human toll from the 2007-08 San Diego area wildfires was comparatively low, the systemic inequities were harsh. Naomi Klein reported in The Nation in late 2007 that residents able to pay several tens of thousands of dollars were whisked away to elite resorts to wait out the fires, while their homes were sprayed with special fire retardants that were tragically unavailable to their neighbors.[12]

During the same period, however, reports from Bangladesh to the Sudan revealed how climate instability is exacerbating conflict and even bloodshed among people. Droughts in East Africa have caused wells to dry up and livestock to perish, fueling interethnic conflicts among the region’s pastoral communities.[13] In India, widespread crop failures due to more frequent droughts and catastrophic flooding events have intensified the tragic wave of farmer suicides that was first brought on by the widespread failure of chemical pesticides and genetically engineered seeds.[14] Half of India’s agricultural districts faced persistent drought during the 2009 monsoon season, with crop losses up to 60 percent.[15] The UK-based Environmental Justice Foundation has reported a finding by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification that, in Africa alone, an estimated 10 million people have been displaced or forced to migrate due to environmental degradation and desertification.[16] While the specific climate contribution to particular weather events is still a subject of legitimate scientific debate, three things are clear: 1) Warmer air holds more moisture, thus prolonging periods of drought, as well as the intensity of storms; 2) Chaotic and extreme weather is consistent with the projections of global climate models; and 3) when scientists do commit the time and the extraordinary computing power necessary to calculate the climate component of particular events, the results are generally quite compelling.[17] And along with especially catastrophic events come countless incidents of mis-timing: rain that falls when farmers need and expect it the least; flowers that open weeks before their pollinators arrive, or before they are safe from frost; unanticipated heat-waves in the early spring.

Template:Anchor Projections and Realities

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—originally established by the UN Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization—issued their fourth comprehensive review of climate science. For the first time, the IPCC stated that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” and that rises in global temperature can only be explained with reference to human-induced increases in carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases”—especially methane, nitrous oxide, and the banned but persistent CFCs used in air conditioners and refrigerators. For the first time, the statistical confidence level of many of their calculations came in at better than 95 percent.[18]

The IPCC documented an unprecedented convergence of findings from hundreds of studies and tens of thousands of distinct data sets in numerous independent fields of inquiry. This feat of scientific data gathering and assessment may have been worthy of a Nobel science prize if the panel hadn’t already been awarded the coveted prize for peace in 2007, along with Al Gore. Perhaps never before had scientific studies in so many distinct areas of research converged on one disturbing conclusion: not only that the evidence for the role of human activity in altering the earth’s climate is “unequivocal,” but that the ecological and human consequences of those alterations are already being felt in countless different ways.

The IPCC’s report appeared in three separate volumes published by distinct international Working Groups, plus a concluding Synthesis Report, all released over the course of 2007; the panel’s earlier reports, and their fifth assessment report published in 2013-14, are similarly organized. Most media coverage tends to focus on the first volume, examining the physical science basis for climate change. Here the assembled scientists describe the evidence for anthropogenic warming and evaluate a wide range of future greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

Scientists such as James Hansen—now retired from NASA and one of the most widely quoted senior scientists of our time—argue that the IPCC tends to underestimate a variety of factors that negatively affect human populations, including the likely sea level rises. Hansen’s analyses in recent years have led to some very alarming conclusions: that a sensible extrapolation from past climate data suggests a sea level rise of up to 80 feet if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels, and that with an atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration around 400 parts per million, we’ve already surpassed the historic carbon dioxide level that is compatible with year-round ice in the Arctic or Antarctic.[19] For Hansen and many others, the question is literally whether or not our earth will continue to resemble the world in which human civilizations have developed, and the only way to accomplish this is to leave most of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground. Meanwhile, policy analysts are proposing “acceptable” or “realistic” greenhouse gas levels that approach 450 or even 550 parts per million.

What often gets lost in these long-term projections, however, are the ways that chaotic global warming is already affecting people around the world today. The IPCC wrote about this in its second Working Group reports in 2007 and 2014, specifically addressing the environmental and human consequences of climate change. But scientists and advocates alike seem to prefer to debate the quantitative details rather than address the ways that our survival is imperiled by the over-consumption of the world’s affluent minority.

Most poor people live in the earth’s tropical and subtropical regions. They are already living in a world of increasingly uncertain rainfall, persistent droughts, coastal flooding, loss of wetlands and fisheries, and increasingly scarce fresh water supplies. The IPCC confirmed in 2007 that severely increased flooding will most immediately affect residents of the major river deltas of Asia and Africa. Additionally, the one sixth of the world’s population that depends on water from glacial runoff may see a brief increase in the size and volume of their freshwater lakes as glaciers melt, but eventually the loss of the glaciers will become a life-threatening reality.[20]

The data points toward a worldwide decrease in crop productivity if global temperatures rise more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit (about 3°C), although crop yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by half as soon as 2020. In Africa alone, between 75 million and 250 million people will be exposed to “increased water stress,” according to the IPCC. Agricultural lands in Latin America will be subject to desertification and increasing salt content.

Probably the grimmest tale is contained in the 2007 report’s chapter on health consequences of climate changes, which predicted “increases in malnutrition and consequent disorders…; increased deaths, disease and injury due to heatwaves, floods, storms, fires and droughts; the increased burden of diarrheal disease; the increased frequency of cardio-respiratory diseases due to higher concentrations of ground-level ozone…; and, the altered spatial distribution of some infectious disease vectors,” including malaria. There is little doubt that those populations with “high exposure, high sensitivity and/or low adaptive capacity” will bear the greatest burdens; those who contribute the least to the problem of global warming will continue to face the most severe consequences.[21]

It took a fair amount of reading between the lines of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report, issued in 2007, to find the evidence supporting a climate justice outlook. But by the time of the IPCC’s fifth assessment in 2014, the second working group report, focused on climate “impacts, adaptation and vulnerability,” was much more thoroughly devoted to the social justice implications of the climate crisis. Six out of the eight “key risks” highlighted in that report’s official summary, all identified with high statistical confidence based on the available research literature, strongly affirm the core messages of climate justice and the urgency of justice-centered solutions:* Risk of death, injury, ill-health, or disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small island developing states and other small islands, due to storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea-level rise.

Risk of severe ill-health and disrupted livelihoods for large urban populations due to inland flooding in some regions.
Systemic risks due to extreme weather events leading to breakdown of infrastructure networks and critical services such as electricity, water supply, and health and emergency services.
Risk of mortality and morbidity during periods of extreme heat, particularly for vulnerable urban populations and those working outdoors in urban or rural areas.
Risk of food insecurity and the breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes, particularly for poorer populations in urban and rural settings.
Risk of loss of rural livelihoods and income due to insufficient access to drinking and irrigation water and reduced agricultural productivity, particularly for farmers and pastoralists with minimal capital in semi-arid regions.[22]

The entire section concludes with the statement: “Many key risks constitute particular challenges for the least developed countries and vulnerable communities, given their limited ability to cope.” Even though the framing in terms of quantifiable risk can serve to distance the discussion from the actual experiences of people living with these hazards, it represents a significant breakthrough in the scientific community’s validation of the messages that have emerged from climate justice movements around the world.

Numerous other studies serve to further affirm those messages, with the number of available studies now growing at a rapid pace.[23] The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, initiated by the UN and released in 2005, offered a graphic representation of where we are and where we seem to be headed. One page of that report offers a pair of world maps, each with a bar graph superimposed on every continent. The upper map chronicles the number of major floods reported every decade from 1950 to 2000 on each continent; the lower map displays the number of major wildfires. Everywhere but in Oceania—which has faced such severe droughts that people now question whether major grain growing regions of Australia can still support any crops—the individual graphs rise steeply as the decades advance.[24] Over this time period, global temperatures only rose about one degree Fahrenheit (just over half a degree C); only the most optimistic of the IPCC’s projected future scenarios limits further warming during this century to less than three additional degrees (1.5°C). Indeed the UN Environment Program projected in late 2009 that current policies would lead to a 3.5°C (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) rise by 2100, and a study by the British Meteorological Office predicted an astounding 4°C (7°F) rise by 2060, resulting in worldwide droughts and heat waves, threatening water supplies for half the earth’s population, and condemning half of all animal and plant species to extinction.[25] A 2009 symposium sponsored by the British Royal Society explored the consequences of 4 degrees warming, the level that will likely result from the continuation of business as usual.[26]

The biennial UN Human Development Report, issued in November of 2007, reported that one out of every 19 people in the so-called developing world was affected by a climate-related disaster between 2000 and 2004.[27] The figure for the wealthiest (OECD) countries was one out of every 1500 people. Yet the funds available thus far to various UN efforts to help the poorest countries adapt to climate changes ($26 million) is less than one week’s worth of flood defense spending in the UK, and about what the city of Venice spends on its flood gates every 2-3 weeks. The report estimates that an additional $86 billion will be needed to sustain existing UN development assistance and poverty reduction programs in the face of all the various threats attributable to climate change.

A 2009 Oxfam study further confirmed that the effects of widespread climate disruptions are already with us. Oxfam found that of nearly 250 million people who are now affected by natural disasters every year, 98 percent of them are falling victim to climate-related events such as floods and droughts. They are predicting that this could quickly increase to over 375 million people per year.[28] Another study, published in the journal Political Geography by Rafael Reuveny of Indiana University, examined 38 cases over the past 70 years where populations were forced to migrate due to a combination of environmental (droughts, floods, storms, land degradation, pollution) and other factors.[29] Half of these cases led to violent conflict between the migrating populations and those in the receiving areas. It is clear, states Reuveny, that those who depend the most on the environment to sustain their livelihood, especially in regions where arable land and fresh water are scarce, are most likely to be forced to migrate when conditions are subjected to rapid and unplanned-for change.

Praful Bidwai, a former Times of India Senior Editor, drew attention in a recent article to the UN Conference on Trade and Development’s 2010 Least Developed Countries Report, which stated that although those countries (LDCs)

account for less than 1 per cent of the world’s total GHG emissions, … the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events in them are five times higher now (519 events in 2000-2010) than during the 1970s. In the last decade, about 40 per cent of all casualties related to natural disasters were found in LDCs, the poorest countries of the world.30

A 2007 report by the UK-based relief organization International Alert compared maps of the world’s most politically unstable regions with those most susceptible to serious or extreme effects of climate change, and concluded that 46 countries, with a total population of 2.7 billion people, are firmly in both categories. The report, titled “A Climate of Conflict,” states:

“Hardest hit by climate change will be people living in poverty, in under-developed and unstable states, under poor governance. The effect of the physical consequences—such as more frequent extreme weather, melting glaciers, and shorter growing seasons—will add to the pressures under which those societies already live. The background of poverty and bad governance means many of these communities both have a low capacity to adapt to climate change and face a high risk of violent conflict.”31

International Alert’s report profiled eight case studies of places in Africa and Asia where climate changes have already caused great stress on people’s livelihoods and often exacerbated internal conflicts. The outlook is significantly improved, however, in places where political institutions are relatively stable and accountable to the population. This contrast allows for a somewhat hopeful conclusion, with the authors extolling “the synergies between climate adaptation policies and peace-building activities in achieving the shared goal of sustainable development and peace.” One specific recommendation is to prioritize efforts to help people adapt to a changing climate, especially where subsistence-based economies contribute very little to global warming but are highly vulnerable to the consequences. Several international NGOs have already intervened, particularly in Africa, to document and disseminate changes in farming practices that have proven most useful in facilitating adaptation to a changing climate.

Since the Persian Gulf War of the early 1990s, activists have become increasingly aware of the devastating environmental consequences of warfare, and also of “peacetime” military activities. Oil consumption by the US military, for example, approaches 14 million gallons a day, according to peace studies scholar Michael Klare, more than is used daily in all of Sweden or Switzerland.[32] The US military is also responsible for thousands of toxic waste dumps on active and former bases around the world. An escalating spiral of warfare and environmental devastation threatens to spin entirely out of control if we are unable to achieve a different way of organizing the world’s affairs. The world’s militaries and elites are preparing themselves for the worst; those of us who seek peace and global justice need to come together as never before if those worst case scenarios are to be averted.

It is clear today that the past two centuries of capitalist development—and especially the unprecedented pace of resource consumption during the past 60 years—have created conditions that threaten everyone’s future. “There could be no clearer demonstration than climate,” says the UN’s Human Development Report, “that economic wealth creation is not the same as human progress.”[33] Those who have benefited the least from the unsustainable pace of economic growth and expansion since 1950 will face a future of suffering and dislocation unlike the world has ever seen, unless we can rapidly reverse the patterns of exploitation that many in the global North have simply come to take for granted.

Template:Anchor How much warming can we tolerate?

A somewhat cautious note of triumph accompanied the pronouncement of the G8 heads of state in July of 2009 that the world was committing to holding the future average global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius. The obstacle? “Developing Nations Rebuff G-8 on Curbing Pollutants,” proclaimed the New York Times headline.[34] One had to read through most of the article to discover that the main objection of those pesky “developing nations” representatives was to affirming a long-range goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (a modest 50 percent reduction by 2050), without proportionate commitments from the major industrialized countries to nearer-term measures. They sought agreement on at least the 20 percent reductions by 2020 that were advocated by most European governments prior to Copenhagen, which could help facilitate progress toward the more distant goal. One astute European activist pointed out that the G8 outcome was “nothing but hot air,” akin to pronouncing that there would be luxury resorts on Mars by 2050: with no intermediate goals nor tangible steps toward implementation, politicians can pledge to do anything at all 40+ years into the future. The 2 degree goal was eventually affirmed in the December 2009 Copenhagen Accord (see Chapter 2), and became the basis for most official discussions of the world’s objectives for limiting global warming.

What, then, does 2 degrees of global warming mean? In April 2009, following a series of articles in the journal Nature that offered some important new revelations about the state of our climate projections, the climatologists who edit the indispensable scientific blog, RealClimate.org, wrote,

We feel compelled to note that even a ‘moderate’ warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, calling 2°C a danger limit seems to us pretty cavalier.”35

Two degrees also turns out to be a rather daunting goal, in terms of the current world economy. At pre-recession rates of economic growth, with CO2 emissions increasing 2 percent per year, we are virtually certain to exceed 2 degrees of warming by 2100, according to the European authors of the Nature 2-degrees study.[36] For a fifty-fifty chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees, developed countries would need to reduce their emissions by at least 80 percent over the next 40 years. There is a large uncertainty in that prediction, however, depending on the vagaries of the global carbon cycle and other hard-to-predict factors. The only reliable way to meet a 2 degree target is for cumulative world emissions to be kept below a rather austere target, equivalent to less than 400 billion tons of carbon between 2000 and 2050. Emissions since 2000 “have used up almost a third of that allowance already,” according to a commentary by one of Nature’s US editors.[37]

Subsequent studies have proposed a remaining global carbon budget between 470 and 565 billion tons, a small fraction of the carbon contained in the world’s known fossil fuel reserves.[38] And for all the trading and offsetting of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, only the recent economic downturn has led to substantial reductions in those emissions. Further, these projections often overlook emissions from agriculture, forestry, and a variety of related land use changes that are generally far more difficult to measure. The Kyoto Protocol, which required wealthy countries to reduce their emissions by 2012 to 6-8 percent below 1990 levels, “has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions, or even in anticipated emissions growth,” according to a widely cited report published in Nature in 2007.[39]

Meanwhile, a growing consensus of climate scientists and UN representatives from the global South insists that 2 degrees by no means a “safe” level of global warming. More recent research suggests that 2 degrees may be the point at which the likelihood of catastrophic, uncontrollable climate disruptions would reach about 50%, especially problematic since global emissions continue to rise.[40] Recent work by James Hansen and a team of global colleagues shows that global emissions would need to peak by around 2030 in order to return to a CO2 concentration of 350 ppm within the next 2-300 years.[41] Considering the weather and sea-level effects of the warming the world has already experienced, the consensus among many global South delegates to the UN climate negotiations is that no more than 1-1.5 degrees of warming is tolerable. Given the long-term residence of CO2 in the atmosphere, limiting warming to one degree would require an almost immediate cessation of fossil fuel combustion.

Global warming can represent a future of deprivation and scarcity for all but the world’s wealthiest, or this global emergency can compel us to imagine a radically transformed society—both in the North and the South—where communities of people are newly empowered to create their own future. The crisis could potentially compel us to break free from a predatory global capitalism that fabulously enriches the top tenth of one percent, while leaving the rest of us scrambling after the crumbs. The reality is too urgent, and the outlook far too bleak, to settle for anything less than a radically new ecological social and political outlook. We need a movement that looks beyond the status-quo, actualizes the transformative potential of an ecological and justice-centered outlook, and illuminates the urgent necessity to create a dramatically different kind of world.

Template:Anchor Template:Anchor Template:Anchor 2. The UN Climate Negotiations and Beyond

The December 2009 United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark was a watershed moment in the evolution of popular campaigns for climate action, and especially for climate justice. As those events recede into history, it is difficult to recapture the feeling of anticipation that engaged people from around the world during the preparations for Copenhagen. Many people involved in movements for climate action during that period held high hopes that the world’s elites might finally begin to approach a meaningful long-term agreement. By the end, however, it appeared that the conference instead spurred a many years-long impasse, furthering a perhaps-inexorable slide toward an unstable and chaotic planetary climate regime—a world that our ancestors would barely recognize. Though some years have now passed since those landmark events, the particulars of the Copenhagen conference are important to recall in some detail. As we shall see, they have significantly shaped all subsequent developments in the world of climate diplomacy.

The Copenhagen conference was known officially as COP-15, the 15[th] Conference of the Parties to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Even as close observers decried an increasing corporate influence over the preparations for COP-15, most participants held onto a shred of hope that something meaningful and significant would emerge from the negotiations. Seeing the urgency of the situation, prominent environmental groups, particularly Greenpeace, focused their strategy on urging US President Obama to personally participate in the Copenhagen summit. During earlier UN conferences the European Union had agreed to support faster reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. An end to US obstructionism, symbolized by the departure of President George W. Bush and the election of Barack Obama, might now clear the way toward a truly historic agreement. Instead, Obama’s participation in Copenhagen demonstrated that US efforts to undermine the climate talks had evolved to a new, perhaps even more dangerous level, and the talks established a pattern of rhetorical flourish and substantive inaction that has continued for many years hence.

Yet on the eve of the Copenhagen summit officials appeared determined to spin the conference as a success, no matter what the outcome. Obama’s announcement in early December 2009 that he would briefly appear in Copenhagen was a headline story, as was China’s public commitment to reduce their economy’s carbon intensity, effectively lowering the rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions in their rapidly growing economy. Officials began to proclaim the advantages of a non-binding “political” or “operational” agreement as an incremental step toward reducing worldwide emissions. While some observers continued to anticipate a new binding global treaty to forestall catastrophic climate changes, the likelihood of such an agreement appeared to diminish with each passing week.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. For several years, environmentalists in North America, Europe, and around the world had anticipated that Copenhagen would be a decisive moment. Since the passage of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, signatories to the Protocol, and to the more comprehensive UN climate convention, held major conferences nearly every year to further these documents’ implementation. With the first so-called “commitment period” of Kyoto scheduled to end in 2012, the Copenhagen meeting was seen as the key to sustaining Kyoto’s legacy of legally binding emissions reductions and perhaps preventing increasingly uncontrollable disruptions of the climate. This despite the highly ambiguous legacy of Kyoto, as we shall soon see.

For well over a year, environmentalists around the world were engaged in planning events, drafting reports, and coordinating action plans with the Copenhagen conference in mind. In October, the new 350.org network, initiated by Bill McKibben and several of his former students at Vermont’s Middlebury College, staged a global day of action, reporting over 5200 documented activities in 181 countries.[1] These were aimed at dramatizing the need to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to below 350 parts per million and clearly timed to influence the COP. For much of the year, the timetable for Congressional action on US climate legislation was also partly focused toward the international stage. In July of 2009, eleven Greenpeace climbers scaled South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore, famous for its larger-than-life stone images of four US presidents, to hang a gigantic banner featuring a portrait of Obama and the message, “America Honors Leaders, Not Politicians. Stop Global Warming.”

By the mid-fall, however, public statements by both US and UN officials were pointedly aimed at lowering expectations. US climate negotiators remained evasive about what if any commitments they would bring to the table. The US Senate halted work on their highly flawed climate bill in mid-November, after a Republican boycott of hearings in Senator Barbara Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee allowed only for the bill’s pro-forma passage through the committee (see Chapter 4). In the midst of the preparatory meetings well in advance of Copenhagen, Martin Khor of the Malaysia-based Third World Network (now with the Geneva-based South Centre) and a decades-long participant in the UN process, wrote “not only is the climate in crisis, the climate talks are also in crisis.”[2] Corporate representatives were hovering like vultures over UN climate meetings, seeking to define the terms of what they still hoped would be a rapidly expanding market in tradable carbon emissions allowances, and the World Bank gained control over funds to curtail deforestation, which is likely responsible for at least a quarter of current global warming. Even UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer began refocusing his public statements toward the “art of the possible.”

One decisive rupture came during preparatory talks in Bangkok in mid-October, aimed at finalizing the framework for a Copenhagen agreement. For the first time, European Union representatives echoed the US refusal to make any future commitments to reduce greenhouse gas pollution under the framework established by the Kyoto Protocol. While previous UN climate meetings were aided by the Europeans’ insistence on scientifically meaningful emission targets, this change—perhaps a perverse result of Obama’s “improved” diplomacy—shifted the focus of the talks and raised the level of acrimony to new heights.[3] A month later, African delegates walked out of a follow-up meeting in Barcelona, and threatened to do the same in Copenhagen if rich countries refused to commit to meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, at a breakfast meeting during an Asia-Pacific economic summit in Singapore in mid-November, Obama and Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen announced that a legally binding climate treaty was not forthcoming, and would take at least another year to negotiate.

Template:Anchor Beyond Kyoto?

Activists wondered how and why the world had gotten to this point of apparent impasse. Part of the problem stemmed from the flaws inherent in the Kyoto Protocol, but much of the blame appeared to rest with US policymakers, who appeared to be working behind the scenes to undermine Copenhagen for quite some time, as we will see. To complicate things further, negotiators often voiced conflicting interpretations of what the Kyoto Protocol meant and to what degree it should help define the terms of future agreements.

In important ways, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol represented a crucial breakthrough in the ongoing UNFCCC process. For the first time, countries agreed to a schedule of binding targets for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and a prescribed means for working toward those targets. The primary responsibility for emissions reductions fell on the richest countries, with the rest of the world accepting “common but differentiated responsibilities” (in the language of the 1992 climate convention) to mitigate a potential climate crisis. The devil, as always, was in the details, and those details were in many ways a product of then-Vice President Al Gore’s interventions in Kyoto.

Gore arrived in Kyoto toward the end of the conference, at a point when the US refusal to sign on to mandatory emissions cuts had threatened to derail the proceedings. Gore was widely credited with saving the day; specifically he offered that the US would sign on to a Kyoto Protocol under two conditions. First, mandated reductions in emissions would be limited to roughly half of what was originally proposed, and second, emissions cuts would be implemented through the market-based trading of “rights to pollute” among various companies and between countries. This was the first use of carbon trading (only later described as “cap-and-trade”—see Chapter 4) as a primary instrument of international policy. While the US never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the rest of the world has had to live with the consequences, namely a cumbersome but corporate-friendly carbon trading system that has failed to bring needed pollution reductions, along with an even more unwieldy scheme allowing companies to offset their emissions by investing in nominally low-carbon projects in the global South.

A decade later, the process was further complicated by the so-called Bali Action Plan that emerged from the 2007 UN climate summit on the island of Bali in Indonesia. This plan allowed for the negotiations toward Copenhagen to proceed on two tracks, one continuing the process laid out in the Kyoto Protocol, and the other essentially going back to the drawing board of the original 1992 climate convention. While Kyoto remained a legally binding treaty, developing nations’ representatives proved justified in their fears that this second track would be used to create a superseding agreement and thus overturn the modest gains that poor countries achieved in Kyoto. At the center of the debates in Copenhagen and beyond was the US and its allies’ effort to overturn Kyoto’s non-distinction between rapidly developing nations such as China and the world’s poorest countries; that circumstance brought China to the fore as a key advocate for those seeking to retain the Kyoto framework. The US repeatedly blamed China and India for their rapidly rising CO2 levels, as well as for keeping a new international climate agreement from moving forward entirely on the North’s terms. The G77 group of developing countries and the Alliance of Small Island States—who have the most to lose if there is no international agreement and sea levels continue to rise—all lined up in support of retaining Kyoto and holding the richest nations responsible for their historic contribution to destabilizing the climate.

Technology transfer funds were another key sticking point in the pre-Copenhagen talks. If poorer countries are to eventually bring their emissions down and simultaneously lift people out of poverty, Northern countries will need to fulfill their Kyoto commitments to speed the deployment of renewable energy technologies in the South. Meanwhile, indigenous peoples’ representatives such as Anastasia Pinto of CORE, based in India’s Eastern Himalayas, viewed such “sustainable development” arguments as mainly benefiting elites in the South, who want to continue getting richer at the expense of both poor people and the environment. During a fall 2009 US tour, Pinto described India’s growing economic divide as the real key to their government’s refusal to limit India’s rising contribution to the climate crisis. Former Times of India Senior Editor Praful Bidwai similarly points a finger at India’s “small but exceedingly powerful consumerist elite…, which has a high stake in raising its emissions and believes it has the ‘right’ to ‘get even’ with the North, no matter what happens to the climate.”[4] This complex interplay of responsibilities and interests, linked to the historical legacy of colonialism and the contentious politics of “development,” contributed in many ways to Copenhagen’s eventual impasse.

Lim Li Lin of the Third World Network summed up one key aspect of the deadlock over Kyoto in a pre-conference briefing paper, stating, “The international compliance regime under the Kyoto Protocol … faces an uncertain future. While it can always be further improved, the risk is now the possibility of no longer having a system of international compliance.”[5] Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of Kyoto was that it could prove far more costly to the environment in the long run to try to develop a new climate treaty from scratch, especially if the worst features of Kyoto—namely the cap-and-trade system—would be retained in either case.

Template:Anchor Revealing the US Strategy

While attempts to preserve aspects of the Kyoto Protocol were burdened by all the complexities of North-South politics, the continued resistance of the US government to internationally binding limits on global warming pollution raised many fundamental questions. Is there any defensible alternative to a mutually agreed-upon effort to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions? Just what was the US bringing to the table in Copenhagen beside a vague pledge to reduce emissions by 2020 to a level that still fell far short of many countries’ 2012 commitments under Kyoto?[6]

An article in the September/October 2009 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs offered some important clues as to what would transpire in Copenhagen and beyond. Foreign Affairs is the official organ of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which has long been seen as both a weathervane and an active arbiter of elite opinion in the US, and lists most recent US presidents and numerous other senior government officials among its members. In his article titled “Copenhagen’s Inconvenient Truth,” CFR Senior Fellow Michael Levi outlined the US government’s apparently long-standing strategy for Copenhagen.[7]

“The odds of signing a comprehensive treaty in December are vanishingly small,” Levi would need to have written early in the summer, in preparation for the journal’s early September publication. Instead, he urged that those concerned about the climate problem needed to “rethink their strategy and expectations” for Copenhagen. Levi’s alternative proposal was to essentially replace international emissions standards with a patchwork of voluntary, country-specific policies with the modest, and fundamentally inadequate, goal of reducing world emissions of carbon dioxide by half, “ideally from 1990 levels, by 2050.” Under Levi’s scenario, China would step up investments in renewable energy and “ultra-efficient conventional coal power,” India would become a pioneer in smart grid technology, and countries with emissions mainly from deforestation (especially Indonesia and Brazil) would be offered incentives to protect their forests and raise agricultural productivity. The main US contribution would be to push for a detailed agreement on “measurement, reporting and verification,” one area where US surveillance technology would clearly hold an advantage.

Levi’s article pointedly blamed developing countries for the world’s inability to agree on meaningful emission caps. He argued that the Chinese and others invariably insist on lower-than-feasible caps, lack the capacity to accurately monitor their emissions, and would simply ignore any limits that they proved unable to meet. Unfortunately, this is precisely how Northern countries have behaved since Kyoto; indeed Levi cited Canada as a key example of a country that repeatedly exceeded its Kyoto limits, and faced no penalty for doing so. For these reasons, according to Levi, efforts to develop binding caps for developing countries are simply “a waste of time.”

A key challenge for the US in Copenhagen, according to Levi, was to avoid “excessive blame” if the conference were to be seen as a failure. Rather than expecting a comprehensive agreement to come out of Copenhagen, he argued, the conference should instead be seen as analogous to the beginning of a round of arms control or world trade talks, processes which invariably take many years to complete. “This ‘Copenhagen Round,’” he argues, mirroring the typical World Trade Organization (WTO) language, “would be much more like an extended trade negotiation than like a typical environmental treaty process.” Overlooking the fact that a substantive, though flawed, agreement was actually signed in Kyoto, he emphasized that it took several more years of negotiations before that treaty could be implemented.

The implications of such a Copenhagen non-agreement were clearly going to be severe. Climate scientists emphasized that time is rapidly running out to prevent irreversible tipping points in the destabilization of the earth’s climate. Trends in CO2 emissions were already exceeding the worst-case “business-as-usual” scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report, and researchers were beginning to predict temperature rises of 4 degrees or more (7 degrees Fahrenheit) in various regions of the world, well before the end of this century.[8] That would mean a permanent loss of Arctic ice, accellerating spells of flooding and droughts, threats to half the earth’s fresh water supplies, and the collapse of countless important ecosystems as well as key agricultural zones.

Meanwhile, climate justice activists in Europe, in indigenous and small farming communities worldwide, as well as in North America, challenged the inequities underlying current climate policies and demanded real solutions. They highlighted the voices of the communities most affected by the climate changes that are already underway, and challenged corporate-friendly false solutions, from carbon trading and offsets, to the myths of “clean coal,” nuclear power, and the onslaught of industrial-scale agrofuel plantations. Simultaneously, they challenged the growing dominance of corporate interests in the UN process itself, a phenomenon that led one participant in the 2007 UN climate conference in Bali to describe it as “a giant shopping extravaganza, marketing the earth, the sky and the rights of the poor.”[9]

Climate justice activists in North America held a continent-wide day of action on Monday, November 30[th], the tenth anniversary of the mass demonstrations that helped shut down the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Hundreds of people marched and rallied and dozens were arrested at locations from San Francisco’s Bank of America headquarters to the Chicago Climate Exchange, then home of the largest voluntary carbon market. South Carolina activists blocked the shipment of a generator for a new coal plant, Canadians sat in at the office of their Finance Minister—a key proponent of the massively destructive scheme to extract oil from the tar sands of central Alberta—and New Yorkers marched from a local Bank of America to the offices of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental advocate for carbon trading.[10]

The following weekend, thousands marched in Geneva during the World Trade Organization’s first ministerial conference in four years. The momentum was building for massive actions on the streets of Copenhagen, where many activists would demand “System Change, Not Climate Change.” They called for fossil fuels to be kept in the ground, indigenous and forest peoples’ rights to be respected, and reparations for ecological and climate debts to be paid by the richest countries to those who are most affected by resource extraction and climate-related disasters. For some advocates, Copenhagen represented capitalism’s last possible attempt to come to terms with the climate crisis. With African delegates threatening another walkout, and the US pushing for an agreement in name only, the analogy raised by international activists between the Copenhagen climate conference and the November 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle looked to be more appropriate than most environmentalists ever imagined.

Template:Anchor Coercive Diplomacy

For the emerging international climate justice movement, Copenhagen was indeed something of a Seattle moment, with some 100,000 people in the streets on the Saturday between the two weeks of talks. It was a unique opportunity for activists and NGO representatives from around the world to gather, forge personal ties, and begin raising the global profile of a comprehensive climate justice agenda. Independent journalists (in the US, most notably Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now team) helped amplify the voices best able to explain that climate disruptions are no longer an abstract scientific issue, and are already impacting the lives of those least able to cope. Even the mainstream US press featured some notable stories of people around the world who are struggling with the effects of climate chaos. More than ever before, the street actions in Copenhagen dramatized the view that the only meaningful solution to the climate crisis is to “leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, and the tar sands in the land,” expanding upon a slogan initially raised by campaigners against oil drilling in Ecuador’s endangered Yasuní National Park.

Copenhagen was also a pivotal moment for the ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance) countries of Latin America—most notably Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—which continued to the very end of the conference to stand up to threats from the US and other powerful countries, and refused to buckle under last-minute pressure to approve the shallow and destructive “Copenhagen Accord.” In the end, the assembled delegates could only agree to “take note” of the five-page Accord. The European Union, on the other hand, which had once stood for a strong worldwide agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, now fell in line with the disruptive strategies of the US. Even though the final document was not formally accepted until the following year, Copenhagen represented a triumph of the US agenda to replace the promise of a comprehensive global climate agreement with a patchwork of informal, individual country commitments.

Ultimately, the Copenhagen Accord served to establish the notion of voluntary national pledges as a new global norm for implementing climate policy. Nothing was binding on governments or corporations, and pledges were only to be “assessed” informally after five years. The last two pages of the Accord actually consisted of a pair of empty charts where countries were to simply fill in their voluntary emissions targets and other proposed mitigation actions by the end of January 2010. Fifty-five countries ultimately met that deadline, essentially putting in writing their negotiating positions prior to the Copenhagen meeting. Another twenty countries submitted their pledges in the months that followed. Hillary Clinton, then the US Secretary of State, had promised global South countries that acceded to the Copenhagen Accord that the US would raise $100 billion a year in funds to assist with climate stabilizing measures, a promise that all but evaporated during subsequent years’ negotiations.

Further, the document was hammered out in a back room, WTO-style. It hedged all the important issues, and appended loopholes and contradictions to every substantive point that it pretended to address. While discussions would continue for at least five more years under the two separate negotiating tracks established in Bali, the Accord provided a justification for leading countries in the process to continue subverting and undermining those discussions in order to continue business as usual.

As some have pointed out, it could have been worse. This non-agreement may have been better than a coercive agreement that would have entrenched insufficient pollution reduction targets and facilitated the further expansion of highly manipulated global carbon markets. But the putative loss of a nominally accountable UN process may have been the worst outcome of all. The US, of course, has always tried to undermine the United Nations when it is unable to overtly control it, but replacing the processes established under the 1992 UN climate convention with a cash-for-compliance, anything-goes circus that more closely mirrors the World Trade Organization’s secretive mechanisms did not bode well for the future.

Representatives of Friends of the Earth correctly described the Copenhagen Accord as a “sham agreement,” British columnist George Monbiot called it an exercise in “saving face,” and former neoliberal “shock doctor”-turned-environmental policy guru Jeffrey Sachs termed it a farce.[11] Long-time UN observer Martin Khor has pointed out that for the assembled countries to “take note” of the document meant that not only was it not formally adopted, but it was not even “welcomed,” a common UN practice.[12]

The Accord also heightened the global divide between rich and poor, with countries experiencing the severest droughts, floods, and heatwaves facing increasingly desperate fates as the full effects of climate disruptions continue to unfold. Not to mention the small island nations that face annihilation as melting ice sheets and thermal expansion bring rising seas, along with infiltrations of seawater into their scarce fresh water supplies. Especially disturbing in Copenhagen was the equivocal role of the rapidly developing “BASIC” countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), whose governments claim to speak for the poor when it is convenient—whether in their own countries or elsewhere around the world—but mainly seek to protect the expanding riches of their own well-entrenched elites, who are all to willing to do the bidding of transnational corporate interests. While the mainstream media in the North preferred to blame China for the lack of a more comprehensive agreement in Copenhagen, a convergence of Chinese and US elite economic interests was clearly manifest in the Copenhagen Accord’s transparent lack of substance.

Template:Anchor Beyond Copenhagen

In April of 2010, researchers from Germany’s most prestigious climate research centers published a paper in Nature that summarized various countries’ emission reduction commitments under the Copenhagen Accord and assessed their likely consequences for the global climate.[13] Most countries, they found, were projecting greenhouse gas levels in 2020 roughly comparable to a business-as-usual scenario, thoroughly lacking in substantial measures to curtail global warming pollution. Only Japan and Norway, among the developed countries, had pledged to accomplish significantly more than that. Many countries’ pledges, they observed, would be fulfilled using surplus emission allowances that they held in reserve due to the systematic over-allocation of allowances condoned by the Kyoto Protocol (see Chapter 4). Even a best-case scenario, based on the upper limit of various countries’ mitigation commitments, came in far short of holding the likely rise in average global temperature within the range of 2 degrees Celsius that was “recognized” as scientifically defensible in the Accord’s text. The German researchers’ more pessimistic scenario projected developed countries’ emissions in 2020 as equivalent to a 6.5 percent increase in greenhouse gases from the 1990 baseline, corresponding to an eventual global average temperature increase of at least 5 degrees (9°Fahrenheit). In unusually descriptive language for the traditionally rather staid pages of Nature, the German group decried the lack of accepted short-term emission-reduction goals as equivalent to “racing towards a cliff and hoping to stop just before it.”[14]

One of the signature moments in Copenhagen was Bolivian president Evo Morales’ invitation to those assembled to participate in a different kind of climate summit in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba the following April. The 2010 “World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth” turned out to be a rather unique coming together of public officials from a few countries with some 30,000 representatives of civil society, indigenous peoples, and social movements from around the world. They collectively drafted a comprehensive set of principles, rooted in indigenous views of harmony, complementarity and anti-colonialism, proposed a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, and called for an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal to judge and penalize activities that promote climate change and contaminate the earth.[15]

The Cochabamba “People’s Agreement,” which was assembled from the products of 17 distinct working groups at the conference, began by declaring that, “Today, our Mother Earth [“Pachamama” in the Andean indigenous cosmology] is wounded and the future of humanity is in danger.” The agreement condemned carbon markets, as well as the commodification of forests for carbon offsets, and also called to protect the rights of climate migrants. It represented a rather refreshing step beyond the diplomatic gridlock of Copenhagen, even though the agreement fell short of endorsing the full climate justice agenda, especially the demand to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The contents of the Cochabamba agreement were presented as proposals to the 2010 and 2011 UN climate conferences, but repeatedly failed to reach the floor of the official plenaries.

Since Copenhagen, progress toward a meaningful climate agreement has continued to be stifled by big-power politics and diplomatic gridlock. Annual conferences under the auspices of the UNFCCC have happened in Mexico, South Africa, Qatar, and Poland, with conferences planned as of this writing in Lima, Peru toward the end of 2014 and Paris in 2015. Participants and civil society observers at recent COPs have witnessed numerous disturbing developments, including:* Increasing polarization between representatives from the North and South, particularly in response to US efforts to dilute the long-standing focus on “common but differentiated responsibilities” for climate mitigation and remove the more explicit language on climate equity that has long been intrinsic to the UNFCCC process;[16]

Unilateral withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on the part of most leading countries outside of Western Europe that were subject to its binding emissions limits, including Japan, Australia, Canada, Russia, and New Zealand;
A 2011 agreement that a new climate treaty would not come into effect until 2020, with the terms slated to be finalized in Paris in 2015; its implementation will likely rely on the system of national mitigation pledges (now termed “contributions,” with undefined legal standing) that the US has insisted upon since Copenhagen, and dissenting voices from the ALBA countries and elsewhere have been largely ignored;
Small concessions to G77 countries along the way, mostly aimed at keeping them engaged in the process. These included the creation of a new structure in 2013 for addressing ongoing losses and damages from climate disruptions, but the means for funding this remain vague.

The 2011 “Durban Platform,” with its deferral of new climate mitigation measures until 2020 at the earliest, heightened a lingering crisis of confidence in the entire process. That delay could spell a “death sentence for Africa, small island states, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide,” in the words of Friends of the Earth International chair Nnimmo Bassey, and increasing “climate racism, ecocide, and genocide,” according to Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network.[17] Additionally, the pledge of $100 billion a year in climate-related financing for developing countries, which was crucial to convincing many countries to let the process to move forward in Copenhagen, has proved increasingly uncertain. Each successive annual conference has come close to adjourning without any new substantive agreements, despite dramatically lowered expectations and an increasingly coercive decision-making process. Global South delegates walked out of the 2013 COP in Warsaw, Poland en masse to protest their continuing marginalization; meanwhile the Polish government added insult to injury that year by sponsoring a conference celebrating the country’s coal industry that coincided with the COP.

A revealing 2013 speech by lead US climate negotiator Todd Stern brought an especially alarming glimpse at where the entire process may be headed. Stern continued the pattern of blaming poorer countries for resisting an “agreement applicable to all parties,” and touted the emphasis on “self-determined mitigation commitments” instead of mandatory obligations to reduce emissions. He dismissed the “loss and damage” negotiations that would dominate many discussions in Warsaw as merely an “ideological narrative of fault and blame,” and insisted that no additional public funds for international climate aid would be available beyond the meager $2.5 billion that the US has committed annually since 2010. Further, he thoroughly rejected the long-standing principle of responsibility for historical CO2 emissions, insisting, with unsurpassed arrogance, that, “It is unwarranted to assign blame to developed countries for emissions before the point at which people realized that those emissions caused harm to the climate system.”[18] Ethics aside, Stern would have us all forget that at least half of all cumulative emissions have occurred since 1980, and a much larger share since the first observations of rising atmospheric CO2 levels in the late 1950s.

So for now the struggle returns to the national and local levels, where people may be best able to create examples of just and effective ways to address the climate crisis. There is no shortage of positive, forward-looking approaches to reducing excess consumption and furthering the development of alternative energy sources, especially ones that can be democratically controlled by communities and not corporations. But the power of positive examples is far from sufficient to address the crucial problem of time.

A few years ago, climate experts shocked the world by saying we had less than ten years to reverse course and take immediate steps to prevent irreversible tipping points in the global climate system. The troubled outcome of the UN process, and continued diplomatic stonewalling in the lead-up to future worldwide agreements, make it difficult to feel confident that it isn’t too late. Now, any meaningful turnaround will require the evolution of an increasingly unified and effective international climate justice movement. In the next chapter, we will turn to the question of how such a movement has begun to take shape.

Template:Anchor Template:Anchor Template:Anchor 3. Toward a Movement for Climate Justice

On the Indonesian island of Bali in late 2007, events surrounding the annual UN climate conference had a strikingly different character than had been seen before. Previous gatherings had brought NGO and civil society representatives from various countries to politely participate in the proceedings and sometimes to demonstrate outside. But the diversity of peoples and issues in Bali was by all accounts a unique site to behold. Colorful costumes and distinctive headgear represented the unique ethnic diversity of Indonesia’s islands, as well as a wide scope of people’s movements from across south Asia and beyond.

The diversity of climate-related issues and public demands raised by the demonstrators was equally impressive. Two years earlier, the leading symbol at protests outside the 2005 climate talks in Montreal was the ubiquitous polar bear. In Bali, representatives of land-based peoples’ movements demanded agrarian reform, an end to conversions of tropical forest into biofuel plantations, and the protection of peatlands. Others called for payment of the global North’s outstanding ecological debts and for an end to the biotechnology industry’s commodification of life.[1] A new global network calling itself Climate Justice Now raised a challenging new set of demands both inside and outside the official proceedings.

In the fall of 2008, U.S. organizations actively working for climate justice in the US and internationally, including the Global Justice Ecology Project, Rising Tide North America, and the Indigenous Environmental Network, launched a national Mobilization for Climate Justice. The Mobilization was founded to link the climate struggle in the US to the growing international climate justice movement, with an eye toward the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit and beyond. Its objective was to provide a justice-based framework for organizing around climate change that sought leadership from communities in the US that are most impacted by climate change and the fossil fuel industry. The MCJ’s open letter to potential allies called for “a radical change in direction to put climate justice, ecological integrity and people’s rights at the center of international climate negotiations.”[2] Another new network, Climate SOS emerged soon afterward to expose the myths of the carbon market as promoted in domestic US legislation.

The following year, European activists engaged in planning events around the climate conference in Copenhagen began to see that the summit would likely fall far short of preventing further climate disruptions, and pledged to take action against the root causes of climate change. Activists from more than 20 countries, including several from the global South, gathered that summer as part of a network called Climate Justice Action, and agreed on an ambitious agenda to challenge the increasingly business-dominated deal-making at the UN level.

“We cannot trust the market with our future, nor put our faith in unsafe, unproven and unsustainable technologies,” their declaration read. “Contrary to those who put their faith in ‘green capitalism,’ we know that it is impossible to have infinite growth on a finite planet.”[3] The statement called for leaving fossil fuels in the ground, popular and community control over production, reducing the North’s overconsumption, respecting indigenous and forest peoples’ rights and reparations for the ecological and climate debts owed by the richest countries to those most affected by resource extraction and climate-related disasters.

Today, representatives of communities disproportionately affected by global inaction on climate gather annually at the UN climate meetings, and aim to coordinate their actions throughout the year around a broad scope of local and regional grievances as well. People from communities disproportionately affected by climate disruptions—especially indigenous peoples, women, peasant farmers, US racial justice activists and many others—gather in host cities to bring their demands to the world. Calls for climate justice, and for “System Change, Not Climate Change,” have become familiar highlights of these proceedings.

This emerging climate justice movement embodies the core understanding that those least responsible for emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that disrupt the climate have already been affected the most by accelerating climate-related disasters around the world. Any remotely adequate response to global climate changes needs to address and directly challenge this profound discrepancy and prioritize the voices of the most affected communities. Many of the same communities are simultaneously impacted by the emerging false solutions to climate change, including carbon trading and offsets, the destruction of forests to create agrofuel plantations, mega-scale hydroelectric developments, and nuclear power (see Chapter 4). False corporate “solutions” to global warming are expanding commodification and privatization of land, waterways, and the atmosphere itself, largely at the expense of those communities.

Template:Anchor Origins of Climate Justice

The first published reference to the concept of climate justice appeared in a 1999 report titled Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice by the San Francisco-based Corporate Watch group.[4] The report was mainly an examination of the petroleum industry and its disproportionate political influence, but it also made an initial attempt to define a multifaceted approach to climate justice, including:* Addressing the root causes of global warming and holding corporations accountable;

Opposing the destructive impacts of oil development, and supporting impacted communities, including those most affected by the increasing incidence of weather-related disasters;
Looking to environmental justice communities (see below) and organized labor for strategies to support a just transition away from fossil fuels;
Challenging corporate-led globalization and the dispro-portionate influence of international financial institutions such as the World Bank and World Trade Organization.

The report’s conclusions were highlighted at a 1999 rally at Chevron Oil’s headquarters in San Francisco, as well as at international conferences held in the Netherlands in 2000 and on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002.

The Corpwatch authors were active supporters of the US movement for environmental justice, which began in earnest in the 1980s and had become a focus for inner city, indigenous, and poor rural communities confronting their disproportionate exposure to a wide variety of environmental hazards. The movement was galvanized by several successful local campaigns, as well as a landmark, church-sponsored report, Toxic Wastes and Race, which revealed that the racial composition of communities is the single largest factor in the siting of hazardous waste facilities in the US. The report documented that 3 out of 5 African-Americans nationwide live in close proximity to abandoned toxic sites.[5]

News of the Toxic Wastes and Race report helped unite a variety of groups that had been challenging this reality on the local level for many years, and helped empower African American, Native American and Latino activists to demand a greater voice within the largely Euro-American-dominated environmental movement.[6] In 1991, a National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit issued a comprehensive public statement against environmental racism and for environmental justice.[7] By the mid-1990s, Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and others were articulating the need to bring the deepening climate crisis into the environmental justice framework, understanding that people of color would be as disproportionately impacted by climate disruptions as by chemical toxins. The movement’s second Leadership Summit in 2002 issued a document titled “10 Principles for Just Climate Change Policies in the US.”[8]

Also throughout the 1990s, international NGOs such as the World Rainforest Movement, Friends of the Earth International and the Third World Network drew public attention to local struggles of indigenous and other land-based peoples in the global South against the rising levels of resource extraction that accompanied neoliberal economic policies. They joined with Corpwatch, IEN and others in Bali in 2002 to develop the Bali Principles of Climate Justice, a comprehensive, 27-point program aimed to “begin to build an international movement of all peoples for Climate Justice.”[9] Campaigns to highlight indigenous land struggles helped shape the international movement against corporate-driven globalization in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and became a central focus for numerous organizations engaged in international climate justice organizing today, including IEN, the Global Forest Coalition, the Global Justice Ecology Project, and many others.[10]

During the lead-up to the final ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 2005, policymakers in the EU and other countries increasingly adopted market-based “cap-and-trade” measures to nominally reduce greenhouse pollution (see Chapter 4). Market skeptics, concerned about the injustices inherent in this approach, convened a meeting in Durban, South Africa in the fall of 2004 that included representatives of social movements and indigenous peoples’ organizations based in Brazil, India, Samoa, the US, and UK, as well as South Africa. That gathering drafted the Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading, which eventually gained over 300 endorsements worldwide.[11]

When the U.N.’s annual climate conference was held in Bali in 2007, the Durban Group for Climate Justice and allies from around the world gathered in significant numbers. Representatives of communities disproportionately affected by global inaction on climate presented a strong and unified showing both inside and outside the official proceedings and, as we have seen, a more formal worldwide network emerged under the slogan, “Climate Justice Now!” At a series of side events, press conferences and protests throughout the Bali conference, representatives of affected communities, indigenous peoples, women, peasant farmers, and their allies articulated their demands for:* reduced consumption in the global North;

huge financial transfers from North to South based on historical responsibility and ecological debt, paid for by redirecting military budgets, innovative taxes and debt cancellation;
leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing in energy-efficiency and community-led renewable energy;
rights based resource conservation that enforces Indigenous land rights and promotes peoples’ sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water; and
sustainable family farming and food sovereignty.[12]

A more detailed statement of principles for Climate Justice Now (CJN), developed the following year, begins in part:

From the perspective of climate justice, it is imperative that responsibility for reducing emissions and financing systemic transformation is taken by those who have benefited most from the past 250 years of economic development. Furthermore, any solutions to climate change must protect the most vulnerable, compensate those who are displaced, guarantee individual and collective rights, and respect peoples’ right to participate in decisions that impact on their lives.13

By 2010, the CJN network included some 750 international organizations, including numerous grassroots groups throughout the global South, and had become a clearinghouse for information and the continuing involvement of many groups seeking to further these goals.[14] At several UN climate conferences, the network offered an inclusive meeting place for critical perspectives on the unfolding international climate negotiations.

In recent years, climate justice has come to embody three distinct but complementary currents from various parts of the world. In the global South, demands for climate justice unite an impressive diversity of indigenous and other land-based people’s movements. They include rainforest dwellers opposing new mega-dams and palm oil plantations, African communities resisting land appropriations for industrial agriculture and agrofuel production, Pacific Islanders facing the loss of their homes due to rising seas, and peasant farmers fighting for food sovereignty and basic land rights. A statement to the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference from the worldwide confederation of peasant movements, La Vía Campesina, stated in part:

Climate change is already seriously impacting us. It brings floods, droughts and the outbreak of pests that are all causing harvest failures. I must point out that these harvest failures are something that the farmers did not create. Instead, it is the polluters who caused the emissions who destroy the natural cycles… [W]e will not pay for their mistakes.15

In the US, environmental justice activists continue to be the leading voices for climate justice—mainly representatives from African American, Latino and Native American communities that have been resisting daily exposure to chemical toxins and other environmental hazards for 30 years. A 2008 report from the Oakland, California-based Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative pointed out that African Americans may be at the greatest risk, both from disruptive climate changes and from exposure to the negative effects of various false solutions. The six US states with the highest African American populations are all in the Atlantic hurricane zone, and African Americans also have the highest historic rates of heat death.[16] They have the highest asthma rates and spend the highest percentage of their income on energy. A 2009 study by several public health professionals confirmed the disproportionate consequences of heat-related illness for communities of color in the US, exacerbated by people’s lack of access to transportation and other essential needs.[17] These findings, and the experiences of frontline communities across the US—from the melting Alaskan tundra to the Louisiana coast—highlight the urgency of a more astute and holistic climate justice movement.

An important two day conference in New York City in early 2009, organized by West Harlem Environmental Action (WEACT), brought together racial justice activists, community and youth organizers, indigenous representatives and farmworker advocates with students, environmental lawyers, scientists, public health advocates and government officials to discuss the relevance of the climate justice framework for communities of color and their allies across the US.[18] Many speakers described the emerging climate justice movement as a continuation of the US civil rights legacy, and of their communities’ continuing “quest for fairness, equity and justice,” as described by the pioneering environmental justice researcher and author, Robert Bullard.”[19] Others explained how, in recent years, the environmental justice movement has broadened its scope to areas of food justice, housing justice, and transportation justice, as well as opposition to the commodification of the atmosphere through global carbon markets. A physician from Los Angeles described carbon trading as yet another means of “redistributing wealth from the poor to the wealthy,” and José Bravo of the Just Transition Alliance suggested that “when we put a price on every square inch of air, there are some of us who won’t be able to afford to breathe.”

In much of Europe, climate justice emerged as a further evolution of the global justice and anticapitalist movements that arose in opposition to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and annual G8 economic summits during the late 1990s and early 2000s. A March 2010 discussion paper from the European Climate Justice Action network (CJA) explained that “Climate Justice means linking all struggles together that reject neoliberal markets and working towards a world that puts autonomous decision making power in the hands of communities.” The paper concluded: “Fundamentally, we believe that we cannot prevent further global warming without addressing the way our societies are organized—the fight for climate justice and the fight for social justice are one and the same.”[20] While Climate Justice Action proved to be relatively short-lived, this approach has been sustained by ongoing networks such as Rising Tide as well as the UK Climate Camp movement, which organized high profile actions between 2006 and 2010 at major power plant sites, Heathrow Airport, London’s financial district, and the Edinburgh headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland.[21]

The role of Rising Tide is especially noteworthy as an international voice for direct action to challenge climate polluters, as well as a long-range systemic critique of the underlying causes of climate disruptions. Formed in the lead-up to the November 2000 UN climate conference in the Hague, Netherlands, Rising Tide recently listed six regional affiliates—North America (US and Canada), UK, Mexico, Ecuador, Australia and Finland—as well as organizing collectives in several US states and regions. Made up mostly of youthful activists with roots in decentralist and anti-authoritarian political traditions, Rising Tide has supported numerous direct action campaigns against both the fossil fuel industry and a variety of corporate-driven false solutions to the climate crisis. Rising Tide has organized and trained participants for many high-profile direct actions, especially in the US, UK, and Australia, and is also noted for its critical educational efforts.[22]

Template:Anchor Climate Justice and the Future

In the aftermath of Copenhagen’s diplomatic meltdown, some in Europe questioned whether a unified climate justice movement could survive. The Copenhagen effort, according to CJA activists Nicola Bullard and Tadzio Müller,

failed to establish an anti-capitalist CJ-discourse that was visible and understandable beyond the subcultures of activists and policy-wonks, and thus failed to provide a visible alternative to despair; failed to establish a new “pole of attraction” that would substantially reconfigure the political field around climate change; and failed to do anything to significantly advance the fight for climate justice. In some sense, the global CJM [Climate Justice Movement; emphasis in original] remained something more of a potential than a reality.23

In the US as well, events organized during the lead-up to Copenhagen also represented a peak in public visibility for climate justice for some years hence. Along with the regional actions timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the WTO shutdown in Seattle (see Chapter 2), the Mobilization for Climate Justice-West (MCJ-West) in the San Francisco Bay Area organized seven high-profile demonstrations during the five months prior to Copenhagen, including several in solidarity with a decades-long effort by activists in the largely African-American city of Richmond, California to confront the hazards of a major Chevron oil refinery.

However MCJ-West found it internally unsustainable to maintain that level of public visibility into 2010 and beyond, and a principled effort to restructure the group to better reflect the priorities of local community-based organizations proved insufficient to keep the group afloat. The fledgling national Mobilization also ceased to operate following a similar internal discussion. While participants generally agreed that frontline environmental justice communities are inherently in the forefront of climate justice organizing, community-based organizations struggling with the daily impacts of political and economic marginalization did not appear to have the capacity, nor perhaps the inclination, to sustain a unified national climate justice coalition at that time.

The lessons of the Mobilizations, however, have inspired insightful new approaches to political alliance-building across barriers of race and class, initiated in part by a San Francisco Bay Area group called the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project.[24] They continued to meet with allied groups, including the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and others, to develop a more accountable coalition model. A September 2010 position paper proposed uniting around four themes: root cause remedies; human rights and anti-racism; reparations for historic injustices; and directly democratic control by people over the decisions that affect their lives.[25] In 2012, nearly 30 groups organized as the Climate Justice Alignment (later changed to Alliance) proposed a nationwide campaign for a “just transition” away from fossil fuel dependence, including the creation of millions of new jobs in renewable energy, public transportation, local food, waste reduction, and related areas. As of this writing, the Climate Justice Alliance is engaged in active “just transition” campaigns in Detroit, Richmond, and in the territory of the Navajo nation in the US southwest, and was also planning a People’s Climate Justice Summit, featuring frontline community delegations, to follow the massive People’s Climate March in New York City in September 2014.[26]

A detailed strategy paper by Jacqueline Patterson, a tireless environmental justice campaigner with the hundred year-old NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in the US systematically outlined the persistent tensions between traditional environmentalists and people organizing in frontline environmental justice communities. While historical and cultural barriers may continue to exist between the two groups, Patterson outlined proposals to overcome those obstacles by forging longer-term working relationships based on mutual concerns, open sharing of resources, and maintaining a stance of “solidarity, not charity.” “Empowerment of traditionally disenfranchised groups, ensuring that frontline communities are leading in the relationship, is an essential aim,” she wrote.[27] Climate justice activists who actively explore the intersections among various struggles are fond of a quote popularly attributed to the Australian Aboriginal activist and artist, Lila Watson: “If you have come to help me, then you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”[28]

Determined public expressions of climate justice also continue to manifest at the annual UN climate conferences. La Vía Campesina and its affiliated peasant farmer movements were in the forefront of public events in Cancún, Mexico in 2010, actively challenging the limitations of the official proceedings. In Durban, South Africa in 2011, differences between civil society groups participating in the UN conference and those who chose to remain outside came to a head on the very last day during an Occupy Wall Street-styled demonstration just outside the conference hall. While representatives of most international environmental NGOs urged cooperation with UN security in clearing the building of protesters, several activists refused to leave and some were forcibly removed.[29] In Warsaw, Poland in 2013, civil society representatives staged a mass walk-out from the official proceedings, with the support of activists gathered outside. While many groups affiliated with Climate Justice Now have had an increasingly difficult time airing their issues within the UN process—pointing to a concerted effort by officials to marginalize civil society voices—others remain more hopeful about the potential for a coordinated inside/outside strategy around these annual events.

Though various organizational expressions have proved challenging to sustain, the outlook of climate justice continues to have significant appeal in many parts of the world, and the informal Climate Justice Now network remains one point of contact among these disparate currents, especially around the ongoing UN climate negotiations. Between UN conferences, people and groups collaborate through a variety of online forums to share news, debate perspectives and strategies, and further the scope of climate justice organizing. The US-based Grassroots Global Justice Alliance continues to sponsor delegations of US environmental justice activists to the UN climate conferences, while the Labor Network for Sustainability, the Cornell University-sponsored Worker Institute, and others work to raise support for climate justice among the ranks of organized labor in the US and worldwide.[30]

Demands for climate justice have been voiced in recent years by representatives of waste pickers in Durban, South Africa, migrant farmworkers in the hills of Vermont, Rising Tide activists blocking the transport of equipment to ship oily bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, and countless others. Author-activists such as Patrick Bond from South Africa have chronicled the successes of communities engaged in climate justice-inspired organizing throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America.[31] In many countries, the emerging youth climate movement is carrying out creative direct actions at corporate headquarters, industry conferences, and even at the offices of corporate-friendly environmental groups in the US such as the Environmental Defense Fund and NRDC.[32] The 350.org network, now global in scope, has sought to bring an increased focus on climate justice and grassroots leadership into its activities around the world.

Internationally, people from Pacific Island nations, in some cases already losing land and groundwater to rising seas, remain in the forefront of calls for immediate action. The worldwide confederation of peasant movements, La Via Campesina, with affiliated groups in more than 80 countries, has challenged the status of carbon as a recently privatized commodity and argued that the UN climate convention “has failed to question the current models of consumption and production based on the illusion of continuous growth.”[33] Further, hundreds of cities and towns in the US have defied the federal government’s long-standing inaction on climate and committed to substantial, publicly-funded CO2 reductions of their own. At the local level, people are regenerating local food systems, seeking locally controlled, renewable energy sources, and building solidarity with kindred movements around the world.[34]

Today, the leading edge of climate justice organizing is often with those who are challenging the expansion of extreme forms of fossil fuel extraction around the world. As author Michael Klare, a long-time analyst of energy geopolitics, points out, most current efforts to tap new sources of oil and gas require energy companies “to drill in extreme temperatures or extreme weather, or use extreme pressures, or operate under extreme danger—or some combination of all of these.”[35] With readily accessible sources of oil and gas reaching their limits worldwide, industry projections for the future of fossil fuels are increasingly tied to so-called “unconventional” sources, such as tar sands, shale gas, and oil drilled from miles beneath the oceans, including the far reaches of the Arctic. Now that world oil prices have reached over $100 per barrel, technologies such as hydro-fracturing (also known as fracking), horizontal drilling, deepwater drilling, and oil extraction from tar sands—all once seen as hypothetically possible but economically prohibitive—have become central to the fossil fuel industry’s plans for the future. Each of these technologies has profound implications for the people and ecosystems most affected by new energy developments, and each has sparked determined opposition from frontline communities and from allies around the world.

Organizing in communities facing extreme energy developments has been inspired in part by the opponents of mountaintop removal coal mining in the US, who have repeatedly put their bodies on the line to expose devastating mining practices that have destroyed over 500 mountains in southern Appalachia. The region has experienced an unprecedented alliance between long-time local residents—many from families that have worked in the coal mines for generations—and youthful forest activists from across the country working with groups such as Coal River Mountain Watch, Climate Ground Zero, Mountain Justice Summer, and Rising Tide. Some of their distinctive action strategies and organizing methods were adopted in part by groups that organized against the construction of the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline in Texas and Oklahoma during 2012-13.[36] Another national effort in the US, supported in part by the Sierra Club, helped halt the construction of at least 174 new coal-fired power plants in the US, and others are campaigning to stop the construction of proposed new export terminals for coal, oil and gas.[37] People challenging the rapid expansion of fracking for gas and oil are increasingly well organized, as are mainly indigenous opponents of expanded uranium mining; in Canada, this threat has united opponents from Cree, Dene, Inuit, and other First Nations, from Québec in the east all the way to Nunavut in the far northwest.[38]

It remains to be seen whether these efforts contain the seeds of a fully unified opposition to extreme energy projects throughout North America. Each struggle has its distinctive qualities and unique challenges, and all of the legal, political, and personal issues faced by these campaigners can make it difficult to focus on broader alliance-building efforts. Many groups engaged in local struggles against new energy developments identify rather loosely if at all with a broader climate justice framework. But it is clear that their stories are already having an essential catalytic effect on the broader climate movement, whose centers of activity are often geographically removed from the day-to-day realities of crucial resource-centered struggles.

There is so much more to do. We need to envision a lower-consumption world of decentralized, clean energy and politically empowered communities. Like the antinuclear activists of 30 years ago, who halted the first wave of nuclear power in the US, while articulating an inspiring vision of directly democratic, solar-powered towns and neighborhoods, we need to again dramatize the positive, even utopian, possibilities for a post-petroleum, post-mega-mall world. The technical means clearly exist for a locally-controlled, solar-based alternative, at the same time that dissatisfaction with today’s consumption-oriented, highly indebted “American way of life” appears to be at an all time high. Experiments in raising and distributing food more locally are thriving everywhere—as are some efforts toward community-controlled renewable energy production—and enhancing many people’s quality of life.

Still, despite the urgency of the problem and the viability of many positive, life-affirming solutions, climate justice activists often find themselves on the defensive, particularly in North America. Greenhouse gas emissions are still rising and environmental disasters continue to unfold from the devastated mountaintops of the Appalachian coal country to the indigenous communities living amidst the tar sands of western Canada. Efforts to create a more unified climate justice movement remain largely under the radar in a political environment still often dominated by reactionary, right wing demagoguery, attacks on organized labor, and increasing economic marginalization of millions of people.

A March 2010 discussion paper from the European Climate Justice Action network suggested one promising approach. “Climate Justice means linking all struggles together that reject neoliberal markets and working towards a world that puts autonomous decision making power in the hands of communities,” the paper stated. “We look towards a society which recognizes our historical responsibilities and seeks to protect the global commons, both in terms of the climate and life itself.” It concluded, “Fundamentally, we believe that we cannot prevent further global warming without addressing the way our societies are organized—the fight for climate justice and the fight for social justice are one and the same.”[39]

In stark contrast to mainstream trends in the US and beyond, many climate justice activists embrace a counter-hegemonic worldview that has often renewed environmentalism since the 1970s: the promise that reorienting societies toward a renewed harmony with nature can help spur a revolutionary transformation of our world. This outlook has helped inspire anti-nuclear activists to sit in at power plant construction sites, forest activists to sustain long-term tree-sits, and environmental justice activists to stand firm in defense of their communities. It has mobilized people around the world to act in solidarity with indigenous peoples fighting resource extraction on their lands. With climate chaos looming on the horizon, such a transformation is no longer optional. Our survival now depends on our ability to renounce the global status-quo and create a more humane and ecologically balanced way of life.

Template:Anchor Template:Anchor Template:Anchor 4. Carbon Trading and Other False Solutions

One of the central contributions of the emerging climate justice movement has been to open an evolving conversation about the numerous false solutions to the global climate crisis. From the worldwide expansion of natural gas drilling through technologies of hydrofracking and horizontal drilling to the proliferation of biofuel plantations worldwide, as well as the creation of markets in tradable greenhouse gas emissions permits, elite interests have been promoting nearly everything imaginable as a global warming “solution.” Often these claims go hand in hand with efforts to forestall more transformative measures that could actually reduce carbon pollution. Major climate justice groups from the Indigenous Environmental Network to Rising Tide have published comprehensive pamphlets reviewing the myriad false solutions (both in collaboration with the international research group, Carbon Trade Watch),[1] and countless local environmental justice and climate groups have grappled with the local impacts of these measures. As with climate changes overall, the consequences of various false solutions fall disproportionately on marginalized communities that scarcely contribute to the problem of excess greenhouse gas emissions. This chapter will attempt a broad overview of the “false solutions” discussion, offer some historical background, and examine how a thoroughly corporate-driven approach to capping emissions has dominated climate policy discussions in the US.

Indeed since the turn of the 21[st] century, the world has been inundated with countless seductive, but ultimately false solutions to the threat of catastrophic climate changes. While such measures are put forward by corporations, governments, and many policy analysts as climate solutions, it is clear that they generally present far greater problems than benefits, both for the global environment and locally-affected communities. These false solutions to the climate crisis fall into two broad categories. First are a series of technological interventions that aim to either increase energy supplies while nominally reducing climate pollution, or to intervene on a massive physical scale to counter the warming of the earth’s atmosphere. The latter approach, broadly described as “geoengineering,” threatens to create a host of new environmental problems in the pursuit of a world-scale techno-fix to the climate crisis.[2] The other broad category of false solutions aims to utilize tools of the capitalist “free market” as a means to reduce pollution. These measures include the creation of regional and national markets in tradable carbon dioxide emissions allowances (often termed “cap-and-trade”), as well as the use of carbon offsets, i.e. encouraging investments in nominally low-carbon technologies in other parts of the world as a substitute for reducing an individual or a corporation’s own emissions profile.

Template:Anchor Which Energy Choices?

Among the many technological false solutions, efforts to expand the use of nuclear power may be the most insidious, as they have been supported by some knowledgeable climate scientists despite nuclear power’s inherent flaws. Nuclear power has been subsidized for over fifty years by various governments—amounting to over a hundred billion dollars in the US alone—yet it still presents intractable technical and environmental problems, as revealed yet again by the catastrophic multiple meltdown of nuclear reactors near Fukushima, Japan in 2011. Nuclear scientists and engineers still have no clue what to do with ever-increasing quantities of nuclear waste that will remain highly radioactive for millennia. Any expansion of nuclear power would expose countless more people to the threat of radiation-induced cancer that critical scientists such as Ernest Sternglass have documented since the 1960s, and threaten several indigenous communities with the even more severe consequences of uranium mining and milling. With an estimated 70 per cent of world uranium supplies located underneath indigenous lands, many communities are still experiencing health effects from radiation released during the first uranium boom of the 1970s. There are reportedly over a thousand abandoned uranium mines on Native lands in the American Southwest, where communities have faced epidemics of cancer ever since the earlier wave of mining.[3]

Recent studies of the implications of an expanded nuclear industry have also revealed some new problems. First it appears that supplies of the relatively accessible, high-grade uranium ore that has thus far helped contain the nuclear fuel cycle’s greenhouse gas emissions are rather limited. If the nuclear industry ever begins to approach its goal of doubling or tripling world nuclear generating capacity—enough to displace a significant portion of the predicted growth in carbon dioxide emissions—they will quickly deplete known reserves of high-grade uranium, and soon have to rely upon fuel sources that require far more fossil fuel energy to mine and purify.[4]

Additionally, the economics of nuclear power rule it out as a significant aid in alleviating the climate crisis. In one recent study, energy systems analyst Amory Lovins compared the current cost of nuclear power to a variety of other sources, both in terms of their power output and their CO2 emissions savings. He concluded that from 2 to 10 times as much carbon dioxide can be withheld from the atmosphere with comparable investments in wind power, cogeneration (simultaneously extracting electricity and heat from the burning of natural gas), and especially energy efficiency.[5] Efforts to export what is often touted as the most successful example of nuclear development—the French model—have utterly failed, as demonstrated by France’s own legacy of nuclear contamination, as well as years of delays, quality-assurance problems, and a near tripling of construction costs at the €9 billion French nuclear construction project in Finland.[6] Such findings, however, are far from adequate to sway either industrialists or politicians who are ideologically committed to the nuclear path. Well known environmental advocates, including the British scientist James Lovelock and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, have reaped the unending adoration of the mainstream press for their advocacy for nuclear power, while former US Senator John Kerry offered generous new subsidies to the nuclear industry in his effort to win Republican Senators’ support for proposed climate and energy legislation.[7]

Claims that the coal industry may be able to clean up its act and reduce its contribution to the climate crisis are equally fanciful. While politicians promote the false promise of “clean coal,” and the World Bank has established a carbon capture trust fund for developing countries, scientists engaged in efforts to capture and sequester CO2 emissions from coal plants admit that the technology is decades away, at best. Many are doubtful that huge quantities of CO2 can ever be stored permanently underground, and project that attempting to do so will increase the energy consumed by coal-burning plants by as much as 40 percent to achieve the same energy output.[8] Still, the myth of “cleaner” coal is aggressively promoted in the US and around the world, partly to justify plans to build a new generation of coal-burning plants that are misleadingly marketed as “capture-ready.” To make matters worse, CO2 pumped underground is most often used to add pressure to existing or already-depleted oil wells and thus increase their output, with little examination of how much of the carbon will remain beneath the earth’s surface.

The downside of efforts to minimize pollution from coal plants was dramatized by a massive spill of hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic coal ash in 2008, following the breach of a massive dam in the US state of Tennessee. That incident literally buried the valleys below the dam in up to six feet of sludge, which is mainly the byproduct of scrubbers installed to make coal burning somewhat cleaner; contaminants that were once spewed into the air are now contaminating waterways instead. Investigations following the breach of another large coal ash dam in North Carolina in 2014 exposed how that state’s entire environmental enforcement apparatus had been redirected to serve coal-dependent utility companies.[9] Another investigation by New York Times revealed that more than 300 coal plants violated US water pollution rules during a recent five year period, while only 10 percent of those were fined or sanctioned in any way.[10] People in regions of the Appalachian Mountains that have relied on coal mining for over a century continue to protest the practice of “mountaintop removal” mining, in which mountaintops are literally blasted off to reveal the coal seams below. It is clear that the only way to reduce the climate, environmental, and public health impacts from coal is to further curtail its use.

So-called “biofuels” present a more ambiguous story. On a hobbyist or farm scale, people are running cars and tractors on everything from waste oil from restaurants to homegrown oil from sunflowers. But industrial-scale biofuels present a very different picture; activists in the global South use the more appropriate term, “agrofuels,” as these are first and foremost products of global agribusiness. Running American cars on ethanol fermented from corn and European vehicles on diesel fuel pressed from soybeans and other food crops contributed to the worldwide food shortages and price spikes that brought starvation and food riots to at least 35 countries in 2007–08.[11] The amount of corn needed to produce the ethanol for one large SUV tank contains enough calories to feed a hungry person for a year. and researchers have documented an expanding legacy of disturbing environmental and human rights impacts from the development of agrofuels around the world, including a global epidemic of land grabs for biofuel crop production.[12] One study by the International Land Coalition revealed that over 203 million hectares of land was purchased by wealthy overseas interests between 2000 and 2010, with nearly 60 percent aimed toward growing biofuel feedstocks.[13] Those land purchases often result in the expulsion of inhabitants, the loss of food production for local consumption, and sometimes escalate into violent conflicts.

Even if the entire US corn crop were to be used for fuel, it would only displace about 12 percent of domestic gasoline use, according to University of Minnesota researchers.[14] The push for agrofuels has consumed a growing share of US corn—up to 40 percent by 2010—and encouraged growers of less energy and chemical-intensive crops such as wheat and soybeans to transfer more of their acreage to growing corn. Land in the Brazilian Amazon and other fragile regions is being plowed under to grow soybeans for export, while Brazil’s uniquely biodiverse coastal grasslands are appropriated to grow sugarcane, today’s most efficient source of ethanol. A series of studies beginning in 2008 suggested that the consequences of converting pasture and forest land to the production of fuel crops are severe enough to make most agrofuels net contributors to global warming.[15]

Commercial supplies of biodiesel often come from soybean or canola fields in the US Midwest, Canada, or the Amazon, where these crops are genetically engineered to withstand large doses of chemical herbicides. Increasingly, biodiesel originates from the vast monoculture oil palm plantations that have in recent years displaced more than 80 percent of the native rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia. As the global food crisis has escalated, some agrofuel proponents suggest that using food crops for fuel is only a temporary solution, and that someday we will run our vehicles on so-called “cellulosic” biofuels extracted from grasses and trees; that myth is exacerbating the widespread conversion of forests to timber plantations, and helping drive a new wave of subsidies to the US biotechnology industry to develop faster-growing genetically engineered trees.[16] Various researchers have documented corporate strategies for advancing a sweeping new “bioeconomy,” based on synthetic biology and other recent innovations, and dramatically expanding the biotechnology industry’s efforts to commodify all of life on earth.[17]

Template:Anchor Trading Pollution

The notion that new commodity markets can become a tool for reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases is perhaps the most brazen expression of capitalist ideology in the climate debate. When Al Gore—then US Vice President—addressed the UN climate conference in Kyoto in 1997, he offered, as we have seen, that the US would sign on to what soon became the Kyoto Protocol under two conditions: that mandated reductions in emissions be far less ambitious than originally proposed, and that emissions reductions be implemented through the market-based trading of “rights to pollute” among various companies and between countries. Under this “cap-and-trade” model, companies are expected to meet a quota for “capping” their emissions; if they fail to do so, they can readily purchase the difference from another permit holder that may have found a way to reduce its emissions faster or more cheaply. While economists claim that this scheme induces companies to implement the most cost-effective changes as soon as possible, experience shows that carbon markets are at least as prone to fraud and manipulation as any other financial markets. More than fifteen years after the Kyoto Protocol was signed, many industrialized countries were still struggling to bring down their annual rate of increase in global warming pollution.[18]

The ideological roots of carbon trading go back to the early 1960s, when corporate managers were just beginning to consider the consequences of pollution and resource depletion.[19] Chicago School economist R. H. Coase published a key paper in 1960, where he challenged the widely accepted view of pollution as an economic “externality”—an approach that originated in the 1920s—and proposed a direct equivalence between the harm caused by pollution and the economic loss to polluting entities if they are compelled to curtail production. “The right to do something which has a harmful effect,” argued Coase, “is also a factor of production.”[20] He proposed that steps to regulate production be evaluated on par with the value of the market transactions that those regulations aim to alter, arguing that economics should determine the optimal allocation of resources needed to best satisfy all parties to any dispute.

The Canadian economist J.H. Dales, widely acknowledged as the founder of pollution trading, carried the discussion two steps further. First, he echoed the neoclassical view that charging for pollution, via a disposal fee or tax, is more efficient than either regulation or subsidizing alternative technologies. Then, as an extension of this argument, Dales proposed a “market in pollution rights” as an administratively simpler and less costly means of implementing pollution charges. “The pollution rights scheme, it seems clear, would require far less policing than any of the others we have discussed,” Dales suggested—a proposition thoroughly at odds with the world’s experience since Kyoto.[21] In 1972, California Institute of Technology economist David Montgomery presented a detailed mathematical model, purporting to show that a market in licenses to pollute indeed reaches a point of equilibrium at which desired levels of environmental quality are achieved at the lowest possible cost.[22]

By the mid-1970s, the new US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was actively experimenting with pollution trading, initially through brokered deals, where the Agency would allow companies to offset pollution from new industrial facilities by reducing existing emissions elsewhere or negotiating with another company to do so. The next significant breakthrough was a 1979 Harvard Law Review article by US Supreme Court Justice (then a law professor) Stephen Breyer. Breyer’s article proposed that regulation is only appropriate to replicate the market conditions of a “hypothetically competitive world” and introduced a broader array of policymakers to the concept of “marketable rights to pollute,” as a substitute for regulation.[23]

By the late 1980s, Harvard economist Robert Stavins, associated with the uniquely corporate-friendly Environmental Defense Fund, was collaborating with environmentalists, academics, government officials, and representatives of corporations such as Chevron and Monsanto to propose new environmental initiatives to the incoming presidency of the elder George H.W. Bush. These initiatives featured market incentives as a supplement to regulation. Seeking to distance himself from his predecessor Ronald Reagan’s rabidly anti-environmental policies, Bush announced a plan based on tradable permits to reduce the sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants that were causing acid rain throughout the eastern US.[24]

Then as now, advocates promoted the idea that the most efficient pollution reductions would come from such emissions trading schemes: the government sets a cap, reduces it over time, and encourages companies to buy and sell pollution permits in order to nominally promote development of the most cost-effective pollution reductions. The Acid Rain Program succeeded modestly, but mainly because regulated electric utilities in the pre-Enron era were mandated by state officials to reduce their output of acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide. Utilities increased their purchases of increasingly available low-sulfur coal, mainly from Western strip-mines. According to many analysts, emissions trading contributed only marginally to the 50 percent pollution reductions from that program. An effort to reduce air pollution in southern California by a similar scheme appeared to mainly delay the installation of emission controls, and that region still has the dirtiest air in the country. In the EPA’s Acid Rain Program, trading might have helped reduce the cost of some companies’ compliance with the rules, but also may have limited the spread of some promising new pollution control technologies.[25]

That didn’t stop the Environmental Defense Fund’s senior economist, Daniel Dudek, from proposing that the limited trading of acid rain emissions in the US was an appropriate “scale model” for a much more ambitious plan to trade global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Al Gore first endorsed the idea in his best-selling 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, and Richard Sandor, then the director of the Chicago Board of Trade, North America’s largest commodities market, co-authored a study for UNCTAD (UN Conference on Trade and Development) that endorsed international emissions trading. Sandor went on to found the now-defunct Chicago Climate Exchange, which at its peak engaged nearly 400 international companies and public agencies in a wholly voluntary carbon market.

While the US never adopted the Kyoto Protocol, the rest of the world has had to live with the consequences of Gore’s intervention in Kyoto, which created what George Monbiot has aptly termed “an exuberant market in fake emissions cuts.”[26] The European Union’s Emissions Trading System, for example, created huge new subsidies for highly polluting corporations without corresponding reductions in pollution. In 2006, the value of European carbon allowances plummeted and the carbon trading system almost collapsed under the weight of excess permits that were freely granted to favored industries, and by 2013 the European carbon price was consistently below €5 per ton, leading a broad coalition of environmental groups to propose that the European Trading System was an unmitigated failure and should be abolished. Meanwhile, European countries also directly support energy conservation and renewable energy technologies with public funds, whereas in the US we are told that solar and wind technologies mainly need to prove their viability in the so-called “free market”—in marked contrast to rarely unchallenged subsidies for nuclear power and agrofuels.

Carbon offsets are another central aspect of the “market” approach to global warming, and offer a massive loophole for companies that exceed their share of emissions allowances. These investments in nominally emissions-reducing projects in other parts of the world are a nearly-universal feature of carbon markets, and represent an even greater obstacle to real solutions. Larry Lohmann of the UK’s Corner House research group has demonstrated in detail how carbon offset schemes are subsidizing the replacement of native forests by monoculture tree plantations, lengthening the lifespan of polluting industrial facilities and toxic landfills in Asia and Africa in exchange for only incremental changes in their operations, and ultimately perpetuating the very inequalities that must be eliminated if we are to create a more just and sustainable world.[27] Even where offset credits occasionally do help support beneficial projects, they serve to postpone investments in necessary emissions reductions in the North and represent a gaping hole in any mandated “cap” in carbon dioxide emissions. At best, they maintain current emissions levels; at worst, they make it possible for domestic emissions in Northern countries to continue to rise. Offsets are a means for polluting industries to continue business as usual at home while contributing, marginally at best, to emission reductions elsewhere.

In the late 2000s, individual purchases of carbon offsets became the basis for a lucrative new business in their own right. Online purchases of tickets for air travel and some major cultural events were routinely accompanied by pleas to purchase offsets to alleviate one’s personal contribution to global warming. These are aptly compared to the “indulgences” that sinners used to buy from the Catholic church during the Middle Ages. On a global scale, with corporations instead of individuals as the main players, offsets became a problem of gigantic proportions. Rather than promoting innovative measures to reduce energy use and sequester carbon in poor countries, as they are usually advertised, carbon offsets instead have subsidized tree plantations in the tropics, methane capture from expanding toxic landfills, minor retooling of highly polluting pig iron smelters in India, and even the routine destruction of byproducts from China’s expanding production of ozone-destroying hydrofluorocarbons.[28]

One of the most notorious cases was that of the French chemical company, Rhodia, which reaped nearly a billion dollars in carbon offset credits in exchange for a $15 million investment in 1970s-vintage technology to destroy the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide in its facility in South Korea.[29] Carbon offsets became the company’s most profitable line of business. Major hydroelectric projects, mainly in China, India and Brazil, represented a quarter of all applications for credits through the UN’s offset program, the so-called Clean Development Mechanism, and nearly all of these were already under development before they applied for their credits. As the International Rivers Network and others have pointed out, large-scale hydro, far from being green, is responsible for huge quantities of methane and other greenhouse gases.[30] A German study of UN-approved carbon offset projects in 2007 reported that as many as 86 percent of all offset-funded projects would likely have been carried out anyway.[31] This ran counter to the Kyoto Protocol’s guideline requiring that projects granted emissions offsets must be “additional,” that is the qualifying projects cannot already be underway.

Nearly two decades of experience has shown that capitalist techno-fixes, trading and offsets will not likely usher in the zero-emissions future that we know is both necessary and achievable. Nevertheless, markets in greenhouse gas emissions allowances continue to be a central feature of proposed climate policies in the US and worldwide.

Template:Anchor False Solutions in the US Congress

When the US House of Representatives passed a first-ever climate bill in June of 2009, it was received by the mainstream press, and many environmentalists, with a palpable sense of triumph. Representative Henry Waxman of California, one of the bill’s main sponsors, called it a “decisive and historic action,” and President Obama described the bill as “a bold and necessary step.” Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) called it no less than “the most important environmental and energy legislation in the history of our country.”

EDF, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Nature Conservancy, played a central role in the development of the 2009-’10 climate bill. As initiators of the US Climate Action Partnership, a collaboration with highly polluting corporations such as Alcoa, BP, Dow, DuPont, GE, and the former “big three” US automakers, among others, they articulated what would become the bill’s broad outlines: an emphasis on long-range goals, trading of emissions allowances, initially free distribution of those allowances to polluting corporations, and a generous offset provision that permits companies to defer significant pollution reductions well into the future.[32]

While many environmentalists suggested that any step in the direction of regulating carbon dioxide and other climate damaging greenhouse gases is better than nothing, others remained skeptical. Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, and Greenpeace issued sharp critiques of the bill’s focus on corporate-friendly cap-and-trade measures. Even more scathing were analyses from smaller independent groups such as Chesapeake Climate Action, Climate SOS, and the influential Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity. The bill that passed the House in 2009 fell far short of international standards in mandating a meaningful level of reductions in global warming pollution, and relied heavily on market-based emissions-trading, especially in the longer-term. It also contained a number of Trojan Horse provisions that would likely forestall, rather than encourage, genuine climate progress.

By the time the bill had passed through the relevant committees, as well as last-minute horse-trading on the House floor, the loopholes were staggering to behold. Most analysts by then agreed that greenhouse gas emissions on the order of 20-40 percent were needed within a decade or so to prevent a slide toward uncontrollable global climate chaos, with reductions on the order of 80-95 percent for the leading industrial economies required by mid-century. The House bill first attempted to shift the terms of the discussion by measuring emissions relative to 2005 levels rather than the accepted Kyoto Protocol benchmark of 1990. It promised a 17 percent reduction by 2020, relative to 2005, which only translates into 4 or 5 percent less global warming pollution than the US produced in 1990. This was the nominal basis for the US negotiating position in Copenhagen, and was promoted by President Obama as his administration’s central climate goal for many years afterward. The much-touted cap-and-trade provision of the bill accounted for only a 1 percent reduction by 2020, according to the Center for Biological Diversity’s analysis, with the remainder coming from traditional performance standards for smaller pollution sources, including automobiles, and from a controversial USAID effort to reduce deforestation in poorer countries. For comparison, recall that most wealthy countries agreed more than fifteen years ago in Kyoto to reduce their emissions to 6-8 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The deforestation provisions of the bill mirrored a highly controversial international climate mitigation strategy, promoted by the UN and the World Bank under the name of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). REDD mainly targets intact forested lands, largely occupied by indigenous peoples, which are now threatened with privatization for use as carbon offsets.[33] Soon after the climate bill passed the House, an Anglo-African brokerage firm announced that it would sell “avoided deforestation” credits to buyers of voluntary carbon offsets in the US, threatening a new wave of corporate takeovers of African forest lands.

Under the House bill, some 7400 facilities across the US would receive annual allowances to continue emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.[34] As many as 85 percent of the allowances would initially go to polluting companies for free, reversing Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge that they should mainly be auctioned off. (In Europe, utilities routinely bill their customers for these annually acquired new assets.) Meanwhile, the quantity of available pollution allowances would have increased for several years, only falling gradually thereafter, and companies would be allowed to indefinitely “bank” them for future use, borrow from their future allocations, and trade allowances on the open market with other companies as well as with Wall Street firms and an emerging cadre of brokers in carbon futures. For many observers, this was highly reminiscent of the financial machinations that nearly brought down the world’s financial markets just a year earlier; meanwhile carbon market boosters were projecting a worldwide trading system that would eventually be valued at $10 trillion a year—sufficient to launch yet another destabilizing financial bubble.

The bill’s supporters argued that, for all their uncertainty, these highly manipulable financial measures are worth the risk because they facilitate the phase-in of an enforceable cap on global warming pollution. But the legislation replicated another of the most egregious features of the Kyoto Protocol: a virtual “hole in the cap,” in the form of an offset feature that allows companies to meet their obligations without reducing their own emissions at home, but rather by investing in pollution control projects anywhere in the country and even overseas. Companies would have been able to satisfy their full obligation to reduce CO2 by buying offsets until 2027; those familiar with the bill’s fine print suggested that companies could stretch this out for 30-40 years.

Allowing companies to postpone their own greenhouse gas reductions by buying offsets was one Trojan Horse provision in the climate bill that threatened future climate progress. Another such measure would have largely prohibited the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to establish future regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. It is important to note it was a 2007 Supreme Court decision allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant that finally forced the G.W. Bush administration to start talking about global warming. Removing this authority represented a defining concession to polluting industries, one that would have virtually removed any teeth of enforcement from future measures to forestall climate chaos. It would become one of the main reasons that so many US environmentalists ultimately refused to support the bill, and instead encouraged the Obama administration to base its climate policies on the Clean Air Act’s regulatory mandates.

Still, these damaging measures built into the climate bill weren’t enough to assuage corporate lobbyists, so politically powerful industries were allowed to write in even more concessions. (The Center for Public Integrity reported in early 2009 that some 2340 lobbyists were working in Washington on this issue.[35]) The coal industry would have until 2025 to comply with the bill’s mandated pollution reductions, with ample means for gaining further extensions. Agribusiness, which is responsible for as much as a quarter of US greenhouse gas emissions, was exempt from most of the bill’s provisions, but large scale farmers who reduce tillage by growing crops genetically engineered to withstand megadoses of herbicides would be eligible for offset credits paid for by industrial polluters. Assessments of ethanol’s eligibility as a “renewable fuel” would exclude its effects on land use, a factor that researchers from Princeton University and the University of Minnesota proved decisive in a pair of landmark studies, showing how industrial biofuels are often net contributors to global warming when impacts from land use changes are included in the assessments.[36] Finally, the nuclear industry expected to be a leading beneficiary of the bill’s free allocation of emission allowances; a memo leaked to the Huffington Post reported that Exelon, the largest US nuclear power company, expected a $1-1.5 billion annual windfall from the bill.[37] This despite the problem of greenhouse gas emissions throughout the nuclear fuel cycle. With horse-trading continuing on the House floor right up to the time of the vote, the bill ultimately included billions of dollars in “special-interest favors,” according to the New York Times.[38] These included $1 billion for green jobs programs in low income communities, viewed as a small concession to inner city environmental justice activists; the biggest favors were clearly reserved for oil, coal and gas producers.

Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer eventually released a Senate version of the climate bill, nominally developed in collaboration with Republican and independent colleagues. In the hope of gaining more bipartisan support, their bill included even more blatant giveaways to the fossil fuel, coal and nuclear industries. This bill’s excesses were so egregious that several environmental groups that had expressed a skeptical but conciliatory view toward the House bill were far more willing to speak out in opposition to Kerry’s version; many veteran political observers pronounced the Senate bill “dead on arrival.”

While Kerry’s giveaways to the energy industry were too much even for some believers in environmental “consensus” and market-based carbon trading, Senate Republicans still boycotted the first committee hearing that was convened to address the proposal. Kerry shifted his focus toward crafting an even more “bipartisan” compromise, in collaboration with Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, a notorious “independent” war hawk, and South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham. One of the first public announcements of this unlikely collaboration was a New York Times opinion piece in which Kerry and Graham called for streamlining regulation of nuclear power and expanding offshore oil drilling.[39] Even after BP’s catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the bill continued to offer huge new concessions to oil companies seeking to drill offshore. Kerry stated publicly that the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases would be leveraged as a bargaining chip to help gain more Republican support for his bill.

While some Washington insiders believed that these giveaways might help rally corporate support for a climate bill, President Obama went ahead and offered up many of the Kerry’s team’s bargaining chips even before the Senate began its debate. Obama’s early 2010 budget proposal included nearly $55 billion in new loan guarantees for the nuclear industry. In late March, he offered a nationwide expansion of offshore oil drilling, a plan that was withdrawn only after BP’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. According to Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, there was no coordination with Senate staffers around these proposals; instead, “Obama had now given away what the senators were planning to trade.”[40] Officials in the Obama White House also apparently sabotaged a pending deal with the oil companies to streamline their purchases of emissions permits; a White House staffer’s leak to Fox News turned the deal into political poison for Graham by recasting the carbon credits as equivalent to a gas tax. An alternative bipartisan proposal, offered by senators from Washington State and from Maine, was praised by many environmentalists as it featured a substantially more progressive plan to tax CO2 emissions and also returned rebates or “dividends” to taxpayers; however this proposal received little serious consideration.

A 2013 study of the 2009-10 US climate debate by Harvard University sociologist Theda Skocpol correctly placed much of the blame for the larger climate bill’s demise on the excessively corporate-friendly approach advocated by EDF and USCAP. By attempting to enlist the most polluting corporations on their side, and largely neglecting a broad range of political and even business interests that might benefit from meaningful climate legislation, they ended up promoting a bill that hardly anyone could enthusiastically support. The effort was further sabotaged by political consultants urging the bill’s advocates to only speak in the most euphemistic terms about global warming, focusing instead on “‘green jobs,’ ‘threats to public health,’ and the need to ‘reduce dependence on foreign oil to bolster national defense’.”[41] The increasing political divide around environmental issues in the US renders the notion of a non-partisan advocacy for cap-and-trade legislation as “a dangerous fantasy” that drives proponents to “misunderstand the political realities they must face,” wrote Skocpol.[42]

A few years later, the Obama administration’s record on climate issues remained mixed at best. Rhetorically, Obama has maintained a forthright emphasis on the significance of climate change along with an appropriately sarcastic stance toward the climate denialists who have shaped the official posture of congressional Republicans. The administration also raised the fuel efficiency standards that automobile manufacturers must comply with to an average of 54.5 miles per gallon of gasoline (by 2025), a process that had been stalled since 1990. As of this writing, Obama has continued to delay construction of the northern portion of the notorious Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would transport 830,000 barrels of heavy bituminous material every day from the tar sands fields of Alberta, Canada to Gulf of Mexico oil refineries. However, he has also presided over an expansion of US infrastructure for transporting, processing, and perhaps soon exporting fossil fuels; such a pace of fossil fuel infrastructure expansion has not been seen since the 1950s. Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy encourages the development of solar and wind energy, but mainly emphasizes expanded production of natural gas through hydrofracking, new loan guarantees for nuclear power, and continued granting of new leases for offshore oil exploration.

In June of 2014, Obama announced a new proposal aimed at reducing CO2 emissions from the electric power sector, particularly from older coal-fired power plants that have long been exempted from key requirements of the Clean Air Act. While headlines emphasized the overall goal of reducing power plant emissions by 30 percent by 2030, the details left much to be desired. First, the end goal is overly modest, as utilities had already reduced emissions by half that amount since the policy’s baseline year of 2005. This was largely a product of the economic recession and continuing stagnation, coupled with successful local opposition to most newly proposed coal plants; coal use in the US fell by nearly 20 percent in just a few short years.

Second, the plan calculated a goal for each state to reduce its emissions intensity—CO2 per unit of power production—so states with growing economies could still increase their overall emissions while meeting the plan’s requirements. Each state’s goal was to be based on four key benchmarks: a modest improvement in the efficiency of its coal-burning facilities, a rising capacity for gas-fueled generation, modest annual increases in energy efficiency, and efforts to sustain recent trends in renewable energy development.[43] States that have difficulty meeting those goals would be encouraged to trade emissions with other states, and subsidies were offered for such perverse measures as prolonging the life of economically unviable nuclear power plants. The overall 30 percent goal is merely an estimate of the emissions reductions that could result from fully implementing these policies; the details will likely shift significantly as policymakers respond to public comments and probable lawsuits. All indications are that this will prove to be yet another example of doing far too little, and far too late, to address the full magnitude of the climate crisis.

Today it is clearer than ever that a much more forward-looking, even revolutionary approach is necessary to reduce climate-destabilizing pollution and achieve meaningful steps toward a fossil fuel-free economy. Such a transition threatens the global economy’s most powerful corporate empires; indeed the very shape of modern capitalism is a product of fossil fuel expansion and is sustained by the myth of unlimited “cheap energy.” Not only is the evolution of the economic system historically inseparable from the exploitation of fossil fuels but, as a recent report from the UK’s Corner House research group explains, “the entire contemporary system of making profits out of labor depended absolutely on cheap fossil carbon…”[44] To meaningfully challenge this system requires not only a resolute opposition to the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, but a rethinking of the underlying assumptions and beliefs of our society, a goal the remainder of this book aims to illuminate and encourage.

Template:Anchor Template:Anchor Template:Anchor 5. On Utopian Aspirations in the Climate Movement

It can be difficult to closely follow developments in climate science without simultaneously falling prey to a rather grim, even apocalyptic view of the future. Predictions of impending disaster look more severe with every new wave of extreme weather and each new study of the effects of the rising levels of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere. Steadily rising levels of drought, wildfires and floods have been experienced on all the earth’s inhabited continents, and people in the tropics and subtropics already face far more difficulty growing enough food due to increasingly unstable weather patterns. Studies predict increasing mass migrations of people desperate to escape the worst consequences of widespread climate disruptions. And persistent diplomatic gridlock and obstruction at the UN level has raised the possibility that temperature increases could even exceed 10˚C in the Arctic and in parts of Africa.[1]

In this context, the utopian ecological visions that inspired earlier generations of environmental activists can seem quaint and out-of-date. The images of autonomous, self-reliant, solar-powered cities and towns that illuminated the first large wave of anti-nuclear activism in the 1970s and eighties sometimes feel more distant than ever. Since those years, we have seen an unprecedented flowering of local food systems, natural building, permaculture design, urban ecology, and other important innovations that first emerged from that earlier wave of activism. Yet today’s advocates of local self reliance and ecological lifestyles seem to engage only on rare occasions in the political struggles that are necessary to advance their visions for a better future.

For social ecologists seeking to further the forward-looking, reconstructive dimensions of an ecological world view, this presents a serious dilemma. From the 1960s onward, Murray Bookchin, the founding theorist of social ecology, proposed that the critical, holistic outlook of ecological science was logically and historically linked to a radically transformative vision for society. A fundamental rethinking of human societies’ relationship to the natural world, he proposed, is made imperative by the understandings of ecological science, furthering the potential for a revolutionary transformation of both our philosophical assumptions and our political and social institutions. Can this approach to ecology, politics and history be renewed for our time? What kinds of social movements have the potential to express these possibilities? Can we meaningfully address the simultaneous threats of climate chaos and potential social breakdown while renewing and further developing the revolutionary outlook of social ecology?

Template:Anchor Ecology and Capitalism

From the 1960s until his passing in 2006, Murray Bookchin insisted that the ecological crisis was a fundamental threat to capitalism, due to the system’s built in necessity to continuously expand its scope and its spheres of control. In a 2001 reflection on the origins of social ecology, Bookchin wrote:

I was trying to provide a viable substitute for Marx’s defunct economic imperative, namely an ecological imperative that, if thought out […] would show that capitalism stood in an irreconcilable contradiction with the natural world […] In short, precisely because capitalism was, by definition, a competitive and commodity-based economy, it would be compelled to turn the complex into the simple and give rise to a planet that was incompatible environmentally with advanced life forms. The growth of capitalism was incompatible with the evolution of biotic complexity as such—and certainly, with the development of human life and the evolution of human society.2 [emphasis in original]

For a couple of decades, however, it appeared to many that capitalism had found a way to accommodate non-human nature and perhaps to “green” itself. This notion can be traced to the period leading up to the 20[th] anniversary of the first Earth Day. By the spring of 1990, many of the largest, most notoriously polluting corporations had begun to incorporate environmental messages into their advertising. By reducing waste, partially restoring damaged ecosystems, investing in renewable energy, and promoting an idealized environmental ethic, the oil, chemical, and other highly polluting industries would portray themselves as stewards of the environment. Prominent authors promised a “sustainable,” even “natural” capitalism, whereby production and consumption would continue to grow and large corporations could join with a new generation of “green” entrepreneurs to solve our environmental problems.[3]

As awareness of the climate crisis rose together with the cost of energy during 2006-7, the “green consumerism” that was promoted as a conscientious lifestyle choice in the 1990s became an all-encompassing mass culture phenomenon. Mainstream lifestyle and even fashion magazines featured special “green” issues, and the New York Times reported that 35 million Americans were regularly seeking out (often high-priced) “earth-friendly” products, “from organic beeswax lipstick from the west Zambian rain forest to Toyota Priuses.”[4] But the Times acknowledged rising criticism of the trend as well, quoting the one-time “green business” pioneer Paul Hawken as saying, “Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” and acknowledging that truly green living might indeed require buying less. With rising awareness of the cost of manufacturing new “green” products, even the iconic Prius was criticized for the high energy costs embedded in its manufacture.

More forward-looking capitalists have had to admit in recent years that an increasingly chaotic natural and social environment will necessarily limit business opportunities.[5] Some critics have suggested that this is one underlying reason for the increasing growth and influence of the financial sector:

In its disciplinary zeal, capitalism has so undermined the ecological conditions of so many people that a state of global ungovernability has developed, further forcing investors to escape into the mediated world of finance where they hope to make hefty returns without bodily confronting the people they need to exploit. But this exodus has merely deferred the crisis, since “ecological” struggles are being fought all over the planet and are forcing an inevitable increase in the cost of future constant capital.6

The result is an increasingly parasitic form of capitalism, featuring widening discrepancies in wealth, both worldwide and within most countries, and the outsourcing of production to the countries and regions where labor costs and environmental enforcement are at the lowest possible levels. As the profitability of socially useful production has fallen precipitously, we have seen the emergence of a casino-like “shadow” economy, in which a rising share of society’s material resources are squandered by elites in the pursuit of socially parasitic but highly lucrative profits from ever-more exotic financial manipulations.[7]

As we have seen, numerous questionable responses to the threat of climate change have emerged from this political and economic context. The previous chapter addressed the consequences of both technological false solutions and those derived from the machinations of financial markets. Different sectors of industrial and finance capital favor differing variations on the general theme, but the overarching message is that solutions to global warming are at hand and everyone should simply go on consuming. More hopeful innovations in solar and wind technology, “smart” power grids, and even energy saving technologies are promoted by some “green” capitalists as well, but these technologies continue to be marginalized by the prevailing financial and political system, raising serious questions about how such alternatives can be implemented.

Template:Anchor A Utopian Movement?

The last time a forward-looking popular movement in the US compelled widespread changes in environmental and energy policies was during the late 1970s. In the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo, imposed during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the nuclear and utility industries adopted a plan to construct more than 300 nuclear power plants in the United States by the year 2000. Utility and state officials identified rural communities across the US as potential sites for new nuclear facilities, and the popular response was swift and unanticipated. A powerful grassroots antinuclear movement emerged, and in April of 1977, over 1400 people were arrested trying to nonviolently occupy a nuclear construction site in the coastal town of Seabrook, New Hampshire. That event helped inspire the emergence of decentralized, grassroots antinuclear alliances all across the country, committed to nonviolent direct action, horizontal forms of internal organization, and a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between technological and social changes. Not only did these groups adopt an uncompromising call for “No Nukes,” but many promoted a vision of an entirely new social order, rooted in decentralized, solar-powered communities empowered to decide both their energy future and their political future. If the nuclear state almost inevitably leads to a police state—due to the massive security apparatus necessary to protect hundreds of nuclear plants and radioactive waste facilities all over the country—activists proposed that a solar-based energy system could provide the underpinning for a radically decentralized and directly democratic model for society.

This movement was so successful in raising the hazards of nuclear power as a matter of urgent public concern that nuclear power projects all across the US faced cancellation. When the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania partially melted down in March of 1979, it spelled the end of the nuclear expansion. No new nuclear plants were licensed or built in the United States for more than 30 years after Three Mile Island. The antinuclear movement of the late 1970s also helped spawn the first significant development of solar and wind technologies, aided by substantial but temporary tax benefits for solar installations, and helped launch a visionary “green cities” movement that captured the imaginations of architects, planners and ordinary citizens alike.

The 1970s and early eighties were relatively hopeful times, and utopian thinking was far more widespread than it is today. This was prior to the “Reagan revolution” in US politics and the rise of neoliberalism worldwide. The political right had not quite begun its crusade to depict the former Soviet Union as the apotheosis of utopian social engineering gone awry. Many antinuclear activists looked to the emerging outlook of social ecology and the writings of its founding theorist, Murray Bookchin, as a source of theoretical grounding for a revolutionary ecological politics. Social ecology challenged activists by overturning prevailing views about the evolution of social and cultural relationships to non-human nature and examining the roots of domination in the earliest emergence of human social hierarchies. For the activists of that period, Bookchin’s insistence that environmental problems are fundamentally social and political in origin encouraged forward-looking responses to ecological concerns and reconstructive visions of a fundamentally transformed society. Social ecology’s emphasis on popular power and direct democracy continued to inspire activists in the global justice movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the Occupy movement more recently.

While radically reconstructive social visions are far less prevalent in today’s social and political climate, dissatisfaction with the status quo is wide-reaching throughout many sectors of the population. The more people consume, and the deeper they fall into debt, the less satisfied they are with the world of business-as-usual. Though elite discourse and the corporate media continue to be confined by a narrowly circumscribed status-quo, there is also the potential for a new opening, reaching far beyond the narrow limits of what is now deemed politically “acceptable.”

Activists hesitant to question the underlying assumptions of capitalism tend to focus on various techno-fixes. While these are generally far more benign than the false solutions proposed by the coal, nuclear and agrofuel industries, they are inherently limited in the absence of broader, systemic changes. Clearly, such proposals are often compelling on their own terms. For example, the acclaimed advocate Van Jones, who advised the Obama White House on green jobs policies before he fell victim to a vicious attack from right wing media apparatus in the US, suggests that:

Hundreds of thousands of green-collar jobs will be weatherizing and energy-retrofitting every building in the United States. Buildings with leaky windows, ill-fitting doors, poor insulation and old appliances can gobble up 30 percent more energy […] Drafty buildings create broke, chilly people—and an overheated planet.8

Clearly, practical measures to address these problems will offer an important benefit for those most in need, and are an essential step toward a greener future. But can such near-term measures be sufficient? In technical terms, there is no shortage of feasible solutions to ending excessive energy consumption and rapidly curtailing the use of fossil fuels. For example since the 1970s, Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory Lovins has been a tireless advocate for dramatically increased energy efficiency throughout the US and global economies. He has demonstrated in exhaustive detail how we can feasibly reduce energy consumption by at least 40 percent, and how many promising changes in technology will result in an unambiguous economic gain. In a recent book, he projected that the US can reduce CO2 emissions by 85 percent over 40 years with a $4.5 trillion total investment and achieve net savings of $5 trillion in energy costs.[9] Lovins’ pitch is unapologetically aimed at believers in the “free market” and those whose primary concern is market profitability, yet the market’s adoption of his ideas has been spotty at best. Mark Jacobson’s research group at Stanford University has developed detailed proposals for replacing all new energy with wind, water and solar power by 2030 and the world’s entire energy supply by 2050.[10]

A central problem, however, is that capitalism aims to maximize profits, not efficiency. Indeed, economists since the 19th century have suggested that improvements in the efficiency of resource consumption often tend to increase demand as capitalists learn how to do more with less, while continuing to grow the economy.[11] Richard York from the University of Oregon has calculated that just a quarter of non-fossil energy currently replaces fossil fuels, and only a tenth of non-fossil electricity; the rest is simply adding more new capacity to the system.[12] While efficiency improvements can significantly reduce the costs of production, corporations will generally accept the added cost of sustaining existing methods that have proven to keep profits growing. Corporations almost invariably prefer to lay off workers, outsource production, or move factories overseas than to invest in environmentally meaningful improvements in production methods. The New York Times reported that corporations are hesitant to invest in measures to save energy and make their operations more efficient unless they can demonstrate a two year payback—a constraint rarely imposed on other forms of investment.[13] Lovins’ focus on efficiency runs counter to the inclinations of a business world aggressively oriented toward growth, capital mobility and accumulation. While important innovations in solar technology, for example, are announced almost daily, its acceptance in the capitalist marketplace still falls far behind many other, far more speculative and hazardous alternatives.

Template:Anchor Hope and Despair

If technological fixes are insufficient to usher in an age of renewable technologies, is the situation hopeless? Is a nihilistic response, anticipating a cataclysmic “end of civilization” as suggested by several popular authors today, the only viable alternative? Are we limited to a future of defensive battles against an increasingly authoritarian world of scarcity and climate chaos? Or can the prefigurative, forward-looking dimensions of earlier, more hopeful radical ecological movements be renewed in our time?

Dystopian outlooks are clearly on the rise in popular culture, among environmentally-minded radicals, and in much of the anti-authoritarian left today. “Anarchists and their allies are now required to project themselves into a future of growing instability and deterioration,” writes Israeli activist and scholar Uri Gordon. He acknowledges the current flowering of permaculture and other sustainable technologies as a central aspect of today’s experiments toward “community self-sufficiency,” but views these as “rear guard” actions, best aimed to “encourage and protect the autonomy and grassroots orientation of emergent resistances” in a fundamentally deteriorating social and political climate.[14]

Derrick Jensen, one of the most prolific and popular anti-authoritarian writers in recent years, insists that a rational transition to an ecologically sustainable society is impossible, and that the only sensible role for ecologically aware activists is to help bring on the collapse of Western civilization. Hope itself, for Jensen, is “a curse and a bane,” an acceptance of powerlessness, and ultimately “what keeps us chained to the system.” Well before Barack Obama adopted a vaguely defined “Hope” as a theme of his first presidential campaign, Jensen argued that hope “serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.”[15]

This view is considerably at odds with many decades of historical scholarship and activist praxis. Radical despair may be sufficient to motivate some young activists to confront authorities when necessary, but it seems unlikely to be able to sustain the lifetimes of radical thought and action that are necessary if we are to create a different world. As social movement historian Richard Flacks has shown, most people are only willing to disrupt the patterns of their daily lives to engage in the project he terms “making history” when social grievances become personal, and they have a tangible sense that a better way is possible. This, for Flacks, is among the historic roles of democratic popular movements, to further the idea “that people are capable of and ought to be making their own history, that the making of history ought to be integrated with everyday life, that [prevailing] social arrangements […] can and must be replaced by frameworks that permit routine access and participation by all in the decisions that affect their lives.”[16]

Flacks’ expansive view of democracy resonates well with social ecology’s long-range, community-centered vision (see Chapter 6). Bookchin’s reconstructive outlook is rooted in direct democracy, in confederations of empowered communities challenging the hegemony of capital and the state, and in restoring a sense of reciprocity to economic relationships, which are ultimately subordinated to the needs of the community. His view resonates with economic historian Karl Polanyi’s piercing analysis of the origins of the mythical “self-regulating” market and its imposed separation of economics from society.[17] Bookchin viewed the subordination of economics as an essential step toward restoring harmony to human relations, and to the reharmonization of our communities with non-human nature.

Further, in his 1970s and eighties’ anthropological studies, Bookchin sought to draw out a number of ethical principles common to preliterate, or “organic” societies, that could further illuminate the path toward such a reharmonization. These include anthropologist Paul Radin’s concept of the irreducible minimum—the idea that communities are responsible for satisfying their members’ most basic human needs—and an expanded view of social complementarity, where communities accept responsibility to compensate for differences among individuals, helping assure that variations in skill or ability in particular areas will not serve to rationalize the emergence of new forms of hierarchy.[18]

Rather than prescribing blueprints for a future society, Bookchin sought to educe principles from the broad scope of human history that he saw as expressing potentialities for further human development. His outlook on social change is resonant with the best of the utopian tradition, as described in a recent essay by Randall Amster, who describes utopia as

a dynamic process and not a static place […] attaining a harmonious exchange with nature and an open, participatory process among community members are central features of these [utopian] endeavors; that resistance to dominant cultures of repression and authoritarianism is a common impetus for anarcho-utopian undertakings; and that communities embodying these principles are properly viewed as ongoing experiments and not finished products.19

While people of different material circumstances and cultural backgrounds would surely emphasize differing needs and inclinations in their search for a better society, such a long-range utopian outlook can help us comprehend the fullest scope of human possibilities.

This view has far more to offer than a bleak “end of civilization” outlook, both for people in Northern countries facing increasingly chaotic weather and for people around the world who are experiencing more extreme consequences of climate disruptions. It is the hope for a better society, along with the determination and support necessary to intervene to challenge current inequities, that has inspired movements of land-based peoples around the world to refuse to accept an oppressive status quo and act to take the future into their hands.

Still, since the collapse of the authoritarian, nominally socialist bloc of countries that was dominated by the Soviet Union and spanned nearly all of eastern Europe, many authors have cast doubt on all forms of radical speculation about the future. Utopian political thought—with its legacy reaching back to Plato and to the writings of Thomas More in the early 16[th] century—is now seen by many as thoroughly discredited. Liberal centrists, as well as ideologues of the political right tend to dismiss the pursuit of any comprehensive alternative political outlook as if it were merely a potential stepping stone to tyranny. Even forward-looking thinkers such as the literary critic Frederic Jameson suggest that utopia “had come to designate a program which neglected human frailty” implying “the ideal purity of a perfect system that always had to be imposed by force on its imperfect and reluctant subjects.”[20]

This is in stark contrast to the view of Ernst Bloch, the mid-20th century chronicler of the utopian tradition who, instead, in Jameson’s words, “posits a Utopian impulse governing everything future-oriented in life and culture.”[21] Bloch’s exhaustive and free-ranging three-volume work, The Principle of Hope begins with the simple act of daydreaming, and then embarks on an epic journey through the myriad expressions of the utopian impulse throughout Western history, spanning folktales, the arts and literature, along with the perennial search for a better world. “Fraudulent hope is one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators of the human race,” states Bloch, while “concretely genuine hope its most dedicated benefactor.”[22]

Current scholarship on this tradition often views utopia as a central element in the emergence of a secular social order in the West, marking the decline of religion as the sole means for expressing people’s hopes for the future. French social critic Alain Touraine writes, “Utopia was born only when the political order separated from the cosmological or religious order… Utopia is one of the products of secularization.”[23] Utopian scholar Lyman Sargent quotes the Dutch future studies pioneer Frederick Polak, who wrote in 1961:

…if Western man now stops thinking and dreaming the materials of new images of the future and attempts to shut himself up in the present, out of longing for security and for fear of the future, his civilization will come to an end. He has no choice but to dream or to die, condemning the whole of Western society to die with him.24

The pioneering German sociologist Karl Mannheim wrote that “The utopian mentality is at the base of all serious social change” and saw the integrity of human will as resting to a large part on “the reality-transcending power of utopia.”[25] While the popular literature of the century wavers continually between the poles of utopia and dystopia, even many intellectuals who lived through the nightmare of Stalinism and its decline warn against discarding utopia along with the baggage of the 20[th] century authoritarian left. For example the Czech dissident Milan Simecka, who experienced the repression of the Prague Spring of 1968, writes that “A world without utopias would be a world without social hope, a world of resignation to the status quo and the devalued slogans of everyday political life.”[26] Today, if we fail to sustain the legacy of utopia, not only will we miss the opportunity to envision and actualize a humane, post-capitalist, post-petroleum future, but we may inadvertently surrender humanity’s future to the false hopes of an ascendant religious fundamentalism.

The social critic Immanuel Wallerstein is one who has recently sought to rescue utopian thinking from its role as a breeder “of illusions, and therefore, inevitably, of disillusions,” proposing a renewed “utopistics,” which broadly examines the alternatives and reveals “the substantive rationality of alternative possible historical systems.”[27] Wallerstein is one renowned contemporary social theorist who explicitly speaks to the likelihood of a difficult, contentious and unpredictable, but potentially rational and democratic long-term transition to a post-capitalist world. It is in this spirit of exploring rational, liberatory future possibilities that Murray Bookchin developed and elaborated his theory of social ecology, and today’s climate activists are seeking to define the terms of a world beyond petro-capitalism. In the next chapter, we will turn to elaborating the holistic revolutionary outlook of social ecology and its numerous contributions to recent movements.

Template:Anchor Looking Forward

From the Zapatistas of southeastern Mexico, who inspired global justice activists worldwide during the 1990s and beyond, to the landless workers of the MST in Brazil, and the scores of self-identified peasant organizations in some eighty countries that constitute the global network La Vía Campesina, people’s movements in the global South in recent decades have challenged historical stereotypes and often transcended the limits of the possible. These grassroots efforts to reclaim the means of life, while articulating far-reaching demands for a different world, represent a starkly different relationship to both the present and the future than is offered by affluent activists and writers in the global North who either contemplate a catastrophic end to civilization, or urge us to go on consuming in the pursuit of a mythical individualist paradise.

Here in the North, new reconstructive movements have helped make visions of an ecological future far more realizable. At the local level, people are working to regenerate local food systems and develop locally controlled, renewable energy sources, sometimes in active solidarity with kindred movements around the world. Campaigns to create urban gardens and farmers’ markets are among the most successful and well-organized efforts toward community-centered solutions to the climate crisis. In recent years, they have been joined in many areas by nonprofit networks aiming to more systematically raise the availability of healthy, local food for urban dwellers, especially those dependent on public assistance.[28] The local foods movement in the US, still significantly dominated by those affluent enough to seek out gourmet products, may be learning from Slow Food activists in Europe that it is necessary to directly support farmers and food producers, and aim to meet the needs of all members of their communities. As the food system is responsible for at least a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, such efforts are far more than symbolic in their importance.[29]

Community-based efforts to reduce energy consumption and move toward carbon-free energy systems have seen some important successes as well. More than two hundred cities and towns throughout the English-speaking world have signed on as “transition towns,” initiating local efforts to address the parallel crises of climate chaos and peak oil. While the transition town movement sometimes tends to focus narrowly on personal and domestic-scale transformations, even avoiding important local controversies, the effort is filling an important vacuum in social organization, and creating public dialogues that more politically engaged and forward-looking efforts can build upon as the tangible effects of the climate crisis strike closer to home.[30]

Still, many chronically vexing questions remain. Can the potential for a more thoroughgoing transformation of society actually be realized? Is it possible for now-isolated local efforts to come together in a holistic manner and fulfill the old left-libertarian dream of a “movement of movements,” organized from the ground up to radically change the world? Can we envision a genuine synthesis of oppositional and alternative-building efforts able to challenge systems of deeply entrenched power, and transcend the dual challenges of political burn-out and the co-optation of aspiring alternative institutions? Can a new movement for social and ecological renewal emerge from the individual and community levels toward the radical re-envisioning of entire regions and a genuinely transformed social and political order?

In these often cynical times, with ever-increasing disparities in wealth and media-saturated cultures of conspicuous consumption in the North, together with increased dislocations and imminent climate crises in the South, it is sometimes difficult to imagine what a genuinely transformative movement would look like. In the US, right wing demagogues appear to be far more effective than progressive forces in channeling the resentments that have emerged from continuing economic stagnation toward serving their regressive political agendas. But it is clear that when people have the opportunity to act on their deepest aspirations for a stronger sense of community, for the health of their families and neighbors, and for a more hopeful future, people’s better instincts can triumph over parochial interests. This is a feature of community life that illuminates the entire history of popular social movements. It offers an important kernel of hope for the kind of movement that can perhaps reinvigorate the long-range reconstructive potential of a social ecological outlook.

A 2009 poll commissioned by the BBC confirmed that people in a dozen key countries agree that capitalism has serious endemic problems, and that we may need a fundamentally different economic system. Only in Pakistan and the US did more than 20 percent of those interviewed express confidence in the present status quo.[31] Perhaps this is the kind of sensibility that will reopen a broader popular discussion of the potential for a different kind of society. Maybe we don’t need to resign ourselves to apocalyptic visions of the end of the world. Perhaps the climate crisis, along with the continuing meltdown of the neoliberal economic order of recent decades, can indeed help us envision a transition toward a more harmonious, more humane and ecological way of life.

Template:Anchor Template:Anchor Template:Anchor 6. Social Ecology and the Future of Ecological Movements

Today’s grassroots climate movements are engaged in an epochal struggle to protect vital ecosystems and communities from the effects of an increasingly unstable global climate. While people in the global South and in indigenous and land-based communities worldwide face daily life-or-death confrontations with the forces of expanded resource extraction and exploitation, many Northern allies are still reluctant to act on their understanding that a global crisis is already upon us. Indeed, many advocates still limit their efforts to addressing the particulars of present-day energy and climate policies. As important as all of our detailed scientific and policy discussions may be in the near term, they scarcely begin to address the full scope of climate-related problems we face today.

Genuinely ecological solutions, on the other hand, will require us to see far beyond the political and economic arrangements that have led us to the present crisis. While public officials and many NGOs will continue to avoid any discussion that deviates too far from business-as-usual, those who embrace a longer-range, more holistic perspective need to actively explore the many paths-not-taken. There are no “easy solutions” to the global climate crisis, no instant policy fixes that will stem the tide of impending climate chaos. This is a serious obstacle. Where solutions are not readily apparent, people tend to focus on the obligations of their daily lives and avoid worrying about what may or may not happen in the distant future.[1] Over time, this can feed a sense of political apathy and despair about the future, fostering a climate that ultimately helps advance the false populism of the ultra-right. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Throughout history, numerous forward-looking social movements have contributed to the positive transformation of society, and sustained their efforts over the long term, in times of change and stagnation, and of success and failure, by exploring the possible paths to a fundamentally different kind of society. Over the past half century of ecological activism, many have engaged in the search for a radical, counter-systemic outlook that can help transform our society’s relationship to non-human nature and reharmonize our communities’ ties to the natural world. One such perspective, which has played an important role in many forward-looking movements of the past several decades is that of social ecology.

The ideas of social ecology were largely developed by the philosopher and social critic Murray Bookchin, and have been elaborated by many others over the course of their development. Social ecology is viewed by most of its students and adherents as a holistic and evolving outlook that offers a critical and radically reconstructive perspective on ecological and social movements, both past and present. Social ecology encourages a searching historical and philosophical exploration of our evolving relationship to the rest of nature, and proposes a long-range vision of a world of self-reliant and highly interdependent eco-communities.

Numerous concepts that became common wisdom among ecological and progressive activists from the 1960s onward were first articulated clearly in Murray Bookchin’s writings, including the socially reconstructive dimensions of ecological science, the potential links between sustainable technologies and political decentralization, and the evolution of the traditional politics of class on the left toward a more comprehensive understanding of social hierarchy in general. Social ecology is highly complementary to, and has learned a great deal from, indigenous world views, environmental justice movements, and practical ecological approaches to energy technology, urban design and permaculture. We will begin here by exploring some of Bookchin’s core ideas, consider social ecology’s contributions to a variety of recent movements, and then reflect on its continuing evolution.

Template:Anchor The Outlook of Social Ecology

Bookchin’s social ecology emerged from a time in the mid-1960s when ecological thought, and even ecological science, were widely viewed as “subversive.” Even rather conventional environmental scientists were contemplating the broad political implications of an ecological world view, confronting academic marginalization, and raising challenging questions about the largely unquestioned dogma of perpetual economic growth. In a landmark 1964 issue of the journal Bioscience, the ecologist Paul Sears described his field of study as a “subversive science,” and challenged the “pathological” nature of economic growth, inquiring whether ecology, “if taken seriously as an instrument for the long run welfare of mankind, would … endanger the assumptions and practices accepted by modern societies.”[2]

Bookchin carried the discussion considerably further, proposing that an ecological understanding of the world is not merely subversive, but fundamentally revolutionary and reconstructive. With the World Wars and Great Depression of the 20[th] century appearing to have only strengthened global capitalism, Bookchin saw the emerging ecological crisis as one challenge that would fundamentally undermine this system’s inherent logic. His first book, Our Synthetic Environment, was issued (under the pseudonym, Lewis Herber) by a major New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and cited by authorities such as the microbiologist Réne Dubos as comparable in its influence to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.[3] Our Synthetic Environment offered a detailed and accessible analysis of the origins of pollution, urban concentration, and chemical agriculture.

In 1964, in a pamphlet titled “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” Bookchin wrote:

The explosive implications of an ecological approach arise not only because ecology is intrinsically a critical science—critical on a scale that the most radical systems of political economy have failed to attain—but also because it is an integrative and reconstructive science. This integrative, reconstructive aspect of ecology, carried through to all its implications, leads directly into anarchic areas of social thought. For, in the final analysis, it is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment.4

Over the next four decades, Bookchin’s social ecology emerged as a unique synthesis of utopian social criticism, historical and anthropological investigation, dialectical philosophy, and political strategy. It can be viewed as an unfolding of several distinct layers of understanding and insight, spanning all of these dimensions, and more.

At its most basic level, social ecology confronts the social and political roots of contemporary ecological problems. It critiques the ways of conventional environmental politics and points activists toward radical, community-centered alternatives. Bookchin always insisted that environmental problems be understood primarily as social problems, and was impatient with the narrowly instrumental approaches advanced by most environmentalists to address particular issues. The holistic understandings of ecological science, he argued, require a social ecology that examines the systemic roots of our ecological crisis, while challenging the institutions responsible for perpetuating a destructive and irrational status quo. Bookchin was perhaps the first writer on the left to explicitly argue that an ecological outlook is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism’s inherent drive toward unlimited growth and expansion.

This critical outlook led to many years of research into the evolution of the relationship between human societies and non-human nature. Both liberals and Marxists have generally viewed the “domination of nature” either as a fulfillment of human destiny and human nature or, in more recent decades, as an unfortunate but necessary precondition for the advancement of civilization. Bookchin sought to turn this view on its head, describing the “domination of nature” as a myth perpetuated by social elites in the earliest hierarchically-organized societies. Far from a historical necessity, efforts to dominate the natural world are instead a destructive byproduct of evolving social hierarchies.

Bookchin elaborated these ideas in his magnum opus, The Ecology of Freedom, a book described by the Village Voice in the early 1980s as belonging “at the pinnacle of the genre of utopian social criticism.”[5] Bookchin closely examined the anthropological literature of the period, seeking forward looking principles and practices that emerge from our understanding of non-hierarchical “organic” societies. These core principles included interdependence, unity-in-diversity, complementarity, and the irreducible minimum: the principle that communities are responsible for meeting their members’ most basic needs.[6] Complementarity for Bookchin meant disavowing the oppressive inequality of supposed “equals” within contemporary societies, instead invoking traditional communities’ efforts to actively compensate for differences in ability among members. Bookchin’s historical and anthropological investigations affirmed his belief that any truly liberatory popular movement needs to challenge hierarchy in general, not only its particular manifestations as oppression by race, gender, or class.

These explorations of the persistent role of social hierarchies in shaping social evolution and our relationships with non-human nature led Bookchin toward a philosophical inquiry into the evolutionary relationship between human consciousness and natural evolution. He sought to renew the legacy of dialectical philosophy—the philosophical tradition of transformation and becoming—abandoning popular oversimplifications and reinterpreting dialectics through examination of its origins in the works of philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel. Bookchin’s “dialectical naturalism” emphasizes the potentialities that lie latent within the evolution of natural and social phenomena and celebrates the uniqueness of human creativity and self-reflection, even while emphasizing the emergence of human consciousness from the possibilities inherent in biological “first nature.” It eschews the common view of nature as merely a realm of necessity, instead viewing nature as striving, in a sense, to actualize through evolution an underlying potentiality for consciousness, creativity and freedom.[7]

For Bookchin, a dialectical outlook on human history compels us to reject what merely is and follow the potentialities inherent in evolution toward an expanded view of what could be, and ultimately what ought to be. While the realization of a free, ecological society is far from inevitable, it may be the most rational outcome of four billion years of natural evolution. This dialectical view of natural and social evolution led to the sometimes controversial claim that nature itself can be viewed as an objective grounding for our social ethics.

Social ecology also proposes a distinct approach to political praxis, aimed at realizing the ecological reconstruction of society. Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism” draws on what he viewed as a fundamental underlying conflict between communities and the nation-state as well as on historical examples of emerging direct democracies from the Athenian polis to the New England town meeting. Bookchin sought a non-exclusive redefinition of citizenship and a reinvigoration of the public sphere, with popular assemblies moving to the center of public life in towns and neighborhoods, taking back control of essential political and economic decisions. Representatives in city councils and regional assemblies would become mandated delegates, deputized by their local assemblies and empowered only to carry out the wishes of the people.

Confederation is also a central aspect of libertarian municipalism, with communities joining together to sustain counterinstitutions aimed at challenging centralized power and advancing a broad liberatory agenda. In contrast to many ecologists who write about politics and society, Bookchin embraced the historic role of cities as potential sites of freedom and universalism, viewing the expanded practice of citizenship in empowered neighborhood assemblies as a means for educating community members into the values of humanism, cooperation, and public service.[8] The stifling anonymity of the capitalist market is to be replaced by a moral economy in which economic, as well as political relationships, are guided by an ethics of mutualism and genuine reciprocity.[9]

Libertarian municipalism offers both an outline of a political strategy and the structure underlying social ecology’s long-range social vision: a vision of directly democratic communities challenging all forms of centralized power while evolving in harmony with the rest of nature. This vision draws on decades of research into political structures, sustainable technologies, revolutionary popular movements, and the best of the utopian tradition in Western thought. Bookchin spent his last decade intensively researching the history of revolutionary movements in the West from the Middle Ages to the mid-20[th] century, drawing out the lessons of the diverse, often subterranean, popular currents that formed the basis for revolutionary movements in England, France, the US, Russia, Spain, and beyond.[10]

Template:Anchor Social Ecology and Social Movements

The influence of this body of ideas upon popular ecological movements began with the largely underground distribution of Bookchin’s essays during the 1960s. Ideas he first articulated, such as the need for a fundamentally radical ecology in contrast to technocratic environmentalism, were embraced by growing numbers of ecologically-informed radicals. Bookchin and his colleagues, including Institute for Social Ecology co-founder Dan Chodorkoff, also participated in some of the earliest efforts to “green” cities and bring alternative, solar-based technologies into inner city neighborhoods.

By the late 1970s, social ecology was playing a much more visible role in the rapidly growing movement against nuclear power. As we have seen, rural communities across the US were being surveyed as potential sites for new nuclear power plants in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The movement that arose to counter this new colonization of the countryside united traditional rural dwellers, and those who had recently moved “back-to-the-land,” with seasoned urban activists, as well as a new generation of radicals who came of age in the aftermath of the ferment of the 1960s. Following the mass arrest of people who sought to nonviolently occupy a nuclear construction site in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977, decentralized anti-nuclear alliances began to appear all across the US. These alliances were committed to direct action, non-violence, and grassroots organization. Many were captivated by the utopian dimension of the emerging “appropriate technology” movement for which Bookchin and other social ecologists provided an essential theoretical and historical grounding.

New England’s anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance was the first to adopt the model of the “affinity group” as the basis of a long-range regional organizing effort.[11] Murray Bookchin introduced the concept of grupos de afinidad—borrowed from the Spanish FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation)—into the US in an appendix to his influential 1968 pamphlet, “Listen, Marxist!”[12] Bookchin initially compared the revolutionary Spanish affinity groups of the 1930s to the countercultural collectives that were appearing in cities across the US during the late 1960s. Quaker activists advocated the formation of affinity groups as a structure for personal support and security at large demonstrations at Seabrook. But after the mass arrests and two weeks of incarceration in New Hampshire’s National Guard Armories, participants began to view the affinity groups as the basis for a much more widely participatory, directly democratic form of social movement organization than had ever been realized before.

Bookchin’s original “Note on Affinity Groups” was distributed widely in the lead-up to a planned follow-up action at Seabrook in June of 1978, and activists in Vermont, Boston, and elsewhere in New England worked hard to help the Clamshell Alliance live up to the most profoundly democratic potential of this organizational model. Anti-nuclear alliances across the US followed the Clamshell in taking their names from local species of animals and plants that were endangered by the spread of nuclear power, and adopted affinity groups and spokescouncils as their fundamental organizational and decision-making structures. While internal divisions would eventually undermine the affinity group-based internal democracy of this movement, Bookchin’s writing significantly helped sustain the anti-nuclear movement’s powerful utopian impulses. Meanwhile, annual summer sessions at the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) in Vermont offered students some of the first intensive, hands-on experiences in organic gardening and alternative technology, combined with in-depth discussions of social ecology, ecofeminism, reconstructive anthropology, and other important political and theoretical topics that have significantly helped shape today’s movements.[13]

Template:Anchor From Green Politics to Global Justice

During the 1980s, social ecologists were intimately involved in the founding of Green political movements in the US and elsewhere. Many were inspired by the way in which the German Green Party emerged out of a variety of social movements, practiced a politics of grassroots democracy in its early years, and came to articulate a sweeping ecological critique in all areas of public policy, from urban design, energy use and transportation, to nuclear disarmament and support for democratic movements in Eastern Europe. But by the early 1990s, a growing tension had emerged between US Greens committed to a localist, decentralized approach, and those advocating for a national Green Party that would mainly run candidates for national office. As the US Greens began to splinter, social ecologists initiated a Left Green Network, many of whose policy positions were adopted at several national Green conferences. Those promoting a more mainstream agenda aggressively resisted this tendency, leading to many years of internal debates and divisions.[14]

Meanwhile, a group of recent social ecology students formed a youth caucus in the Greens, which eventually became an independent organization known as the Youth Greens. The Youth Greens attracted a significant base of young radicals largely from outside the Greens and joined with the Left Greens to initiate a major direct action to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the original Earth Day in April of 1990. On the day following the official Earth Day commemorations—a Sunday filled with polite, heavily corporate-sponsored events—several hundred Left Greens, Youth Greens, ecofeminists, environmental justice activists, Earth Firsters and urban squatters converged on Wall Street seeking to block the opening of the New York Stock Exchange. Activists based around the ISE in Vermont had prepared a comprehensive action handbook, featuring a variety of social ecology writings and helped create a broad, empowering coalition effort. The next day, columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote in the New York Daily News,

Certainly, those who sought to co-opt Earth Day into a media and marketing extravaganza, to make the public feel good while obscuring the corporate root of the Earth’s pollution almost succeeded. It took angry Americans from places like Maine and Vermont to come to Wall Street on a workday and point the blame where it belongs.15

During the 1980s and nineties, social ecologists also played a central role in the development and elaboration of ecofeminist ideas. Ynestra King’s classes on ecofeminism at the ISE during the late 1970s were among the first to be offered anywhere, and annual colloquia on feminism and ecology were organized by Chaia Heller and other social ecologists throughout the early 1990s. Ecofeminist activists played a central role in initiating two Women’s Pentagon Actions and a Women’s Peace Camp alongside the Seneca Army Depot in New York State, while self-identified ecofeminists with a rather eclectic mix of political outlooks played a central role in the evolution of Green politics in the US.[16] While social ecologists became more skeptical toward ecofeminism per se as it evolved in a more cultural and spiritual direction during the 1990s, discussions of the links between ecology and feminist thought continued to be a centerpiece of the Institute’s educational offerings.[17]

In the later 1990s, social ecologists played important roles in the rapidly growing movement to promote global justice and challenge the institutions of capitalist globalism, a movement that became an important precursor to today’s climate justice movements. They raised discussions of the potential for direct democracy as a counter-power to centralized economic and political institutions, helped further the evolution of a longer-range reconstructive vision, and established grassroots democratic structures within the movement that came of age on the streets of Seattle in 1999. After Seattle, an ISE booklet titled Bringing Democracy Home highlighted the writings of various social ecologists on potential future directions for that movement. Global justice activists from across the US attended programs at the ISE in Vermont during the early 2000s to further their political analysis and join Bookchin and other faculty members in wide-ranging discussions of where the movement might be heading.

During the 1990s, Bookchin and his colleagues found themselves increasingly at odds with an anti-authoritarian youth culture that was increasingly fascinated with New Age spirituality, punk-inspired disdain for organization, and “neo-primitivist” notions of an impending “end of civilization.” In response, Bookchin rose in defense of such unfashionable notions as reason, civilization, historical continuity, and the philosophical legacy of the European Enlightenment. Facing an increasingly hostile audience in anarchist-oriented activist circles, Bookchin cast aside his once-fervent hopes for reviving and updating the anarchist tradition. Encouraged by international colleagues, particularly in the Scandinavian countries, he articulated a new framework that he called “communalism,” and redoubled his focus on the need for sustained political engagement and revolutionary organization.[18] Communalism, Bookchin argued, required a “new and comprehensive revolutionary outlook” drawing on the best of Marxism and the libertarian socialist tradition and rooted in an expansive view of confederal, municipally-centered direct democracies developing non-statist counterinstitutions capable of contesting political power. Speaking of his new communalist synthesis, Bookchin wrote:

From Marxism, it draws the basic project of formulating a rationally systematic and coherent socialism that integrates philosophy, history, economics, and politics. Avowedly dialectical, it attempts to infuse theory with practice. From anarchism, it draws its commitment to antistatism and confederalism, as well as its recognition that hierarchy is a basic problem that can be overcome only by a libertarian socialist society.19

During the same period, the ISE’s Biotechnology Project pioneered the use of New England’s Town Meetings as a primary organizing vehicle to express opposition to the genetic engineering of food in the US. In March of 2002, residents in 28 Vermont towns voted for labeling genetically engineered (GE) foods and a moratorium on GE crops.[20] Eight towns took the further step of declaring a moratorium or otherwise discouraging the planting of GE crops within their town; in northern California, several counties outright banned the cultivation of genetically modified organisms in 2003-04. By 2007, 85 Vermont towns and 120 across New England had passed resolutions questioning genetically engineered agriculture. At a time when efforts to adequately regulate biotech products at the national level had become hopelessly deadlocked, this campaign invigorated public discussion of genetic engineering in the region and across the US, gained international attention, and articulated a broader analysis of the social and ecological implications of genetic engineering and the commodification of life.

Template:Anchor Justice, Freedom, and Technology

Two additional themes, first elaborated by Bookchin in The Ecology of Freedom, are also of potential interest to climate activists today. The first addresses the historical ambiguities that underlie the dual legacy of justice and freedom in the West; the second concerns the evolution of ideas about technology’s role in society. The discussion of justice and freedom sheds light, for example, on a debate that arose among some activists in Copenhagen as to whether a justice-centered perspective—even the discussion of climate debts—could inadvertently bind activists to measures of value determined by the capitalist market. The discussion of technology arises in response to those who tend to view technological developments as the central driving factors in our social evolution.

In Bookchin’s account, modern notions of justice began to emerge during ancient times, when a Greek-inspired cult of warrior elites was beginning to reshape social expectations and entrench patterns of exploitation, social coercion, and rule by privileged minorities. Whereas many traditional communities embodied an expansive sense of freedom rooted in reciprocity and complementarity, subjugated peoples had to settle for a more objectively neutral, nominally “blind” approach, relying on more limited standards of balance and equivalence.

Oppressed peoples have raised the banner of justice through the ages and have won countless epochal victories against elites who came to view themselves as naturally superior. Societies rooted in principles of justice are often less parochial and more inclined to accept strangers into their midst. At the same time, however, justice is often a poor substitute for the more expansive view of human freedom, rooted in an ethic of complementarity, which still thrives in many indigenous communities. Justice emerged, says Bookchin, “first, as a surrogate for the freedom that is lost with the decline of organic society,” but “later as the ineffable protagonist of new conceptions of freedom.”[21] Even as we struggle for justice in the present day, we can simultaneously strive to actualize our most far-reaching visions of a more fully liberatory society.

At the same time, climate activists and many others often hold to the view that new technologies, from agriculture to forms of warfare to the discovery of fossil fuels, are often the primary causes that impel the evolution of societies. Social ecology offers an important challenge to this view. Bookchin offers a compelling argument, supported by many other writers and historians, that technology is not an autonomous driving force nor an overarching principle of human evolution, but rather a reflection of its underlying “social matrix.” Societies as radically different as the despotic Inca empire and the relatively egalitarian Iroquois confederacy had very similar, rather basic tools, yet these societies evolved in starkly different ways. As the historian Lewis Mumford has revealed, many technologies we take for granted today—from glass to waterwheels—had largely ceremonial or religious functions before they came to be tapped for productive or practical purposes.[22] For Mumford, the first “megamachine” was not technological in any sense, but rather the massive bureaucratic organization of human labor that built the Egyptian pyramids. Long before machines were invented to take advantage of centralized human labor, the earliest factories merely concentrated and intensified human labor, physically centralizing traditional practices such as spinning, weaving and dyeing that used to be performed at home.

Today’s mega-technologies are not only products of the particular social relations of industrial capitalism, but were developed specifically to reinforce and strengthen those relationships. David Noble, a leading critical historian of technology, described in detail how the automation of machine tools after World War II was developed explicitly to disempower skilled labor and helped set the stage for a permanent war economy in the United States.[23] Similar concerns can be raised about many of today’s advanced communication technologies, for example the surveillance techniques and software devices to convey our personal information to advertisers that are often embedded in the very structure of advanced web pages and mobile applications. From the design of our cities to the ways we use energy, the tools and technics that shape our lives are most often products of capitalist social relations, and have therefore served to reinforce and perpetuate patterns of hierarchy and rule. Rather than blame our social problems on technology, it is imperative that we work to envision a qualitatively different kind of eco-technology that helps us create a radically transformed, more humane and ecological society.

Template:Anchor Social Ecology and the Future

In recent decades, a flowering of popular movements for land rights, for community survival, and against new land enclosures emerged throughout the global South. From the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico to “water wars” in Bolivia and India, permanent land occupations by Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), and global resistance to corporate land-grabs, among many others, these movements have increasingly captured the imagination of global justice advocates, even those who for a time seemed to take environmental concerns for granted. These movements also offer a profound challenge to traditional environmentalism, as usually practiced in the North, and have challenged conventional approaches to land conservation as practiced by northern NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund.[24] While some authors have appropriately cautioned against the automatic labeling of indigenous, land-based movements as ecological, the resurgence of interest in these movements has furthered the evolution of many activists’ ecological outlook.[25] It has also encouraged many thoughtful urban activists to broadly identify with the world views of those whose livelihoods are still principally derived from the land.

Today, with a growing awareness of climate disruptions and the profound social and ecological upheavals that we face, environmental politics may once again be ascendant. But often we see similar forms of narrowly instrumental environmentalism to those Bookchin critiqued in the 1960s and seventies. “Green consumerism,” which first emerged as a widespread phenomenon around the 1990 Earth Day anniversary, has returned with a vengeance, incessantly promoted as the key to reducing our personal impact on the climate. Even some critical observers, such as the popular British columnist George Monbiot, have focused on the feasibility of a “least painful” lower-energy scenario, rather than posing a fundamental ecological challenge to the further destructive development of global capitalism.[26]

In this disturbingly constrained political and intellectual environment, what does the future hold? Will capitalism finally come to terms with the environmental crisis, perhaps driven by the dynamic movement to withdraw university and public funds from investments in fossil fuel corporations? Or are such campaigns mainly a step toward a more fundamental political challenge and a movement toward a thoroughly transformed future? To address these questions it is useful to consider some of the particular ways that social ecology may continue to inform and enlighten today’s emerging social and ecological movements.

First, social ecology offers an uncompromising ecological outlook that challenges the entrenched power structures that underlie the systems of capitalism and the nation-state. A movement that fails to confront the underlying causes of environmental destruction and climate disruption can, at best, only superficially address those problems. Capitalism continually promotes false solutions such as carbon trading, geoengineering, and fracked gas as a “bridge fuel,” which serve the system’s imperative to keep growing. Ultimately, to fully address the causes of climate change and other compelling environmental problems requires us to raise long-range, transformative demands that the dominant economic and political systems may prove unable to accommodate. We can structure our activist campaigns in a manner that illuminates hidden structures of oppression and hierarchy, and reveals how various oppressions intersect, even while joyfully and dramatically illustrating the long-range, reconstructive potential of our movement.[27] Such a systemic approach can help guide our movements further in the direction of the social transformation that we know is necessary, challenge the continuing sellouts of corporate-friendly “official” environmentalism and help us “keep our eyes on the prize.”

Second, social ecology offers us a lens to better comprehend the origins and the historical emergence of ecological radicalism, from the nascent movements of the late 1950s and early sixties right up to the present. Over five decades, the writings of Murray Bookchin and his colleagues have reflected upon the most important on-the-ground debates within ecological and social movements with passion and polemic, as well as with humor and long-range vision. Movements that are aware of their history, and comprehend the lessons of their many ebbs and flows over time, are much better equipped to discuss where we may be headed.

Third, social ecology offers the most comprehensive theoretical treatment of the origins of human social domination and its historical relationship to abuses of the earth’s living ecosystems. Social ecology has consistently pointed to the origins of ecological destruction in social relations of domination, in contrast to conventional views suggesting that impulses to dominate non-human nature are a product of mere historical necessity. Social ecologists celebrate the ways that humans can participate meaningfully and supportively in the processes of natural evolution, rather than pretending that we can live as merely passive observers. Evolving eco-technologies, from permaculture to green urban design, can help point the way toward new relationships of harmony between our own communities and the rest of nature, prefigure new kinds of social relationships, and help us usher in more profound changes that reach beyond the local level.

Fourth, social ecology presents a framework for comprehending the origins of human consciousness and the emergence of human reason from its natural context. Bookchin’s philosophy reaches far beyond popular, often solipsistic notions of an “ecological self,” grounding the embeddedness of consciousness in nature in a coherent theoretical framework with roots in both classical nature philosophies and modern science. It advances a challenge to overturn popular acceptance of the world as it is, and to persistently inquire as to how things ought to be.

Fifth, social ecology offers activists an historical and strategic grounding for political and organizational debates about the potential for direct democracy. Social ecologists have worked to bring the praxis of direct democracy into popular movements since the 1970s, and Bookchin’s writings offer an essential historical and theoretical context for this continuing conversation. When environmental organizations refuse to be accountable to their membership, we can offer a principled challenge, and also develop new forms of organization that help illuminate the potential for a fundamentally different kind of social and political power.

Sixth, at a time when the remaining land-based peoples around the world are facing unprecedented assaults on their communities and livelihoods, social ecology reminds us of the roots of Western radicalism in the social milieu of peoples recently displaced from their own rural, agrarian roots. Bookchin’s four-volume opus, The Third Revolution, describes in detail how revolutionary movements in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Spanish Civil War were often rooted in pre-industrial social relations, an understanding which can serve to historicize and deromanticize our approach to contemporary land-based struggles. Rather than an exotic other, vaguely reminiscent of a distant and idealized past, current peasant and indigenous movements offer much insight and practical guidance to help us live better on the earth, reclaiming both our past and our future.

Seventh, social ecology offers a coherent and articulate political alternative to economic reductionism, identity politics, and many other trends that often dominate today’s progressive left. Bookchin polemicized relentlessly against these and other limiting tendencies, insisting that our era’s ecological crises compel a focus on the general interest, with humanity itself as the most viable “revolutionary subject.” Social ecology has helped connect contemporary revolutionaries with the legacies of the past and offered a theoretical context for sustaining a coherent, emancipatory revolutionary social vision.

Finally, Bookchin insisted for four decades on the inseparability of oppositional political activity from a reconstructive vision of an ecological future. He viewed most popular leftist writing of our era as only half complete, focusing on critique and analysis without also proposing a coherent way forward. At the same time, social ecologists have often spoken out against the increasing accommodation of many “alternative” institutions—including numerous once-radical cooperatives and collectives—to a stifling capitalist status quo. Opposition without a reconstructive vision often leads to exhaustion and burnout. “Alternative” institutions without a link to vital, counter-systemic social movements are cajoled and coerced by market forces into the ranks of non-threatening “green” businesses, merely serving an elite clientele with products that are “socially responsible” in name only. A genuine convergence of the oppositional and reconstructive strands of activity is a first step toward a political movement that can ultimately begin to contest and reclaim political power.

Some defenders of the status quo would have us believe that “green” capitalism and the “information economy” will usher in a transition to a more ecological future. But, like all the capitalisms of the past, this latest incarnation relies ultimately on the continued and perpetual expansion of its reach, at the expense of people and ecosystems worldwide. From urban centers to remote rural villages, we are all being sold on a way of life that can only continue to devour the earth and its peoples. Today’s high-tech consumer lifestyles, whether played out in New York, Beijing, Bangalore, or the remotest reaches of human civilization, defy all meaningful limits, ultimately raising global inequality and economic oppression to previously unimaginable proportions while profoundly destabilizing the earth’s ability to sustain complex life.

The corrosive simplification of living ecosystems and the retreat into an increasingly synthetic world that Murray Bookchin warned of in the early 1960s has evolved from a disturbing future projection into an impending global reality. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to challenge economic and social systems at their core and evolve a broad, counterhegemonic social movement that refuses to compromise its values or settle for partial measures. Nearly fifty years ago, Bookchin observed and reported on the dramatic May-June revolt in Paris in 1968, when huge crowds of students and workers united to occupy the universities and the streets. One of their popular slogans, inspired by the writings of the French Situationists in the late 1950s and early sixties, is usually translated as, “Be realistic—do (or ‘demand’) the impossible.” In response to the emerging ecological crisis, Bookchin urged his readers to consider a “more solemn injunction”: “If we don’t do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.”[28] Facing a future of unstoppable climate chaos if we fail to act quickly, we need to set our sights on nothing less.

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Preface to the Revised Edition

Climate Change Impacts in the United States: Overview and Report Findings (Washington, DC: US Global Change Research Program, 2014), p. 9. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that atmospheric water vapor has risen by 4 percent since the 1970s, with a likely 5-10 percent effect on amplification of precipitation and storms: his article is “Framing the way to relate climate extremes to climate change,” Climatic Change 115:2 (2012) pp. 283-29.
James Hansen, et al., “Perception of climate change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109 (2012), pp. 14726-14727. Temperatures are defined as far warmer than normal here if they deviate from the norm by more than three standard deviations.
James Samenow, “February caps 29-year streak of warmer than normal months on Earth,” Washington Post online, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/03/19/february-completes-29-year-streak-of-warmer-than-normal-months-on-earth (March 19, 2014).
Pardeep Pall, et al., “Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000,” Nature 470 (2011), pp. 382-86.
Matthias Dietz & Heiko Garrelts, eds., Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement (Oxford: Routledge International Handbooks Series, 2013).
Michael T. Klare, “The New ‘Golden Age of Oil’ That Wasn’t,” TomDispatch.com (2012), http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175601/klare_the_new_golden_age_of_oil_that_wasn.
For more details see Brian Tokar, “Tar Sands, Extreme Energy and the Future of the Climate Movement,” in T. Black, et al., eds., A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2014).
Subhankar Banerjee, “Shell Game in the Arctic,” TomDispatch.com (August 2, 2012), http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175577/subhankar_banerjee_arctic_shell_game; Clifford Krauss, “Shell Vessels Sidelined, Imperilling Arctic Plans,” New York Times (February 11, 2013).
Tricia Shapiro, Mountain Justice (Oakland: AK Press, 2010).
See, for example, Marc Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, “A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030,” Scientific American (November 2009), pp. 58-65, and further discussion of these issues in Chapter 5 of this book.

Global Warming and the Struggle for Justice

A thoughtful early response from US climate scientists to the widely publicized leaked emails from the University of East Anglia in the UK can be found at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack. For a thorough review of the scientific response to these allegations, see Michael Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 207-248.
On corporate funding of climate denial, see for example, Koch Industries Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine (Washington, DC: Greenpeace USA, March 2010), at http://greenpeace.org/kochindustries.
Anthony Leiserowitz, et al., “Climate Change in the American Mind: Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in January 2010,” (New Haven and Washington, DC: Yale Project on Climate Change and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, 2010), at http://environment.yale.edu/uploads/AmericansGlobalWarmingBeliefs2010.pdf.
Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons,” New York Times (May 24, 2010).
Anthony Leiserowitz, et al., What’s In A Name? Global Warming vs. Climate Change (New Haven and Washington, DC: Yale Project on Climate Change and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, 2014), p. 23.
David Leonhardt, “On Climate, Republicans and Democrats Are From Different Continents,” New York Times (May 8, 2014), at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/upshot/on-climate-republicans-and-democrats-are-from-different-continents.html.
IPCC Working Group I Summary for Policymakers (September 2013), p. SPM-32, from ipcc.ch.
The emerging conflict between technocratic environmentalism and social ecology was first explored by social ecologist Murray Bookchin in the 1970s; several of his essays from that period are compiled in his Toward an Ecological Society (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980).
Andrew C. Revkin, “The Climate Divide: Reports From Four Fronts in the War on Warming,” New York Times (April 3, 2007).
Kathy Marks, “Global Warming Threatens Pacific Island States,” The Independent (October 27, 2006).
Nicholas Schmidle, “Wanted: A New Home for My Country,” New York Times (May 10, 2009). An award-winning 2011 film, The Island President, further documented Nasheed’s efforts.
Naomi Klein, “Rapture Rescue 911: Disaster Response for the Chosen,” The Nation (November 19, 2007).
See, for example, Ernest Waititu “Drought Spurs Resource Wars,” Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, reprinted in The Indypendent (New York City), No. 119 (April 25, 2008).
Jim Yardley, “Drought Puts Focus on a Side of India Left Out of Progress,” New York Times (September 5, 2009).
Rahul Goswami, “The Road From Drought: The Monsoon Crisis of 2009,” Pune: InfoChange India, September 2009, at http://infochangeindia.org/200909167941/Agriculture/Analysis/The-road-from-drought.html.
No Place Like Home: Where Next for Climate Refugees? (London: Environmental Justice Foundation, 2009), p. 4.
For further explanation see the Preface to this volume.
The various IPCC reports, and condensed “Summaries for Policy Makers,” can be downloaded from http://www.ipcc.ch.
Reported in James Hansen, et al., “Climate change and trace gases,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A 365 (2007), pp. 1925–1954 and James Hansen, et al., “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” (unpublished manuscript), available from http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf.
The IPCC’s conclusions in this and the next two paragraphs are from their 2007 Working Group II Report, titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” and available from http://www.ipcc.ch.
IPCC Working Group II Report (2007), p. 393.
Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, IPCC Working Group II Summary for Policymakers (March 2014), p. 12, from ipcc.ch.
For example, the IPCC’s latest report mentions that the number of available citations on climate and health alone doubled between 2007 and 2009. See “Human Health: Impacts, Adaptation and Co-Benefits,” Chapter 11 of the full IPCC Working Group II report (2014), p. 5.
World Resources Institute, Synthesis: Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, A Report of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), p. 119.
Juliet Eilperin, “New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast Of 6.3-Degree Temperature Increase,” Washington Post (September 25, 2009), at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/24/AR2009092402602.html; David Adam, “Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes,” The Guardian (September 28, 2009), at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/28/met-office-study-global-warming
See Mark New, et al., “Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A 369 (2011), pp. 6-19.
Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World (United Nations Development Program, 2007), p. 16.
The Right to Survive: The humanitarian challenge for the twenty-first century (London: Oxfam International, April 2009).
Rafael Reuveny, “Climate change-induced migration and violent conflict, Political Geography 26 (2007), pp. 656-673.
Praful Bidwai, “Climate change, equity and development—India’s dilemmas,” in Niclas Hällstrom, ed., What Next Volume III: Climate, Development and Equity (Development Dialog No. 61; Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 2012), p. 148.
Dan Smith and Janani Vivekananda, A Climate of Conflict: The links between climate change, peace and war (London: International Alert, November 2007), p. 3.
Michael T. Klare, “The Pentagon vs. Peak Oil: How Wars of the Future May Be Fought Just to Run the Machines That Fight Them” (2007), at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174810.
Human Development Report 2007/2008, p. 27.
Peter Baker, “Developing Nations Rebuff G-8 on Curbing Pollutants,” New York Times (July 8, 2009).
“Hit the brakes hard,” Real Climate (April 29, 2009), at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/04/hit-the-brakes-hard.
Malte Meinshausen, et al., “Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2ºC,” Nature 458 (April 30 2009), pp. 1158-1163.
Richard Monastersky, “A burden beyond bearing,” Nature 458 (April 30 2009), pp. 1091-1094.
IPCC Working Group I Summary for Policymakers (September 2013), p. SPM-20, from ipcc.ch; Meinshausen, et al., “Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2ºC,” supra note 33.
Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner, “Time to ditch Kyoto,” Nature 449 (October 25, 2007), pp. 973-975.
Joeri Rogelj, et al., “Global warming under old and new scenarios using IPCC climate sensitivity range estimates,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012), pp. 248–253; Glen P. Peters, et al., “The challenge to keep global warming below 2°C,” Nature Climate Change 3 (2013), pp. 4-6.
James Hansen, et al., “Assessing ‘Dangerous Climate Change’: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature,” PLOS One 8:12 (2013), p. 8.

The UN Climate Negotiations and Beyond

http://www.350.org/en/story, accessed April 2013.
Martin Khor, “Climate talks facing crisis,” Shah Alam, Malaysia: The Star (June 15, 2009), via email.
Naomi Klein elaborated the link between Obama’s renewed multilateralism and Europe’s capitulation in “Obama isn’t helping. At least the world argued with Bush,” The Guardian (October 16, 2009).
Praful Bidwai, “Climate change, equity and development—India’s dilemmas,” in Niclas Hällstrom, ed., What Next Volume III: Climate, Development and Equity (Development Dialog No. 61; Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 2012), p. 158.
Lim Li Lin, “Why we need to save the Kyoto Protocol” (Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network: November 2009).
Obama pledged that the US would reduce emissions approximately 17% from 2005 levels by 2020, echoing a bill that passed the House of Representatives in June of 2009, This was equivalent to only a 4-5 percent reduction from 1990 levels, the baseline established in Kyoto. EU countries, in contrast, agreed in Kyoto to an 8 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2012.
Michael A. Levi, “Copenhagen’s Inconvenient Truth: How to Salvage the Climate Conference,” Foreign Affairs 88:5 (September/October 2009), pp. 92-104.
See, for example, I. Allison, et al., The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science (Sydney: University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, November 2009); on the British study, see David Adam, “Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes,” The Guardian (September 28, 2009).
Rachel Smolker, personal communication (December 9, 2007).
Full reports on these actions were posted at actforclimatejustice.org.
Becca Connors, email message from Friends of the Earth (December 18, 2009); George Monbiot, “Copenhagen Negotiators Bicker and Filibuster While the Biosphere Burns,” The Guardian (December 19, 2009), at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-negotiators-bicker-filibuster-biosphere; Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Obama as Climate Change Villain” (December 21, 2009), from www.project-syndicate.org (accessed June 2010).
Martin Khor, “Climate: Talks end by only ‘noting’ an Accord after much wrangling,” South-North Development Monitor No. 6840 (December 22, 2009).
Joeri Rogelj, et al., “Copenhagen Accord pledges are paltry,” Nature 464 (2010), pp. 1126-1128.
ibid. p. 1128.
People’s Agreement, World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, at http://pwccc.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/peoples-agreement.
Martin Khor, “Complex implications of the Cancun Climate Conference” Economic and Political Weekly 45:52 (Mumbai, December 2010).
Both are quoted in Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle, “The Durban Disaster,” Z Magazine (February 2012).
Todd D. Stern, “The Shape of a New International Climate Agreement” (London, UK, October 2013), at http://www.state.gov/e/oes/rls/remarks/2013/215720.htm.

Toward a Movement for Climate Justice

Classic photos from Bali and subsequent UN climate conferences can be viewed in slides from an exhibit assembled by photojournalist Orin Langelle for the 2013 conference in Warsaw, at http://photolangelle.org/2013/11/09/the-warsaw-poland-exhibit.
“Mobilization for Climate Justice Open Letter to the Grassroots,” at http://www.actforclimatejustice.org/about/open-letter-to-the-grassroots/.
CJA declaration, as conveyed via personal communication from Tadzio Müller (July 16, 2009).
Kenny Bruno, et al., Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice (San Francisco: Transnational Resource & Action Center, 1999).
Toxic wastes and race in the United States: A national report on the racial and socioeconomic characteristics of communities with hazardous waste sites (New York: United Church of Christ, 1987). The conclusions were updated in Robert D. Bullard, et al., Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty 1987—2007: Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the United States (Cleveland: United Church of Christ, 2007).
Brian Tokar, “Environmental Justice,” in Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash (Boston: South End Press, 1997), pp. 125-140.
Available from http://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html.
Downloaded from http://www.ejnet.org/ej/climatejustice.pdf, accessed June 14, 2012.
Downloaded from http://www.ejnet.org/ej/bali.pdf, accessed June 14, 2012.
The climate-centered activities of GJEP are highlighted on their blog, at http://climate-connections.org and IEN’s at http://ienearth.org/climatejustice.html.
http://www.durbanclimatejustice.org/durban-declaration/english.html.
Climate Justice Now press statement, Bali, Indonesia, December 14, 2007, via Durban Group email list.
“Climate Justice Now: Principles of Unity,” May 12, 2008 draft, via Climate Justice Now email list.
A full listing as of November 2010 is at http://www.climate-justice-now.org/category/climate-justice-movement/cjn-members (accessed August 11, 2010).
Statement of Henry Saragih, general coordinator of La Vía Campesina, to the Klimaforum alternative summit, December 7, 2009, via CommonDreams.org, accessed December 9, 2009.
J. Andrew Hoerner and Nia Robinson, A Climate of Change: African Americans, Global Warming, and a Just Climate Policy in the U.S. (Oakland: Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, June 2008).
Rachel Morello-Frosch, et al., The Climate Gap: Inequalities in How Climate Change Hurts Americans and How to Close the Gap (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, May 2009).
WEACT’s origins are discussed in Ashley Dawson, “Climate Justice: The Emerging Movement against Green Capitalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109:2 (Spring 2010), pp. 325-326. Also see Advancing Climate Justice: Transforming the Economy, Public Health and Our Environment: Conference Agenda and Resource Guide (New York: WEACT, 2009).
Comments of Robert Bullard at “Advancing Climate Justice: Transforming the Economy, Public Health and Our Environment” conference, New York: Fordham University (January 30, 2009).
“What does Climate Justice mean in Europe? A Discussion Paper,” via Climate Justice Action email list (March 26, 2010).
http://www.risingtidenorthamerica.org/about-rising-tide-north-america/our-history/, accessed June 18, 2012; “Remember, Remember: Climate Camp,” Shift Magazine No. 12, at http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=461.
See Brian Tokar, “Organization profile—Rising Tide,” in Matthias Dietz & Heiko Garrelts, eds., Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement (Oxford: Routledge International Handbooks Series, 2013), pp. 255-257.
Nicola Bullard & Tadzio Müller, “Beyond the ‘Green Economy’: System change, not climate change?” Development 55:1 (2012), p. 57.
Movement Generation’s outlook and activities are described at http://www.movementgeneration.org. Their distinct approach to climate justice organizing, developed in collaboration with the Ruckus Society and other groups, is most fully explored in Hilary Moore and Joshua Kahn Russell, Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections on Navigating the Climate Crisis (Oakland: PM Press, 2011).
Available at http://www.climate-justice-now.org/cj-in-the-usa-root-cause-remedies-rights-reparations-and-representation (accessed June 14, 2012).
See http://www.ourpowercampaign.org.
Jacqueline Patterson, “And the People Shall Lead: Centralizing Frontline Community Leadership in the Movement Towards a Sustainable Planet” (October 2013), via email.
Moore and Russell, Organizing Cools the Planet (supra note 24), p. 15.
See Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle, “The Durban Disaster,” Z Magazine (February 2012).
GGJ’s activities at the “Rio+20” environmental summit in Brazil in 2012 are outlined at http://ggjalliance.org/node/982. On climate justice and organized labor, see http://www.labor4sustainability.org and http://energydemocracyinitiative.org.
Patrick Bond, The Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below (Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012), especially pp. 188-194.
Rising Tide North America’s sit-in at EDF’s offices in Washington, DC in December of 2008 is described at http://www.risingtidenorthamerica.org/wordpress/2008/12/01/first-hand-account-of-environmental-defense-occupation; the November 30, 2009 demonstration at NRDC headquarters is at http://www.risingtidenorthamerica.org/wordpress/2009/09/24/nyc- climate-activists-expose-the-true-“green”-of-big-enviros-deliver-giant-climate-“bill”-to-offices/.
La Via Campesina and ASEED Europe, “Call to the Climate Agriculture Action Day December 15th, 2009” (November 2009), via email.
Numerous such initiatives are described in detail in Tommy Linstroth and Ryan Bell, Local Action: The New Paradigm in Climate Change Policy (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2007).
Michael T. Klare, “The New ‘Golden Age of Oil’ That Wasn’t,” TomDispatch.com, at http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175601/klare_the_new_golden_age_of_oil_that_wasn.
See http://www.tarsandsblockade.org.
Mark Hertsgaard, “Climate Activists Put the Heat on Obama,” The Nation (February 18, 2013).
“Uranium Hype Hits Indigenous Opposition Globally, Provokes Conflict in the North” (Ottawa: Mining Watch Canada, 2007), at http://www.miningwatch.ca/uranium-hype-hits-indigenous-opposition-globally-provokes-conflict-north; Ramsey Hart, “Indigenous Rights and Mining—Recent Developments, Opportunities and Challenges” (2011), at http://www.miningwatch.ca/article/indigenous-rights-and-mining-recent-developments-opportunities-and-challenges.
“What does Climate Justice mean in Europe? A discussion paper,” supra note 20.

Carbon Trading and Other False Solutions

Indigenous Peoples’ Guide: False Solutions to Climate Change (Bemidji, Minnesota: Indigenous Environmental Network and Carbon Trade Watch, 2009); Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: False Solutions to Climate Change (Hood River, Oregon: Rising Tide North America and Carbon Trade Watch (2011).
See, for example, The Emperor’s New Climate: Geoengineering as 21st Century Fairytale (Ottawa: ETC Group, 2009).
Winona LaDuke, “Navajos ban uranium mining,” Earth Island Journal (Autumn 2005), at http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/navajos_ban_uranium_mining.
See, for example, Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, Nuclear Power: The Energy Balance; available at http://www.stormsmith.nl.
Amory B. Lovins and Imran Sheikh, “The Nuclear Illusion,” available at http://community.livejournal.com/greenparty/342794.html.
Linda Gunter, “The French Nuclear Industry Is Bad Enough in France; Let’s Not Expand It to the U.S.,” AlterNet (March 23, 2009); Peter Saunders, “More Trouble at Olkiluoto Nuclear Plant” (London: The Institute of Science in Society, March 2014), at http://permaculturenews.org/2014/03/06/trouble-olkiluoto-nuclear-plant.
John Kerry and Lindsey Graham, “Yes We Can (Pass Climate Change Legislation),” New York Times (October 11, 2009); Darren Samuelsohn, “Senate Dems Opening to Nuclear as Path to GOP Support for Climate Bill,” New York Times ClimateWire (October 7, 2009).
See, for example, Emily Rochon, et al., False Hope: Why Carbon Capture and Storage Won’t Save the Climate (Amsterdam: Greenpeace International, 2008).
Trip Gabriel, “Ash Spill Shows How Watchdog Was Defanged,” New York Times (February 28, 2014).
Charles Duhigg, “Cleansing the Air at the Expense of Waterways,” New York Times (October 13, 2009).
Brian Tokar, “Biofuels and the Global Food Crisis,” in Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar, eds., Agriculture and Food in Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).
Lester R. Brown, “Supermarkets and Service Stations Now Competing for Grain,” Earth Policy Institute Update (July 13, 2006), at http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update55.htm; C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor,” Foreign Affairs, 86:3 (2007), pp. 41–53. A summary of the human rights impacts is in Brian Tokar, “Biofuels and the Global Food Crisis” (ibid.). On the problem of global land grabs, see the chapter by the international research group GRAIN, “The New Farm Owners: Corporate Investors and the Control of Overseas Farmland” in Magdoff and Tokar, eds., Agriculture and Food in Crisis, ibid.
Ward Anseeuw, et al., Land Rights and the Rush for Land (Rome: ILC, 2012), p. 4, available at http://www.cirad.fr/en/publications-resources/publishing/studies-and-documents/land-rights-and-the-rush-for-land.
Jason Hill, et al., “Environmental, Economic, and Energetic Costs and Benefits of Biodiesel and Ethanol Biofuels,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103:30 (2006), pp. 11206–11210.
For example, see Joseph Fargione, et al., “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt,” Science 319:5867 (February 29, 2008), pp. 1235-1238; Timothy Searchinger, et al., “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change,” Science 319:5867 (February 29, 2008), pp. 1238-1240, both also available from www.sciencexpress.org.
See Rachel Smolker, et al., “The True Cost of Agrofuels: Impacts on Food, Forests, Peoples and the Climate,” (Asunción, Paraguay: Global Forest Coalition, 2008), especially Chapter 6, available at http://www.globalforestcoalition.org/img/userpics/File/publications/Truecostagrofuels.pdf; for continuing updates see http://www.nogetrees.org.
See, for example, ETC Group, Who Will Control the Green Economy? (Ottawa: ETC Group, November 2011), and Ronnie Hall and Joseph Zacune, Bio-Economies: The EU’s real ‘Green Economy’ agenda? (London: World Development Movement and Transnational Institute, June 2012).
See, for example, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, “Global CO2 Emissions: Annual Increase Halves in 2008”; available at http://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/2009/Global-CO2-emissions-annual-increase-halves-in-2008.html.
An updated version of this history can be found in Brian Tokar, “The Myths of “Green Capitalism,” New Politics (Winter 2014) pp. 62-67.
R.H. Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 3 (1960), p. 44.
J.H. Dales, Pollution, Property & Prices (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), p. 97.
W. David Montgomery, “Markets in Licenses and Efficient Pollution Control Programs,” Journal of Economic Theory, 5 (1972), pp. 395–418.
Stephen Breyer, “Analyzing Regulatory Failure, Mismatches, Less Restrictive Alternatives and Reform,” Harvard Law Review, 92:3 (1979), pp. 547–609.
For a more complete treatment of the origins of the US Acid Rain Program, see Brian Tokar, Earth For Sale (Boston: South End Press, 1997), pp. 33–45.
See, for example, Gar Lipow, “Emissions Trading: A Mixed Record, with Plenty of Failures,” Grist (February 19, 2007).
George Monbiot, “We’ve Been Suckered Again by the US. So Far the Bali Deal is Worse than Kyoto,” The Guardian (December 17, 2007).
Larry Lohmann, “Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatization and Power,” Development Dialogue, 48 (Uppsala: Dag Hammerskjöld Foundation, September 2006).
ibid. Lucrative offfset credits for HFC capture are often a perverse incentive for production to continue to rise.
Charles Forelle, “French Firm Cashes In Under U.N. Warming Program,” Wall St. Journal (July 23, 2008); Fiona Harvey, et al., “Producers, traders reap credits windfall,” Financial Times (April 26 2007).
Barbara Haya, Failed Mechanism: How the CDM is subsidizing hydro developers and harming the Kyoto Protocol (Berkeley: International Rivers, November 2007).
Lambert Schneider, “Is the CDM fulfilling its environmental and sustainable development objectives? An evaluation of the CDM and options for improvement” (Berlin: Öko-Institut, 2007).
For a more complete list of USCAP members, see http://www.us-cap.org.
See Hallie Boas, ed., No REDD Papers (Portland, Oregon: Indigenous Environmental Network and Carbon Trade Watch, 2013).
The details of the Waxman-Markey climate bill are best summarized in Climate Law Institute, “Analysis of Key Provisions of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACESA), as Amended June 22, 2009” (San Francisco: Center for Biological Diversity, June 2009).
Marianne Lavelle, “Gore business: 2340 climate lobbyists,” Center for Public Integrity (February 25, 2009), at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/19255.html.
See J. Fargione, et al., “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt,” and T. Searchinger, et al., “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change,” supra note 15.
Ryan Grim, “Internal Memo: Nuclear Power Company Could Make A Billion A Year From Climate Change Law,” Huffington Post (June 23, 2009), at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/23/internal-memo-nuclear-pow_n_219256.html.
John M. Broder, “With Something for Everyone, Climate Bill Passed,” New York Times (July 1, 2009).
J. Kerry and L. Graham, “Yes We Can (Pass Climate Change Legislation),” supra note 7.
Ryan Lizza, “As the World Burns: How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change,” New Yorker (October 11, 2010).
Theda Skocpol, “Naming the Problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight against Global Warming,” Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University (January 2013), p. 5.
ibid., p. 99.
Brad Plumer, “How the EPA’s new climate rule actually works—in 8 steps,” at http://www.vox.com/2014/6/4/5779052/how-to-figure-out-which-states-get-hit-hardest-by-obamas-climate-rule; David Hawkins, “Unpacking EPA’s Carbon Pollution Proposal,” at http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dhawkins/unpacking_epas_carbon_pollutio.html.
Larry Lohmann and Nicholas Hildyard, Energy, Work, and Finance (Dorset, UK: The Corner House, 2014).

On Utopian Aspirations in the Climate Movement

See, for example, Juliet Eilperin, “New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast Of 6.3-Degree Temperature Increase,” Washington Post (September 25, 2009); David Adam, “Met Office Warns of Catastrophic Global Warming in Our Lifetimes,” The Guardian (September 28, 2009).
Murray Bookchin, “Reflections: An Overview of the Roots of Social Ecology,” Harbinger, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2002), italics in original.
See Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).
Alex Williams, “Buying Into the Green Movement,” New York Times (July 1, 2007).
This case is made most comprehensively in Kate Gordon, et al., Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States (2014), a report commissioned by financiers Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson and Thomas Steyer, and available from http://riskybusiness.org.
Midnight Notes Collective, Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons (April 2009), p. 5.
For an insightful discussion of the capitalist trend toward financialization, see John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, “Monopoly Finance Capital and the Paradox of Accumulation,” Monthly Review 61: 5 (2009).
Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (New York: Harper One, 2008), pp. 9-10.
Amory B. Lovins, et al., Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011) p. 235.
Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, “Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials,” and “Part II: Reliability, system and transmission costs, and policies,” Energy Policy 39 (2011) pp. 1154–1169, 1170–1190.
John Bellamy Foster, “The Jeavons Paradox: Environment and Technology Under Capitalism,” in The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (New York: Monthly Review Books, 2009), pp. 121–128.
Richard York, Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” Nature Climate Change 2 (June 2012), pp. 441-443.
Matthew L. Wald, “Efficiency, Not Just Alternatives, Is Promoted as an Energy Saver,” New York Times (May 29, 2007).
Uri Gordon, “Dark Tidings: Anarchist Politics in the Age of Collapse,” in Randall Amster, et al., eds., Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 249–58.
Derrick Jensen, “Beyond Hope,” Orion (May/June 2006).
Richard Flacks, Making History: The American Left and the American Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 7.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), pp. 43-61.
Randall Amster, “Anarchy, Utopia, and the State of Things to Come,” in R. Amster, et al. (eds.), Contemporary Anarchist Studies (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 290–301. Emphasis in original; embedded references deleted.
Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), p. xi.
ibid., p. 2.
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 5.
Alain Touraine, “Society as Utopia,” in R. Schaer, G. Claeys, and L.T.Sargent, eds., Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 18, 29. Touraine, once a pioneering scholar of social movements, now apparently prefers “moral individualism” to political action as a means for limiting autocratic power.
Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopian Traditions: Themes and Variations,” in R. Schaer, et al., eds., Utopia, p. 15.
ibid., p. 14; Krishnan Kumar, “Utopia and Anti-Utopia in the Twentieth Century,” in R. Schaer, et al., eds., Utopia, p. 265.
Quoted in K. Kumar, ibid., p. 266.
Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics: Or Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century (New York: The New Press, 1998).
See Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi, Food Justice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); Mark Winne, Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).
One study proposed that factory farming may be raising agriculture’s contribution to global warming to as much as 50 percent: see Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, “Livestock and Climate Change,” WorldWatch, (November/December 2009). For an overview of the links between agriculture and climate see Brian Tokar, “Food Sovereignty and Climate Justice,” in Eric Holt-Gimenez, ed., Food Movements Unite: Strategies to Transform Our Food Systems (Oakland: Food First Books, 2011).
For an articulate political critique of the emerging “transition towns” movement, see Paul Chatterton and Alice Cutler, The Rocky Road to a Real Transition (Leeds: Trapese Collective, April 2008).
“Worldwide poll: Vast majority say capitalism not working,” The Raw Story, (November 9, 2009), at http://rawstory.com/2009/11/survey-capitalism-not-working, accessed November 10, 2009.

Social Ecology and the Future of Ecological Movements

Yale psychologist Dale Kahan has demonstrated that people’s views on climate correlate most closely with the views of their “cultural community,” whatever their level of education: See his commentary, “Why we are poles apart on climate change,” Nature 488 (August 16, 2012), p. 255, based on a concurrent research paper, coauthored with six others, “The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks,” Nature Climate Change 2 (October 2012), pp. 732-735.
Paul B. Sears, “Ecology: A Subversive Subject,” BioScience 14 (July 7, 1964).
René Dubos, Man Adapting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 196.
Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 58.
Quoted at http://essentialbooks.com/id50.htm.
Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), especially Chapters 2 and 3.
The fullest elaboration of these ideas appears in Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990; Revised edition 1995). For philosophical and scientific background to these ideas, see Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
Murray Bookchin, “A New Municipal Agenda,” in From Urbanization to Cities: Toward a New Politics of Citizenship (London: Cassell, 1995), pp. 201–245. Also see his earlier Limits of the City, originally published by Harper & Row in 1974 and in an expanded edition by Black Rose Books.
Murray Bookchin, “Market Economy or Moral Economy,” in The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986).
Murray Bookchin, The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era, 4 volumes (London: Cassell, 1996, 1998; and Continuum, 2004, 2006).
At least one earlier mass action, aimed at shutting down Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War in May of 1971, was organized on the affinity group model, but Clamshell activists were the first in the US to make this the underlying structure of their organization.
Murray Bookchin, “A Note on Affinity Groups,” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (supra note 4), pp. 221-222.
On the history and present activities of the Institute for Social Ecology, see www.social-ecology.org.
For more on the US Greens and the role of social ecologists, see Brian Tokar, “The Greens as a Social Movement: Values and Conflicts,” in Frank Zelko and Carolin Brinkmann, eds., Green Parties: Reflections on the First Three Decades (Washington, D.C.: Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, 2006).
Juan Gonzalez, “Getting Serious about Ecology,” New York Daily News (April 24, 1990).
See Greta Gaard, Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).
See Chaia Heller, Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature (Montreal: Black Rose, 1999); Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
See Janet Biehl, “Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism,” Communalism 12 (October 2007).
Murray Bookchin, “The Communalist Project,” in Social Ecology and Communalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2007).
On the evolution of resistance to genetic engineering in the US, see Brian Tokar, “Resisting the Engineering of Life,” in Brian Tokar, ed., Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (London: Zed Books, 2001). For a more theoretical treatment, see Brian Tokar, “Biotechnology: Enlarging the Debate,” Z Magazine (June 2001).
Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p. 141.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967).
David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Automation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Mac Chapin, “A Challenge to Conservationists,” WorldWatch (November/December 2004), pp. 17–31.
Larry Lohmann, “Visitors to the Commons,” in Bron Taylor, ed., Ecological Resistance Movements (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Boston: South End Press, 2007). For a comprehensive review of more radical solutions to the climate crisis, see the “Less Energy” series in the Green politics journal Synthesis/Regeneration (now Green Social Thought), beginning with the Winter 2007 issue, No. 42 (Available at http://www.greens.org/s-r).
Chaia Heller, “Illustrative Opposition: Drawing the Revolutionary Out of the Ecological,” in Ecology of Everyday Life, pp. 149–171.
Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p. 41. Bookchin’s more detailed account of Paris in 1968 can be found in a pair of essays, reprinted in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (supra note 4), pp. 249-270.

Template:Anchor Template:Anchor Template:Anchor About the Author

Brian Tokar is a long-time activist and author, a lecturer in environmental studies at the University of Vermont, and the current director of the Institute for Social Ecology. He is the author of “The Green Alternative” and “Earth for Sale,” co-editor of “Agriculture and Food in Crisis,” and editor of two books on the politics of biotechnology, “Redesigning Life?” and “Gene Traders.” Tokar lectures internationally on environmental issues and politics.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-In convincing himself that the Center is not completely wrong to combat “cosmopolitanism,” the intellectual argues thus: the religion of Rome spread more or less over the area in which so-called European civilization arose. Those countries which today form the Western provinces of the Imperium were for centuries the eastern peripheries of that civilization. The growth of modem Europe, with its concurrent development of trade and industry, deepened the rift between “Europe” and its outlying “Eastern Marches.” A citizen of Iowa asked to define what he means by “Europe” would probably name France, Holland, Italy, Germany. He would go no farther East, and he would imagine the inhabitants of that distant area to be a mixture of untrustworthy, backward tribes.
+{{clear}}
+[[Image:cover.jpg.png|center]]
-It is possible that our Iowan is an example of “historical lag,” that his ideas are the products of concepts which no longer coincide with facts. Nevertheless, his opinions are characteristic, and in fact reflected in American political moves which did not see Russia’s occupation of the “Eastern Marches” as a loss that could have serious consequences. After all, it was in Western Europe that money and power accumulated through the centuries and that culture patterns arose which later spread to the East. (For example, Polish churches and palaces were built by Italian architects; Polish popular art was shaped by Baroque; Polish poets admiringly followed the forms of French verse, etc.) The countries of Central and Eastern Europe were traditionally “poor relations,” a semi-colonial terrain. The West’s attitude toward them was in general patronizing, and still does not differ much from the somewhat oversimplified opinions of the citizen of Iowa.
+= X =
-The Pole, Czech, or Hungarian of average education knows a good bit about France, Belgium, or Holland. The Frenchman, Belgian, or Hollander of average education knows little about Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary. The Eastern individual finds this state of affairs unreasonable, and feels a certain solidarity with the Russian who has old and unpleasant scores to settle with the West. Even though he is irritated by Russia’s inferiority complex, which leads her to demand constant homage and assurances of her unquestionable superiority, the West’s disdain of Central and Eastern Europe upsets him even more, for it seems to spring from a lack of recognition of the change in proportion which has occurred in the twentieth century. These countries have a large population which has displayed a definite ability to adapt itself to the exigencies of modem technology. They are rich in natural resources, and their mining and heavy industry are rapidly developing. Their worker no longer resembles the helpless emigrant who, setting out for the West in search of bread, was forced to accept the lowest type of manual labor. Their technicians and scholars can compete successfully with their Western colleagues. Their writers and musicians cannot complain of any lack of talent.
+== X ==
-And what is more, from every point of view, these countries seem to be the most important part not only of Europe, but of the whole world: if we assume that the New Faith will spread throughout the earth, then these are the first and therefore most interesting areas of the experiment outside Russia itself. If we assume that the Center will lose, then the economic and culture patterns that will arise subsequently in these countries will certainly be new, for there is no such thing in history as a return to the status quo. Then is one not justified in checking this idolatry of Western models which was so prevalent among the cultivated circles of the “Eastern Marches”? Why should present-day French painting, bom in a country living on remembered glories, be imitated in Prague or Warsaw? Why should English plays, written for a completely different public, be played in these Eastern capitals? One must break that habit of imitation which was inevitable as long as French, English, or Belgian capitals, investing in the mines, railroads, and factories of the “Eastern Marches,” pushed its books, films, and styles upon them. Just as nationalized industry now stands on its own feet, so Eastern European cultures must learn to stand by their own strength.
+=== [Front Matter] ===
-Unhappily, in freeing themselves from the spell of the West, the literature, science, and art of these Marches became totally dependent on the new metropolis. Once imitation was spontaneous and voluntary, but now it is obligatory. Any attempt to find one’s own way is denounced as Tito ism. Any attempt to reach into one’s own national past is possible only to the extent that that past parallels the development of the Russian nation. One may turn to folklore, obviously, and to the realistic plays of the nineteenth century. But, foi example, Poland has a tradition of romantic drama which does not lend itself to realistic representation. It also possesses a tradition of stage production which is known as “monumental theater.” To continue such traditions would smack of dangerous heresy. The fight against “cosmopolitanism” is in reality nothing more than the act of emptying a retort and refilling it with a different fluid. In the past, a particular substance was created in this retort through the interaction of native and imported elements. Today the imported element appears in much purer form, for a sufficient number of laboratory workers are eager to maintain the necessary respect for the formula.
+==== [Table of Contents] ====
-In the last century, the “decadent West” was condemned by patriotic Russian historians because it was liberal, and because the ideas that emanated from it threatened autocratic governments. Nor was it only these defenders of the throne who criticized it mercilessly. One has but to read Tolstoi’s What Is Art? to get a picture of the scorn for Western sophistication that is so typical of the Russians. Tolstoi regarded Shakespeare’s plays as collections of bloody crimes, and French painting (this was the period of the flowering of Impressionism) as the daubs of degenerates. After the Revolution, when once again the social system of Russia differed from that of the West, it was not difficult to enlarge on this precedent with a goodly number of arguments. Didn’t Russia’s strength lie in its suspicion of the West; and weren’t even the Tsarist historians working for the Revolution by cultivating Russia’s self-assurance and faith in the special calling of the nation? Conscious of their hitherto latent power, the “Scythians,” as the great Russian poet Blok called his nation, at last began to march. Therefore, it would seem that the nations lying between the Baltic and Mediterranean seas would do well to imitate this Russian self-assurance and free themselves from the bad habit of parroting the West.
+[[#TOWARDCLIMATEJUSTICE|TOWARD CLIMATE JUSTICE]]
-The intellectual understands, of course, that he himself is “cosmopolitan” since he looks to the West for something. This does not mean, however, that he complains about the orders that have banished Parisian boulevard art, or American detective stories from his country. A great many cultural phenomena which excite the “elite” in Western countries are distasteful to him. Asked whether T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party should be played in his native land, he would undoubtedly answer “No”; whereas, he finds The Wasteland by the same author an interesting piece of poetry. The new acquisition that the people of Central and Eastern Europe will never want to relinquish is the feeling of responsibility for what the public gets from editors or producers. If, for example, one considers a play bad, one should not present it even though it might be a considerable financial success. (Just imagine a Prague or Warsaw worker looking at The Cocktail Party!) On the other hand, the ban on Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps is obviously absurd. The “cosmopolitanism” of the intellectual I describe is very moderate. He makes distinctions between what is worthy of his respect in the West and what owes its success to cheap publicity appealing to the taste of a dubious “elite.”
+[[#Topofpart0002html|Foreword]]
-The superiority of Russian realist painting (;pieredwizniki) over French Impressionism has been proved in Moscow. Unfortunately, the eye is used in the appreciation of a painting, and the most learned discourse cannot transform an ugly canvas into a great work of art—which is obviously to be deplored! At every step, be it in the realm of aesthetics or ethics, one encounters the opposition that the strangeness of man raises against the wisest of theories. It is reasonable that a responsibly raised child should inform on his father if he observes his behavior to be contrary to the good of the social order on whose well-being the happiness of all mankind depends. And yet the disgust such behavior awakens in many people is just as inexplicable as their preference for Manet over Russian nineteenth-century realists.
+[[#Topofpart0003html|Preface to the Revised Edition]]
-The recklessness with which the Russians are carrying out their mental operations in the people’s democracies is reaching dangerous proportions. Consistent reasoning which orders one to by-pass a fact when a concept comes into conflict with reality must eventually lead to costly errors. Hitler’s war on “degenerate art” sprang from the same seed as the new ethics of his party which ordered the slaughter of “inferior races”; and in these very ideas lay the causes of his defeat. Knowing the Center’s demand that science and art conform to the Method instead of searching for objective truth and beauty, the intellectual comes to the conclusion that it is not the wisdom of the West that will cause the downfall of the Imperium, but rather the aberrations to which the Method leads.
+[[#Topofpart0004html|1 Global Warming and the Struggle for Justice]]
-Announcing Mendelian genetics to be wrong, the Center used roughly three groups of arguments: 1) It contradicts the dialectical interpretation of Darwin’s theory of the natural selection of species because it stresses those elements of his theory which are the reflection of the social circumstances of Darwin’s day, namely, the pitiless struggle for existence in a capitalist society. (In place of the struggle for existence within a given species, one must substitute cooperation within a given species.) 2) It does not yield satisfactory practical results in agriculture. 3) It can serve as the basis for racist theories, since an individual is “better” or “worse” according to his genes. All these arguments evidence the wish that reality were all one longs for it to be. Yet what will happen if Mendelian genetics proves to be consistent with scientific observation? No matter how loudly he applauds the speakers who annihilate Western genetics, the Eastern intellectual suspects he is the dupe of an enormous hoax similar to the hoaxes of German scholars who scientifically proved whatever was necessary to the Nazis at a particular moment.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#Whoisaffectedbyglobalwarmin|Who is affected by global warming?]]</div>
-This constitutes one step in the direction of doubt about the dialectical method itself. Is it not based at times on an interpretation of signs in nature and in history which the interpreter carefully placed there himself? Dialectics is the “logic of contradictions” applicable, according to the wise men, to those cases where formal logic is inadequate, namely to phenomena in motion. Because human concepts as well as the phenomena observed by men are in motion, “contradictions contained in the concepts are but reflections, or translations into the language of thought, of those contradictions which are contained in the phenomena.”
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#ProjectionsandRealities|Projections and Realities]]</div>
-Very well; yet what about the example Ple-khanov goes on to cite to prove the inadequacy of formal logic? Someone points to a young man whose beard is just beginning to grow and demands a reply to the question as to whether he does or does not have a beard. One cannot say he does not, for he has the beginnings of one. One cannot say he does, for it is not yet a beard. In a word, the beard is becoming; it is in motion; it is only a certain quantity of individual hairs which will one day become a quality called a beard. “Hell,” mutters our intellectual, “these are nothing more than seventeenth-century rabinical exercises.” The hairs growing on the chin of a young man are absolutely indifferent as to what name one will give them. There is no “transition” here from “quantity to quality,” as the faithful so piously proclaim. The problem “beard or no beard” arises from the language we use, from our system of classification. What boundless vanity it is to ascribe to phenomena the contradictions in which we are entangled because of our clumsy concepts.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#Howmuchwarmingcanwetolerate|How much warming can we tolerate?]]</div>
-But this is a very serious matter. The fate of the Imperium hangs on that unhappy chin. If all the historical analyses carried out according to the Method operate on the same sort of trickery—that is, if it first introduces the concepts, and then takes their contradictions to be the contradictions of the material observed—then the new Imperium may at any time trip itself in its own acrobatics.
+[[#Topofpart0005html|2 The UN Climate Negotiations and Beyond]]
-And yet the Eastern intellectual is terrorized by the Method. How can one explain this? Without confessing to anyone, he admits to himself that falseness exists in the very core of the Method. But this does not prevent him from ascribing to the Method any success he may have in working with material by other techniques. The Method exerts a magnetic influence on contemporary man because it alone emphasizes, as has never before been done, the fluiditv and interdependence of phenomena. Since the people of the twentieth century find themselves in social circumstances where even the dullest mind can see that “naturalness” is being replaced by fluidity and interdependence, thinking in categories of motion seems to be the surest means of seizing reality in the act. The Method is mysterious; no one understands it completely—but that merely enhances its magic power. Its elasticity, as exploited by the Russians, who do not possess the virtue of moderation, can result at times in the most painful edicts. Nevertheless, history shows us that a healthy, reasoning mind was rarely an effective guide through the labyrinth of human affairs.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#BeyondKyoto|Beyond Kyoto?]]</div>
-The Method profits from the discoveries of Marx and Engels, from their moral indignation, and from the tactics of their successors who have denied the rightness of moral indignation. It is like a snake, which is undoubtedly a dialectical creature: “Daddy, does a snake have a tail?” asked the little boy. “Nothing but a tail,” answered the father. This leads to unlimited possibilities, for the tail can begin at any point. Asking himself why he cannot escape from its embrace (even if he should want to), the intellectual replies that the measure of the Method’s accuracy lies in the strength of those who rule in its name. They know how to erect a building with mobile walls on ground that is constantly shaken by earthquakes; while the West, lacking equally perfected blueprints, clings to a traditional architecture that threatens to crash. Certain walls of the dialectical structure are so monstrous that they make the inhabitants fear for the future of a building so constructed. But when they compare it with the static architecture of the West, they believe at times that all humanity will have to move into more mobile apartments.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#RevealingtheUSStrategy|Revealing the US Strategy]]</div>
-The Eastern intellectual’s attitude toward the West is therefore complicated, and not reducible to formulas of sympathy or antipathy. It is somewhat like disappointed love, and as we know, such deception often leaves a sediment of sarcasm. It took such a calamity to enable the new system, entirely contrary to the predictions of Marx, to have been born in backward Russia, and for the Revolution to have become an enterprise directed by the bureaucrats of the Center and extended by military conquest. It took such a calamity to bring matters to the point where Europeans seeking to change the obsolete order of their countries must agree, also contrary to the predictions of Marx, to submit to a nation which has never known how to rule itself, and which in all its history has never known prosperity or freedom. What a terrible fate to have been born in such an era! This is what our intellectual thinks even as he pronounces a speech about the “supreme honor” it is to live in the “great Stalinist epoch.” His function is, as he defiantly calls it, to “inoculate” others with the “basic principles of enthusiasm.” It does not seem entirely unlikely to him that the West may emerge triumphant in its dispute with the Method. Still the Method, that is the revision of Marx according to Russian patterns, though it has many weaknesses, is a stronger weapon in the hands of the rulers than tanks or guns alone. And it works effectively.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#CoerciveDiplomacy|Coercive Diplomacy]]</div>
-Experience has taught the Eastern intellectual to measure his moves carefully. He has seen too many who fell into the abyss of disfavor for a single thoughtless step, for a single impulsively written article. If the Imperium falls, it may prove possible in the ensuing chaos to seek new means of survival and action. Until that happens, one must work devotedly for the triumph of the Imperium, secretly nourishing the hope that the “stupidity” of the West is not so unbounded as one is led to suppose. If only the people in the West really understood the mechanism of the “great Stalinist epoch,” and if only they would act accordingly! Everything would seem to indicate that they do not understand. But perhaps, perhaps they will?
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#BeyondCopenhagen|Beyond Copenhagen]]</div>
-** Chapter Three Ketman
+[[#Topofpart0006html|3 Toward a Movement for Climate Justice]]
-Officially, contradictions do not exist in the minds of the citizens in the people’s democracies. Nobody dares to reveal them publicly. And yet the question of how to deal with them is posed in real life. More than others, the members of the intellectual elite are aware of this problem. They solve it by becoming actors.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#OriginsofClimateJustice|Origins of Climate Justice]]</div>
-It is hard to define the type of relationship that prevails between people in the East otherwise than as acting, with the exception that one does not perform on a theater stage but in the street, office, factory, meeting hall, or even the room one lives in. Such acting is a highly developed craft that places a premium upon mental alertness. Before it leaves the lips, every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and accusations. Even one’s gestures, tone of voice, or preference for certain kinds of neckties are interpreted as signs of one’s political tendencies.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#ClimateJusticeandtheFuture|Climate Justice and the Future]]</div>
-A visitor from the Imperium is shocked on coming to the West. In his contacts with others, beginning with porters or taxi drivers, he encounters no resistance. The people he meets are completely relaxed. They lack that internal concentration which betrays itself in a lowered head or in restlessly moving eyes. They say whatever words come to their tongues; they laugh aloud. Is it possible that human relations can be so direct?
+[[#Topofpart0007html|4 Carbon Trading and Other False Solutions]]
-Acting in daily life differs from acting in the theater in that everyone plays to everyone else, and everyone is fully aware that this is so. The fact that a man acts is not to his prejudice, is no proof of unorthodoxy. But he must act well, for his ability to enter into his role skillfully proves that he has built his characterization upon an adequate foundation. If he makes a passionate speech against the West, he demonstrates that he has at least 10 per cent of the hatred he so loudly proclaims. If he condemns Western culture lukewarmly, then he must be attached to it in reality. Of course, all human behavior contains a significant amount of acting. A man reacts to his environment and is molded by it even in his gestures. Nevertheless, what we find in the people’s democracies is a conscious mass play rather than automatic imitation. Conscious acting, if one practices it long enough, develops those traits which one uses most in one’s role, just as a man who became a runner because he had good legs develops his legs even more in training. After long acquaintance with his role, a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans. To identify one’s self with the role one is obliged to play brings relief and permits a relaxation of one’s vigilance. Proper reflexes at the proper moment become truly automatic.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#WhichEnergyChoices|Which Energy Choices?]]</div>
-This happens in literature as well. A poet writing a piece of propaganda does not confine himself to a purely rationalistic approach. Imbued with the thought that poetry ideally should be suited to recitation in chorus at a meeting, he begins by tuning himself to an appropriate pitch of collective emotion before he can release himself in words. In the theater, the actor who plays the Cid, for example, is the Cid on stage. Yet not every actor, even if he is young and well-built, can play the Cid; he must have an inborn capacity to release himself emotionally in that role. Poetry as we have known it can be defined as the individual temperament refracted through social convention. The poetry of the New Faith can, on the contrary, be defined as social convention refracted through the individual temperament. That is why the poets who are most adapted to the new situation are those endowed with dramatic talent. The poet creates the character of an ideal revolutionary and writes his verses as the monologue of this character. He does not speak for himself but for the ideal citizen. His results are reminiscent of songs written to be sung on the march since the aim is the same—the forging of the fetters of collectivity that bind together an advancing column of soldiers. The best examples of such song-slogans are certain verses of the German poet, Berthold Brecht, which are superior to the works of other Eastern poets because Brecht is fully conscious of the histrionic process involved.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#TradingPollution|Trading Pollution]]</div>
-Even though the identification of the play with private thought-property is carried very far, a large residue of unassimilated matter remains which forces one to keep alert. A constant and universal masquerade creates an aura that is hard to bear, yet it grants the performers certain not inconsiderable satisfactions. To say something is white when one thinks it black, to smile inwardly when one is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love, to know when one pretends not to know, and thus to play one’s adversary for a fool (even as he is playing you for one)—these actions lead one to prize one’s own cunning above all else. Success in the game becomes a source of satisfaction. Simultaneously, that which we protect from prying eyes takes on a special value because it is never clearly formulated in words and hence has the irrational charm of things purely emotional. Man takes refuge in an inner sanctuary which is the more precious the greater the price he pays in order to bar others from access to it.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#FalseSolutionsintheUSCongre|False Solutions in the US Congress]]</div>
-Acting on a comparable scale has not occurred often in the history of the human race. Yet in trying to describe these new mores, we happen across a striking analogy in the Islamic civilization of the Middle East. Not only was the game played in defense of one’s thoughts and feelings well-known there, but indeed it was transformed into a permanent institution and graced with the name of Ket-man.
+[[#Topofpart0008html|5 On Utopian Aspirations in the Climate Movement]]
-What is Ketman? I found its description in a book by Gobineau entitled Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia. Gobineau spent many years in Persia (from 1855 to 1858 he was a secretary in the French legation, from 1861 to 1863 he was French minister), and we cannot deny his gift for keen observation, even though we need not necessarily agree with the conclusions of this rather dangerous writer. The similarities between Ketman and the customs cultivated in the countries of the New Faith are so striking that I shall permit myself to quote at length.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#EcologyandCapitalism|Ecology and Capitalism]]</div>
-The people of the Mussulman East believe that “He who is in possession of truth must not expose his person, his relatives or his reputation to the blindness, the folly, the perversity of those whom it has pleased God to place and maintain in error.” One must, therefore, keep silent about one’s true convictions if possible.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#AUtopianMovement|A Utopian Movement?]]</div>
-“Nevertheless,” says Gobineau, “there are occasions when silence no longer suffices, when it may pass as an avowal. Then one must not hesitate. Not only must one deny one’s true opinion, but one is commanded to resort to all ruses in order to deceive one’s adversary. One makes all the protestations of faith that can please him, one performs all the rites one recognizes to be the most vain, one falsifies one’s own books, one exhausts all possible means of deceit.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#HopeandDespair|Hope and Despair]]</div>
-Thus one acquires the multiple satisfactions and merits of having placed oneself and one’s relatives under cover, of not having exposed a venerable faith to the horrible contact of the infidel, and finally of having, in cheating the latter and confirming him in his error, imposed on him the shame and spiritual misery that he deserves.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#LookingForward|Looking Forward]]</div>
-“Ketman fills the man who practices it with pride. Thanks to it, a believer raises himself to a permanent state of superiority over the man he deceives, be he a minister of state or a powerful king; to him who uses Ketman, the other is a miserable blind man whom one shuts off from the true path whose existence he does not suspect; while you, tattered and dying of hunger, trembling externally at the feet of duped force, your eyes are filled with light, you walk in brightness before your enemies. It is an unintelligent being that you make sport of; it is a dangerous beast that you disarm. What a wealth of pleasures!”
+[[#Topofpart0009html|6 Social Ecology and the Future of Ecological Movements]]
-How far Ketman can go is demonstrated by the founder of one sect, Hadzhi-Sheikh-Ahmed. “Although he left behind many works of theology, he never openly advanced in his books, as even his most passionate disciples avow, anything which could place the reader on the path of the ideas attributed to him today. But everyone affirms he practiced Ketman and that in private he was extremely daring and precise in establishing order in the doctrines which bear his name today.” We cannot wonder, therefore, that, as a certain Persian admitted in conversation with Gobineau, “there is not a single true Moslem in Persia.”
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#TheOutlookofSocialEcology|The Outlook of Social Ecology]]</div>
-Not everyone was as careful as Hadzhi-Sheikh-Ahmed. To some, Ketman was useful in the preparatory period, but when they felt themselves sufficiently strong, they proclaimed their heresy openly. Here, for example, is the description of the itinerant preachings of Sadra, the disciple of Avicenna.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#SocialEcologyandSocialMoveme|Social Ecology and Social Movements]]</div>
-“He too was afraid of the mullahs. To incite contradiction, ambiguous propositions, illacious syllogisms out of which only the initiated could see their way, the whole heavily seasoned with unimpeachable professions of faith, he succeeded in spreading Avicennism throughout the entire lettered class; and when at last he believed he could reveal himself completely, he drew aside the veils, repudiated Islam, and showed himself the logician, the metaphysician that he really was.”
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#FromGreenPoliticstoGlobalJu|From Green Politics to Global Justice]]</div>
-their distrust was inevitable, but to provide a solid basis, furnish proof for their accusations, that would have been to expose himself to endless persecutions, and to compromise at the same time the future of the philosophical restoration he meditated. Therefore he conformed to the demands of his times and resorted to the great and splendid expedient of Ket-man. When he arrived in a city he was careful to present himself humbly to all the moudjteheds or doctors of the region. He sat in a comer of their salons, their talars, remained silent usually, spoke modestly, approved each word* that escaped their venerable lips. He was questioned about his knowledge; he expressed only ideas borrowed from the strictest Shiite theology and in no way indicated that he concerned himself with philosophy. After several days, seeing him so meek, the moudjteheds themselves engaged him to give public lessons. He set to work immediately, took as his text the doctrine of ablution or some similar point, and split hairs over the prescriptions and inner doubts of the subtlest theoreticians. This behavior delighted the mullahs. They lauded him to the skies; they forgot to keep an eye on him. They themselves wanted to see him lead their imaginations through less placid questions. He did not refuse. From the doctrine of ablution he passed to that of prayer; from the doctrine of prayer, to that of revelation; from revelation, to divine unity and there, with marvels of ingenuity, reticence, confidences to the most advanced ils, self-Islamic Ketman and the Ketman of the twentieth century in Europe seem to differ only in that the boldness Sadra permitted himself would instantly have brought him to a sad end in Europe. Nevertheless, Ketman in its narrowest and severest forms is widely practiced in the people’s democracies. As in Islam, the feeling of superiority over those who are unworthy of attaining truth constitutes one of the chief joys of people whose lives do not in general abound in pleasures. “Deviations,” the tracing of which creates so many troubles for the rulers, are not an illusion. They are cases of accidental unmask-ings of Ketman; and those who are most helpful in detecting deviations are those who themselves practice a similar form of Ketman. Recognizing in other acrobats the tricks they themselves employ, they take advantage of the first occasion to down an opponent or friend. Thus they protect themselves; and the measure of dexterity is to anticipate by at least one day the similar accusation which could be leveled against them by the man they denounce. Since the number of varieties of Ketman is practically unlimited, the naming of deviations cannot keep pace with the weeding of a garden so full of unexpected specimens of heresy. Every new commentary on the precepts of the New Faith proclaimed by the Center multiplies the internal reservations of those who are externally the most faithful. It is impossible to enumerate all the forms of Ketman that one can discover in the people’s democracies. I shall try, however, to proceed somewhat in the manner of a naturalist determining major groups and families.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#JusticeFreedomandTechnology|Justice, Freedom, and Technology]]</div>
-National Ketman is broadly diffused throughout the masses, and even the upper brackets of the Party in the various dependent states are not free of it. Because Tito, like Sadra, announced his heresy to all the world, millions of human beings in the people’s democracies must employ exceedingly ingenious means of masking themselves. Instructive displays of condemnation of those who wished to follow the national road to socialism in individual Eastern capitals taught the public what kind of phrases and reflexes can expose one to reproach for harboring this; fatal tendency. The surest safeguard is to manifest loudly one’s awe at Russia’s achievements in every field of endeavor, to carry Russian books under one’s-arm, to hum Russian songs, to applaud Russian actors and musicians enthusiastically, etc. A writer who has not consecrated a single work to outstanding Russian figures or to Russian life, but has confined himself to national themes, cannot consider himself entirely safe. The chief characteristic of the people who practice this Ketman is an unbounded contempt for Russia as a barbaric country. Among the workers and peasants it is most often purely emotional, and based on observation of either the soldiers of the liberating army, or (since during the war a great many were in areas directly administered by the Russians) of Russians in their daily life.
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">[[#SocialEcologyandtheFuture|Social Ecology and the Future]]</div>
-Because until now the living standard of the masses in Russia was so much lower than that of the so-called people’s democracies, national Ketman finds abundant nourishment. It cannot be defined simply as nationalism. For many centuries hatred existed between the Central European Slavs and the Germans, still it was colored among the Slavs by a respect for Germany’s material achievements. On the other hand, perceiving by comparison the greater refinement of his own customs, his greater organizational ability (be it only in respect to transportation or the handling of machinery), the Central European would express his attitude toward Russia, if he could, by a disdainful shrug of his shoulders—which, however, doesn’t prevent him from shuddering in fear before the countless hordes pouring out of the Euro-Asian continent.
+[[#Topofpart0010html|Notes]]
-But this Ketman is not exclusively emotional in its appeal. Amid the young intelligentsia of working-class origin the overwhelming opinion can be summed up shortly as “Socialism—yes, Russia—no”; and this is where the subtleties of doctrinal differences arise. The countries of Europe, this line of reasoning begins, are infinitely more prepared to realize socialism than Russia. Their population is more intelligent; most of their land is under cultivation; their systems of communication and their industry are more highly developed. Measures based on absolute cruelty are unnecessary and even pointless since there exists a greater degree of social discipline. Nevertheless, “the national road to socialism” has been condemned and many efforts made to prove that whoever is opposed to total adaptation to Russian models and to surrendering to Russian dictatorship is a traitor who must share the fate of Tito— that is, must come out against the Center and thus weaken its war potential without which there can be no revolution on a world scale. To pronounce oneself against this thesis would be to deny the New Faith and to introduce in its place a different faith, for example one directly linked to Marx and Engels. Many do so. Others, seeing in the alliance between Tito and the West an example of historical fatality, and rejecting the idea that this fatality may be due simply to the Center’s policy toward dependent nations, shut themselves up in a Ketman which does not hamper the Center in its external acts. A true Moslem, even though he be deeply attached to his Ketman, never seeks to injure Islam in those areas where it is fighting for its life against unbelievers. Such Ketman expresses itself only in practical moves which do no harm in the world struggle, but which on the other hand safeguard national interests whenever possible.
+[[#Topofpart0011html|About the Author]]
-The Ketman of Revolutionary Purity is a rare variety, more common in the large cities of Russia than in the people’s democracies. It is based on a belief in the “sacred fire of the revolutionary epoch of Lenin” which burns in such a poet as Mayakovski. Mayakovski’s suicide in 1930 marked the end of an era distinguished by the flowering of literature, the theater, and music. The “sacred fire” was dampened, collectivization was introduced mercilessly, millions of Soviet citizens perished in slave labor camps, a ruthless policy toward non-Russian nations was established. Literature became flat and colorless under the influence of imposed theories; Russian painting was destroyed; Russian theater, then the foremost in the world, was deprived of freedom to experiment; science was subjected to directives from Party chiefs. A man who reasons thus hates Him with all his heart, holding Him responsible for the terrible lot of the Russian people and for the hatred they inspire in other nations.
+{{anchor|TowardClimateJusticePerspecti}}
-Still, he is not altogether sure whether He is necessary or not. Perhaps in extraordinary periods such as the present the appearance of a tyrant must be considered desirable. Mass purges in which so many good communists died, the lowering of the living standard of the citizens, the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yes-men, the extermination of entire national groups—what other man would dare undertake such measures? After all, Russia stood firm against Hitler; the Revolution weathered the attack of enemy armies. In this perspective, His acts seem effective and even justified, perhaps, by an exceptional historical situation. If He had not instituted an exceptional terror in the year 1937, wouldn’t there have been more people willing to help Hitler than there actually were? For example, doesn’t the present-day line in scholarship and art, no matter how at odds it may be at times with common sense, effectually raise Russian morale in the face of the war that threatens? He is an infamous blot on the bright New Faith, but a blemish we must tolerate for the moment. And indeed we must even support Him. The “sacred fire” has not gone out. When victory is achieved, it will burst forth again with its old strength, the bonds He imposed will fall away, and relations between nations will operate on new and better principles. This variety of Ketman was widespread if not universal in Russia during the Second World War, and its present form is a rebirth of an already once-deceived hope.
-Aesthetic Ketman is born of the disparity between man’s longings and the sense-satisfactions the New Faith offers. A man of taste cannot approve the results of official pressure in the realm of culture no matter how much he applauds the latest verses, how many flattering reviews he writes of current art expositions, nor how studiously he pretends that the gloomy new buildings coincide with his personal preferences in architecture. He changes completely within the four walls of his home. There one finds (if he is a well-situated intellectual) reproductions of works of art officially condemned as bourgeois, records of modern music, and a rich collection of ancient authors in various languages. This luxury of splendid isolation is pardoned him so long as his creative work is effective propaganda. To protect his position and his apartment (which he has by the grace of the State), the intellectual is prepared to make any sacrifice or compromise; for the value of privacy in a society that affords little if any isolation is greater than the saying “my home is my castle” can lead one to surmise. Two-way television screens installed in private homes to observe the behavior of citizens in seclusion belong as yet to the future. Hence, by listening to foreign radio stations and reading good books, he profits from a moment of relaxation; that is, of course, if he is alone, for as soon as guests arrive the play begins anew.
-Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic. Such experiences are associated with works of art for only an insignificant number of individuals. The majority find pleasure of an aesthetic nature in the mere fact of their existence within the stream of life. In the cities, the eye meets colorful store displays, the diversity of human types. Looking at passers-by, one can guess from their faces the story of their lives. This movement of the imagination when a man is walking through a crowd has an erotic tinge; his emotions are very close to physiological sensations. He rejoices in dresses, in the flash of lights; while, for instance, Parisian markets with their heaps of vegetables and flowers, fish of every shape and hue, fruits, sides of meat dripping with every shade of red offer delights, he need not go seeking them in Dutch or Impressionist painting. He hears snatches of arias, the throbbing of motors mixed with the warble of birds, called greetings, laughter. His nose is assailed by changing odors: coffee, gasoline, oranges, ozone, roasting nuts, perfumes.
+==== [Copyright] ====
-Those who have sung of the large cities have consecrated many pages to the description of this joyous immersion in the reservoir of universal life. The swimmer who trusts himself to the wave, and senses the immensity of the element that surrounds him lives through a like emotion. I am thinking of such great singers of the city as Balzac, Baudelaire, and Whitman. It would seem that the exciting and invigorating power of this participation in mass life springs from the feeling of potentiality, of constant unexpectedness, of a mystery one ever pursues.
+''Toward Climate Justice:Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change2010, 2014 © Brian Tokar''
-Even the life of the peasants, though it be dulled by brutalizing hand labor, allows for aesthetic expression in the rhythm of custom, the rites of the church, holy pictures, country fairs, native costumes, paper flower decorations, folk sculptures, music, and dances.
+ISBN 978-82-93064-09-1
-In the countries of the New Faith the cities lose their former aspect. The liquidation of small private enterprises gives the streets a stiff and institutional look. The chronic lack of consumer goods renders the crowds uniformly gray and uniformly indigent. When consumer products do appear, they are of a single second-rate quality. Fear paralyzes individuality and makes people adjust themselves as much as possible to the average type in their gestures, clothing, and facial expressions. Cities become filled with the racial type well-regarded by the rulers: short, square men and women, with short legs and wide hips. This is the proletarian type, cultivated to an extreme, thanks to binding aesthetic standards. (We know that these same dumpy women and stocky men could change completely under the influence of films, painting, and fashion, for America has proved that mass communication is at least as important as diet in determining physical appearance.) Streets, factories, and meeting places sport the inevitable red flags and painted slogans. The new buildings are monumental and oppressive, lightness and charm in architecture being condemned as formalistic. The number of aesthetic experiences accessible to a city-dweller in the countries of the New Faith is uncommonly limited. The only place of magic is the theater, for the spell of the theater exists even though confined by the commands of socialist realism which define both the contents of a play and stage decor. The tremendous popular success of authors like Shakespeare is due to the fact that their fantasy triumphs even within the bounds of naturalistic stage setting. The hunger for strangeness that is so great inside the Imperium should give the rulers pause; yet in all probability it does not, for they consider such longings derelicts from the past.
+Published by New Compass PressGrenmarsvegen 12N–3912 PorsgrunnNorway
-In the villages, where the entire former pattern of custom is to be abolished through the transformation of peasants into agricultural workers, there still remain survivals of the individual peasant cultures which slowly stratified over the centuries. Still, let us speak frankly, the main supports of this culture were usually the wealthier peasants. The battle against them, and their subsequent need to hide, must lead to the atrophy of peasant dress, decoration of huts, cultivation of private gardens, etc. There is a definite contradiction between the official protection of folklore (as a harmless form of national culture designed to satisfy patriotic tendencies) and the necessities of the new economic structure.
+Design and layout by Eirik Eiglad
-In these conditions aesthetic Ketman has every possibility of spreading. It is expressed not only in that unconscious longing for strangeness which is channeled toward controlled amusements like theater, film, and folk festivals, but also into various forms of escapism. Writers burrow into ancient texts, comment upon and re-edit ancient authors. They write children’s books so that their fancy may have slightly freer play. Many choose university careers because research into literary history offers a safe pretext for plunging into the past and for converse with works of great aesthetic value. The number of translators of former prose and poetry multiplies. Painters seek an outlet for their interests in illustrations for children’s books, where the choice of gaudy colors can be justified by an appeal to the “naive” imagination of children. Stage managers, doing their duty by presenting bad contemporary works, endeavor to introduce into their repertoires the plays of Lope de Vega or Shakespeare—that is, those of their plays which are approved by the Center.
+New Compass presents ideas on participatory democracy, social ecology, and movement building—for a free, secular, and ecological society.
-Some representatives of the plastic arts are so daring that they reveal their Ketman to no small degree by proclaiming the need of an aesthetic of everyday life, and by establishing special institutes to design fabrics, furniture, glass, and ceramics for industry. There is money for such enterprises, and they find support among the most intelligent dialecticians of the upper circles of the Party. Such efforts deserve respect when one considers that before the Second World War Poland and Czechoslovakia were, aside from Sweden and Finland, the leading countries in interior decoration. Nevertheless, there is no reason why that which passes as formalism in painting and architecture should be tolerated for any length of time in the applied arts.
+New Compass is Camilla Svendsen Skriung, Sveinung Legard, Eirik Eiglad, Peter Munsterman, Kristian Widqvist, Lisa Roth, Camilla Hansen, Jakob Zethelius.
-The rationalization of aesthetic Ketman is obvious: since everything is planned in a socialist economy, why not proceed to a planned satisfaction of the aesthetic needs of human beings? Here, however, we trespass upon the treacherous territory of the demon, Psychology. To admit that a man’s eye has need of exultant colors, harmonious forms, or light sunny architecture is to affirm that the taste of the Center is bad. However, even there one can see some progress. They are already erecting skyscrapers patterned after the buildings raised in Chicago about the year 1900. It is possible that in the year 2000 they will officially introduce art forms that today are considered modern in the West. But how can one still the thought that aesthetic experiences arise out of something organic, and that the union of color and harmony with fear is as difficult to imagine as brilliant plumage on birds living in the northern tundras?
+[http://new-compass.net/ new-compass.net]<span style="color:#000000;">2014</u></span>
-Professional Ketman is reasoned thus: since I find myself in circumstances over which I have no control, and since I have but one life and that is fleeting, I should strive to do my best. I am like a crustacean attached to a crag on the bottom of the sea. Over me storms rage and huge ships sail; but my entire effort is concentrated upon clinging to the rock, for otherwise I will be carried off by the waters and perish, leaving no trace behind. If I am a scientist I attend congresses at which I deliver reports strictly adhering to the Party line. But in the laboratory I pursue my research according to scientific methods, and in that alone lies the aim of life. If my work is successful, it matters little how it will be presented and toward whose glory. Discoveries made in the name of a disinterested search for truth are lasting, whereas the shrieks of politicians pass. I must do all they demand, they may use my name as they wish, as long as I have access to a laboratory and money for the purchase of scientific instruments.
+==== <span style="color:#000000;">[Title Page]</span> ====
-If I am a writer, I take pride in my literary achievements. Here, for example, is my treatise on Swift, a Marxist analysis. This type of analysis, which is not synonymous with the Method or the New Faith, makes possible a keen penetration into historical events. Marx had a genius for observation. In following him one is secure against attack, for he is, after all, the prophet; and one can proclaim one’s belief in the Method and the New Faith in a preface fulfilling much the same function as dedications to kings or tsars in times past. Here is my translation of a sixteenth-century poem, or my novel whose scene is laid in the distant past. Aren’t they of permanent value? Here are my translations from Russian. They are viewed with approbation and have brought me a large sum of money, but certainly Pushkin is a great poet, and his worth is not altered by the fact that today his poems serve Him as a means of propaganda. Obviously I must pay for the right to practice my profession with a certain number of articles and odes in the way of tribute. Still one’s life on earth is not judged by transitory panegyrics written out of necessity.
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{anchor|Topofpart0001html}} {{anchor|BRIANTOKARTOWARDCLIMATEJU}} BRIAN TOKAR</div>
-These two examples of professional Ketman should demonstrate how little discomfort it creates for the rulers. It is the source of considerable dynamic force and one cause of the tremendous impetus toward education. The object is to establish some special field in which one can release one’s energies, exploit one’s knowledge and sensibility, and at the same time escape the fate of a functionary entirely at the mercy of political fluctuations. The son of a worker who becomes a chemist makes a permanent advance. The son of a worker who becomes a member of the security police rises to the surface, where large ships sail but where the sea is changeable and stormy. But most important of all, chemical experiments, bridges, translations of poetry, and medical care are exceptionally free of falsity. The State, in its turn, takes advantage of this Ketman because it needs chemists, engineers, and doctors. From time to time, it is true, there come from above muffled grumbles of hatred against those who practice Ketman in the realm of humanistic studies. Fadeyev, Moscow’s literary overseer, attacked the University of Leningrad because one of its students had written a dissertation on the English poet, Walter Savage Landor. “Who needs Landor? Who ever heard of him?” cried Fadeyev. So it would seem that moderation and watchfulness are indicated for those who espouse this form of Ketman.
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{anchor|TOWARDCLIMATEJUSTICE}} TOWARD CLIMATE JUSTICE</div>
-Sceptical Ketman is widely disseminated throughout intellectual circles. One argues that humanity does not know how to handle its knowledge or how to resolve the problems of production and division of goods. The first scientific attempts to solve social problems, made in the nineteenth century, are interesting but not precise enough. They happened, however, into the hands of the Russians who, unable to think otherwise than dogmatically, raised these first attempts to the dignity of dogma. What is happening in Russia and the countries dependent upon her bespeaks a kind of insanity, but it is not impossible that Russia will manage to impose her insanity upon the whole world and that the return to reason will occur only after two or three hundred years. Finding oneself in the very midst of an historical cyclone, one must behave as prudently as possible, yielding externally to forces capable of destroying all adversaries. This does not prevent one from taking pleasure in one’s observations, since what one beholds is indeed unprecedented. Surely man has never before been subjected to such pressure, never has he had to writhe and wriggle so to adapt himself to forms constructed according to the books but obviously not to his size. All his intellectual and emotional capacities are put to the test.
+<div style="text-align:center;">Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change</div>
-Whoever contemplates this daily sight of repudiation and humiliation knows more about man than an inhabitant of the West who feels no pressure other than that of money. The accumulating of this store of observations is the activity of a miser who counts his treasure in secret. Since this Ketman is based on a total lack of belief in the Method, it helps one conform externally to the obligatory line by allowing for complete cynicism, and therefore for elasticity in adjusting oneself to changing tactics.
+<div style="text-align:center;">[[Image:00001.jpeg.png]]</div>
-Metaphysical Ketman occurs generally in countries with a Catholic past. Most examples of it within the Imperium are found in Poland. This Ketman depends upon a suspended belief in a metaphysical principle of the world. A man attached to this Ketman regards the epoch in which he lives as anti-metaphysical, and hence as one in which no metaphysical faith can emerge. Humanity is learning to think in rationalistic and materialistic categories; it is burdened with immediate problems and entangled in a class war. Other-worldly religions are crumbling, living through a period of crisis and, what is worse, serving to defend the obsolete order. This does not mean that mankind will not return to a better and purified religion in the future. Perhaps the New Faith is an indispensable purgatory; perhaps God’s purpose is being accomplished through the barbarians, i.e. the Center, who are forcing the masses to awaken out of their lethargy. The spiritual fare these masses receive from the New Faith is inferior and insufficient. Still one must commend the Center for breaking new ground and for demolishing externally splendid but internally rotten fagades. One should cooperate in this task without betraying one’s attachment to the Mystery. All the more so because the Mystery has no possibility of appearing in literature, for example, and because neither the language nor the ideas at the disposal of contemporary man are ripe enough to express it.
+<div style="text-align:center;">[http://new-compass.net/ new-compass.net]</div>
-This metaphysical Ketman in its turn has a number of varieties. Certain practicing Catholics serve even in the security police, and suspend their Catholicism in executing their inhumane work. Others, trying to maintain a Christian community in the bosom of the New Faith, come out publicly as Catholics. They often succeed in preserving Catholic institutions, because the dialecticians are ready to accept so-called “progressive” and “patriotic” Catholics who comply in political matters. The mutual game is rather ambiguous. The rulers tolerate such Catholics as a temporary and necessary evil, reasoning that the stage has not yet arrived at which one can utterly wipe out religion, and that it is better to deal with accommodating bigots than with refractory ones. “Progressive Catholics” are, however, conscious of being relegated to a not particularly honorable place, that of shamans or witch-doctors from savage tribes whom one humors until one can dress them in trousers and send them to school. They appear in various state spectacles and are even sent abroad as shining testimonials to the Center’s tolerance toward uncivilized races. One can compare theii function to that of “noble savages” imported to the metropolis by colonial powers for state occasions. Their defense against total degradation is metaphysical Ketman: they swindle the devil who thinks he is swindling them. But the devil knows what they think and is satisfied.
+=== {{anchor|Topofpart0002html}} {{anchor|ForewordGlobalwarmingisth}} {{anchor|Foreword}} Foreword ===
-What holds for such Catholics can be applied to members of other religions, as well as to persons outside any denomination. One of the most ominous reproaches leveled against writers is the suspicion that their verses, plays, or novels contain a “metaphysical residue.” Since a writer is a civilizer who dares not be a shaman or a sorcerer, the slightest signs of a metaphysical tendency in him are unforgivable. The literature of the countries which, until the Second World War, were free from Moscow’s domination betrayed especially strong inclinations in that direction, so that metaphysical deviation is of constant and imperative concern to the rulers. For instance, a play that introduces “strangeness,” revealing the author’s interest in the tragedy of life, has no chance of being produced because the tragedy of human fate leads to thoughts about the mystery of human destiny. One forgives certain writers like Shakespeare these predispositions, but there is no question of permitting any contemporary author to harbor them. It is for this reason that Greek tragedies are not deemed suitable for theater repertoires. Marx loved the Greek tragedians, but let us not forget that the connection between the New Faith and Marx is rather superficial.
+Global warming is the most immediate and vexing ecological challenge facing humanity. Only a few degrees increase in temperature may have far-reaching and dire consequences for biological diversity, ecosystem stability, and human demography.
-The New Faith is a Russian creation, and the Russian intelligentsia which shaped it had developed the deepest contempt for all art that does not serve social ends directly. Other social functions of art, probably the most important ones, consistently escaped its understanding. As for poetry, since its sources are hard to differentiate from the sources of all religion, it is singularly exposed to persecution. True, the poet is free to describe hills, trees, and flowers, but if he should feel that boundless exaltation in the face of nature that seized Wordsworth on his visit to Tintem Abbey, he is at once suspect. This is an excellent means of eliminating the legions of bad poets who like to confess their pantheistic flights publicly, but it is also a means of exterminating poetry as a whole and replacing it by jingles little better than the singing commercials broadcast over the radio in America. A painter, in turn, may be attacked quite as easily for using abbreviated and synthesized forms (formalism), as for an excessive love of the beauty of the world, i.e. a contemplative attitude which signifies that he is a metaphysicist by temperament. A musician should see to it that his compositions are easy to translate into the language of common activities (enthusiasm for work, folk festivities, etc.), and that no element remains which is difficult to grasp and hence dangerous. If metaphysical Ketman is tolerated in the “savages,” i.e. those who profess the Christian religion, in the artists who are considered the educators of society, it is severely punished.
+Since the UN-initiated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its fourth comprehensive report in 2007, a general acceptance of an impending climate crisis has spread from scientific circles into the mainstream media. Now it is widely acknowledged that not only is our planet faced with the immediate threat of global warming, but that these climate changes are man-made.
-Ethical Ketman results from opposition to the ethics of the New Faith, which is based on the principle that good and evil are definable solely in terms of service or harm to the interests of the Revolution. Since exemplary behavior of citizens in their interrelations aids the cause of socialism, great emphasis is placed upon individual morality.
+The fact that global warming is caused by human activity does not mean that we are all equally to blame. The greenhouse gas emissions from the industrialized “North” have been disproportionate, and continue to be so. Indeed, the countries of the North have to a great extent developed their technological assets and global hegemony precisely through the intensive burning of fossil fuels. Paradoxically, however, the intensification of the climate crisis is likely to have the most devastating effects on people in the impoverished and underdeveloped “South.” Globally, the people who have contributed the least to climate-altering emissions will not only be hit hardest by increasing weather chaos and rising sea levels, but are the least prepared technologically to face the ordeals of the coming decades. Therefore, the climate crisis not only poses a challenge to our societies in a general sense, but it also challenges our sense of social justice. There is something fundamentally unfair about the fact that those populations who will be hit the hardest are those least responsible for causing the crisis in the first place. This simple recognition strikes at the heart of the climate justice issue.
-“The development of a new man” is the key point in the New Faith’s program. Demands made upon Party members are exceedingly harsh. One exacts of them no small degree of abstinence. As a result, admission to the Party is not unlike entrance into a religious order; and the literature of the New Faith treats this act with a gravity equal to that with which Catholic literature speaks of the vows of young nuns. The higher one stands in the Party hierarchy, the more attentively is one’s private life supervised. Love of money, drunkenness, or a confused love-life disqualify a Party member from holding important offices. Hence the upper brackets of the Party are filled by ascetics devoted to the single cause of Revolution. As for certain human tools, deprived of real influence but useful because of their names, even if they belong to the Party one tolerates or sometimes encourages their weaknesses, for they constitute a guarantee of obedience. The general ethical ideal of the New Faith is puritanical. If it were feasible to lodge all the citizens in cells and release them only for work or for political meetings, that would undoubtedly be most desirable. But alas, one must make concessions to human nature. Procreation is possible only as a result of sexual relations between men and women, and one must take this inconvenience into account.
+As we see it, the issue of global warming and social justice may well prove to be the crucial battle for the ecology movement in the years ahead. A movement for climate justice is bound to touch upon and confront all issues regarding fair distribution, energy use, technology, infrastructure, urban reorganization, and agrarian reform, as well as the reclaiming of the commons and the potential for a participatory politics.
-The “new man” is conditioned to acknowledge the good of the whole as the sole norm of his behavior. He thinks and reacts like others; is modest, industrious, satisfied with what the state gives him; limits his private life to nights spent at home, and passes all the rest of his time amidst his companions at work or at play, observing them carefully and reporting their actions and opinions to the authorities. Informing was and is known in many civilizations, but the New Faith declares it a cardinal virtue of the good citizen (though the name itself is carefully avoided). It is the basis of each man’s fear of his fellow-men. “Work in an office or factory is hard not only because of the amount of labor required, but even more because of the need to be on guard against omnipresent and vigilant eyes and ears. After work one goes to political meetings or special lectures, thus lengthening a day that is without a moment of relaxation or spontaneity. The people one talks with may seem relaxed and careless, sympathetic and indignant, but if they appear so, it is only to arouse corresponding attitudes and to extract confidences which they can report to their superiors.
+On a superficial level, to be sure, ecological concerns that were rightfully considered politically subversive only decades ago now have become common wisdom. However, in order to properly confront the crises of our time, we need to recover the radical messages of the ecology movement. In an immediate, practical sense, we need to look at what concrete solutions are available from a sustainable, ecological perspective. How can we act swiftly to reduce our societies’ dependence on fossil fuels and reduce harmful emissions? On a most practical level, new technologies—as well as more extensive and more efficient use of existing eco-technology—can ameliorate the impact of global warming, and ultimately help reverse the path that we are on.
-In effect this cult of the community produces something which poisons the community itself. The mentality of the Party’s sages is, indeed, rather strange. They make concessions to physiological human weaknesses, but they refuse to admit that man has other foibles as well: that he feels fine when he can relax, and unhappy when he is afraid, that lying is bad for him because it creates internal tension. These weaknesses, together with others like the desire to bettei one’s own lot at the expense of one’s fellow-men, transform the ethic which was originally founded on cooperation and brotherhood into an ethic of a war pitting all men against all others, and granting the greatest chances of survival to the craftiest. Victory in this new struggle seems to belong to a breed different from that which was favored to win in the battle for money in the early days of industrial capitalism. If biting dogs can be divided into two main categories, noisy and brutal, or silent and slyly vicious, then the second variety would seem most privileged in the countries of the New Faith. Forty or fifty years of education in these new ethical maxims must create a new and irretrievable species of mankind. The “new man” is not merely a postulate. He is beginning to become a reality.
+However, we need to go beyond the very idea that new technologies will solve the ecological crisis. There are no simple solutions and there is no “technical fix.” If current political structures and economic imperatives remain intact, we will still have a wasteful and highly energy-demanding—indeed, anti-ecological and unjust—social order. For this reason, there is an urgent need to start defining what the outlines of ''an ecological society'' will actually look like; our answers to this question will inform how we will make full use of the liberatory potential of new technologies. Arguably it is only in a non-exploitative and liberatory social context that we can assure that the whole of society—on a global scale—will benefit from technological and scientific advances. Indeed, the adaptation of new ecological technologies requires a drastic decentralization of energy use and food production, as well as of infrastructures and political decision-making.
-Ethical Ketman is not rare among highly placed figures in the Party. These persons, no matter how capable they are of murdering millions of people in the name of Communism, try to compensate for their professional severity and are often more honorable in their personal relations than people who affect individualistic ethics. Their capacity to sympathize and help is almost unlimited. Indeed this very feeling of compassion pushed them onto the road of revolution in their youth, and in this they reiterated the experience of Marx himself. One finds this Ketman chiefly among the old Communists. Conflicts between friendship and the interests of the Revolution are matters they weigh at length in their conscience; and they are pitiless only when completely convinced that, in shielding a friend or in refraining from denouncing him, they are injuring that cause which is most precious to them. Though they are usually esteemed as people of crystalline righteousness, they are not safe from frequent accusations of “intellectuality,” a contemptuous epithet for those who are blameless as theoreticians, but hampered in action by an oversensitivity to ethical considerations. A revolutionary should be without scruples. It is bettei to cut down human trees blindly than to wonder which among them are really rotten.
+Further, we need to create ''a new global ecological'' ''movement'' able to define the outlines of an ecological society and struggle to actualize it. Such a movement must seek to bridge the economic and political gaps between the North and the South. Indeed, in confronting these issues the ecology movement must become truly global in its perspectives and outreach, and strive to make new bonds between activists all over the world. Importantly, we must work to compensate for the economic disadvantages forced on peasants and producers in the global South. At the same time, such a movement must develop real local political foundations, and strive to bridge the gaps between the rich and the poor in all communities, strengthen municipal political life, encourage regional ecological production, and foster communal sensibilities—by empowering common people as responsible ''citizens''.
-This variety of Ketman is one of the most prevalent in the people’s democracies because the new ethic is of recent inculcation, whereas the ethic vanquished by the New Faith was ensconced there for centuries. One can never foresee when and in whom this Ketman will appear, which makes for an element of surprise. Individuals who give one every reason to suppose that they do not denounce others turn out to be inveterate informers; individuals who are apparently most indifferent to “prejudices,” show themselves inexplicably loyal toward their friends and even toward strangers. Since this Ketman augments the difficulties of controlling the citizens’ thoughts, it is diligently sought out and penalized; yet the number of situations to which it can be applied is so great that it often eludes all manner of pressure.
+To fulfill the promises of climate justice we need to ask ourselves even more questions. How can we see beyond the current environmental focus on the major climate summits (like COP 15 in Copenhagen and COP 16 in Cancún), important as they may be, and understand why they have failed to take decisive action? How can we discern and expose the fashionable “false solutions” propagated by the profit-hungry corporations and their lobbies? What can we learn from the escalated calls for climate justice, and how can we act accordingly? How can we work to strengthen this global movement, and make sure it lives up to its far-reaching ideals? And what may this movement learn from the theory and practice of social ecology? Brian Tokar touches upon all these questions, and more, in this book.
-The inhabitants of Western countries little realize that millions of their fellow-men, who seem superficially more or less similar to them, live in a world as fantastic as that of the men from Mars. They are unaware of the perspectives on human nature that Ketman opens. Life in constant internal tension develops talents which are latent in man. He does not even suspect to what heights of cleverness and psychological perspicacity he can rise when he is cornered and must either be skillful or perish. The survival of those best adapted to mental acrobatics creates a human type that has been rare until now. The necessities which drive men to Ketman sharpen the intellect.
+Brian Tokar is a seasoned activist with a long commitment to peace, justice and environmental concerns. Tokar was introduced to radical activism in New York City in the early 1970s, first in anti-war work, and then in the powerful antinuclear movement. In 1980, inspired by the ideas of social ecologist Murray Bookchin, he moved to Vermont to work with the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE), and got increasingly involved in Green politics and environmental justice. Tokar has been a key coordinator of resistance against biotechnology and genetic engineering in New England, and he founded the ISE’s Climate Justice Project in 2006. He is currently the director of the ISE and an instructor in environmental studies at the University of Vermont.
-Whoever would take the measure of intellectual life in the countries of Central or Eastern Europe from the monotonous articles appearing in the press or the stereotyped speeches pronounced there, would be making a grave error. Just as theologians in periods of strict orthodoxy expressed their views in the rigorous language of the Church, so the writers of the people’s democracies make use of an accepted special style, terminology, and linguistic ritual. What is important is not what someone said but what he wanted to say, disguising his thought by removing a comma, inserting an “and,” establishing this rather than another sequence in the problems discussed. Unless one has lived there one cannot know how many titanic battles are being fought, how the heroes of Ketman are falling, what this warfare is being waged over. Obviously, people caught up in this daily struggle are rather contemptuous of their compatriot political emigres. A surgeon cannot consider a butcher his equal in dexterity; just so a Pole, Czech, or Hungarian practiced in the art of dissimulation smiles when he learns that someone in the emigration has called him a traitor (or a swine) at the very moment when this traitor (or swine) is engaged in a match of philosophical chess on whose outcome the fate of fifteen laboratories or twenty ateliers depends. They do not know how one pays— those abroad do not know. They do not know what one buys, and at what price.
+Brian Tokar’s authorship reflects this engagement with radical ecology, and his major publications include ''The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future'' (San Pedro: R. & E. Miles, 1987; Revised edition 1992), and ''Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash'' (Boston: South End Press, 1997). Tokar has also edited books such as ''Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering'' (London: Zed Books, 2001), and ''Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade, and the Globalization of Hunger'' (Burlington: Toward Freedom, 2004). His most recent book on food politics, edited with Fred Magdoff, is titled ''Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal'' (New York: Monthly Review, 2010). These publications all point to Tokar’s long-standing involvement with the ecology movement. Tokar also has written numerous essays and articles throughout the decades, engaging with the pressing environmental issues of the day.
-Ketman as a social institution is not entirely devoid of advantages. In order to evaluate them, one need only look at life in the West. Westerners, and especially Western intellectuals, suffer from a special variety of laedium vitae; their emotional and intellectual life is too dispersed. Everything they think and feel evaporates like steam in an open expanse. Freedom is a burden to them. No conclusions they arrive at are binding: it may be so, then again it may not. The result is a constant uneasiness. The happiest of them seem to be those who become Communists. They live within a wall which they batter themselves against, but which provides them with a resistance that helps them define themselves. Steam that once evaporated into the air becomes a force under pressure. An even greater energy is generated in those who must hide their Communist convictions, that is, who must practice Ketman, a custom which is, after all, not unknown in the countries of the West.
+The original edition of ''Toward Climate Justice'' (2010) was substantially based on a series of essays that first appeared in various journals. The author and publishers would like to thank the editors of ''Z Magazine'', the ''Journal of Aesthetics and Protest'', ''Communalism: A Social Ecology Journal'', ''Capitalism Nature Socialism'', the websites ''ZNet'', ''Counterpunch'', ''Toward Freedom'' and ''AlterNet'', and (for this revised edition) the ''Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement'' for originally publishing those essays, portions of which were adapted and reworked for this volume. Brian Tokar’s essays have aimed to explain, encourage, and influence the emerging climate justice movement since early 2008. Now thoroughly updated and revised, this book seeks to offer a comprehensive overview of the movement and its challenges.
-In short, Ketman means self-realization against something. He who practices Ketman suffers because of the obstacles he meets; but if these obstacles were suddenly to be removed, he would find himself in a void which might perhaps prove much more painful. Internal revolt is sometimes essential to spiritual ^health, and can create a particular form of happiness. What can be said openly is often much less interesting than the emotional magic of defending one’s private sanctuary. For most people the necessity of living in constant tension and watchfulness is a torture, but many intellectuals accept this necessity with masochistic pleasure.
+While ecological concerns today are publicly acknowledged and debated, mainstream media tend to go to great lengths to downplay their radical underlying messages. Still, the intensifying climate crisis—with its prospects for global warming and meteorological chaos—requires creative social alternatives as well as bold political action. As a social ecologist, Brian Tokar urges us to go to the roots of the ecological crisis and propose new social alternatives. That such solutions are needed is an understatement.
-He who practices Ketman lies. But would he be less dishonest if he could speak the truth? A painter who tries to smuggle illicit (“metaphysical”) delight in the beauty of the world into his picture of life on a collective farm would be lost if he were given complete freedom, for the beauty of the world seems greater to him the less free he is to depict it. A poet muses over what he would write if he were not bound by his political responsibilities, but could he realize his visions if he were at liberty to do so? Ketman brings comfort, fostering dreams of what might be, and even the enclosing fence affords the solace of reverie.
+It remains, however, to see whether this emerging movement for climate justice will succeed in bridging the economic and political gaps between the North and the South—the affluent and the impoverished—into a new responsible politics for civic empowerment and global solidarity. But this movement aspires to do so, and we all need to help it live up to its potential.
-Who knows whether it is not in man’s lack of an internal core that the mysterious success of the New Faith and its charm for the intellectual lie? By subjecting man to pressure, the New Faith creates this core, or in any case the feeling that it exists. Fear of freedom is nothing more than fear of the void. “There is nothing in man,” said a friend of mine, a dialectician. “He will never extract anything out of himself, because there is nothing there. You can’t leave the people and write in a wilderness. Remember that man is a function of social forces. Whoever wants to be alone will perish.” This is probably true, but I doubt if it can be called anything more than the law of our times. Feeling that there was nothing in him, Dante could not have written his Divine Comedy or Montaigne his Essays, nor could Chardin have painted a single still-life. Today man believes there is nothing in him, so he accepts anything, even if he knows it to be bad, in order’to find himself at one with others, in order not to be alone. As long as he believes this, there is little one can reproach in his behavior. Perhaps it is better for him to breed a full-grown Ketman, to submit to pressure and thus feel that he is, than to take a chance on the wisdom of past ages which maintains that man is a creature of God.
+Our choices and actions today—for better or worse—will have defining consequences for future generations.
-But suppose one should try to live without Ketman, to challenge fate, to say: “If I lose, I shall not pity myself.” Suppose one can live without outside pressure, suppose one can create one’s own inner tension—then it is not true that there is nothing in man. To take this risk would be an act of faith.
+Eirik EigladJune 2010
-** Chapter Four Alpha, the Moralist
+=== {{anchor|PrefacetotheRevisedEdition}} {{anchor|PrefacetotheRevisedEdition1}} {{anchor|Topofpart0003html}} Preface to the Revised Edition ===
-The history of the last decades in Central and Eastern Europe abounds in situations in regard to which all epithets and theoretical considerations lose meaning. A man’s effort to match up to these situations decides his fate. The solution each accepts differs according to those impalpable factors which constitute his individuality.
+Just a few short years ago, as the research for this book was beginning to take shape, public discussions of the emerging global climate crisis were far different than today’s. Global warming was generally depicted as an esoteric scientific issue with impacts that would be felt in a somewhat distant future. Efforts to engage the public, especially in the United States, were generally limited to explaining the science of global warming and emphatically making the case that the phenomenon was real. Environmentalists embraced images of polar bears stranded on shrinking ice floes, and occasionally referenced the experiences of island dwellers concerned about the loss of their homes to rising sea levels. For the most part, climate issues were something for future generations to grapple with. For the present, people could be consumed with more immediate concerns.
-Since the fate of millions is often most apparent in those who by profession note changes in themselves and in others, i.e. the writers, a few portraits of typical Eastern European writers may serve as concrete examples of what is happening within the Imperium.
+Now we have unambiguously entered the age of extreme weather. Unprecedented droughts, storms and wildfires are almost constantly in the news, even in the relatively sheltered communities of North America. Uniquely powerful hurricanes and tornadoes have devastated communities throughout the East and South, and unprecedented droughts and wildfires continually plague the West. Images of devastating storm damage from other parts of the world paint an even more severe image of our current reality. While mainstream commentators persist in attributing such incidents to short-term weather phenomena like El Niño currents and polar vortices, it is clear that something has dramatically shifted in our day-to-day experience of life on this planet. When established authors on climate change like James Hansen and Bill McKibben write that today’s earth no longer resembles the one on which civilizations emerged, it is not merely an artistic flourish, but a central fact of our daily lived experience.
-The man I call Alpha is one of the best-known prose writers east of the Elbe. He was a close friend of mine, and memories of many difficult moments that we went through together tie us to each other. I find it hard to remain unmoved when I recall him. I even ask myself if I should subject him to this analysis. But I shall do so because friendship would not prevent me from writing an article on his books in which I would say more or less what I shall say here.
+The relationship between extreme weather and longer-term, human-induced changes to the global climate remains an area of legitimate scientific controversy. The underlying processes are complex, and it’s difficult to be sure about the links between climate and weather, even as we are now effectively certain that human activities such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down the world’s forests are disrupting the climate system and warming the earth. But a few things are well understood.
-Before the War, he was a tall, thin youth with horn-rimmed glasses. He printed his stories in a certain right-wing weekly that was held in low esteem by the literary circles of Warsaw, which were made up chiefly of Jews or of people who looked with distaste on the racist and totalitarian yearnings of this publication. The editor of the weekly had to some degree discovered him, and had reason to congratulate himself upon his choice, for Alpha’s talent was developing rapidly. Very shortly, his first novel began to appear serially in the weekly. It was later published by one of the leading houses, and created a great stir.
+First, warm air simply holds more moisture, a straight-forward physical phenomenon. In a warming climate, clouds accumulate more water over a longer period of time and have more water to unload when conditions are finally ripe for rainfall. The 2014 US National Climate Assessment reports that a consistently higher proportion of precipitation now falls in the form of very heavy storms, up to a 71 percent increase in the northeastern US from 20[th] century norms.[1]
-His main interest was directed toward tragic moral conflicts. At the time many young writers were under the spell of Joseph Conrad’s prose. Alpha was particularly susceptible to Conrad’s style because he had a tendency to create solemn and hieratic characters. Night fascinated him. Small people with their powerful passions in a night whose silence and mystery embraced their fate in its gigantic folds— this was the usual formula of his novels and stories. His youthful works resembled Conrad’s in theii majesty and silence, and in a sense of the immensity of the inhuman, indifferent world. Alpha’s position was metaphysical and tragic. He was tormented by the enigma of purity—moral purity and purity of tone in what he wrote. He distilled his sentences. He wanted each to be not merely a statement but, like a phrase in a musical composition, irreplaceable and effective in its very sound.
+Secondly, we know that the turbulent weather we are experiencing is precisely what increasingly sophisticated models of the global climate have long predicted. The entire system is shifting ever farther from the relatively stable state that prevailed for much of human history—over hundreds, and likely thousands, of years. The current instability of Arctic and Antarctic ice is one key indicator. Climatologist James Hansen describes these shifts in the climate as analogous to playing a game with loaded dice. For quite a long time, the odds of relatively normal temperature, below normal temperature, and above normal temperature were about equal, as if each of these conditions were represented by two sides of a six-sided cube. To portray today’s realities, the cube-shaped dice would have to be reimagined, such that four of the six sides represent warmer than normal conditions, and more than half a “side” (to stretch the analogy somewhat) would have to represent weather that is statistically far warmer than normal.[2] As of this writing, twenty nine years have passed since the world as a whole last experienced a single month that averaged below normal in temperature by 20[th] century standards.[3] These observations, given the parallel and consistent predictions of climate models, strengthen the case that extreme weather is significantly attributable to the shifting climate.
-This need for purity, I would say for otherworldly purity, was basic to his character; yet in his relations with people he was haughty and imperious. His pursuit of purity in his work was closely linked to his personal arrogance; the former was his sublimation, his other ego, the repository of all his hopes. The more he worried about his disordered private life, the more highly he prized his redeeming activity, which is what his writing was for him, and the more he accorded to it the nature of a solemn rite. The one rank that could have sated his ambition was that of a cardinal. Slow movements, the flow of scarlet silk, the proffering of a ring to kiss—this for him was purity of gesture, self-expression through the medium of a better self. There are certain comic actors who dream all their lives of playing a serious, dignified role; in him, much the same motives were at play. Alpha, who was gifted with an exceptional sense of humor in conversation, changed completely when he began to write; then he dwelt only in the highest registers of tragedy. His ambition reached further than fame as an author of well-written books. He wanted to be a moral authority.
+Finally, a few studies have sought to measure the specific role of climate change in causing individual extreme weather events. One of the most detailed studies, which appeared in the prestigious journal ''Nature'' in early 2011, sought to measure how much climate changes contributed to a series of catastrophic flooding events in England and Wales during the autumn of 2000. The study took ten years to complete and mobilized a vast network of volunteers to offer surplus time on their home and office computers in order to run thousands of forecast scenarios and complete the required calculations. In the end, the researchers determined that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions made those severe storms 90 percent more likely in two out of three climate model scenarios. In 90 percent of scenarios, the severity of the storms was at least 20% attributable to greenhouse gases. Such precision is technically possible, but in fact only serves to confirm the conclusions that climate scientists have been discussing in more general terms for a very long time.[4]
-The novel I mentioned, which was his first big success, was widely acclaimed as a Catholic novel, and he was hailed as the most gifted Catholic writer, which in a Catholic country like Poland was no small matter. It is hard to say whether or not he really was a Catholic writer. The number of twentieth-century Catholic authors is negligible. So-called conversions of intellectuals are usually of a dubious nature, not significantly different from transitory conversions to surrealism, expressionism, or existentialism.
+Another important factor that has changed dramatically since the chapters of this book first began to be drafted during 2007-09 is the character of the climate change movement.[5] From 2007 onward, representatives of civil society organizations have converged annually at the site of various UN climate negotiations, seeking to urge stronger global policies to curtail excess emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Many representatives of indigenous and other land-based peoples from around the world have made a compelling case that the climate crisis is not just another environmental issue, but one with profound implications for human rights and human survival. This is especially true for the most marginalized communities in the global South, who have been experiencing the consequences of extreme weather and a destabilized climate for well over a decade.
-Alpha was the kind of Catholic so many of us were. This was a period of interest in Thomism and of references to Jacques Maritain in literary discussion. It would be wrong to maintain that for all these “intellectual Catholics” literary fashion alone was at stake; one cannot reduce the clutching gestures of a drowning man to a question of fashion. But it would be equally incorrect to consider literary debates based on a skillful juggling of Thomist terminology as symptoms of Catholicism. Be that as it may, the “intellectual Catholics” colored certain literary circles. Theirs was a special political role; they were foes of racism and totalitarianism. In this they differed from the Catholics proper, whose political mentality was not entirely free of worship of “healthy organisms” (i.e. Italy and Germany) and approval of anti-Semitic brawls. The Communists despised Jacques Maritain’s influence as degenerate, but they tolerated the “intellectual Catholics” because they opposed the ideas of the extreme right. Soon after he published his novel, Alpha began to frequent the circles of the “intellectual Catholics” and the left. Sensitive to the opinion people held of him, and taking the writer’s role as a moral authority very seriously, he broke with the rightist weekly and signed an open letter against anti-Semitism.
+In the lead-up to the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the new “350.org” network began staging symbolic but highly visible demonstrations around the world to dramatize the need to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million. These were relatively early, somewhat cautious stirrings of a rising public awareness of the severity of the climate crisis. In Copenhagen itself, as many as 100,000 people took to the streets to demand a comprehensive global climate agreement that was not to be. But after a short hiatus, concerned people around the world are again on the march, and the contrast is especially noteworthy in the US. A thousand people were arrested outside the White House in the late summer of 2012 protesting the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline and nearly 40,000 demonstrated in Washington in the winter of 2014. As of this writing, a significantly larger public event was being planned in New York City to coincide with a special meeting called by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to urge heads of state to make good on the promise of a new international climate agreement by 2015.
-Everyone looked for something different in Catholicism. Alpha, with his tragic sense of the world, looked for forms: words and concepts, in short, textures. This tragic sense in him was not unlike Wells’s Invisible Man, who when he wanted to appear among people had to paste on a false nose, bandage his face and pull gloves over his invisible hands. Catholicism supplied Alpha’s language. With concepts like sin and saintliness, damnation and grace he could grasp the experiences of the characters he described; and, even more important, the language of Catholicism automatically introduced the elevated tone that was so necessary to him and lulled his longing for a cardinal’s scarlet. The hero of his book was a priest, a sure sign of the influence of French Catholic novelists, and above all Bernanos, but also an expression of Alpha’s urge to create pure and powerful characters. The action took place in a village, and here his weaknesses revealed themselves. He was so preoccupied with building up moral conflicts that he was blind to concrete details and incapable of observing living people. Having been raised in the city, he knew little of peasants and their life. The village he described was a universal one; it could just as easily have been Breton or Flemish, and for this reason it was not a real village. The characters seemed to be wearing costumes alien to them (like young nobles dressed as shepherds in pastoral literature), and their speech was uniformly alike.
+Even more significantly, people around the world have been organizing to resist what the ''New York Times'' has called the largest expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure since the 1950s. With readily accessible sources of oil and gas reaching their limits worldwide, fossil fuel producers are going to great lengths to tap into so-called “unconventional” sources of oil and gas—such as tar sands, previously impenetrable shale formations, and oil deposits lying miles beneath the oceans, including in the far reaches of the Arctic. Michael Klare, a long-time analyst of energy geopolitics, describes this as the age of “extreme energy,” as most new sources of oil and gas now require energy companies “to drill in extreme temperatures or extreme weather, or use extreme pressures, or operate under extreme danger—or some combination of all of these.”[6] Extreme energy extraction is far more threatening to ecosystems and human communities than conventional oil drilling, and the organized opposition of those communities has significantly reshaped the climate movement’s understanding of the local impacts of climate-destroying activities.[7]
-The story played itself out against a barely sketched-in background, but it was powerfully welded together and the critics received it enthusiastically. It ran into several editions quickly. He received a national award for it which brought him a large sum of money. It is possible that the prize jury took into account not only the artistic merits of the book, but also certain political advantages to themselves in choosing him. In those years, the government was clearly flirting with the extreme right and the choice of Alpha seemed a wise move. The right would certainly be satisfied; whereas the liberals would have no reason to attack the decision for after all everyone was then free to believe as he pleased and to write as he believed.
+In recent years, we have seen a widespread uprising of First Nations indigenous communities across Canada, objecting to the exceptionally destructive extraction of oil from the Alberta Tar Sands, as well as the construction of new and expanded pipelines across the continent to facilitate exports of tar sands bitumen. Opposition to hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) of underground shale formations to extract oil and gas has arisen throughout North America, as well as in the UK, Eastern Europe, and as far afield as South Africa. Iñupiat communities in Alaska have been at the forefront of opposition to oil drilling in newly navigable but uniquely hazardous Arctic waters, and environmentalists everywhere breathed a sigh of relief when Shell Oil withdrew its damaged drilling vessels from Alaskan waters in early 2013.[8] In the historic coal mining regions of the eastern US an unprecedented alliance of long-time local residents and youthful forest activists seeks to end the most extreme form of strip-mining for coal, appropriately described as “mountaintop-removal” mining.[9] All these developments speak to the potential for a heightened sense of immediacy in today’s climate movements, and an increased awareness of the energy industry’s local, as well as global impacts.
-Despite fame and money, in his heart Alpha never considered his novel and his collection of short stories good books. Still, the position he had won permitted him to be as haughty as he loved to be. He was recognized as the author of profound and noble prose, whereas his colleagues could hardly hope to reach a wide public otherwise than by creating a cheap sensation. Their books were either glaringly naturalistic, especially in a physiological sense, or else they were psychological tracts disguised as novels. Men of letters lived in the intellectual ghetto of their literary cafes; and the more they suffered from their isolation from the life of the masses, the stranger and less comprehensible their styles became. The bitterness Alpha felt in spite of the success of his first books was something he found difficult to define, but the moment when he realized that there was something wrong with his writing was decisive for the rest of his life.
+The core underlying message of climate justice—that those who contribute least to excess greenhouse gas emissions are disproportionately impacted by climate changes—is now embraced by a wide variety of distinct but complementary popular movements from around the world. The most urgent voices continue to be those of indigenous and other land-based peoples, especially in the global South, whose communities have felt the impacts of climate disruptions that threaten their lands and their entire way of life. In the North, climate justice has continued the evolution of a variety of global justice movements that emerged in response to the rise of international financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization during the late 1990s and early 2000s. This includes the youthful Rising Tide network, which was founded in Europe, sprouted chapters throughout the US, Canada and Australia, and has staged dramatic direct actions to challenge numerous false solutions to the climate crisis, as well as the expansion of extreme energy. In the US, the leading voices for climate justice are often from communities of color that have been organizing for decades in response to their disproportionate exposure to a wide variety of environmental hazards. These environmental justice communities continue the legacy of the civil rights movement in the US as they resist environmental racism and seek a transition to a more just and sustainable future. This unique constellation of voices from around the world has proved central to our understanding of the profound social justice and human rights implications of the unfolding climate crisis.
-A great doubt assailed him. If his colleagues doubted the worth of their work, suspended as it was in a void, then his perplexity took on larger proportions. He wanted to attain a purity of moral tone, but purity in order to be genuine must be earthy, deeply rooted in experience and observation of life. He perceived that he had blundered into falseness by living in the midst of ideas about people, instead of among people themselves. What he knew about man was based on his own subjective experiences within the four walls of his room. His Catholicism was no more than a cover; he toyed with it as did many twentieth-century Catholics, trying to clothe his nudity in an esteemed, Old World cloak. He was seeking some means of awakening in his reader the emotional response he wanted, and obviously the reader on finding words like grace or sin, known to him since childhood, reacted strongly. But there is an element of dishonesty in such a use of words and concepts.
+In conventional environmental policy circles, however, very little has changed since this book first appeared in 2010. Significant numbers of environmental policy advocates continue to accept inadequate and short-sighted approaches to curtailing climate-related pollution in the name of a misdirected political “realism.” International negotiators at the UN level continue to advance the notion of “voluntary” national pledges as the most viable way to achieve global reductions of greenhouse gases, and policymakers persist in implementing proposed reductions through the market-based trading of carbon emissions allowances. The focus on emissions trading contributed greatly to the failings of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, as we will see, and remains a central focus of climate policy discussions in the US and Europe, including the Obama administration’s latest efforts to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants.
-Alpha no longer knew whether the conflicts he created were real. Hailed as a Catholic writer, he knew that he was not; and his reaction was like that of a painter who having painted cubistically for a while is astonished to find that he is still called a cubist after he has changed his style. Critics, deceived by appearances, reckoned his books among those that were healthy and noble as opposed to the decadent works of his fellow-writers. But he realized that he was no healthier than his colleagues who at least did not attempt to hide theii sorry nakedness.
+Energy industries and policymakers continue to persist in promoting numerous false solutions to the climate crisis. Not only carbon markets, but also various forms of large-scale experimentation with the atmosphere—termed “geoengineering”—are actively promoted by those who are unwilling to consider the necessary changes to energy production and the structures of the economic system. Environmentally destructive and uncertain energy technologies, including nuclear power, carbon sequestration from coal plants, and the large scale combustion of biomass for energy, are widely depicted as part of the solution rather than as merely perpetuating existing problems. The expansion of hydraulic fracturing of shale formations as a means to extract previously unreachable deposits of oil and gas has served to reinforce the long-standing myth that natural gas can serve as a “bridge fuel” to a more sustainable future.
-The War broke out, and our city and country became a part of Hitler’s Imperium. For five and a half years we lived in a dimension completely different from that which any literature or experience could have led us to know. What we beheld surpassed the most daring and the most macabre imagination. Descriptions of horrors known to us of old now made us smile at their naivete. German rule in Europe was ruthless, but nowhere so ruthless as in the East, for the East was populated by races which, according to the doctrines of National Socialism, were either to be utterly eradicated or else used for heavy physical labor. The events we were forced to participate in resulted from the effort to put these doctrines into practice.
+The use of more genuinely renewable energy sources is also growing rapidly, but its course of development under a system of corporate control and financial speculation has raised many questions of its own. Many analysts point out that power from the sun and wind are now the fastest growing energy sources, surpassing new fossil fuel projects in much of the US and Europe. Countries like Denmark, Spain, Portugal and Germany are in the forefront, and even some US states are approaching 20 percent renewable electricity. But these projects still represent a small fraction of overall consumption, and many renewables are adding to, rather than replacing, existing capacity. Community controlled models of wind power development, as pioneered in Denmark, are increasingly superseded by larger, corporate-owned projects, raising heightened concerns over the impacts on ecosystems and communities, even in regions where support for climate mitigation measures is strong.
-Still we lived; and since we were writers, we tried to write. True, from time to time one of us dropped out, shipped off to a concentration camp or shot. There was no help for this. We were like people marooned on a dissolving floe of ice; we dared not think of the moment when it would melt away. War communiques supplied the latest data on our race with death. We had to write; it was our only defense against despair. Besides, the whole country was sown with the seeds of conspiracy and an “underground state” did exist in reality, so why shouldn’t an underground literature exist as well. Except for two or three Nazi propaganda organs, no books or magazines were printed in the language of the defeated nation. Nonetheless, the cultural life of the country refused to be stifled. Underground publications were mimeographed on the run or illegally printed in a small format that was easy to circulate. Many underground lectures and authors’ evenings were organized. There were even underground presentations of plays. All this raised the morale of the beaten but still fighting nation. National morale was good, too good, as events toward the end of the War proved.
+We know that technologies exist to meet our essential needs with far less energy, and to permit a conversion to non-fossil, non-nuclear energy sources by mid-century or sooner.[10] The main obstacles, as we shall see, are the entrenched political power of the fossil fuel industries, their continued excessive profitability as prices rise, and the widespread disinterest in renewable energy on the part of global capital. Questions about future energy sources are, above all, questions about what kind of society we want to live in, a topic we will return to in this book’s later chapters.
-In the course of these years, Alpha successfully realized his ambition to become a moral authority. His behavior was that of an exemplary writer-citizen. His judgments as to which actions were proper or improper passed in literary circles as those of an oracle, and he was often asked to decide whether someone had trespassed against the unwritten patriotic code. By unspoken accord, he became something of a leader of all the writers in our city. Underground funds went into his hands and he divided them among his needy colleagues; he befriended beginning writers; he founded and co-edited an underground literary review, typed copies of which were transmitted in rotation to “clubs” where they were read aloud in clandestine meetings. He ranked rather high among those initiated into the secrets of the underground network. His actions were characterized by real humanitarianism. Even before the War he had parted with his rightist patron who had voiced the opinion that the country needed to institute its own totalitarianism. (The patron was shot by the Gestapo in the first year of the War.) When the German authorities set out to murder systematically the three million Jews of Poland, the anti-Semites did not feel compelled to worry overmuch; they condemned this bestiality aloud, but many of them secretly thought it was not entirely unwarranted. Alpha belonged to those inhabitants of our town who reacted violently against this mass slaughter. He fought with his pen against the indifference of others, and personally helped Jews in hiding even though such aid was punishable by death.
+Readers familiar with the original 2010 edition of this book may notice rather substantial changes and revisions on nearly every page. I’ve attempted to update every chapter with new information and analysis on recent developments in climate science and politics. The most substantial changes are in Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 incorporates the discussion of the origins of climate justice that originally appeared in Chapter 2, and includes material from three other articles I’ve written since 2012 chronicling the climate justice movement. Chapter 4, on carbon markets and the other corporate-driven false solutions to the climate crisis, combines portions of the original chapters 2 and 4 and updates the story of the evolution of US climate policies.
-He was a resolute opponent of nationalism, so nightmarishly incarnated in the Germans. This does not mean, however, that he had Communist leanings. The number of Communists in Poland had always been insignificant; and the cooperation between the Russians and the Germans after the Molotov-Rib-bentrop pact created conditions particularly unfavorable to the activity of Moscow followers. The Communist Underground was weak. The hopes of the masses were turned toward the West, and the “underground state” was dependent on the Govern-ment-in-Exile in London. Alpha, with his barometerlike sensitivity to the moral opinions of his environment, felt no sympathy for a country that awakened friendly feelings in almost no one. But like the majority of his friends, he was anxious for far-reaching social reforms and for a people’s government.
+Whereas the first three chapters of the original book were largely based on a series of magazine articles that reviewed the broad scope of developments in climate justice over a period of years, leading up to the UN conference in Copenhagen and its immediate aftermath, I believe the new chapters 1-4 are all substantially more coherent and topical, each now addressing a specific aspect of the evolving climate justice story. The last two chapters are substantially unchanged in structure (except for the removal of the false solutions discussions from Chapter 5), though a summary of my further research on current utopian thought—a portion of which was added to the social ecology chapter at the last moment in 2010—is now placed where it properly belongs in Chapter 5.
-He and I used to meet often. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we spent the War years together. The sight of him was enough to raise one’s spirits. He smiled in the face of all adversity; his manner was nonchalant; and to symbolize his contempt for hob-nailed boots, uniforms, and shouts of “Heil Hitler,” he habitually carried a black umbrella. His tall, lean figure, the ironic flash of his eyes behind his glasses, and the anointed air with which he strode through the terror-plagued streets of the city added up to a silhouette that defied the laws of war.
+I am grateful to my students at the University of Vermont for their thoughtful comments and questions on these chapters over the past few years, and especially to Rachel Smolker, who reviewed drafts of the revised chapters and offered her incomparable insights and suggestions. Eirik Eiglad of The New Compass has demonstrated an exceptional patience and diligence throughout the many stages of this project. I also credit the unfailing energy and inspiration of my colleagues on the board of 350Vermont and the youthful activists of Rising Tide Vermont for helping sustain my confidence that we ''can'' create a better world.
-Once, in the first year of the War, we were returning from a visit to a mutual friend who lived in the country. As I remember, we were arguing about the choice of a train. We decided against the advice of our host who had urged us to take a train leaving half an hour later. We arrived in Warsaw and walked along the streets feeling very satisfied with life. It was a beautiful summer morning. We did not know that this day was to be remembered as one of the blackest in the history of our city. Scarcely had I closed my door behind me when I heard shrieks in the street. Looking out the window, I saw that a general manhunt was on. This was the first man-hunt for Auschwitz. Later millions of Europeans were to be killed there, but at the time this concentration camp was just starting to operate. From the first huge transport of people caught on the streets that day no one, it appears, escaped alive. Alpha and I had strolled those streets five minutes before the beginning of the hunt; perhaps his umbrella and his insouciance brought us luck.
+Brian TokarEast Montpelier, VermontJune 2014
-These years were a test for every writer. The real tragedy of events pushed imaginary tragedies into the shade. Whichever of us failed to find an expression for collective despair or hope was ashamed. Only elementary feelings remained: fear, pain at the loss of dear ones, hatred of the oppressor, sympathy with the tormented. Alpha, whose talent was in search of real and not imaginary tragedy, sensed the material at hand and wrote a series of short stories which were published as a book after the War and widely translated. The theme of all these stories can be defined as loyalty. Not for nothing had Conrad been the favorite writer of his youth. This was a loyalty to something in man, something nameless, but strong and pure. Before the War, he tended to call this imperative sense of loyalty moral, in the Catholic sense. Now, fearing falseness, he affirmed merely that this imperative existed. When his dying heroes turned their eyes toward a mute heaven, they could find nothing there; they could only hope that their loyalty was not completely meaningless and that, in spite of everything, something in the universe responded to it.
+=== {{anchor|1GlobalWarmingandtheStruggl}} {{anchor|1GlobalWarmingandtheStruggl1}} {{anchor|Topofpart0004html}} 1. Global Warming and the Struggle for Justice ===
-The morality of his heroes was a lay morality, with a question mark, with a pause, a pause that was not quite faith. I think he was more honest in these stories than in his pre-war writings. At the same time, he expressed accurately and powerfully the state of mind of the countless underground fighters dying in the battle against Nazism. Why did they throw their lives into the scale? Why did they accept torture and death? They had no point of support like the Fiihrer for the Germans or the New Faith for the Communists. It is doubtful whether most of them believed in Christ. It could only have been loyalty, loyalty to something called fatherland or honor, but something stronger than any name. In one of his stories, a young boy, tortured by the police and knowing that he will be shot, gives the name of his friend because he is afraid to die alone. They meet before the firing squad, and the betrayed forgives his betrayer. This forgiveness cannot be justified by any utilitarian ethic; there is no reason to forgive traitors. Had this story been written by a Soviet author, the betrayed would have turned away with disdain from the man who had succumbed to base weakness. Forsaking Christianity, Alpha became a more religious writer than he had been before, if we grant that the ethic of loyalty is an extension of religious ethics and a contradiction of an ethic of collective goals.
+How can we give voice to a more justice-centered approach to the global climate crisis? This question was raised by activists from around the world during the lead-up to the landmark 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. As calls for climate justice rang through the streets of Copenhagen that chilly December, both participants and careful observers came to discover the vastly disproportionate human impacts of global climate changes. Until relatively recently, the warming of the earth’s climate was most often viewed as a rather esoteric scientific concern, with consequences that would be felt at some indefinite future time and mostly affect the non-human inhabitants of remote and uniquely endangered ecosystems. The most iconic symbol of the wave of climate activism that flourished prior to Copenhagen was the polar bear, struggling to stand its ground amidst shrinking ice flows in the Arctic north.
-In the second half of the War, a serious crisis in political consciousness took place in the “underground state.” The underground struggle against the occupying power entailed great sacrifices; the number of persons executed or liquidated in concentration camps grew constantly. To explain the need of such sacrifice solely on the basis of loyalty left one a prey to doubt. Loyalty can be the basis of individual action, but when decisions affecting the fate of hundreds of thousands of people are to be made, loyalty is not enough. One seeks logical justification. But what kind of logical justification could there be? From the East the victorious Red Army was drawing near. The Western armies were far away. In the name of what future, in the name of what order were young people dying every day? More than one man whose task it was to sustain the morale of others posed this question to himself. No one was able to formulate an answer. Irrational dreams that something would happen to stop the advance of the Red Army and at the same time overthrow Hitler were linked with an appeal to the honor of the “country without a Quisling”; but this was not a very substantial prop for those of a more sober turn of mind. At this moment, Communist underground organizations began to be active, and were joined by some left-wing Socialists. The Communist program offered more realistic arguments than did the program of the London-directed “underground state”: the country, it was fairly clear, was going to be liberated by the Red Army; with its aid one should start a people’s revolution.
+As tens of thousands of people converged in Copenhagen, a different kind of climate movement had already begun to emerge. While some activists still featured polar bears in their imagery, and many others aimed quite sensibly to focus the world’s attention on the need to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to a maximum of 350 parts per million, a far more urgent outlook on the climate crisis was gradually beginning to capture the world’s attention. The outlook known as climate justice is rooted in vulnerable communities around the world that have for many years experienced severe and destabilizing climate-related disruptions to their lives and livelihoods. As we will see, climate justice embodies the fundamental understanding that those who contribute the least to the excess of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere consistently and disproportionately experience the most severe and disruptive consequences of global warming, and are often the least prepared to cope with its consequences.
-Gradually the intellectuals in the underground became impatient with the irrational attitudes that were spreading in the resistance movement. This irrationality began to reach the point of hysteria. Conspiracy became an end in itself; to die or to expose others to death, something of a sport. Alpha found himself surrounded by living caricatures of the ethic of loyalty he expounded in his stories. The patriotic code of his class prohibited him from approaching the small groups whose policy followed Moscow’s dictates.
+In the United States, a marked shift in public perceptions was experienced briefly in 2005-06, when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes. Many residents of the most impoverished neighborhoods were left behind in the floods; others were never able to return. Soon afterward, the success of Al Gore’s award-winning documentary, ''An Inconvenient Truth'', spurred some substantive changes in public attitudes toward global climate disruptions, but the film advocated only the most superficial and shallow solutions, symbolized by the huge new wave of green products and corporate greenwashing that emerged during the late 2000s. In 2007, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared the evidence for human-caused global warming “unequivocal,” and the disturbing, and sometimes catastrophic, reality of worldwide climate disruptions was beginning to affect many people’s daily lives, even in the earth’s hitherto sheltered temperate zones.
-Like so many of his friends, Alpha felt himself in a trap. Then, for the first time in his writing he invoked his sense of humor, using it to point up the figures he knew so well, the figures of men mad for conspiracy. His satires bared the social background of underground hysteria. There is no doubt that the “underground state” was the handiwork of the intelligentsia above all, of a stratum never known in Western Europe, not to mention the Anglo-Saxon countries. Since the intelligentsia was, in its customs and ties, the legatee of the nobility (even if some members were of peasant origin), its characteristic traits were not especially attractive to the intellectuals. The intellectuals of Poland had made several attempts to revolt against the intelligentsia of which they themselves were a part, much as the intellectuals in America had rebelled against the middle class. When a member of the intelligentsia really began to think, he perceived that he was isolated from the broad masses of the population. Finding the social order at fault, he tended to become a radical in an effort to establish a tie with the masses. Alpha’s satires on the intelligentsia of the Underground convinced him that this stratum, with its many aberrations, boded ill for the future of the country if the postwar rulers were to be recruited from its ranks— which seemed inevitable in the event of the London Government-in-Exile’s arrival in Poland.
+For much of the 1980s and nineties, the minds of a media-dazzled American public seemed to be firmly lodged in the sand with respect to the emerging changes in the global climate. But by the end of the first decade of the 21[st] century, disturbing changes in our weather and in the once-familiar patterns of the seasons had become difficult to ignore. Initially, the changes were subtle. Spring would begin a couple of weeks or more earlier than it used to, and fall would start later. Unseasonably warm weather would appear sporadically throughout the year, while cold spells were more sudden, severe, and relatively short-lived. Rainfall in some areas increased markedly, while in other regions it became increasingly sparse, and arrived more often in rapid, concentrated deluges, often accompanied by catastrophic flooding.
-Just when he was passing through this process of bitter and impotent mockery, the uprising broke out. For two months, a kilometer-high column of smoke and flames stood over Warsaw. Two hundred thousand people died in the street fighting. Those neighborhoods which were not leveled by bombs or by the fire of heavy artillery were burned down by SS squads. After the uprising, the city which once numbered over a million inhabitants was a wilderness of ruins, its population deported, and its demolished streets literally cemeteries. Alpha, living in a distant suburb that bordered on fields, succeeded in escaping unharmed through the dangerous zone where people in flight were caught and sent to concentration camps.
+These were noticeable, but far from catastrophic changes, making it easier for Americans to remain oblivious to what was happening in other parts of the world. The catastrophic European heat wave of 2003, which killed more than 50,000 people, was barely reported in the US news media, and massive flooding in Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere was almost never reported as a climate-related story. Even unprecedented droughts and wildfires, from the Great Plains of the upper Midwest to much of the US southern tier, from Georgia through Texas and Arizona, were generally attributed to short-term weather patterns such the tropical ocean current known as El Niño. When parts of Alabama and Tennessee experienced their driest weather in over a century during 2007, and summer temperatures in Arizona—as well as in parts of Greece and Turkey—reached well above 115 degrees Fahrenheit, or around 45 Celsius, it still was difficult to find broadly accessible discussions of the longer-term climatic significance of these events.
-In April of 1945, after the Germans had been expelled by the Red Army (the battles were then raging at the gates of Berlin), Alpha and I returned to Warsaw and wandered together over the mounds of rubble that had once been streets. We spent several hours in a once familiar part of the city. Now we could not recognize it. We scaled a slope of red bricks and entered upon a fantastic moon-world. There was total silence. As we worked our way downward, balancing to keep from falling, ever new scenes of waste and destruction loomed before us. In one of the gorges we stumbled upon a little plank fastened to a metal bar. The inscription, written in red paint or in blood, read: “Lieutenant Zbyszek’s road of suffering.” I know what Alpha’s thoughts were at that time, and they were mine: we were thinking of what traces remain after the life of a man. These words rang like a cry to heaven from a shattered earth. It was a cry for justice. Who was Lieutenant Zbyszek? Who among the living would ever know what he had suffered? We imagined him crawling along this trail which some comrade, probably long-since killed, had marked with the inscription. We saw him as, with an effort of his will, he mustered his fleeting strength and, aware of being mortally wounded, thought only of carrying out his duty. Why? Who measured his wisdom or madness? Was this a monad of Leibnitz, fulfilling its destiny in the universe, or only the son of a postman, obeying a futile maxim of honor instilled in him by his father, who himself was living up to the virtues of a courtly tradition?
+Climate denialism thrived in the US even as wildfires swept repeatedly through large, populated areas of Arizona and southern California, and most media outlets barely mentioned that the hurricanes that devastated New Orleans and surroundings in 2005 were intensified by anomalously high sea temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and across the South Atlantic. Even when the reality of the unfolding climate crisis did briefly appear to break through the veils of the corporate media, it was quickly superseded by the severe economic downturn that began in 2008 and even by the sensationalized accusations of scientific misconduct that were disingenuously termed “Climate-gate.”[1] Weather and climate stories made the news again in 2012 when vast reaches of the agricultural Midwest experienced a dry spell that rivaled the catastrophic “Dust Bowl” years of the 1930s, and just a few months later when the remnants of Hurricane Sandy devastated coastal communities in New York, New Jersey and other eastern states. Climate concerns were raised once again in light of the unprecedented drought and wildfires that swept across California two years later. But these stories, too, were soon swept aside by other world events. An unusually cold, snowy winter throughout the northeastern quarter of the US in 2014—partly attributed to climate-related disruptions of the polar jet stream—further aroused the voices of sarcasm and dismissal: “You call this global warming?”
-Farther on, we came upon a worn footpath. It led into a deep mountain cleft. At the bottom stood a clumsy, huddled cross with a helmet on it. At the foot of the cross were freshly planted flowers. Somebody’s son lay here. A mother had found her way to him and worn the path through her daily visits.
+For people from the Arctic to the subtropics, however, the reality of global climate disruptions has already become an undeniable part of their lived experience. On every continent, the incidence of catastrophic floods, droughts and wildfires has systematically risen. Indigenous Arctic communities experiencing the loss of permafrost and the populations of island nations facing saltwater intrusions from rising seas all face an increasingly imminent need to relocate. Crop failures are increasingly frequent occurrences in many parts of Africa and south Asia, and catastrophic floods have washed away neighborhoods in Jakarta, Bangkok and other major world cities. A persistent and unrelenting drought has contributed greatly to the mass exodus of over a hundred thousand refugees from the continuing political instability in Somalia. The most severe typhoon ever to reach landfall devastated several Philippine islands, right on the eve of the 2013 UN climate conference in Warsaw. While it is a very long and labor-intensive process to precisely measure the climate component of specific weather events, the trends toward more extreme weather consistently match the projections of detailed climate models. It is also clear that these events continue to disproportionately impact indigenous and other land-based communities, as well as poor urban dwellers, and especially the roughly half of the world’s population that currently lives on less than two dollars a day.
-Theatrical thunder suddenly broke the silence. It was the wind rattling the metal sheets hanging from a cliff-like wall. We scrambled out of the heap of debris into a practically untouched courtyard. Rusting machines stood among the high weeds. And on the steps of the charred villa we found some account books listing profits and losses.
+The inability of many people in the North to comprehend the links between extreme weather and long-term changes in the climate is partly a result of the organized climate change denial that is both directly and indirectly supported by corporate benefactors from the fossil fuel industry.[2] But it is also the result of a persistent failure on the part of those who regularly communicate to the mainstream public about global warming. Until very recently, the climate crisis has been discussed in the US and Europe as mainly a scientific or technical matter. The hazards may be severe, but are viewed as uncertain and long-range in nature. We can read at length about the optimal level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its correlation to predicted changes in average global temperature, but still considerably less about the persistent real-world effects of climate disruptions. The proposed solutions tend to vary from relatively trivial suggestions like changing light bulbs—as highlighted at the end of Gore’s 2006 film—to disastrous technical fixes like reviving nuclear power, or pumping sun-blocking particulates into the atmosphere. Few commentators address the underlying systemic roots of the problem, much less the need for a sweeping ecological transformation of society.
-The Warsaw uprising begun at the order of the Government-in-Exile in London broke out, as we know, at the moment when the Red Army was approaching the capital and the retreating German armies were fighting in the outskirts of the city. Feeling in the Underground was reaching a boiling point; the Underground Army wanted to fight. The uprising was intended to oust the Germans and to take possession of the city so that the Red Army would be greeted by an already-functioning Polish government. Once the battle in the city began, and once it became obvious that the Red Army, standing on the other side of the river, would not move to the aid of the insurgents, it was too late for prudence. The tragedy played itself out according to all the immutable rules. This was the revolt of a fly against two giants. One giant waited beyond the river for the other to kill the fly. As a matter of fact, the fly defended itself, but its soldiers were generally armed only with pistols, grenades, and benzine bottles. For two months the giant sent his bombers over the city to drop their loads from a height of a few hundred feet; he supported his troops with tanks and the heaviest artillery. In the end, he crushed the fly only to be crushed in his turn by the second, patient giant.
+The persistent framing of the climate crisis as mainly a scientific problem contributed to the disproportionate coverage of the so-called “Climate-gate” scandals on both sides of the Atlantic. While mounting scientific evidence continues to support the most pessimistic predictions for the future of the earth’s climate, leaked emails from British climate scientists and a minor error of interpretation in the IPCC’s 2007 report came to dominate the headlines, just as world leaders were getting ready to attend the climate conference in Copenhagen. While it is easy to pin the blame entirely on the corporate-controlled media, the public response has revealed a profound lack of understanding of the nature of scientific uncertainty and the very nature of scientific debate.
-There was no logical reason for Russia to have helped Warsaw. The Russians were bringing the West not only liberation from Hitler, but liberation from the existing order, which they wanted to replace with a good order, namely their own. The “underground state” and the London Government-in-Exile stood in the way of their overthrow of capitalism in Poland; whereas, behind the Red Army lines a different Polish government, appointed in Moscow, was already in office. The destruction of Warsaw represented certain indisputable advantages. The people dying in the street fights were precisely those who could create most trouble for the new rulers, the young intelligentsia, seasoned in its underground struggle with the Germans, and wholly fanatic in its patriotism. The city itself in the course of the years of occupation had been transformed into an underground fortress filled with hidden printing shops and arsenals. This traditional capital of revolts and insurrections was undoubtedly the most insubordinate city in the area that was to find itself under the Center’s influence. All that could have argued for aid to Warsaw would have been pity for the one million inhabitants dying in the town. But pity is superfluous wherever sentence is pronounced by History.
+In January of 2010, researchers from Yale and George Mason Universities released the results of a detailed survey of public opinions on global warming in the United States, and their findings are disturbing. They found that twice as many Americans believed that global warming was ''not'' happening, compared to two years earlier (20 percent, compared to only 10 percent in 2008), and that nearly a quarter of the population said they don’t know. Only 47 percent of those surveyed said that global warming is caused mainly by human activities, 40 percent believed “there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening,” and only 28 percent (down from 38 percent in 2008) said they thought global warming was already harming people around the world.[3] The BBC reported that barely 26 percent of people in the UK in 2012 accepted that climate change is happening and “largely manmade,” and a poll conducted by ''Der Spiegel'' found that fear of global warming in Germany fell from 62 percent to only 42 percent over a period of four years.[4] While climate concerns, as documented by the Yale group and others, have slowly returned to 2007 levels, political polarization around global warming has also increased, especially in the United States. A more recent report from the Yale and George Mason researchers showed that over 60 percent of Americans support either a large or medium-scale effort to reduce climate change, with proportionate economic costs.[5] However, when US opinion is broken down along lines of political affiliation, two-thirds of self-identified Democrats are very concerned about the issue, compared with just over a quarter of self-identified Republicans.[6]
-Alpha, walking with me over the ruins of Warsaw, felt, as did all those who survived, one dominant emotion: anger. Many of his close friends lay in the shallow graves which abounded in the lunar landscape. The twenty-year-old poet Christopher, a thin asthmatic, physically no stronger than Marcel Proust, had died at his post sniping at SS tanks. With him the greatest hope of Polish poetry perished. His wife Barbara was wounded and died in a hospital, grasping a manuscript of her husband’s verses in her hand. The poet Karol, son of the workers’ quarter and author of a play about Homer, together with his inseparable comrade, the poet Marek, were blown up on a barricade the Germans dynamited. Alpha knew, also, that the person he loved most in his life had been deported to the concentration camp at Ravens-bruck after the suppression of the uprising. He waited for her long after the end of the War until he finally had to accept the idea that she was no longer alive. His anger was directed against those who had brought on the disaster, that terrible example of what happens when blind loyalty encounters the necessities of History. Just as his Catholic words had once rung false to him, so now his ethic of loyalty seemed a pretty but hollow concept.
+Even a brief review of the actual data, however, leaves little doubt that disturbing patterns of atmospheric heating, highly erratic weather, and cycles of floods and drought are being felt worldwide. These observations closely match the projections of climate modelers going back more than a decade, and recent warming trends can only be rationally explained if human-induced climate changes are taken into account. The 2013 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that this is true for each of the world’s continents and oceans, not just the global average temperature.[7] Interestingly, scientists once predicted that many of the climate changes that we are seeing today would only occur several decades farther into the future.
-Actually, Alpha was one of those who were responsible for what had happened. Could he not see the eyes of the young people gazing at him as he read his stories in clandestine authors’ evenings? These were the young people who had died in the uprising: Lieutenant Zbyszek, Christopher, Barbara, Karol, Marek, and thousands like them. They had known there was no hope of victory and that their death was no more than a gesture in the face of an indifferent world. They had died without even asking whether there was some scale in which their deeds would be weighed. The young philosopher Milbrand, a disciple of Heidegger, assigned to press work by his superiors, demanded to be sent to the line of battle because he believed that the greatest gift a man can have is the moment of free choice; three hours later he was dead. There were no limits to these frenzies of voluntary self-sacrifice.
+Several systematic studies, most notably the reports of the IPCC’s second Working Group, which focuses on the consequences of climate change, have begun to map out this latter story in detail, as we will see shortly. Furthermore, impoverished people around the world are also bearing the consequences of the most prevalent false solutions to global warming, including the push for biofuels, expanded gas drilling, and the global market in carbon offsets. A basic concern for justice and equity today leads irrevocably to the conclusion that a thoroughgoing social and economic transformation is necessary if we are to head off the very worst consequences of an increasingly erratic, overheating climate. While business-as-usual scenarios for future energy use and carbon dioxide emissions are often acknowledged to be untenable, so too is the continuation of business-as-usual in the structure of our political and economic institutions.
-Alpha did not blame the Russians. What was the use? They were the force of History. Communism was fighting Fascism; and the Poles, with their ethical code based on nothing but loyalty, had managed to thrust themselves between these two forces. Joseph Conrad, that incorrigible Polish noble! Surely the example of Warsaw had demonstrated that there was no place in the twentieth century for imperatives of fatherland or honor unless they were supported by some definite end. A moralist of today, Alpha reasoned, should turn his attention to social goals and social results. The rebels were not even an enemy in the minds of the Germans; they were an inferior race that had to be destroyed. For the Russians, they were “Polish fascists.” The Warsaw uprising was the swansong of the intelligentsia and the order it defended; like the suicidal charges of the Confederates during the American Civil War, it could not stave off defeat. With its fall, the Revolution was, in effect, accomplished; in any case, the road was open. This was not, as the press of the new government proclaimed in its effort to lull the people, a “peaceful revolution.” Its price was bloody, as the ruins of the largest city in the country testified.
+==== {{anchor|Whoisaffectedbyglobalwarmin}} Who is affected by global warming? ====
-But one had to live and be active instead of looking back at what had passed. The country was ravaged. The new government went energetically to work reconstructing, putting mines and factories into operation, and dividing estates among the peasants. New responsibilities faced the writer. His books were eagerly awaited by a human ant-hill, shaken out of its torpor and stirred up by the big stick of war and of social reforms. We should not wonder, then, that Alpha, like the majority of his colleagues, declared at once his desire to serve the new Poland that had risen out of the ashes of the old.
+Since the first Earth Day, close to 45 years ago, there has been a serious divide between those who view environmental issues as fundamentally social and political, and those who focus entirely on the technical aspects of individual problems and on narrow, status-quo solutions. Regulatory agencies and most traditional environmental groups view ecological problems as primarily technical in nature, typically ignoring the larger picture.
-He was accepted with open arms by the handful of Polish Communists who had spent the war years in Russia and who had returned to organize the state according to the maxims of Leninism-Stalinism. Then, that is in 1945, everyone who could be useful was welcomed joyfully without any demand that he be a Red. Both the benevolent mask under which the Party appeared and the moderation of its slogans were due to the fact that there were so uncommonly few Stalinists in the country.
+As social ecologists have argued since the mid-1960s, however, environmental problems not only have serious human consequences, but are thoroughly social and political in origin.[8] With respect to global climate disruptions, this contrast is now central to understanding where we are and where we may be headed. An understanding of the science and politics of global warming is increasingly shaping how we understand problems of social justice, or war and peace, and how these concerns will play out in the coming decades. A brief look at the evidence should help illuminate this.
-Unquestionably, it is only by patient and gradually increased doses of the doctrine that one can bring a pagan population to understand and accept the New Faith. Ever since his break with the rightist weekly, Alpha had enjoyed a good opinion in those circles which were now most influential. He was not reprimanded for having kept his distance from Marxist groups during the War; authors who had maintained such contacts could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Now the writers of Poland were a little like virgins—willing, but timid. Their first public statements were cautious and painstakingly measured. Still it was not what they said that mattered. Their names were needed as proof that the government was supported by the entire cultural elite. The program of behavior toward various categories of people had been elaborated by the Polish Communists while they were still in Moscow; and it was a wise program, based on an intimate understanding of conditions in the country. The tasks that lay before them were unusually difficult. The country did not want their government. The Party, which had barely existed before the War, had to be reorganized and had to reconcile itself to the knowledge that most of its new members would be opportunists. Left-wing Socialists had to be admitted into the government. It was still necessary to carry on a complicated game with the Peasant Party, for after Yalta the Western allies demanded at least the semblance of a coalition. The most immediate job, therefore, was to bridge the gap between the small group of Communists and the country as a whole; those who could help most in building this bridge were famous writers who were known as liberals or even as conservatives. Alpha fulfilled every requirement. His article appeared on the first page of a government literary weekly; it was an article on humanism. As I recall it, he spoke in it of the ethic of respect for man that revolution brings.
+One of the first news reports to bring the global justice consequences of global warming to a wide US audience was an insightful piece in the ''New York Times'' that appeared fast on the heels of the landmark 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As reporter Andrew Revkin stated, “In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed the least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet. Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest.”[9]
-It was May, 1945, in the medieval city of Cracow. Alpha and I, as well as many other writers and artists, had taken refuge there after the destruction of Warsaw. The night the news of the fall of Berlin came was lit with bursts of rockets and shells, and the streets echoed with the fire ot small arms as the soldiers of the victorious Red Army celebrated the prospect of a speedy return home. The next morning, on a fine spring day, Alpha and I were sitting in the office of Polish Film, working on a scenario. Tying up the loose ends of a film is a burdensome business; we were putting our feet up on tables and armchairs, we were pacing the room, smoking too many cigarettes and constantly being lured to the window through which came the warble of sparrows. Outside the window was a courtyard with young trees, and beyond the courtyard a huge building lately transformed into a prison and the headquarters of the Security Police. We saw scores of young men behind the barred windows on the ground floor. Some had thrust their faces into the sun in an effort to get a tan. Others were fishing with wire hooks for the bits of paper which had been tossed out on the sand from neighboring cells. Standing in the window, we observed them in silence.
+The ''Times'' dispatched reporters to cover four widely varying instances of people coping with the consequences of a severely altered climate, illustrating some stark contrasts across different parts of the world. In a village in Malawi, officials struggle to maintain the functioning of a simple weather station, chronically lacking basic supplies like light bulbs and chart paper, while in India, rural villagers can barely cope with the effects of more erratic monsoons and increased flooding on their already fragile life support systems. Meanwhile, Western Australia has built a state-of-the-art water desalinization plant, powered by an array of wind turbines about 100 miles away, and the Dutch have begun building homes attached to huge columns that allow the actual houses to rise and fall by as much as 18 feet with the ebb and flow of tidal waters.
-It was easy to guess that these were soldiers of the Underground Army. Had the London Govern-ment-in-Exile returned to Poland, these soldiers of the “underground state” would have been honored and feted as heroes. Instead, they were incarcerated as a politically uncertain element—another of History’s ironic jokes. These young boys who had grown used to living with a gun in their hands and surrounded by perpetual danger were now supposed to forget their taste for conspiracy as quickly as possible. Many succeeded so well in forgetting that they pretended they had never been active in the Underground. Others stayed in the woods, and any of them that were caught were thrown behind bars. Although their foe had been Hitler, they were now termed agents of the class enemy. These were the brothers of the young people who had fought and died in the Warsaw uprising, people whose blind self-sacrifice lay on Alpha’s conscience. I do not know what he was thinking as he looked at the windows of those prison cells. Perhaps even then he was sketching the plan of his first post-war novel.
+The plight of people in various low-lying Pacific island nations has also attracted some mainstream press attention. With rising sea levels, not only are people having to relocate homes away from the shore, but sources of essential drinking water are becoming brackish due to increasing infiltrations of sea water. Migration of Pacific islanders to New Zealand has quadrupled in recent years, according to ''The Independent'' in the UK, as rising numbers of island communities are becoming uninhabitable.[10] Yet island nations, according to the IPCC, are collectively responsible for far less than 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In mid-2009, the ''New York Times’ ''Sunday magazine'' ''featured a striking profile of the diplomatic efforts by then-President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives to secure a new permanent home for the islands’ population.[11]
-As his whole biography demonstrates, his ambition was always boundless. He was never content to be just one among many; he had to be a leader so that he could justify his personal haughtiness. The novel he was writing should, he believed, raise him to first place among the writers active in the new situation. This was a time when writers were trying to change their style and subject matter, but they could not succeed without first effecting a corresponding change in their own personalities. Alpha was undergoing a moral crisis which was personal to him, but at the same time a reiteration of a conflict known to many of his countrymen. He sensed in himself a power that flowed from his individual but simultaneously universal drama. His feeling for the tragedy of life was seeking a new garment in which to appear in public.
+Closer to home, Hurricane Katrina first highlighted the extreme inequity in people’s capacity to cope with climate-related disasters. While affluent homes were mostly restored, and travelers soon returned to New Orleans’ unique tourist quarters, roughly a third of the city’s population were unable to return home, and emptied public housing projects were threatened with demolition, despite a relatively low level of storm-related damage. While the human toll from the 2007-08 San Diego area wildfires was comparatively low, the systemic inequities were harsh. Naomi Klein reported in ''The Nation'' in late 2007 that residents able to pay several tens of thousands of dollars were whisked away to elite resorts to wait out the fires, while their homes were sprayed with special fire retardants that were tragically unavailable to their neighbors.[12]
-Alpha did not betray his belief in himself. The novel he wrote was the product of a mature talent. It made a great impression on its readers. All his life he had circled around the figure of a strong and pure hero. In his pre-war novel, he had used a priest; now he drew a representative of the New Faith, a fearless old Communist who after spending many years in German concentration camps emerged unbroken in spirit. Returning to his devastated homeland, this hero found himself faced with a chaos which his clear mind and strong will were to convert into a new social order. The society he was to transform showed every sign of moral decay. The older generation of the intelligentsia, personally ambitious and addicted to drink, was still daydreaming of help from the Western allies. The youth of the country, educated to principles of blind loyalty and habituated to an adventurous life in the Underground, was now completely lost. Knowing no goals of human activity other than war against the enemy in the name of honor, it continued to conspire against a new enemy, namely the Party and the government imposed by Russia. But given post-war circumstances, the Party was the only power that could guarantee peace, reconstruct the country, enable the people to earn their daily bread, and start schools and universities, ships and railroads functioning. One did not have to be a Communist to reach this conclusion; it was obvious to everyone. To kill Party workers, to sabotage trains carrying food, to attack laborers who were trying to rebuild the factories was to prolong the period of chaos. Only madmen could commit such fruitless and illogical acts.
+During the same period, however, reports from Bangladesh to the Sudan revealed how climate instability is exacerbating conflict and even bloodshed among people. Droughts in East Africa have caused wells to dry up and livestock to perish, fueling interethnic conflicts among the region’s pastoral communities.[13] In India, widespread crop failures due to more frequent droughts and catastrophic flooding events have intensified the tragic wave of farmer suicides that was first brought on by the widespread failure of chemical pesticides and genetically engineered seeds.[14] Half of India’s agricultural districts faced persistent drought during the 2009 monsoon season, with crop losses up to 60 percent.[15] The UK-based Environmental Justice Foundation has reported a finding by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification that, in Africa alone, an estimated 10 million people have been displaced or forced to migrate due to environmental degradation and desertification.[16] While the specific climate contribution to particular weather events is still a subject of legitimate scientific debate, three things are clear: 1) Warmer air holds more moisture, thus prolonging periods of drought, as well as the intensity of storms; 2) Chaotic and extreme weather is consistent with the projections of global climate models; and 3) when scientists do commit the time and the extraordinary computing power necessary to calculate the climate component of particular events, the results are generally quite compelling.[17] And along with especially catastrophic events come countless incidents of mis-timing: rain that falls when farmers need and expect it the least; flowers that open weeks before their pollinators arrive, or before they are safe from frost; unanticipated heat-waves in the early spring.
-This was Alpha’s picture of the country. One might have called it a piece of common-sense journalism had it not been for something that always distinguished him as a writer: pity, pity for the old Communist as well as for those who considered him their enemy. Because he felt compassion for both these forces, he succeeded in writing a tragic novel.
+==== {{anchor|ProjectionsandRealities}} Projections and Realities ====
-His shortcomings as a writer, so clearly evident in his pre-war works, now stood him in good stead. His talent was not realistic; his people moved in a world difficult to visualize. He built up moral conflicts by stressing contrasts in his characters; but his old Communist was as rare a specimen on the Polish scene as the priest he had made his hero before the War. Communists may, in general, be depicted as active, intelligent, fanatic, cunning but above all as men who take external acts as their domain. Alpha’s hero was not a man of deeds; on the contrary, he was a silent, immovable rock whose stony exterior covered all that was most human—personal suffering and a longing for good. He was a monumental figure, an ascetic living for his ideas. He was ashamed of his personal cares, and his refusal to confess his private pain won the sympathy of the readers. In the concentration camp he had lost the wife he dearly loved; and now it was only by the greatest effort of his will that he could compel himself to live, for life had suddenly become devoid of meaning. He was a titan with a torn heart, full of love and forgiveness. In short, he emerged as a potential force capable of leading the world toward good. Just when his feelings and thoughts were purest he died, shot by a young man who saw in him only an agent of Moscow.
+In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—originally established by the UN Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization—issued their fourth comprehensive review of climate science. For the first time, the IPCC stated that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” and that rises in global temperature can only be explained with reference to human-induced increases in carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases”—especially methane, nitrous oxide, and the banned but persistent CFCs used in air conditioners and refrigerators. For the first time, the statistical confidence level of many of their calculations came in at better than 95 percent.[18]
-One can understand why Alpha, living in a country where the word “Communist” still had an abusive connotation, wanted to portray his hero as the model of a higher ethic; but that ethic can be evaluated properly only when we see it applied to concrete problems, only when its followers treat people as tools. As for the society the old Communist wanted to transform, an accurate observer would have seen in it positive signs and not merely symptoms of disintegration. The intelligentsia, that is every variety of specialist, were setting to work just as enthusiastically as the workers and peasants in mobilizing the factories, mines, railroads, schools, and theaters. They were governed by a feeling of responsibility toward the community and by professional pride, not by a vision of socialism along Russian lines. Nevertheless, their ethic of responsibility bore important results. Their political thinking was naive, and their manners often characteristic of a by-gone era. Yet it was they, and not the Party, who reacted most energetically at first. The younger generation was lost and leaderless, but its terroristic deeds were at least as much a product of despair as of demoralization. The boys that Alpha and I had seen in the windows of the prison were not there because of any crimes they had committed, but only because of their war-time service in the “underground state.” Alpha could not say all this because of the censorship, but his expressed pity for these boys permitted the reader to guess at what he left unsaid. However, his failure to present all the facets of the situation altered the motivation of his characters.
+The IPCC documented an unprecedented convergence of findings from hundreds of studies and tens of thousands of distinct data sets in numerous independent fields of inquiry. This feat of scientific data gathering and assessment may have been worthy of a Nobel science prize if the panel hadn’t already been awarded the coveted prize for peace in 2007, along with Al Gore. Perhaps never before had scientific studies in so many distinct areas of research converged on one disturbing conclusion: not only that the evidence for the role of human activity in altering the earth’s climate is “unequivocal,” but that the ecological and human consequences of those alterations are already being felt in countless different ways.
-His book was entirely dominated by a feeling of anger against the losers. This anger was essential to the existence of Alpha and many like him. The satiric attitude toward the underground intelligentsia which marked the stories he wrote toward the end of the War now manifested itself in the chapters of the novel that mocked absurd hopes for a sudden political change. In reality, these hopes, no matter how absurd the form they took in members of the white collar class, were far from alien to the peasants and workers. Alpha never knew the latter intimately, so he could, with much greater ease, attribute the belief in a magic removal of the Russians to a special characteristic of the intelligentsia which, unfortunately, was not distinguished for its political insight.
+The IPCC’s report appeared in three separate volumes published by distinct international Working Groups, plus a concluding Synthesis Report, all released over the course of 2007; the panel’s earlier reports, and their fifth assessment report published in 2013-14, are similarly organized. Most media coverage tends to focus on the first volume, examining the physical science basis for climate change. Here the assembled scientists describe the evidence for anthropogenic warming and evaluate a wide range of future greenhouse gas emission scenarios.
-A novel that favorably compared the ethic of the New Faith with the vanquished code was very important to the Party. The book was so widely publicized that it quickly sold over 100,000 copies, and in 1948, Alpha was awarded a state prize. One city donated to him a beautiful villa furnished at considerable expense. A useful writer in a people’s democracy cannot complain of a lack of attention.
+Scientists such as James Hansen—now retired from NASA and one of the most widely quoted senior scientists of our time—argue that the IPCC tends to underestimate a variety of factors that negatively affect human populations, including the likely sea level rises. Hansen’s analyses in recent years have led to some very alarming conclusions: that a sensible extrapolation from past climate data suggests a sea level rise of up to 80 feet if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels, and that with an atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration around 400 parts per million, we’ve already surpassed the historic carbon dioxide level that is compatible with year-round ice in the Arctic or Antarctic.[19] For Hansen and many others, the question is literally whether or not our earth will continue to resemble the world in which human civilizations have developed, and the only way to accomplish this is to leave most of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground. Meanwhile, policy analysts are proposing “acceptable” or “realistic” greenhouse gas levels that approach 450 or even 550 parts per million.
-The Party dialecticians knew perfectly well that Alpha’s hero was not a model of the “new man.” That he was a Communist could be divined only from the author’s assurances. He appeared on the pages of the book prepared to act, but not in action. Alpha’s old hero had merely traded his priest’s cassock for the leather jacket of a Communist. Although Alpha had changed the language of his concepts, the residue of tragedy and metaphysics remained constant. And even though the old Communist did not pray, the readers would not have been surprised to hear his habitually sealed lips suddenly utter the lamentations of Jeremiah, so well did the words of the prophet harmonize with his personality. Alpha, then, had not altered subjectively since his pre-war days; he still could not limit himself to a purely utilitarian ethic expressed in rational acts. Faust and King Lear did penance within his hero. Both heaven and earth continued to exist. Still one could not ask too much. He did not belong to the Party, but he showed some understanding. His treatment of the terrorist youth even more than his portrayal of the old Communist demonstrated that he was learning. It was too early to impose “socialist realism”; the term was not even mentioned lest it alarm the writers and artists. For the same reason, the peasants were assured that there would be no collective farms in Poland.
+What often gets lost in these long-term projections, however, are the ways that chaotic global warming is already affecting people around the world today. The IPCC wrote about this in its second Working Group reports in 2007 and 2014, specifically addressing the environmental and human consequences of climate change. But scientists and advocates alike seem to prefer to debate the quantitative details rather than address the ways that our survival is imperiled by the over-consumption of the world’s affluent minority.
-The day of decision did not come for Alpha until a few years after he had published his novel. He was living in his beautiful villa, signing numerous political declarations, serving on committees and traveling throughout the country lecturing on literature in factory auditoriums, clubs and “houses of culture.” For many, these authors’ trips, organized on a large scale, were a painful duty; but for him they were a pleasure, for they enabled him to become acquainted with the life and problems of the working-class youth. For the first time, he was really stepping out of his intellectual clan; and better still, he was doing so as a respected author. As one of the top-ranking writers of the people’s democracies he could feel himself, if not a cardinal, then at least an eminent canon.
+Most poor people live in the earth’s tropical and subtropical regions. They are already living in a world of increasingly uncertain rainfall, persistent droughts, coastal flooding, loss of wetlands and fisheries, and increasingly scarce fresh water supplies. The IPCC confirmed in 2007 that severely increased flooding will most immediately affect residents of the major river deltas of Asia and Africa. Additionally, the one sixth of the world’s population that depends on water from glacial runoff may see a brief increase in the size and volume of their freshwater lakes as glaciers melt, but eventually the loss of the glaciers will become a life-threatening reality.[20]
-In line with the Center’s plan, the country was being progressively transformed. The time came to shorten the reins on the writers and to demand that they declare themselves clearly for the New Faith. At writers’ congresses “socialist realism” was proclaimed the sole indicated creative method. It appears that he lived through this moment with particular pain. Showing incredible dexterity the Party had imperceptibly led the writers to the point of conversion. Now they had to comply with the Party’s ultimatum or else rebel abruptly and so fall to the foot of the social ladder. To split one’s loyalties, to pay God in one currency and Caesar in another, was no longer possible. No one ordered the writers to enter the Party formally; yet there was no logical obstacle to joining once one accepted the New Faith. Such a step would signalize greater courage, for admission into the Party meant an increase in one’s responsibilities.
+The data points toward a worldwide decrease in crop productivity if global temperatures rise more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit (about 3°C), although crop yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by half as soon as 2020. In Africa alone, between 75 million and 250 million people will be exposed to “increased water stress,” according to the IPCC. Agricultural lands in Latin America will be subject to desertification and increasing salt content.
-As the novelist most highly regarded by Party circles. Alpha could make but one decision. As a moral authority he was expected to set an example for his colleagues. During the first years of the new order he had established strong bonds with the Revolution. He was, at last, a popular writer whose readers were recruited from the masses. His highly praised pre-war novel had sold scarcely a few thousand copies; now he and every author could count on reaching a tremendous public. He was no longer isolated; he told himself he was needed not by a few snobs in a coffee-house, but by this new workers’ youth he spoke to in his travels over the country. This metamorphosis was entirely due to the victory of Russia and the Party, and logically one ought to accept not only practical results but also the philosophical principles that engendered them.
+Probably the grimmest tale is contained in the 2007 report’s chapter on health consequences of climate changes, which predicted “increases in malnutrition and consequent disorders…; increased deaths, disease and injury due to heatwaves, floods, storms, fires and droughts; the increased burden of diarrheal disease; the increased frequency of cardio-respiratory diseases due to higher concentrations of ground-level ozone…; and, the altered spatial distribution of some infectious disease vectors,” including malaria. There is little doubt that those populations with “high exposure, high sensitivity and/or low adaptive capacity” will bear the greatest burdens; those who contribute the least to the problem of global warming will continue to face the most severe consequences.[21]
-That was not easy for him. Ever more frequently he was attacked for his love of monumental tragedy. He tried to write differently, but whenever he denied something that lay in the very nature of his talent his prose became flat and colorless; he tore up his manuscripts. He asked himself whether he could renounce all effort to portray the tragic conflicts peculiar to life in a giant collective. The causes of the human distress he saw about him daily were no longer the same as in a capitalist system, but the sum total of suffering seemed to grow instead of diminish.
+It took a fair amount of reading between the lines of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report, issued in 2007, to find the evidence supporting a climate justice outlook. But by the time of the IPCC’s fifth assessment in 2014, the second working group report, focused on climate “impacts, adaptation and vulnerability,” was much more thoroughly devoted to the social justice implications of the climate crisis. Six out of the eight “key risks” highlighted in that report’s official summary, all identified with high statistical confidence based on the available research literature, strongly affirm the core messages of climate justice and the urgency of justice-centered solutions:* Risk of death, injury, ill-health, or disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small island developing states and other small islands, due to storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea-level rise.
+* Risk of severe ill-health and disrupted livelihoods for large urban populations due to inland flooding in some regions.
+* Systemic risks due to extreme weather events leading to breakdown of infrastructure networks and critical services such as electricity, water supply, and health and emergency services.
+* Risk of mortality and morbidity during periods of extreme heat, particularly for vulnerable urban populations and those working outdoors in urban or rural areas.
+* Risk of food insecurity and the breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes, particularly for poorer populations in urban and rural settings.
+* Risk of loss of rural livelihoods and income due to insufficient access to drinking and irrigation water and reduced agricultural productivity, particularly for farmers and pastoralists with minimal capital in semi-arid regions.[22]
-Alpha knew too much about Russia and the merciless methods dialecticians employed on “human material” not to be assailed by waves of doubt. He was aware that in accepting the New Faith he would cease to be a moral authority and become a pedagogue, expressing only what was recognized as useful. Henceforth, ten or fifteen dialectical experts would weigh each of his sentences, considering whether he had committed the sin of pure tragedy. But there was no returning. Telling himself that he was already a Communist in his actions, he entered the Party and at once published a long article about himself as a writer. This was a self-criticism; in Christian terminology, a confession. Other writers read his article with envy and fear. That he was first everywhere and in everything aroused their jealousy, but that he showed himself so clever—so like a Stak-hanovite miner who first announces that he will set an unusually high norm—filled them with apprehension. Miners do not like any of their comrades who are too inclined to accumulate honors for having driven others to a speed-up.
-His self-criticism was so skillfully written that it stands as a classic declaration of a writer renouncing the past in the name of the New Faith. It was translated into many languages, and printed even by Stalinist publications in the West. In condemning his previous books he resorted to a special stratagem: he admitted openly what he had always secretly thought of the flaws in his work. He didn’t need dialectics to show him these flaws; he knew them of old, long before he approached Marxism, but now he attributed his insight to the merits of the Method. Every good writer knows he should not let himself be seduced by high-sounding words or by emotionally effective but empty concepts. Alpha affirmed that he had stumbled into these pitfalls because he wasn’t a Marxist. He also let it be understood that he did not consider himself a Communist writer, but only one who was trying to master the Method, that highest of all sciences. What was remarkable about the article was the sainted, supercilious tone, always Alpha’s own, in which it was written. That tone led one to suspect that in damning his faults he was compounding them and that he gloried in his new garb of humility.
-The Party confided to him, as a former Catholic, the function of making speeches against the policy of the Vatican. Shortly thereafter, he was invited to Moscow, and on his return he published a book about the “Soviet man.” By demonstrating dialectically that the only truly free man was the citizen of the Soviet Union, he was once again reaching for the laurels of supremacy. His colleagues had always been more or less ashamed to use this literary tactic even though they knew it was dialectically correct. As a result, he came to be actively disliked in the literary ghetto. I call this a ghetto because despite the fact that they were lecturing throughout the country and reaching an ever larger public the writers were now as securely locked up in their collective homes and clubs as they had been in their pre-war coffee-houses. Alpha’s fellow-authors, jealous of the success his noble tone had brought him, called him the “respectable prostitute.”
+The entire section concludes with the statement: “Many key risks constitute particular challenges for the least developed countries and vulnerable communities, given their limited ability to cope.” Even though the framing in terms of quantifiable risk can serve to distance the discussion from the actual experiences of people living with these hazards, it represents a significant breakthrough in the scientific community’s validation of the messages that have emerged from climate justice movements around the world.
-It is not my place to judge. I myself traveled the same road of seeming inevitability. In fleeing I trampled on many values that may determine the worth of a man. So I judge myself severely though my sins are not the same as his. Perhaps the difference in our destinies lay in a minute disparity in our reactions when we visited the ruins of Warsaw or gazed out the window at the prisoners. I felt that I could not write of these things unless I wrote the whole truth, not just a part. I had the same feeling about the events that took place in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, namely that every form of literature could be applied to them except fiction. We used to feel strangely ashamed, I remember, whenever Alpha read us his stories in that war-contaminated city. He exploited his subject matter too soon, his composition was too smooth. Thousands of people were dying in torture all about us; to transform their sufferings immediately into tragic theater seemed to us indecent. It is sometimes better to stammer from an excess of emotion than to speak in well-turned phrases. The inner voice that stops us when we might say too much is wise. It is not improbable that he did not know this voice.
+Numerous other studies serve to further affirm those messages, with the number of available studies now growing at a rapid pace.[23] The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, initiated by the UN and released in 2005, offered a graphic representation of where we are and where we seem to be headed. One page of that report offers a pair of world maps, each with a bar graph superimposed on every continent. The upper map chronicles the number of major floods reported every decade from 1950 to 2000 on each continent; the lower map displays the number of major wildfires. Everywhere but in Oceania—which has faced such severe droughts that people now question whether major grain growing regions of Australia can still support any crops—the individual graphs rise steeply as the decades advance.[24] Over this time period, global temperatures only rose about one degree Fahrenheit (just over half a degree C); only the most optimistic of the IPCC’s projected future scenarios limits further warming during this century to less than three additional degrees (1.5°C). Indeed the UN Environment Program projected in late 2009 that current policies would lead to a 3.5°C (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) rise by 2100, and a study by the British Meteorological Office predicted an astounding 4°C (7°F) rise by 2060, resulting in worldwide droughts and heat waves, threatening water supplies for half the earth’s population, and condemning half of all animal and plant species to extinction.[25] A 2009 symposium sponsored by the British Royal Society explored the consequences of 4 degrees warming, the level that will likely result from the continuation of business as usual.[26]
-Only a passion for truth could have saved Alpha from developing into the person he became. Then, it is true, he would not have written his novel about the old Communist and demoralized Polish youth. He had allowed himself the luxury of pity, but only once he was within a framework safe from the censors’ reproaches. In his desire to win approbation he had simplified his picture to conform to the wishes of the Party. One compromise leads to a second and a third until at last, though everything one says may be perfectly logical, it no longer has anything in common with the flesh and blood of living people. This is the reverse side of the medal of dialectics. This is the price one pays for the mental comfort dialectics affords. Around Alpha there lived and continue to live many workers and peasants whose words are ineffectual, but in the end, the inner voice they hear is not different from the subjective command that shuts writers’ lips and demands all or nothing. Who knows, probably some unknown peasant or some minor postal employee should be placed higher in the hierarchy of those who serve humanity than Alpha the moralist.
+The biennial UN Human Development Report, issued in November of 2007, reported that one out of every 19 people in the so-called developing world was affected by a climate-related disaster between 2000 and 2004.[27] The figure for the wealthiest (OECD) countries was one out of every 1500 people. Yet the funds available thus far to various UN efforts to help the poorest countries adapt to climate changes ($26 million) is less than one week’s worth of flood defense spending in the UK, and about what the city of Venice spends on its flood gates every 2-3 weeks. The report estimates that an additional $86 billion will be needed to sustain existing UN development assistance and poverty reduction programs in the face of all the various threats attributable to climate change.
-** Chapter Five Beta, the Disappointed Lover
+A 2009 Oxfam study further confirmed that the effects of widespread climate disruptions are already with us. Oxfam found that of nearly 250 million people who are now affected by natural disasters every year, 98 percent of them are falling victim to climate-related events such as floods and droughts. They are predicting that this could quickly increase to over 375 million people per year.[28] Another study, published in the journal ''Political Geography'' by Rafael Reuveny of Indiana University, examined 38 cases over the past 70 years where populations were forced to migrate due to a combination of environmental (droughts, floods, storms, land degradation, pollution) and other factors.[29] Half of these cases led to violent conflict between the migrating populations and those in the receiving areas. It is clear, states Reuveny, that those who depend the most on the environment to sustain their livelihood, especially in regions where arable land and fresh water are scarce, are most likely to be forced to migrate when conditions are subjected to rapid and unplanned-for change.
-When I met Beta in 1942, he was twenty years old. He was a lively boy with black, intelligent eyes. The palms of his hands perspired, and there was that exaggerated shyness in his behavior that usually bespeaks immense ambition. Behind his words one felt a mixture of arrogance and humility. In conversation he seemed inwardly convinced of his own superiority; he attacked ferociously yet retreated immediately, bashfully hiding his claws. His ripostes were full of pent-up irony. Probably, though, these characteristics were most pronounced when he spoke with me or with other writers older than he. As a beginning poet, he felt he owed them a certain respect, but actually he believed they were none too deserving of it. He knew better; in him lay the promise of a truly great writer.
+Praful Bidwai, a former ''Times of India'' Senior Editor, drew attention in a recent article to the UN Conference on Trade and Development’s 2010 ''Least Developed Countries Report'', which stated that although those countries (LDCs)
-In 1942 in Warsaw, we were living without hope, or rather on a hope we knew to be a delusion. The empire which had absorbed our country was so mighty that only an incorrigible optimist could believe in the possibility of a totally vanquished Germany. Nazi plans in regard to our nation were perfectly clear: to exterminate the educated class, to colonize, and to deport a segment of the population to the East.
+===== account for less than 1 per cent of the world’s total GHG emissions, … the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events in them are five times higher now (519 events in 2000-2010) than during the 1970s. In the last decade, about 40 per cent of all casualties related to natural disasters were found in LDCs, the poorest countries of the world.30 =====
-Beta was one of the young people who started writing during the War, in the language of slaves. He supported himself by various odd jobs. It is hard to define exactly how people earn a living in a city completely outside the Jaw. Usually they took half-fictitious posts in an office or factory that supplied them with a work-card plus the opportunity to operate a black market or to steal, which was not regarded as immoral because it injured the Germans. At the same time, he studied in the underground university and shared the exuberant life of the resistance youth. He went to meetings where he and the other young people drank vodka, argued heatedly about literature and politics, and read illegal publications.
+A 2007 report by the UK-based relief organization International Alert compared maps of the world’s most politically unstable regions with those most susceptible to serious or extreme effects of climate change, and concluded that 46 countries, with a total population of 2.7 billion people, are firmly in both categories. The report, titled “A Climate of Conflict,” states:
-But he smiled scornfully at his comrades; he saw things more clearly than they. He found their patriotic zeal for battle against the Germans a purely irrational reflex. Battle—yes, but in the name of what? None of these young people believed any longer in democracy. Most of the countries of Eastern Europe had been semi-dictatorships before the War; and the parliamentary system seemed to belong to a dead era. There was no question as to how one came into power; whoever wanted to take over authority had only to seize it by force, or else create a “movement” to exert pressure on the government for admittance into a coalition. This was an age of nationalist “movements,” and Warsaw youth was still very much under their influence even though, obviously, it had no sympathy for either Hitler or Mussolini. Its reasoning was confused. The Polish nation was oppressed by the Germans; so, one had to fight. When Beta declared that they were merely countering German nationalism with Polish nationalism, his comrades shrugged their shoulders. When he asked what values they wanted to defend or on what principles Europe was to be built in the future, he got no reply.
+===== “Hardest hit by climate change will be people living in poverty, in under-developed and unstable states, under poor governance. The effect of the physical consequences—such as more frequent extreme weather, melting glaciers, and shorter growing seasons—will add to the pressures under which those societies already live. The background of poverty and bad governance means many of these communities both have a low capacity to adapt to climate change and face a high risk of violent conflict.”31 =====
-Here indeed was a well of darkness: no hope of liberation, and no vision of tomorrow. A battle for battle’s sake. A return to the pre-war status quo, bad though it had been, was to be the reward for those who might live to see the victory of the Anglo-Saxons. This lack of any sort of vision led him to see the world as a place in which nothing existed outside of naked force. It was a world of decline and fall. And the liberals of the older generation, mouthing nineteenth-century phrases about respect for man—while all about them hundreds of thousands of people were being massacred—were fossil remains.
+International Alert’s report profiled eight case studies of places in Africa and Asia where climate changes have already caused great stress on people’s livelihoods and often exacerbated internal conflicts. The outlook is significantly improved, however, in places where political institutions are relatively stable and accountable to the population. This contrast allows for a somewhat hopeful conclusion, with the authors extolling “the synergies between climate adaptation policies and peace-building activities in achieving the shared goal of sustainable development and peace.” One specific recommendation is to prioritize efforts to help people adapt to a changing climate, especially where subsistence-based economies contribute very little to global warming but are highly vulnerable to the consequences. Several international NGOs have already intervened, particularly in Africa, to document and disseminate changes in farming practices that have proven most useful in facilitating adaptation to a changing climate.
-Beta had no faith, religious or other, and he had the courage to admit it in his poems. He ran off his first volume of verse on a mimeograph machine. No sooner had I received his book and pried apart its sticky pages than I realized that here was a real poet. The reading of his hexameters was not, however, a joyous undertaking. The streets of occupied Warsaw were gloomy. Underground meetings in cold and smoky rooms, when one listened for the sound of Gestapo boots on the stairs, were like grim rituals conducted in catacombs. We were living at the bottom of a huge crater, and the sky far up above was the only element we shared with the other people on the face of the earth. All this was in his verse—grayness, fog, gloom, and death. Still his was not a poetry of grievance but of icy stoicism. The poems of this entire generation lacked faith. Their fundamental motif was a call to arms and a vision of death. Unlike young poets of other epochs, they did not see death as a romantic theme but as a real presence. Almost all these young writers of Warsaw died before the end of the War either at the hands of the Gestapo or in battle. None of them, however, questioned the meaning of sacrifice to the same degree as did he. “There will remain after us only scrap-iron and the hollow, jeering laughter of generations,” he wrote in one of his verses.
+Since the Persian Gulf War of the early 1990s, activists have become increasingly aware of the devastating environmental consequences of warfare, and also of “peacetime” military activities. Oil consumption by the US military, for example, approaches 14 million gallons a day, according to peace studies scholar Michael Klare, more than is used daily in all of Sweden or Switzerland.[32] The US military is also responsible for thousands of toxic waste dumps on active and former bases around the world. An escalating spiral of warfare and environmental devastation threatens to spin entirely out of control if we are unable to achieve a different way of organizing the world’s affairs. The world’s militaries and elites are preparing themselves for the worst; those of us who seek peace and global justice need to come together as never before if those worst case scenarios are to be averted.
-His poetry had in it none of that affirmation of the world that is present in the sympathy with which the artist portrays, for example, an apple or a tree. What his verse disclosed was a profoundly disturbed equilibrium. One can divine a great deal from a work of art, e.g. that the world of Bach or of Breughel was ordered, arranged hierarchically. Modem art reflects the disequilibrium of modem society in that it so often springs from a blind passion vainly seeking to sate itself in form, color, or sound. An artist can contemplate sensual beauty only when he loves all that surrounds him on earth. But if all he feels is loathing at the discrepancy between what he would wish the world to be and what it is in reality, then he is incapable of standing still and beholding. He is ashamed of reflexes of love; he is condemned to perpetual motion, to a restless sketching of discontinued, broken observations of nature. Like a sleepwalker, he loses his balance as soon as he stops moving. Beta’s poems were whirlpools of fog, saved from complete chaos only by the dry rhythm of his hexameters. This character of his poetry must be attributed at least in part to the fact that he belonged to an ill-fated generation in an ill-fated nation, but he had thousands of brothers in all the countries of Europe, all of them passionate and deceived.
+It is clear today that the past two centuries of capitalist development—and especially the unprecedented pace of resource consumption during the past 60 years—have created conditions that threaten everyone’s future. “There could be no clearer demonstration than climate,” says the UN’s Human Development Report, “that economic wealth creation is not the same as human progress.”[33] Those who have benefited the least from the unsustainable pace of economic growth and expansion since 1950 will face a future of suffering and dislocation unlike the world has ever seen, unless we can rapidly reverse the patterns of exploitation that many in the global North have simply come to take for granted.
-Unlike his comrades who acted out of loyalty to their fatherland, on Christian or vague metaphysical grounds, he needed a rational basis for action. When the Gestapo arrested him in 1943, it was rumored in our city that he was taken as the result of an “accident” to one of the left-wing groups. If life in Warsaw was little reminiscent of paradise, then Beta now found himself in the lower circle of hell: the “concentration universe.” In what was then the normal order of events, he spent several months in jail before being shipped off to Auschwitz. Incredibly, he managed to survive there for two years. When the Red Army drew near, he and the other prisoners were transported to Dachau, and there they were eventually set free by the Americans. We learned of all this only after the War, when he published a volume of stories recounting his experiences.
+==== {{anchor|Howmuchwarmingcanwetolerate}} How much warming can we tolerate? ====
-Immediately after his release he settled in Munich. It was there in 1946 that the book, We Were in Auschwitz, written by him and two of his fellow-prisoners, appeared. It was dedicated to “The American Seventh Army which brought us liberation from the Dachau-Allach concentration camp.” On his return to Poland, he published his volume of short stories.
+A somewhat cautious note of triumph accompanied the pronouncement of the G8 heads of state in July of 2009 that the world was committing to holding the future average global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius. The obstacle? “Developing Nations Rebuff G-8 on Curbing Pollutants,” proclaimed the ''New York Times'' headline.[34] One had to read through most of the article to discover that the main objection of those pesky “developing nations” representatives was to affirming a long-range goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (a modest 50 percent reduction by 2050), without proportionate commitments from the major industrialized countries to nearer-term measures. They sought agreement on at least the 20 percent reductions by 2020 that were advocated by most European governments prior to Copenhagen, which could help facilitate progress toward the more distant goal. One astute European activist pointed out that the G8 outcome was “nothing but hot air,” akin to pronouncing that there would be luxury resorts on Mars by 2050: with no intermediate goals nor tangible steps toward implementation, politicians can pledge to do anything at all 40+ years into the future. The 2 degree goal was eventually affirmed in the December 2009 Copenhagen Accord (see Chapter 2), and became the basis for most official discussions of the world’s objectives for limiting global warming.
-I have read many books about concentration camps, but not one of them is as terrifying as his stories because he never moralizes, he relates. A special social hierarchy comes into being in a “concentration universe.” At the top stand the camp authorities; after them come prisoners trusted by the administration; next come the prisoners clever enough to find means of getting sufficient food to keep up their strength. At the bottom stand the weak and clumsy, who daily tumble lower as their undernourished organisms fail to bear up under the work. In the end they die, either in the gas chamber or from an injection of phenol. Obviously this hierarchy does not include the masses of people killed immediately upon their arrival, i.e. the Jews, except for those who were single and especially fit for work. In his stories, Beta clearly defines his social position. He belonged to the caste of clever and healthy prisoners, and he brags about his cunning and agility. Life in a concentration camp requires constant alertness; every moment can decide one’s life or death. In order to react appropriately at all times, one must know where danger lies and how to escape it: sometimes by blind obedience, sometimes by calculated negligence, sometimes by blackmail or bribery. One of his stories consists of an account of a series of dangers he dodges in the course of a single day:
+What, then, does 2 degrees of global warming mean? In April 2009, following a series of articles in the journal ''Nature'' that offered some important new revelations about the state of our climate projections, the climatologists who edit the indispensable scientific blog, RealClimate.org, wrote,
-. A guard offers him some bread. To get it he has to jump a ditch that constitutes the line of watch. Guards, under orders to shoot prisoners who cross it, receive three days’ leave plus five marks for everyone they kill beyond this limit. Beta, understanding the guard’s intentions, refuses the bait.
+===== We feel compelled to note that even a ‘moderate’ warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, calling 2°C a danger limit seems to us pretty cavalier.”35 =====
-. A guard overhears him telling another prisoner the news of the fall of Kiev. Beta forestalls a report of the offense by giving the guard, through an intermediary, an old watch as a bribe.
+Two degrees also turns out to be a rather daunting goal, in terms of the current world economy. At pre-recession rates of economic growth, with CO2 emissions increasing 2 percent per year, we are virtually certain to exceed 2 degrees of warming by 2100, according to the European authors of the ''Nature'' 2-degrees study.[36] For a fifty-fifty chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees, developed countries would need to reduce their emissions by at least 80 percent over the next 40 years. There is a large uncertainty in that prediction, however, depending on the vagaries of the global carbon cycle and other hard-to-predict factors. The only reliable way to meet a 2 degree target is for cumulative world emissions to be kept below a rather austere target, equivalent to less than 400 billion tons of carbon between 2000 and 2050. Emissions since 2000 “have used up almost a third of that allowance already,” according to a commentary by one of ''Nature''’s US editors.[37]
-. He slips out of the hands of a dangerous camp overseer, or kapo, by a quick execution of an order. The fragment I quote below concerns some Greek prisoners who were too weak to march properly. As a punishment, sticks were tied to their legs. They are supervised by a Russian, Andrej.
+Subsequent studies have proposed a remaining global carbon budget between 470 and 565 billion tons, a small fraction of the carbon contained in the world’s known fossil fuel reserves.[38] And for all the trading and offsetting of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, only the recent economic downturn has led to substantial reductions in those emissions. Further, these projections often overlook emissions from agriculture, forestry, and a variety of related land use changes that are generally far more difficult to measure. The Kyoto Protocol, which required wealthy countries to reduce their emissions by 2012 to 6-8 percent below 1990 levels, “has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions, or even in anticipated emissions growth,” according to a widely cited report published in ''Nature'' in 2007.[39]
-I leap back, struck from behind by a bicycle. I whip off my cap. The Unterscharfiihrer, a landlord from Har-menze, jumps off the bicycle red with irritation.
+Meanwhile, a growing consensus of climate scientists and UN representatives from the global South insists that 2 degrees by no means a “safe” level of global warming. More recent research suggests that 2 degrees may be the point at which the likelihood of catastrophic, uncontrollable climate disruptions would reach about 50%, especially problematic since global emissions continue to rise.[40] Recent work by James Hansen and a team of global colleagues shows that global emissions would need to peak by around 2030 in order to return to a CO2 concentration of 350 ppm within the next 2-300 years.[41] Considering the weather and sea-level effects of the warming the world has already experienced, the consensus among many global South delegates to the UN climate negotiations is that no more than 1-1.5 degrees of warming is tolerable. Given the long-term residence of CO2 in the atmosphere, limiting warming to one degree would require an almost immediate cessation of fossil fuel combustion.
-“What’s happening in this crazy unit? Why are those people walking around with sticks tied to their legs? It’s time for work!”
+Global warming can represent a future of deprivation and scarcity for all but the world’s wealthiest, or this global emergency can compel us to imagine a radically transformed society—both in the North and the South—where communities of people are newly empowered to create their own future. The crisis could potentially compel us to break free from a predatory global capitalism that fabulously enriches the top tenth of one percent, while leaving the rest of us scrambling after the crumbs. The reality is too urgent, and the outlook far too bleak, to settle for anything less than a radically new ecological social and political outlook. We need a movement that looks beyond the status-quo, actualizes the transformative potential of an ecological and justice-centered outlook, and illuminates the urgent necessity to create a dramatically different kind of world.
-“They don’t know how to walk!”
+=== {{anchor|2TheUNClimateNegotiationsan}} {{anchor|Topofpart0005html}} {{anchor|2TheUNClimateNegotiationsan1}} 2. The UN Climate Negotiations and Beyond ===
-“If they don’t know how to walk, kill them! And you, do you know another goose has disappeared?”
+The December 2009 United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark was a watershed moment in the evolution of popular campaigns for climate action, and especially for climate justice. As those events recede into history, it is difficult to recapture the feeling of anticipation that engaged people from around the world during the preparations for Copenhagen. Many people involved in movements for climate action during that period held high hopes that the world’s elites might finally begin to approach a meaningful long-term agreement. By the end, however, it appeared that the conference instead spurred a many years-long impasse, furthering a perhaps-inexorable slide toward an unstable and chaotic planetary climate regime—a world that our ancestors would barely recognize. Though some years have now passed since those landmark events, the particulars of the Copenhagen conference are important to recall in some detail. As we shall see, they have significantly shaped all subsequent developments in the world of climate diplomacy.
-“Why are you standing there like a dumb dog?” the kapo screamed at me. “Tell Andrej to settle with them. Los!”
+The Copenhagen conference was known officially as COP-15, the 15[th] Conference of the Parties to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Even as close observers decried an increasing corporate influence over the preparations for COP-15, most participants held onto a shred of hope that something meaningful and significant would emerge from the negotiations. Seeing the urgency of the situation, prominent environmental groups, particularly Greenpeace, focused their strategy on urging US President Obama to personally participate in the Copenhagen summit. During earlier UN conferences the European Union had agreed to support faster reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. An end to US obstructionism, symbolized by the departure of President George W. Bush and the election of Barack Obama, might now clear the way toward a truly historic agreement. Instead, Obama’s participation in Copenhagen demonstrated that US efforts to undermine the climate talks had evolved to a new, perhaps even more dangerous level, and the talks established a pattern of rhetorical flourish and substantive inaction that has continued for many years hence.
-I ran down the path ...
+Yet on the eve of the Copenhagen summit officials appeared determined to spin the conference as a success, no matter what the outcome. Obama’s announcement in early December 2009 that he would briefly appear in Copenhagen was a headline story, as was China’s public commitment to reduce their economy’s carbon intensity, effectively lowering the rate of ''increase'' in greenhouse gas emissions in their rapidly growing economy. Officials began to proclaim the advantages of a non-binding “political” or “operational” agreement as an incremental step toward reducing worldwide emissions. While some observers continued to anticipate a new binding global treaty to forestall catastrophic climate changes, the likelihood of such an agreement appeared to diminish with each passing week.
-“Andrej, finish them off! Kapo’s orders!”
+It wasn’t supposed to be that way. For several years, environmentalists in North America, Europe, and around the world had anticipated that Copenhagen would be a decisive moment. Since the passage of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, signatories to the Protocol, and to the more comprehensive UN climate convention, held major conferences nearly every year to further these documents’ implementation. With the first so-called “commitment period” of Kyoto scheduled to end in 2012, the Copenhagen meeting was seen as the key to sustaining Kyoto’s legacy of legally binding emissions reductions and perhaps preventing increasingly uncontrollable disruptions of the climate. This despite the highly ambiguous legacy of Kyoto, as we shall soon see.
-Andrej seized a stick and struck with all his might. The Greek shielded himself with his arm, howled, and fell. Andrej put the stick across his throat, stepped on it and rocked himself. I went on my way quickly.
+For well over a year, environmentalists around the world were engaged in planning events, drafting reports, and coordinating action plans with the Copenhagen conference in mind. In October, the new 350.org network, initiated by Bill McKibben and several of his former students at Vermont’s Middlebury College, staged a global day of action, reporting over 5200 documented activities in 181 countries.[1] These were aimed at dramatizing the need to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to below 350 parts per million and clearly timed to influence the COP. For much of the year, the timetable for Congressional action on US climate legislation was also partly focused toward the international stage. In July of 2009, eleven Greenpeace climbers scaled South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore, famous for its larger-than-life stone images of four US presidents, to hang a gigantic banner featuring a portrait of Obama and the message, “America Honors Leaders, Not Politicians. Stop Global Warming.”
-His day is filled not only with escapes from danger, but also with the intricate game waged between him and his Russian co-prisoner Ivan. Ivan has stolen a piece of soap from him. He decides to avenge himself and patiently seeks his opportunity. He observes that Ivan has stolen a goose; an artfully arranged report (so that he won’t be stigmatized as an informer) occasions a search. The goose is found and Ivan is beaten by an SS man. The score is settled.
+By the mid-fall, however, public statements by both US and UN officials were pointedly aimed at lowering expectations. US climate negotiators remained evasive about what if any commitments they would bring to the table. The US Senate halted work on their highly flawed climate bill in mid-November, after a Republican boycott of hearings in Senator Barbara Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee allowed only for the bill’s pro-forma passage through the committee (see Chapter 4).''' '''In the midst of the preparatory meetings well in advance of Copenhagen, Martin Khor of the Malaysia-based Third World Network (now with the Geneva-based South Centre) and a decades-long participant in the UN process, wrote “not only is the climate in crisis, the climate talks are also in crisis.”[2] Corporate representatives were hovering like vultures over UN climate meetings, seeking to define the terms of what they still hoped would be a rapidly expanding market in tradable carbon emissions allowances, and the World Bank gained control over funds to curtail deforestation, which is likely responsible for at least a quarter of current global warming. Even UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer began refocusing his public statements toward the “art of the possible.”
-He is proud to succeed when others, less clever, perish. There is no small amount of plain sadism in his repeated emphasis of the fact that he is well-dressed, well-fed, and healthy.
+One decisive rupture came during preparatory talks in Bangkok in mid-October, aimed at finalizing the framework for a Copenhagen agreement. For the first time, European Union representatives echoed the US refusal to make any future commitments to reduce greenhouse gas pollution under the framework established by the Kyoto Protocol. While previous UN climate meetings were aided by the Europeans’ insistence on scientifically meaningful emission targets, this change—perhaps a perverse result of Obama’s “improved” diplomacy—shifted the focus of the talks and raised the level of acrimony to new heights.[3] A month later, African delegates walked out of a follow-up meeting in Barcelona, and threatened to do the same in Copenhagen if rich countries refused to commit to meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, at a breakfast meeting during an Asia-Pacific economic summit in Singapore in mid-November, Obama and Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen announced that a legally binding climate treaty was not forthcoming, and would take at least another year to negotiate.
-“They keep moving to avoid a beating; they eat grass and slimy mud so they won’t feel hungry; they walk dejectedly, still-living corpses,” he says of his fellow-inmates. But of himself: “It’s good to work after one has eaten a breakfast of a rasher of bacon with bread and garlic, and washed it down with a can of condensed milk.” A detail concerning his clothes (all about him are half-naked wretches): “I go into the shade and place my jacket under me so that 1 won’t soil my silk shirt [the italics are mine, C. M.] and settle down comfortably to sleep. Each of us rests however he can afford to.” And here is a scene of “class” contrast. Beker, another prisoner, is to be burned in the crematorium because he is too weak to be useful.
+==== {{anchor|BeyondKyoto}} Beyond Kyoto? ====
-At that moment, a huge gray skull emerged out of the depths, over the edge of the wooden bunk and embarrassed, blinking eyes peered at us. Then Beker’s face appeared, crumpled and more aged than ever.
+Activists wondered how and why the world had gotten to this point of apparent impasse. Part of the problem stemmed from the flaws inherent in the Kyoto Protocol, but much of the blame appeared to rest with US policymakers, who appeared to be working behind the scenes to undermine Copenhagen for quite some time, as we will see. To complicate things further, negotiators often voiced conflicting interpretations of what the Kyoto Protocol meant and to what degree it should help define the terms of future agreements.
-“Teddy, I have something to ask you.”
+In important ways, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol represented a crucial breakthrough in the ongoing UNFCCC process. For the first time, countries agreed to a schedule of binding targets for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and a prescribed means for working toward those targets. The primary responsibility for emissions reductions fell on the richest countries, with the rest of the world accepting “common but differentiated responsibilities” (in the language of the 1992 climate convention) to mitigate a potential climate crisis. The devil, as always, was in the details, and those details were in many ways a product of then-Vice President Al Gore’s interventions in Kyoto.
-“Talk,” I said, leaning down to him.
+Gore arrived in Kyoto toward the end of the conference, at a point when the US refusal to sign on to mandatory emissions cuts had threatened to derail the proceedings. Gore was widely credited with saving the day; specifically he offered that the US would sign on to a Kyoto Protocol under two conditions. First, mandated reductions in emissions would be limited to roughly half of what was originally proposed, and second, emissions cuts would be implemented through the market-based trading of “rights to pollute” among various companies and between countries. This was the first use of carbon trading (only later described as “cap-and-trade”—see Chapter 4) as a primary instrument of international policy. While the US never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the rest of the world has had to live with the consequences, namely a cumbersome but corporate-friendly carbon trading system that has failed to bring needed pollution reductions, along with an even more unwieldy scheme allowing companies to offset their emissions by investing in nominally low-carbon projects in the global South.
-“Teddy, I’m going to the chimney.”
+A decade later, the process was further complicated by the so-called Bali Action Plan that emerged from the 2007 UN climate summit on the island of Bali in Indonesia. This plan allowed for the negotiations toward Copenhagen to proceed on two tracks, one continuing the process laid out in the Kyoto Protocol, and the other essentially going back to the drawing board of the original 1992 climate convention. While Kyoto remained a legally binding treaty, developing nations’ representatives proved justified in their fears that this second track would be used to create a superseding agreement and thus overturn the modest gains that poor countries achieved in Kyoto. At the center of the debates in Copenhagen and beyond was the US and its allies’ effort to overturn Kyoto’s non-distinction between rapidly developing nations such as China and the world’s poorest countries; that circumstance brought China to the fore as a key advocate for those seeking to retain the Kyoto framework. The US repeatedly blamed China and India for their rapidly rising CO2 levels, as well as for keeping a new international climate agreement from moving forward entirely on the North’s terms. The G77 group of developing countries and the Alliance of Small Island States—who have the most to lose if there is no international agreement and sea levels continue to rise—all lined up in support of retaining Kyoto and holding the richest nations responsible for their historic contribution to destabilizing the climate.
-I leaned down a little more, and looked into his eyes at close range. They were calm and empty.
+Technology transfer funds were another key sticking point in the pre-Copenhagen talks. If poorer countries are to eventually bring their emissions down and simultaneously lift people out of poverty, Northern countries will need to fulfill their Kyoto commitments to speed the deployment of renewable energy technologies in the South. Meanwhile, indigenous peoples’ representatives such as Anastasia Pinto of CORE, based in India’s Eastern Himalayas, viewed such “sustainable development” arguments as mainly benefiting elites in the South, who want to continue getting richer at the expense of both poor people and the environment. During a fall 2009 US tour, Pinto described India’s growing economic divide as the real key to their government’s refusal to limit India’s rising contribution to the climate crisis. Former ''Times of India'' Senior Editor Praful Bidwai similarly points a finger at India’s “small but exceedingly powerful consumerist elite…, which has a high stake in raising its emissions and believes it has the ‘right’ to ‘get even’ with the North, no matter what happens to the climate.”[4] This complex interplay of responsibilities and interests, linked to the historical legacy of colonialism and the contentious politics of “development,” contributed in many ways to Copenhagen’s eventual impasse.
-“Teddy, I’ve been hungry for so long. Give me something to eat. For this last evening.”
+Lim Li Lin of the Third World Network summed up one key aspect of the deadlock over Kyoto in a pre-conference briefing paper, stating, “The international compliance regime under the Kyoto Protocol … faces an uncertain future. While it can always be further improved, the risk is now the possibility of no longer having a system of international compliance.”[5] Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of Kyoto was that it could prove far more costly to the environment in the long run to try to develop a new climate treaty from scratch, especially if the worst features of Kyoto—namely the cap-and-trade system—would be retained in either case.
-Kazik slapped me on the knee.
+==== {{anchor|RevealingtheUSStrategy}} Revealing the US Strategy ====
-“Do you know this Jew?”
+While attempts to preserve aspects of the Kyoto Protocol were burdened by all the complexities of North-South politics, the continued resistance of the US government to internationally binding limits on global warming pollution raised many fundamental questions. Is there any defensible alternative to a mutually agreed-upon effort to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions? Just what was the US bringing to the table in Copenhagen beside a vague pledge to reduce emissions by 2020 to a level that still fell far short of many countries’ 2012 commitments under Kyoto?[6]
-“It’s Beker,” I answered softly.
+An article in the September/October 2009 issue of the journal ''Foreign Affairs'' offered some important clues as to what would transpire in Copenhagen and beyond. ''Foreign Affairs'' is the official organ of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which has long been seen as both a weathervane and an active arbiter of elite opinion in the US, and lists most recent US presidents and numerous other senior government officials among its members. In his article titled “Copenhagen’s Inconvenient Truth,” CFR Senior Fellow Michael Levi outlined the US government’s apparently long-standing strategy for Copenhagen.[7]
-“You, Jew, get up there on the bunk and stuff yourself. When you’re full, you can take the rest with you to the chimney. Go on! I don’t sleep there so you can take along your lice.”
+“The odds of signing a comprehensive treaty in December are vanishingly small,” Levi would need to have written early in the summer, in preparation for the journal’s early September publication. Instead, he urged that those concerned about the climate problem needed to “rethink their strategy and expectations” for Copenhagen. Levi’s alternative proposal was to essentially replace international emissions standards with a patchwork of voluntary, country-specific policies with the modest, and fundamentally inadequate, goal of reducing world emissions of carbon dioxide by half, “ideally from 1990 levels, by 2050.” Under Levi’s scenario, China would step up investments in renewable energy and “ultra-efficient conventional coal power,” India would become a pioneer in smart grid technology, and countries with emissions mainly from deforestation (especially Indonesia and Brazil) would be offered incentives to protect their forests and raise agricultural productivity. The main US contribution would be to push for a detailed agreement on “measurement, reporting and verification,” one area where US surveillance technology would clearly hold an advantage.
-“Teddy,” he took me by the arm, “come. In the barrack I’ve got a wonderful apple pie, straight from my mother.”
+Levi’s article pointedly blamed developing countries for the world’s inability to agree on meaningful emission caps. He argued that the Chinese and others invariably insist on lower-than-feasible caps, lack the capacity to accurately monitor their emissions, and would simply ignore any limits that they proved unable to meet. Unfortunately, this is precisely how Northern countries have behaved since Kyoto; indeed Levi cited Canada as a key example of a country that repeatedly exceeded its Kyoto limits, and faced no penalty for doing so. For these reasons, according to Levi, efforts to develop binding caps for developing countries are simply “a waste of time.”
-The strong and clever were used by the camp authorities for special work, which gave them the opportunity to procure food and clothing. One of the most sought-after jobs was that of unloading the box-cars that brought Jews from all the cities of Europe to Auschwitz. These Jews brought suitcases full of clothes, gold, jewels, and food with them because they had been told they were leaving for “re-settlement.” When the train entered the gates of the camp, the frightened crowd was immediately chased out of the cars. Those who were young and strong enough to work were separated out, while old people and women with children were sent at once to the gas chambers and crematoriums. The work of the prisoners was to carry out the baggage that was destined to enrich the Reich and the camp administration. Beta describes his work around the transport. He has gotten into this brigade through a French friend, Henri.
+A key challenge for the US in Copenhagen, according to Levi, was to avoid “excessive blame” if the conference were to be seen as a failure. Rather than expecting a comprehensive agreement to come out of Copenhagen, he argued, the conference should instead be seen as analogous to the beginning of a round of arms control or world trade talks, processes which invariably take many years to complete. “This ‘Copenhagen Round,’” he argues, mirroring the typical World Trade Organization (WTO) language, “would be much more like an extended trade negotiation than like a typical environmental treaty process.” Overlooking the fact that a substantive, though flawed, agreement was actually signed in Kyoto, he emphasized that it took several more years of negotiations before that treaty could be implemented.
-In the abundant literature of atrocity of the twentieth century, one rarely finds an account written from the point of view of an accessory to the crime. Authors are usually ashamed of this role. But collaboration is an empty word as applied to a concentration camp. The machine is impersonal; responsibility shifts from those who carry out orders to those higher, always higher. Beta’s stories about the “transport” should, I believe, be included in all anthologies of literature dealing with the lot of man in totalitarian society, if ever such anthologies are compiled.
+The implications of such a Copenhagen non-agreement were clearly going to be severe. Climate scientists emphasized that time is rapidly running out to prevent irreversible tipping points in the destabilization of the earth’s climate. Trends in CO2 emissions were already exceeding the worst-case “business-as-usual” scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report, and researchers were beginning to predict temperature rises of 4 degrees or more (7 degrees Fahrenheit) in various regions of the world, well before the end of this century.[8] That would mean a permanent loss of Arctic ice, accellerating spells of flooding and droughts, threats to half the earth’s fresh water supplies, and the collapse of countless important ecosystems as well as key agricultural zones.
-The arrival of a “transport” is spread out, like a play, over several acts. A few quotations will give a better picture of his literary method than any amount of description:
+Meanwhile, climate justice activists in Europe, in indigenous and small farming communities worldwide, as well as in North America, challenged the inequities underlying current climate policies and demanded real solutions. They highlighted the voices of the communities most affected by the climate changes that are already underway, and challenged corporate-friendly false solutions, from carbon trading and offsets, to the myths of “clean coal,” nuclear power, and the onslaught of industrial-scale agrofuel plantations. Simultaneously, they challenged the growing dominance of corporate interests in the UN process itself, a phenomenon that led one participant in the 2007 UN climate conference in Bali to describe it as “a giant shopping extravaganza, marketing the earth, the sky and the rights of the poor.”[9]
-*** Prologue, or anticipation of the “transport”
+Climate justice activists in North America held a continent-wide day of action on Monday, November 30[th], the tenth anniversary of the mass demonstrations that helped shut down the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Hundreds of people marched and rallied and dozens were arrested at locations from San Francisco’s Bank of America headquarters to the Chicago Climate Exchange, then home of the largest voluntary carbon market. South Carolina activists blocked the shipment of a generator for a new coal plant, Canadians sat in at the office of their Finance Minister—a key proponent of the massively destructive scheme to extract oil from the tar sands of central Alberta—and New Yorkers marched from a local Bank of America to the offices of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental advocate for carbon trading.[10]
-Greeks are sitting around us, moving their jaws voraciously like huge inhuman insects, greedily eating moldy clods of bread. They are uneasy; they don’t know what they’ll be doing. Rails and planks worry them. They don’t like heavy hauling.
+The following weekend, thousands marched in Geneva during the World Trade Organization’s first ministerial conference in four years. The momentum was building for massive actions on the streets of Copenhagen, where many activists would demand “System Change, Not Climate Change.” They called for fossil fuels to be kept in the ground, indigenous and forest peoples’ rights to be respected, and reparations for ecological and climate debts to be paid by the richest countries to those who are most affected by resource extraction and climate-related disasters. For some advocates, Copenhagen represented capitalism’s last possible attempt to come to terms with the climate crisis. With African delegates threatening another walkout, and the US pushing for an agreement in name only, the analogy raised by international activists between the Copenhagen climate conference and the November 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle looked to be more appropriate than most environmentalists ever imagined.
-“Was wir arbeiten?” they ask.
+==== {{anchor|CoerciveDiplomacy}} Coercive Diplomacy ====
-“Niks. Transport kommen, alles Krematorium, compris?”
+For the emerging international climate justice movement, Copenhagen was indeed something of a Seattle moment, with some 100,000 people in the streets on the Saturday between the two weeks of talks. It was a unique opportunity for activists and NGO representatives from around the world to gather, forge personal ties, and begin raising the global profile of a comprehensive climate justice agenda. Independent journalists (in the US, most notably Amy Goodman’s ''Democracy Now'' team) helped amplify the voices best able to explain that climate disruptions are no longer an abstract scientific issue, and are already impacting the lives of those least able to cope. Even the mainstream US press featured some notable stories of people around the world who are struggling with the effects of climate chaos. More than ever before, the street actions in Copenhagen dramatized the view that the only meaningful solution to the climate crisis is to “leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, and the tar sands in the land,” expanding upon a slogan initially raised by campaigners against oil drilling in Ecuador’s endangered Yasuní National Park.
-“Alles verstehen,” they answer in crematorium esperanto. They calm down; they won’t be loading rails on trucks, or carrying planks.
+Copenhagen was also a pivotal moment for the ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance) countries of Latin America—most notably Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—which continued to the very end of the conference to stand up to threats from the US and other powerful countries, and refused to buckle under last-minute pressure to approve the shallow and destructive “Copenhagen Accord.” In the end, the assembled delegates could only agree to “take note” of the five-page Accord. The European Union, on the other hand, which had once stood for a strong worldwide agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, now fell in line with the disruptive strategies of the US. Even though the final document was not formally accepted until the following year, Copenhagen represented a triumph of the US agenda to replace the promise of a comprehensive global climate agreement with a patchwork of informal, individual country commitments.
-*** Act I, or the arrival of the “transport”
+Ultimately, the Copenhagen Accord served to establish the notion of voluntary national pledges as a new global norm for implementing climate policy. Nothing was binding on governments or corporations, and pledges were only to be “assessed” informally after five years. The last two pages of the Accord actually consisted of a pair of empty charts where countries were to simply fill in their voluntary emissions targets and other proposed mitigation actions by the end of January 2010. Fifty-five countries ultimately met that deadline, essentially putting in writing their negotiating positions prior to the Copenhagen meeting. Another twenty countries submitted their pledges in the months that followed. Hillary Clinton, then the US Secretary of State, had promised global South countries that acceded to the Copenhagen Accord that the US would raise $100 billion a year in funds to assist with climate stabilizing measures, a promise that all but evaporated during subsequent years’ negotiations.
-A striped crowd lay near the tracks in the long strips of shade. It breathed heavily and unevenly, spoke lazily in its own tongues and gazed indifferently at the majestic people in green uniform, at the green of the trees, near and unattainable, at the steeple of a distant little church which at that moment was tolling a late angelus.
+Further, the document was hammered out in a back room, WTO-style. It hedged all the important issues, and appended loopholes and contradictions to every substantive point that it pretended to address. While discussions would continue for at least five more years under the two separate negotiating tracks established in Bali, the Accord provided a justification for leading countries in the process to continue subverting and undermining those discussions in order to continue business as usual.
-“The transport is coming,” someone said, and everyone stood up in expectation. Freight cars appeared around the curve as the train backed in. The trainman standing in the caboose leaned out, waved his hand, whistled. The locomotive screeched, wheezed and the train trundled slowly along the station. Behind the tiny barred windows one could see human faces, pale, crumpled, disheveled, as if they were sleepy—frightened women, and men who, exotically, had hair. They passed slowly, gazing at the station in silence. Then something started to boil inside the wagons and to beat against their wooden walls.
+As some have pointed out, it could have been worse. This non-agreement may have been better than a coercive agreement that would have entrenched insufficient pollution reduction targets and facilitated the further expansion of highly manipulated global carbon markets. But the putative loss of a nominally accountable UN process may have been the worst outcome of all. The US, of course, has always tried to undermine the United Nations when it is unable to overtly control it, but replacing the processes established under the 1992 UN climate convention with a cash-for-compliance, anything-goes circus that more closely mirrors the World Trade Organization’s secretive mechanisms did not bode well for the future.
-“Water! Air!” Despairing, hollow cries burst out.
+Representatives of Friends of the Earth correctly described the Copenhagen Accord as a “sham agreement,” British columnist George Monbiot called it an exercise in “saving face,” and former neoliberal “shock doctor”-turned-environmental policy guru Jeffrey Sachs termed it a farce.[11] Long-time UN observer Martin Khor has pointed out that for the assembled countries to “take note” of the document meant that not only was it not formally adopted, but it was not even “welcomed,” a common UN practice.[12]
-Human faces pressed to the windows, lips desperately gasping for air sucked in a few gulps, vanished; others struggled into their place, then they too vanished. The shrieks and moans grew steadily louder.
+The Accord also heightened the global divide between rich and poor, with countries experiencing the severest droughts, floods, and heatwaves facing increasingly desperate fates as the full effects of climate disruptions continue to unfold. Not to mention the small island nations that face annihilation as melting ice sheets and thermal expansion bring rising seas, along with infiltrations of seawater into their scarce fresh water supplies. Especially disturbing in Copenhagen was the equivocal role of the rapidly developing “BASIC” countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), whose governments claim to speak for the poor when it is convenient—whether in their own countries or elsewhere around the world—but mainly seek to protect the expanding riches of their own well-entrenched elites, who are all to willing to do the bidding of transnational corporate interests. While the mainstream media in the North preferred to blame China for the lack of a more comprehensive agreement in Copenhagen, a convergence of Chinese and US elite economic interests was clearly manifest in the Copenhagen Accord’s transparent lack of substance.
-*** Act II, or the segregation (a few scenes will suffice)
+==== {{anchor|BeyondCopenhagen}} Beyond Copenhagen ====
-Here comes a woman walking briskly, hurrying almost imperceptibly yet feverishly. A small child with the plump, rosy face of a cherub runs after her, fails to catch up, stretches out its hands, crying, “Mama, mama!”
+In April of 2010, researchers from Germany’s most prestigious climate research centers published a paper in ''Nature'' that summarized various countries’ emission reduction commitments under the Copenhagen Accord and assessed their likely consequences for the global climate.[13] Most countries, they found, were projecting greenhouse gas levels in 2020 roughly comparable to a business-as-usual scenario, thoroughly lacking in substantial measures to curtail global warming pollution. Only Japan and Norway, among the developed countries, had pledged to accomplish significantly more than that. Many countries’ pledges, they observed, would be fulfilled using surplus emission allowances that they held in reserve due to the systematic over-allocation of allowances condoned by the Kyoto Protocol (see Chapter 4). Even a best-case scenario, based on the upper limit of various countries’ mitigation commitments, came in far short of holding the likely rise in average global temperature within the range of 2 degrees Celsius that was “recognized” as scientifically defensible in the Accord’s text. The German researchers’ more pessimistic scenario projected developed countries’ emissions in 2020 as equivalent to a 6.5 percent ''increase'' in greenhouse gases from the 1990 baseline, corresponding to an eventual global average temperature increase of at least 5 degrees (9°Fahrenheit). In unusually descriptive language for the traditionally rather staid pages of ''Nature'', the German group decried the lack of accepted short-term emission-reduction goals as equivalent to “racing towards a cliff and hoping to stop just before it.”[14]
-“Woman, take this child in your arms!”
+One of the signature moments in Copenhagen was Bolivian president Evo Morales’ invitation to those assembled to participate in a different kind of climate summit in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba the following April. The 2010 “World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth” turned out to be a rather unique coming together of public officials from a few countries with some 30,000 representatives of civil society, indigenous peoples, and social movements from around the world. They collectively drafted a comprehensive set of principles, rooted in indigenous views of harmony, complementarity and anti-colonialism, proposed a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, and called for an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal to judge and penalize activities that promote climate change and contaminate the earth.[15]
-“Sir, it isn’t my child, it isn’t mine!” the woman shouts hysterically, and runs away covering her face with her hands. She wants to hide; she wants to reach those who won’t leave in a truck, who will leave on foot, who will live. She is young, healthy, pretty, she wants to live.
+The Cochabamba “People’s Agreement,” which was assembled from the products of 17 distinct working groups at the conference, began by declaring that, “Today, our Mother Earth [“Pachamama” in the Andean indigenous cosmology] is wounded and the future of humanity is in danger.” The agreement condemned carbon markets, as well as the commodification of forests for carbon offsets, and also called to protect the rights of climate migrants. It represented a rather refreshing step beyond the diplomatic gridlock of Copenhagen, even though the agreement fell short of endorsing the full climate justice agenda, especially the demand to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The contents of the Cochabamba agreement were presented as proposals to the 2010 and 2011 UN climate conferences, but repeatedly failed to reach the floor of the official plenaries.
-But the child runs after her, pleading at the top of its voice, “Mama, mama, don’t run away!”
+Since Copenhagen, progress toward a meaningful climate agreement has continued to be stifled by big-power politics and diplomatic gridlock. Annual conferences under the auspices of the UNFCCC have happened in Mexico, South Africa, Qatar, and Poland, with conferences planned as of this writing in Lima, Peru toward the end of 2014 and Paris in 2015. Participants and civil society observers at recent COPs have witnessed numerous disturbing developments, including:* Increasing polarization between representatives from the North and South, particularly in response to US efforts to dilute the long-standing focus on “common but differentiated responsibilities” for climate mitigation and remove the more explicit language on climate equity that has long been intrinsic to the UNFCCC process;[16]
+* Unilateral withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on the part of most leading countries outside of Western Europe that were subject to its binding emissions limits, including Japan, Australia, Canada, Russia, and New Zealand;
+* A 2011 agreement that a new climate treaty would not come into effect until 2020, with the terms slated to be finalized in Paris in 2015; its implementation will likely rely on the system of national mitigation pledges (now termed “contributions,” with undefined legal standing) that the US has insisted upon since Copenhagen, and dissenting voices from the ALBA countries and elsewhere have been largely ignored;
+* Small concessions to G77 countries along the way, mostly aimed at keeping them engaged in the process. These included the creation of a new structure in 2013 for addressing ongoing losses and damages from climate disruptions, but the means for funding this remain vague.
-“It’s not mine, not mine, not ... !”
-Until Andrej, the sailor from Sevastopol, overtook her. His eyes were troubled by vodka and the heat. He reached her, knocked her off her feet with a single powerful blow and, as she fell, caught her by the hair and dragged her up again. His face was distorted with fury.
-“Why you lousy fucking Jew-bitch! Jebit twoju mat’! You’d run away from your own child! I’ll show you, you whore!” He grabbed her in the middle, one paw throttling her throat which wanted to shout, and flung her into the truck like a heavy sack of grain.
+The 2011 “Durban Platform,” with its deferral of new climate mitigation measures until 2020 at the earliest, heightened a lingering crisis of confidence in the entire process. That delay could spell a “death sentence for Africa, small island states, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide,” in the words of Friends of the Earth International chair Nnimmo Bassey, and increasing “climate racism, ecocide, and genocide,” according to Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network.[17] Additionally, the pledge of $100 billion a year in climate-related financing for developing countries, which was crucial to convincing many countries to let the process to move forward in Copenhagen, has proved increasingly uncertain. Each successive annual conference has come close to adjourning without any new substantive agreements, despite dramatically lowered expectations and an increasingly coercive decision-making process. Global South delegates walked out of the 2013 COP in Warsaw, Poland ''en masse'' to protest their continuing marginalization; meanwhile the Polish government added insult to injury that year by sponsoring a conference celebrating the country’s coal industry that coincided with the COP.
-“Here! Take this with you, you slut!” And he threw her child at her feet.
+A revealing 2013 speech by lead US climate negotiator Todd Stern brought an especially alarming glimpse at where the entire process may be headed. Stern continued the pattern of blaming poorer countries for resisting an “agreement applicable to all parties,” and touted the emphasis on “self-determined mitigation commitments” instead of mandatory obligations to reduce emissions. He dismissed the “loss and damage” negotiations that would dominate many discussions in Warsaw as merely an “ideological narrative of fault and blame,” and insisted that no additional public funds for international climate aid would be available beyond the meager $2.5 billion that the US has committed annually since 2010. Further, he thoroughly rejected the long-standing principle of responsibility for historical CO2 emissions, insisting, with unsurpassed arrogance, that, “It is unwarranted to assign blame to developed countries for emissions before the point at which people realized that those emissions caused harm to the climate system.”[18] Ethics aside, Stern would have us all forget that at least half of all cumulative emissions have occurred since 1980, and a much larger share since the first observations of rising atmospheric CO2 levels in the late 1950s.
-“Gut gemacht. That’s how one should punish unnatural mothers,” said an SS man standing near the van.
+So for now the struggle returns to the national and local levels, where people may be best able to create examples of just and effective ways to address the climate crisis. There is no shortage of positive, forward-looking approaches to reducing excess consumption and furthering the development of alternative energy sources, especially ones that can be democratically controlled by communities and not corporations. But the power of positive examples is far from sufficient to address the crucial problem of time.
-A pair of people fall to the ground entangled in a desperate embrace. He digs his fingers into her flesh convulsively, tears at her clothes with his teeth. She screams hysterically, curses, blasphemes until, stifled by a boot, she chokes and falls silent. They split them apart like a tree; and herd them into the car like animals.
+A few years ago, climate experts shocked the world by saying we had less than ten years to reverse course and take immediate steps to prevent irreversible tipping points in the global climate system. The troubled outcome of the UN process, and continued diplomatic stonewalling in the lead-up to future worldwide agreements, make it difficult to feel confident that it isn’t too late. Now, any meaningful turnaround will require the evolution of an increasingly unified and effective international climate justice movement. In the next chapter, we will turn to the question of how such a movement has begun to take shape.
-Others are carrying a young girl with a missing leg; they hold her by her arms and by her one remaining leg. Tears are streaking down her face as she whispers sadly, “Please, please, it hurts, it hurts ...” They heave her into a truck, among the corpses. She will be burned alive, together with them.
+=== {{anchor|3TowardaMovementforClimate1}} {{anchor|Topofpart0006html}} {{anchor|3TowardaMovementforClimate}} 3. Toward a Movement for Climate Justice ===
-*** Act III, or the conversation of the witnesses
+On the Indonesian island of Bali in late 2007, events surrounding the annual UN climate conference had a strikingly different character than had been seen before. Previous gatherings had brought NGO and civil society representatives from various countries to politely participate in the proceedings and sometimes to demonstrate outside. But the diversity of peoples and issues in Bali was by all accounts a unique site to behold. Colorful costumes and distinctive headgear represented the unique ethnic diversity of Indonesia’s islands, as well as a wide scope of people’s movements from across south Asia and beyond.
-A cool and starry evening falls. We are lying on the tracks. It is infinitely silent. Anemic lamps burn on high poles behind the circles of light.
+The diversity of climate-related issues and public demands raised by the demonstrators was equally impressive. Two years earlier, the leading symbol at protests outside the 2005 climate talks in Montreal was the ubiquitous polar bear. In Bali, representatives of land-based peoples’ movements demanded agrarian reform, an end to conversions of tropical forest into biofuel plantations, and the protection of peatlands. Others called for payment of the global North’s outstanding ecological debts and for an end to the biotechnology industry’s commodification of life.[1] A new global network calling itself Climate Justice Now raised a challenging new set of demands both inside and outside the official proceedings.
-“Did you exchange shoes?” Henri asks me.
+In the fall of 2008, U.S. organizations actively working for climate justice in the US and internationally, including the Global Justice Ecology Project, Rising Tide North America, and the Indigenous Environmental Network, launched a national Mobilization for Climate Justice. The Mobilization was founded to link the climate struggle in the US to the growing international climate justice movement, with an eye toward the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit and beyond. Its objective was to provide a justice-based framework for organizing around climate change that sought leadership from communities in the US that are most impacted by climate change and the fossil fuel industry. The MCJ’s open letter to potential allies called for “a radical change in direction to put climate justice, ecological integrity and people’s rights at the center of international climate negotiations.”[2] Another new network, Climate SOS emerged soon afterward to expose the myths of the carbon market as promoted in domestic US legislation.
-“No.”
+The following year, European activists engaged in planning events around the climate conference in Copenhagen began to see that the summit would likely fall far short of preventing further climate disruptions, and pledged to take action against the root causes of climate change. Activists from more than 20 countries, including several from the global South, gathered that summer as part of a network called Climate Justice Action, and agreed on an ambitious agenda to challenge the increasingly business-dominated deal-making at the UN level.
-“Why not?”
+“We cannot trust the market with our future, nor put our faith in unsafe, unproven and unsustainable technologies,” their declaration read. “Contrary to those who put their faith in ‘green capitalism,’ we know that it is impossible to have infinite growth on a finite planet.”[3] The statement called for leaving fossil fuels in the ground, popular and community control over production, reducing the North’s overconsumption, respecting indigenous and forest peoples’ rights and reparations for the ecological and climate debts owed by the richest countries to those most affected by resource extraction and climate-related disasters.
-“Man, I have enough, absolutely enough!”
+Today, representatives of communities disproportionately affected by global inaction on climate gather annually at the UN climate meetings, and aim to coordinate their actions throughout the year around a broad scope of local and regional grievances as well. People from communities disproportionately affected by climate disruptions—especially indigenous peoples, women, peasant farmers, US racial justice activists and many others—gather in host cities to bring their demands to the world. Calls for climate justice, and for “System Change, Not Climate Change,” have become familiar highlights of these proceedings.
-“Already? After the first transport? Just think, me— since Christmas maybe a million people have passed through my hands. The worst are the transports from Paris: a man always meets friends.”
+This emerging climate justice movement embodies the core understanding that those least responsible for emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that disrupt the climate have already been affected the most by accelerating climate-related disasters around the world. Any remotely adequate response to global climate changes needs to address and directly challenge this profound discrepancy and prioritize the voices of the most affected communities. Many of the same communities are simultaneously impacted by the emerging false solutions to climate change, including carbon trading and offsets, the destruction of forests to create agrofuel plantations, mega-scale hydroelectric developments, and nuclear power (see Chapter 4). False corporate “solutions” to global warming are expanding commodification and privatization of land, waterways, and the atmosphere itself, largely at the expense of those communities.
-“And what do you say to them?”
+==== {{anchor|OriginsofClimateJustice}} Origins of Climate Justice ====
-“That they’re going to take a bath, and that we’ll meet later in the camp. What would you say?”
+The first published reference to the concept of climate justice appeared in a 1999 report titled ''Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice'' by the San Francisco-based Corporate Watch group.[4] The report was mainly an examination of the petroleum industry and its disproportionate political influence, but it also made an initial attempt to define a multifaceted approach to climate justice, including:* Addressing the root causes of global warming and holding corporations accountable;
+* Opposing the destructive impacts of oil development, and supporting impacted communities, including those most affected by the increasing incidence of weather-related disasters;
+* Looking to environmental justice communities (see below) and organized labor for strategies to support a just transition away from fossil fuels;
+* Challenging corporate-led globalization and the dispro-portionate influence of international financial institutions such as the World Bank and World Trade Organization.
-*** Epilogue (many trains came to Auschwitz that evening. The transport totaled 15,000 people)
-As we return to the camp, the stars begin to fade, the sky becomes ever more translucent and lifts above us, the night grows light. A clear, hot day announces itself.
-From the crematoriums, broad columns of smoke rise steadily and merge above into a gigantic, black river that turns exceedingly slowly in the sky over Birkenau and disappears beyond the forests, in the direction of Trze-binia. The transport is already burning.
+The report’s conclusions were highlighted at a 1999 rally at Chevron Oil’s headquarters in San Francisco, as well as at international conferences held in the Netherlands in 2000 and on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002.
-We pass an SS squad, moving with mechanized weapons to relieve the guard. They march evenly, shoulder to shoulder, one mass, one will.
+The Corpwatch authors were active supporters of the US movement for environmental justice, which began in earnest in the 1980s and had become a focus for inner city, indigenous, and poor rural communities confronting their disproportionate exposure to a wide variety of environmental hazards. The movement was galvanized by several successful local campaigns, as well as a landmark, church-sponsored report, ''Toxic Wastes and Race'', which revealed that the racial composition of communities is the single largest factor in the siting of hazardous waste facilities in the US. The report documented that 3 out of 5 African-Americans nationwide live in close proximity to abandoned toxic sites.[5]
-“Und Morgen die ganze Welt ...” they sing at the top of their lungs.
+News of the ''Toxic Wastes and Race'' report helped unite a variety of groups that had been challenging this reality on the local level for many years, and helped empower African American, Native American and Latino activists to demand a greater voice within the largely Euro-American-dominated environmental movement.[6] In 1991, a National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit issued a comprehensive public statement against environmental racism and for environmental justice.[7] By the mid-1990s, Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and others were articulating the need to bring the deepening climate crisis into the environmental justice framework, understanding that people of color would be as disproportionately impacted by climate disruptions as by chemical toxins. The movement’s second Leadership Summit in 2002 issued a document titled “10 Principles for Just Climate Change Policies in the US.”[8]
-<br>
+Also throughout the 1990s, international NGOs such as the World Rainforest Movement, Friends of the Earth International and the Third World Network drew public attention to local struggles of indigenous and other land-based peoples in the global South against the rising levels of resource extraction that accompanied neoliberal economic policies. They joined with Corpwatch, IEN and others in Bali in 2002 to develop the Bali Principles of Climate Justice, a comprehensive, 27-point program aimed to “begin to build an international movement of all peoples for Climate Justice.”[9] Campaigns to highlight indigenous land struggles helped shape the international movement against corporate-driven globalization in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and became a central focus for numerous organizations engaged in international climate justice organizing today, including IEN, the Global Forest Coalition, the Global Justice Ecology Project, and many others.[10]
-Beta is a nihilist in his stories, but by that I do not mean that he is amoral. On the contrary, his nihilism results from an ethical passion, from disappointed love of the world and of humanity. He wants to go the limit in describing what he saw; he wants to depict with complete accuracy a world in which there is no longer any place for indignation. The human species is naked in his stories, stripped of those tendencies toward good which last only so long as the habit of civilization lasts. But the habit of civilization is fragile; a sudden change in circumstances, and humanity reverts to its primeval savagery. How deluded are those respectable citizens who, striding along the streets of English or American cities, consider themselves men of virtue and goodness! Of course, it is easy to condemn a woman who would abandon her child in order to save her own life. This is a monstrous act. Yet a woman who, while reading on her comfortable sofa, judges her unfortunate sister should pause to consider whether fear would not be stronger than love within her, if she too were faced with horror. Perhaps it would, perhaps not—who can foretell?
+During the lead-up to the final ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 2005, policymakers in the EU and other countries increasingly adopted market-based “cap-and-trade” measures to nominally reduce greenhouse pollution (see Chapter 4). Market skeptics, concerned about the injustices inherent in this approach, convened a meeting in Durban, South Africa in the fall of 2004 that included representatives of social movements and indigenous peoples’ organizations based in Brazil, India, Samoa, the US, and UK, as well as South Africa. That gathering drafted the Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading, which eventually gained over 300 endorsements worldwide.[11]
-But the “concentration universe” also contained many human beings who spurred themselves to the noblest acts, who died to protect others. None of them figure in Beta’s stories. His attention is fixed not on man—man is simply an animal that wants to live —but on “concentration societv.” Prisoners are ruled by a special ethic: it is permissible to harm others, provided they harm you first. Beyond this unwritten contract, every man saves himself as best he can. We would search in vain for pictures of human solidarity in Beta’s book. The truth about his behavior in Auschwitz, according to his fellow-prisoners, is utterly different from what his stories would lead one to suppose; he acted heroically, and was a model of comradeship. But he wants to be tough; and he does not spare himself in his desire to observe soberly and impartially. He is afraid of lies; and it would be a lie to present himself as an observer who judged, when in reality he, though striving to preserve his integrity, felt subjected to all the laws of degradation. As narrator, he endows himself with the qualities which pass as assets in a concentration camp: cleverness and enterprise. Thanks to the element of “class” war between the weak and the strong, wherein he did not deviate from the truth, his stories are extraordinarily brutal.
+When the U.N.’s annual climate conference was held in Bali in 2007, the Durban Group for Climate Justice and allies from around the world gathered in significant numbers. Representatives of communities disproportionately affected by global inaction on climate presented a strong and unified showing both inside and outside the official proceedings and, as we have seen, a more formal worldwide network emerged under the slogan, “Climate Justice Now!” At a series of side events, press conferences and protests throughout the Bali conference, representatives of affected communities, indigenous peoples, women, peasant farmers, and their allies articulated their demands for:* reduced consumption in the global North;
+* huge financial transfers from North to South based on historical responsibility and ecological debt, paid for by redirecting military budgets, innovative taxes and debt cancellation;
+* leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing in energy-efficiency and community-led renewable energy;
+* rights based resource conservation that enforces Indigenous land rights and promotes peoples’ sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water; and
+* sustainable family farming and food sovereignty.[12]
-Liberated from Dachau, he became acquainted with the life of refugees in Western Germany. It was like an extension of the life in the camp. Demoralization, thievery, drunkenness, corruption—all the evil forces set loose in man by the years of Hitlerism continued to triumph. The callous policy of the occupying powers toward the millions of recent slaves aroused his anger. Here, then, was the dreamt-of end of the war: again the law of the jungle prevailed; again the strong, this time mouthing the slogans of democracy and freedom, trod upon the weak or treated them with cruel indifference.
-Beta had a keen eye, but it was focussed on all that was absurd, infamous, and vile in those about him. Pitiless and intolerant, he was one open wound. Perhaps he would have been less bitter had he been able, after these years of suffering, to stand still at one point for one moment and see an individual man instead of a society shaken by the great paroxysm of the end of the War. He was in constant inner motion; his face was perpetually distorted into a grimace of rage and irony. He continued to see the mass of humanity in whose midst he was living as naked and ruled by a few primitive impulses. For him, who had to aim toward something, such a world was unbearable. He felt he could no longer remain in a state of undirected fury and revolt.
-Like many ex-prisoners, he had to choose between return to his native country and self-imposed exile. His war-time Marxist sympathies were vaguely rooted in a feeling that Marxism treats man realistically. His convictions could be reduced to the simple maxim that man is not governed by his good intentions, but solely by the laws of the social order in which he is placed. Whoever wants to change man must, first of all, change social conditions. Still, like all Poles, he was suspicious of the powerful Russian state. The violence of his style brought him closest to such writers as Zola or, among contemporaries, Hemingway, whom he read avidly; and thus he was one of those artists known in Russia as “the slime of the West.” Nothing evokes such horror in the land of dialectics as a writer who depicts man in terms of elementary forces of hunger and love.
+A more detailed statement of principles for Climate Justice Now (CJN), developed the following year, begins in part:
-He hesitated for a long time. Finally, after literary publications appearing in Poland began to filter through to him, he made up his mind to go back. Two major factors determined his decision. He had great literary ambitions, but he was a beginner and unknown. Where, outside his own country, could he find readers of books written in his native tongue? Besides, a revolution was in progress in Poland. That was the place for a man torn by fury; that was where he could find the opportunity to remake the world.
+===== From the perspective of climate justice, it is imperative that responsibility for reducing emissions and financing systemic transformation is taken by those who have benefited most from the past 250 years of economic development. Furthermore, any solutions to climate change must protect the most vulnerable, compensate those who are displaced, guarantee individual and collective rights, and respect peoples’ right to participate in decisions that impact on their lives.13 =====
-He said good-bye to his friends, and returned to a Warsaw whose inhabitants were living in the cellars of demolished houses. With their own hands they were clearing away the heaps of rubble and loading them on shoddy little horse-carts. Thus was the rebuilding of the town begun. But books and magazines were instantly snatched up throughout Poland. The government spared no expense in its support of literature. Unlimited possibilities opened before any writer who had the slightest bit of talent. Beta’s career began at the tempo of a blitz. By publishing in the best reviews, and collecting large royalties, he was getting only his due. He had a fine mastery of the language; his style was terse and biting. Because his experiences were those of many of his countrymen, his subject matter was universally near and understandable. No wonder, then, that his book of stories about the “concentration universe” was hailed as a literary event of first importance.
+By 2010, the CJN network included some 750 international organizations, including numerous grassroots groups throughout the global South, and had become a clearinghouse for information and the continuing involvement of many groups seeking to further these goals.[14] At several UN climate conferences, the network offered an inclusive meeting place for critical perspectives on the unfolding international climate negotiations.
-Fortunately for him, socialist realism was not vet obligatory, for his book was in the most blatant opposition to Soviet writing techniques. According to the canons imposed on writers by the Center, it was practically a crime. Obviously, the subject itself was politically irreproachable. Descriptions of the bestiality of Hitlerism were eminently desirable, especially since the average Pole hated the Russians just about as much as he hated the Germans. Concentrating the readers’ attention upon German atrocities channeled their hatred into a single direction and so contributed to the “psychological preparation” of the country. Hence the growing number of books about the Gestapo, partisan warfare, or concentration camps.
+In recent years, climate justice has come to embody three distinct but complementary currents from various parts of the world. In the global South, demands for climate justice unite an impressive diversity of indigenous and other land-based people’s movements. They include rainforest dwellers opposing new mega-dams and palm oil plantations, African communities resisting land appropriations for industrial agriculture and agrofuel production, Pacific Islanders facing the loss of their homes due to rising seas, and peasant farmers fighting for food sovereignty and basic land rights. A statement to the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference from the worldwide confederation of peasant movements, La Vía Campesina, stated in part:
-Official tolerance went so far that one was free to write sympathetically about the Polish army’s fight against the Germans in 1939, even though that army had defended a “lordly” Poland that was like a cinder in the Soviet Union’s eye. Still, a politically correct theme would not have saved him from the critics’ attack had they wanted to apply orthodox criteria, because he described the concentration camp as he personally had seen it, not as one was supposed to see it. In this lay his transgression. How was one supposed to see a concentration camp? It is not hard to enumerate: 1) the prisoners should have banded together in secret organizations; 2) the leaders in these organizations should have been Communists; 3) all the Russian prisoners appearing on the pages of the book should have distinguished themselves by their moral strength and heroic behavior; 4) the prisoners should have been differentiated according to their political outlook. None of this is true of his stories. The Party noticed this and even though it did not consider Polish writers ripe for socialist realism, its critics upbraided him for his chief sins. They proclaimed that his work resembled depraved, or American, literature; that it was pessimistic; and that it lacked the element of “conscious struggle,” i.e. struggle in the name of Communism. But these criticisms were uttered in a persuasive tone. He was young and needed educating, yet he had in him the makings of a real Communist writer. Observing him carefully, the Party discovered in him a rare and precious treasure: true hatred.
+===== Climate change is already seriously impacting us. It brings floods, droughts and the outbreak of pests that are all causing harvest failures. I must point out that these harvest failures are something that the farmers did not create. Instead, it is the polluters who caused the emissions who destroy the natural cycles… [W]e will not pay for their mistakes.15 =====
-Beta was receptive. The more he read of Leninist-Stalinist theory, the more he convinced himself that this was exactly what he was looking for. His hatred was like a torrential river uselessly rushing ahead. What could be simpler than to set it to turning the Party’s gristmills. What a relief: useful hatred, hatred put to the service of society!
+In the US, environmental justice activists continue to be the leading voices for climate justice—mainly representatives from African American, Latino and Native American communities that have been resisting daily exposure to chemical toxins and other environmental hazards for 30 years. A 2008 report from the Oakland, California-based Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative pointed out that African Americans may be at the greatest risk, both from disruptive climate changes and from exposure to the negative effects of various false solutions. The six US states with the highest African American populations are all in the Atlantic hurricane zone, and African Americans also have the highest historic rates of heat death.[16] They have the highest asthma rates and spend the highest percentage of their income on energy. A 2009 study by several public health professionals confirmed the disproportionate consequences of heat-related illness for communities of color in the US, exacerbated by people’s lack of access to transportation and other essential needs.[17] These findings, and the experiences of frontline communities across the US—from the melting Alaskan tundra to the Louisiana coast—highlight the urgency of a more astute and holistic climate justice movement.
-At the root of his hatred was the same reaction that Sartre called “la nausee,” namely, disgust with man as a physiological being determined by the laws of nature and society, and subject to the destructive effects of time. Man should somehow break these shackles, and rise even if he had to hoist himself up by his own bootstraps. Had Beta been French, perhaps he might have become an existentialist; probably, though, that would not have satisfied him. He smiled contemptuously at mental speculation, for he remembered seeing philosophers fighting over garbage in the camp. Human thought had no significance; subterfuges and self-deceptions were easy to decipher; all that really counted was the movement of matter. He absorbed dialectical materialism as a sponge soaks up water. Its materialistic side appeased his hunger for brutal truth; its dialectical side permitted a sudden leap above the human species, to a vision of humanity as the material of history.
+An important two day conference in New York City in early 2009, organized by West Harlem Environmental Action (WEACT), brought together racial justice activists, community and youth organizers, indigenous representatives and farmworker advocates with students, environmental lawyers, scientists, public health advocates and government officials to discuss the relevance of the climate justice framework for communities of color and their allies across the US.[18] Many speakers described the emerging climate justice movement as a continuation of the US civil rights legacy, and of their communities’ continuing “quest for fairness, equity and justice,” as described by the pioneering environmental justice researcher and author, Robert Bullard.”[19] Others explained how, in recent years, the environmental justice movement has broadened its scope to areas of food justice, housing justice, and transportation justice, as well as opposition to the commodification of the atmosphere through global carbon markets. A physician from Los Angeles described carbon trading as yet another means of “redistributing wealth from the poor to the wealthy,” and José Bravo of the Just Transition Alliance suggested that “when we put a price on every square inch of air, there are some of us who won’t be able to afford to breathe.”
-In a very short while, he published a new book. Its title alone was symbolic of his attitude, The Stony World—stony, therefore merciless and bare. The book comprised extremely short stories devoid of almost all action, no more than sketches of what he had seen. He was a master at the art of using material details to suggest a whole human situation. The “stony world” was Central Europe after the defeat of Hitler and the end of the Second World War. Since he had spent some time in the American zone of Germany, he had an ample store of subjects—people of all nationalities and social positions, ex-Nazis, ex-prisoners, the German bourgeoisie baffled by what had happened, American soldiers and officers, etc. Under his temperate words lurked an immensity of bitterness against a civilization whose fruit was Hitlerism. He set up equations: Christianity equals capitalism equals Hitlerism. The theme of the book was the finale of civilization. Its tone can be summed up in a single protest: “You told me about culture, about religion, about morality; and look what they led to!”
+In much of Europe, climate justice emerged as a further evolution of the global justice and anticapitalist movements that arose in opposition to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and annual G8 economic summits during the late 1990s and early 2000s. A March 2010 discussion paper from the European Climate Justice Action network (CJA) explained that “Climate Justice means linking all struggles together that reject neoliberal markets and working towards a world that puts autonomous decision making power in the hands of communities.” The paper concluded: “Fundamentally, we believe that we cannot prevent further global warming without addressing the way our societies are organized—the fight for climate justice and the fight for social justice are one and the same.”[20] While Climate Justice Action proved to be relatively short-lived, this approach has been sustained by ongoing networks such as Rising Tide as well as the UK Climate Camp movement, which organized high profile actions between 2006 and 2010 at major power plant sites, Heathrow Airport, London’s financial district, and the Edinburgh headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland.[21]
-For Beta, as for many of his companions, the reign of Hitler was the culmination of the capitalist era in Europe. Its collapse announced the victory of the Revolution on a world scale. The future might mean further striving, but the turning point was passed. Almost all the books written in the early postwar years by young men like him developed the theme of man’s impotence against the laws of History: even people with the best of intentions had fallen into the machine of Nazi terror and been converted into frightened cave men. The reading public was faced with a dilemma, a choice between the old civilization which had taken its evilness out on their hides, or the new civilization which could arise only through the victorious might of the East. So powerful is the hold success has over man’s imagination that it seems not to result from human design plus favorable circumstances, but to reflect the highest law of the age. (Yet Russia and her seemingly invincible order had been merely a hair’s-breadth away from defeat in the Second World War.)
+The role of Rising Tide is especially noteworthy as an international voice for direct action to challenge climate polluters, as well as a long-range systemic critique of the underlying causes of climate disruptions. Formed in the lead-up to the November 2000 UN climate conference in the Hague, Netherlands, Rising Tide recently listed six regional affiliates—North America (US and Canada), UK, Mexico, Ecuador, Australia and Finland—as well as organizing collectives in several US states and regions. Made up mostly of youthful activists with roots in decentralist and anti-authoritarian political traditions, Rising Tide has supported numerous direct action campaigns against both the fossil fuel industry and a variety of corporate-driven false solutions to the climate crisis. Rising Tide has organized and trained participants for many high-profile direct actions, especially in the US, UK, and Australia, and is also noted for its critical educational efforts.[22]
-The Stony World was the last book in which Beta tried to employ artistic tools, like restraint, hidden irony, masked anger, etc., recognized as effective in Western literature. He quickly realized that all his concern about “art” was superfluous. On the contrary, the harder he stepped down on the pedal, the more he was praised. Loud, violent, clear, biased —this is what his writing was expected to be. As Party writers (he entered the Party) began to outbid each other in an effort to be accessible and simple, the boundary between literature and propaganda began to fade. He started to introduce more and more direct journalism into his writing. He discharged his venom in attacks on capitalism, i.e. on all that was. happening outside the sphere of the Im-perium. He would take an item from the news about warfare in Malaya or hunger in India, for example, and turn it into something halfway between an article and a snapshot.
+==== {{anchor|ClimateJusticeandtheFuture}} Climate Justice and the Future ====
-I saw him for the last time in 1950. He had changed a great deal since the days before his arrest by the Gestapo. His former shyness and artificial humility were gone. Whereas once he had walked with a slight stoop and a lowered head, he was now a straight-backed man with an air of self-assurance. He was dry, concentrated on his work. The bashful poet had become a thorough homo politicm. At that time he was already a well-known propagandist. Every week one of his malignant articles appeared in a government weekly. He visited Eastern Germany frequently to gather news stories. No reporter can serve a cause as well as an author with a period of disinterested writing in his background; and Beta used all his knowledge of the writer’s trade in his poisonous articles against America.
+In the aftermath of Copenhagen’s diplomatic meltdown, some in Europe questioned whether a unified climate justice movement could survive. The Copenhagen effort, according to CJA activists Nicola Bullard and Tadzio Müller,
-Looking at this esteemed nihilist, I would often think how like a smooth slope any form of art is, and of the amount of effort the artist must expend in order to keep from sliding back to where the footing is easier. The inner command that forces him to this effort is, at the core, irrational. By refusing to recognize disinterested art, the New Faith destroys this inner command. Beta was a real writer in his stories about the concentration camp; though he questioned all man’s inner imperatives, he counterfeited nothing, he did not try to please anybody. Then he introduced a single particle of politics and, like a supersaturated solution, his writing crystallized, became thereafter transparent and stereotyped. But one must not oversimplify. Many great authors, among them Swift, Stendhal, Tolstoi, wrote out of political passion. One might even say that political conviction, an important social message a writer wants to communicate to his readers, adds strength to his work. The essential difference between the great writers who criticized the political institutions of their day and people of Beta’s type seems to lie in the total non-conformity of the former. They acted in opposition to their environment; he, writing, listened for the applause of his Party comrades.
+===== failed to establish an anti-capitalist CJ-discourse that was visible and understandable beyond the subcultures of activists and policy-wonks, and thus failed to provide a visible alternative to despair; failed to establish a new “pole of attraction” that would substantially reconfigure the political field around climate change; and failed to do anything to significantly advance the fight for climate justice. In some sense, the global CJM [Climate Justice Movement; emphasis in original] remained something more of a potential than a reality.23 =====
-For all their violence and precision of language, his articles were so dull and one-dimensional that this debasement of a gifted prose-writer stirred my curiosity. He was certainly intelligent enough to understand that he was wasting his talent. In conversation with several literary authorities whose word determines a writer’s place in the official hierarchy, I asked why such measures were being applied to him. Surely the interests of the Party did not require it to reduce him to a rag. He was certainly more useful as a writer of stories and novels; to force him to write articles meant bad management of available artistic resources. “No one makes him write articles,” came the reply, “that’s the whole misfortune. The editor of the weekly can’t drive him away. He himself insists on writing them. He thinks there is no time, today, for art, that you have to act on the masses more directly and elementally. He wants to be as useful as possible.” This was a somewhat hypocritical answer. The Party constantly stresses its desire for good literature; at the same time, it creates such a tense atmosphere of propaganda that writers feel compelled to resort to the most primitive and oversimplified literary techniques. Yet it was true that Beta himself wanted to devote all his time to journalism; although he was a highly qualified specialist, he seized upon work that was easy for the most ordinary drudge. His mind, like that of so many Eastern intellectuals, was impelled toward self-annihilation.
+In the US as well, events organized during the lead-up to Copenhagen also represented a peak in public visibility for climate justice for some years hence. Along with the regional actions timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the WTO shutdown in Seattle (see Chapter 2), the Mobilization for Climate Justice-West (MCJ-West) in the San Francisco Bay Area organized seven high-profile demonstrations during the five months prior to Copenhagen, including several in solidarity with a decades-long effort by activists in the largely African-American city of Richmond, California to confront the hazards of a major Chevron oil refinery.
-The psychological process that is set into motion as soon as such an intellectual takes up his pen is fairly complex. Let us imagine he is about to describe a certain event in international politics. He sees that phenomena are interrelated functionally rather than casually. Therefore, to present the event honestly, he would have to penetrate the motives of the opposing forces and the necessities which govern them— in short, to analyze it from every side. Then anger comes to his rescue, introducing order into the tangle of interdependencies and releasing him from the obligation to analyze. This anger against the self-deception that anything at all depends on man’s will is, simultaneously, a fear of falling prey to one’s own naiveness. Since the world is brutal, one must reduce everything to the simplest and most brutal factors. The author understands that what he is doing is far from accurate: people’s stupidity or people’s good intentions influence events no less than do the necessities of the economic struggle. But he takes his vengeance upon mankind (upon others and upon himself) by demonstrating that man is dominated by a few elementary laws; at the same time, he feeds his sense of superiority and proves himself acute and strong enough to dispense with “prejudices.”
+However MCJ-West found it internally unsustainable to maintain that level of public visibility into 2010 and beyond, and a principled effort to restructure the group to better reflect the priorities of local community-based organizations proved insufficient to keep the group afloat. The fledgling national Mobilization also ceased to operate following a similar internal discussion. While participants generally agreed that frontline environmental justice communities are inherently in the forefront of climate justice organizing, community-based organizations struggling with the daily impacts of political and economic marginalization did not appear to have the capacity, nor perhaps the inclination, to sustain a unified national climate justice coalition at that time.
-In his political articles, just as in his concentration camp stories, Beta’s urge to simplify, to strip off all illusions, to present everyone and everything nakedly was always predominant. But if one continues to follow this urge one reaches a point at which the intellect has nothing more to say. Words become a war-cry, an imperfect substitute for a clenched fist. Beta did arrive at the stage where words no longer satisfied him; he could not write novels or stories because they would last through time and so could not answer his need for a cry to battle. The movement to which he was subjected went on accelerating: faster and faster, greater and greater doses of hatred and of dizziness. The shapes of the world became simpler and simpler, until at last an individual tree, an individual man, lost all importance and he found himself not among palpable things, but among political concepts. His feverish addiction to journalism is not hard to explain. The writing of articles acted on him like a narcotic. When he put down his pen he felt he had accomplished something. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t a single thought of his own in these articles; it didn’t matter that thousands of second-rate journalists from the Elbe to the Pacific were saying exactly the same thing. He was active in the sense that a soldier marching in formation is active.
+The lessons of the Mobilizations, however, have inspired insightful new approaches to political alliance-building across barriers of race and class, initiated in part by a San Francisco Bay Area group called the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project.[24] They continued to meet with allied groups, including the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and others, to develop a more accountable coalition model. A September 2010 position paper proposed uniting around four themes: root cause remedies; human rights and anti-racism; reparations for historic injustices; and directly democratic control by people over the decisions that affect their lives.[25] In 2012, nearly 30 groups organized as the Climate Justice Alignment (later changed to Alliance) proposed a nationwide campaign for a “just transition” away from fossil fuel dependence, including the creation of millions of new jobs in renewable energy, public transportation, local food, waste reduction, and related areas. As of this writing, the Climate Justice Alliance is engaged in active “just transition” campaigns in Detroit, Richmond, and in the territory of the Navajo nation in the US southwest, and was also planning a People’s Climate Justice Summit, featuring frontline community delegations, to follow the massive People’s Climate March in New York City in September 2014.[26]
-“Und Morgen die ganze Welt” sang the SS guards moving against the background of the black smoke pouring out of the crematoriums of Auschwitz. Nazism was collective insanity; yet the German masses followed Hitler for profound psychological reasons. A great economic and social crisis gave birth to Nazism. The young German of that day saw all about him the decay and chaos of the Weimar Republic, the degradation of millions of unemployed, the disgusting aberrations of the cultured elite, the prostitution of his sisters, and the fight of man against man for money. When the hope of socialism vanished, he accepted the other philosophy of history that was offered him, a philosophy that was a parody of Leninist-Stalinist doctrine. It is possible that the German who locked Beta into the concentration camp was, like him, a disappointed lover of the world who longed for harmony and purity, discipline and faith. He despised those of his countrymen who refused to join in the joyous march. Pitiful remnants of humanitarianism, they mumbled that the new movement violated moral principles. Here, immediate and in sight, was the salvation of Germany and the reconstruction of the world. And in this unique moment—a moment that occurs once in a thousand years—these whining believers in that miserable Jesus dared to mention their trifling moral scruples! How hard it was to fight for a new and better order—if among one’s own people one still encountered such infantile prejudice!
+A detailed strategy paper by Jacqueline Patterson, a tireless environmental justice campaigner with the hundred year-old NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in the US systematically outlined the persistent tensions between traditional environmentalists and people organizing in frontline environmental justice communities. While historical and cultural barriers may continue to exist between the two groups, Patterson outlined proposals to overcome those obstacles by forging longer-term working relationships based on mutual concerns, open sharing of resources, and maintaining a stance of “solidarity, not charity.” “Empowerment of traditionally disenfranchised groups, ensuring that frontline communities are leading in the relationship, is an essential aim,” she wrote.[27] Climate justice activists who actively explore the intersections among various struggles are fond of a quote popularly attributed to the Australian Aboriginal activist and artist, Lila Watson: “If you have come to help me, then you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”[28]
-Beta also could see a new and better order within his grasp. He believed in, and demanded, earthly salvation. He hated the enemies of human happiness and insisted that they must be destroyed. Are they not evil-doers who, when the planet enters a new epoch, dare to maintain that to imprison people, or to terrify them into professions of political faith, is not quite nice? Whom do we imprison? Class enemies, traitors, rabble. And the faith we force on people, is it not true faith? History, History, is with us! We can see its living, explosive flame! Small and blind, indeed, are the people who, instead of comprehending the whole of the gigantic task, squander their time on worry about insignificant details!
+Determined public expressions of climate justice also continue to manifest at the annual UN climate conferences. La Vía Campesina and its affiliated peasant farmer movements were in the forefront of public events in Cancún, Mexico in 2010, actively challenging the limitations of the official proceedings. In Durban, South Africa in 2011, differences between civil society groups participating in the UN conference and those who chose to remain outside came to a head on the very last day during an Occupy Wall Street-styled demonstration just outside the conference hall. While representatives of most international environmental NGOs urged cooperation with UN security in clearing the building of protesters, several activists refused to leave and some were forcibly removed.[29] In Warsaw, Poland in 2013, civil society representatives staged a mass walk-out from the official proceedings, with the support of activists gathered outside. While many groups affiliated with Climate Justice Now have had an increasingly difficult time airing their issues within the UN process—pointing to a concerted effort by officials to marginalize civil society voices—others remain more hopeful about the potential for a coordinated inside/outside strategy around these annual events.
-Despite his talent and intelligence, Beta did not perceive the dangers inherent in an exciting march. On the contrary, his talent, intelligence, and ardor drove him to action while ordinary people temporized and rendered unto an unloved Caesar only so much as was absolutely necessary. He willingly shouldered responsibility. He did not pause to consider what a philosophy of historic change becomes once it sets out to conquer the world by the might of armies. “And tomorrow the world!”
+Though various organizational expressions have proved challenging to sustain, the outlook of climate justice continues to have significant appeal in many parts of the world, and the informal Climate Justice Now network remains one point of contact among these disparate currents, especially around the ongoing UN climate negotiations. Between UN conferences, people and groups collaborate through a variety of online forums to share news, debate perspectives and strategies, and further the scope of climate justice organizing. The US-based Grassroots Global Justice Alliance continues to sponsor delegations of US environmental justice activists to the UN climate conferences, while the Labor Network for Sustainability, the Cornell University-sponsored Worker Institute, and others work to raise support for climate justice among the ranks of organized labor in the US and worldwide.[30]
-A few months after I wrote this portrait, I learned of Beta’s death. He was found one morning in his home in Warsaw. The gas jet was turned on. Those who observed him in the last months of his feverish activity were of the opinion that the discrepancy between what he said in his public statements and what his quick mind could perceive was increasing daily. He behaved too nervously for them not to suspect that he was acutely aware of this contrast. Moreover, he frequently spoke of the “Mayakovski case.” Numerous articles appeared in the press written by his friends, writers of Poland and Eastern Germany. His coffin, draped with a red flag, was lowered into the grave to the sound of the “Internationale” as the Party bid farewell to its most promising young writer.
+Demands for climate justice have been voiced in recent years by representatives of waste pickers in Durban, South Africa, migrant farmworkers in the hills of Vermont, Rising Tide activists blocking the transport of equipment to ship oily bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, and countless others. Author-activists such as Patrick Bond from South Africa have chronicled the successes of communities engaged in climate justice-inspired organizing throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America.[31] In many countries, the emerging youth climate movement is carrying out creative direct actions at corporate headquarters, industry conferences, and even at the offices of corporate-friendly environmental groups in the US such as the Environmental Defense Fund and NRDC.[32] The 350.org network, now global in scope, has sought to bring an increased focus on climate justice and grassroots leadership into its activities around the world.
-** Chapter Six Gamma, the Slave of History
+Internationally, people from Pacific Island nations, in some cases already losing land and groundwater to rising seas, remain in the forefront of calls for immediate action. The worldwide confederation of peasant movements, La Via Campesina, with affiliated groups in more than 80 countries, has challenged the status of carbon as a recently privatized commodity and argued that the UN climate convention “has failed to question the current models of consumption and production based on the illusion of continuous growth.”[33] Further, hundreds of cities and towns in the US have defied the federal government’s long-standing inaction on climate and committed to substantial, publicly-funded CO2 reductions of their own. At the local level, people are regenerating local food systems, seeking locally controlled, renewable energy sources, and building solidarity with kindred movements around the world.[34]
-In speaking of Gamma, I must evoke a picture of the town in which I went to school and later to the University. There are certain places in Europe which are particularly troublesome to history and geography teachers: Trieste, the Saar Basin, Schleswig-Holstein. Just such a sore-spot is the city of Vilna. In the last half-century it belonged to various countries and saw various armies in its streets. With each change, painters were put to work repainting street and office signs into the new official language. With each change, the inhabitants were issued new passports and were obliged to conform to new laws and injunctions. The city was ruled in turn by the Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, again the Lithuanians, again the Germans, and again the Russians. Today it is the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, a fancy title designed to conceal the blunt fact that Russia is effectively carrying out the precepts of the Tsars in regard to territorial expansion.
+Today, the leading edge of climate justice organizing is often with those who are challenging the expansion of extreme forms of fossil fuel extraction around the world. As author Michael Klare, a long-time analyst of energy geopolitics, points out, most current efforts to tap new sources of oil and gas require energy companies “to drill in extreme temperatures or extreme weather, or use extreme pressures, or operate under extreme danger—or some combination of all of these.”[35] With readily accessible sources of oil and gas reaching their limits worldwide, industry projections for the future of fossil fuels are increasingly tied to so-called “unconventional” sources, such as tar sands, shale gas, and oil drilled from miles beneath the oceans, including the far reaches of the Arctic. Now that world oil prices have reached over $100 per barrel, technologies such as hydro-fracturing (also known as fracking), horizontal drilling, deepwater drilling, and oil extraction from tar sands—all once seen as hypothetically possible but economically prohibitive—have become central to the fossil fuel industry’s plans for the future. Each of these technologies has profound implications for the people and ecosystems most affected by new energy developments, and each has sparked determined opposition from frontline communities and from allies around the world.
-During my school and university years the city belonged to Poland. It lies in a land of forests, lakes, and streams, concealed in a woody dale. Travelers see it emerge unexpectedly from behind the trees. The steeples of its scores of Catholic churches, built by Italian architects in the baroque style, contrast in their gold and white with the blackness of the surrounding pines. Legend tells us that a certain Lithuanian ruler, hunting in the wilds, fell asleep by a fire and had a prophetic dream. Under the spell of his dream, he constructed a city on the spot where he had slept. Throughout the many centuries of its existence, Vilna never ceased to be a city of the forests. All about it lay an abandoned province of Europe whose people spoke Polish, Lithuanian, and Byelorussian, or a mixture of the three, and retained many customs and habits long since forgotten elsewhere. I speak in the past tense because today this city of my childhood is as lava-inundated as was Pompeii. Most of its former inhabitants were either murdered by the Nazis, deported to Siberia, or re-settled by the Russians in the western territories from which the Germans were expelled. Other people, born thousands of miles away, now walk its streets; and for them, its churches, founded by Lithuanian princes and Polish kings, are useless.
+Organizing in communities facing extreme energy developments has been inspired in part by the opponents of mountaintop removal coal mining in the US, who have repeatedly put their bodies on the line to expose devastating mining practices that have destroyed over 500 mountains in southern Appalachia. The region has experienced an unprecedented alliance between long-time local residents—many from families that have worked in the coal mines for generations—and youthful forest activists from across the country working with groups such as Coal River Mountain Watch, Climate Ground Zero, Mountain Justice Summer, and Rising Tide. Some of their distinctive action strategies and organizing methods were adopted in part by groups that organized against the construction of the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline in Texas and Oklahoma during 2012-13.[36] Another national effort in the US, supported in part by the Sierra Club, helped halt the construction of at least 174 new coal-fired power plants in the US, and others are campaigning to stop the construction of proposed new export terminals for coal, oil and gas.[37] People challenging the rapid expansion of fracking for gas and oil are increasingly well organized, as are mainly indigenous opponents of expanded uranium mining; in Canada, this threat has united opponents from Cree, Dene, Inuit, and other First Nations, from Québec in the east all the way to Nunavut in the far northwest.[38]
-Then, however, no one dreamt of mass murder and mass deportations. And the life of the town unfolded in a rhythm that was slower and less subject to change than are forms of government or borders of kingdoms. The University, the Bishops’ Palace, and the Cathedral were the most esteemed edifices in the city. On Sundays, crowds filled the narrow street leading to the old city gate upon which, in a chapel, was housed the picture of the Virgin known for its miraculous powers. Vilna was a blend of Italian architecture and the Near East. In the little streets of the Jewish quarter on a Friday evening, through the windows one could see families seated in the gleam of candlelight. The words of the Hebrew prophets resounded in the ancient synagogues, for this was one of the most important centers of Jewish literature and learning in Europe. Great fairs on Catholic holidays attracted peasants from neighboring villages to the city, where they would display their wooden wares and medicinal herbs on the ground. No fair was complete without obwarzanki (hard, round, little cakes threaded on a string); and no matter where they were baked, they always bore the name of the little town whose only claims to fame were its bakeries and its one-time “bear academy,” an institution where bears were trained. In the winter, the steep streets were filled with boys and girls on skis, their red and green jerkins flashing against a snow that became rosy in the frosty sun.
+It remains to be seen whether these efforts contain the seeds of a fully unified opposition to extreme energy projects throughout North America. Each struggle has its distinctive qualities and unique challenges, and all of the legal, political, and personal issues faced by these campaigners can make it difficult to focus on broader alliance-building efforts. Many groups engaged in local struggles against new energy developments identify rather loosely if at all with a broader climate justice framework. But it is clear that their stories are already having an essential catalytic effect on the broader climate movement, whose centers of activity are often geographically removed from the day-to-day realities of crucial resource-centered struggles.
-The University building had thick walls and low, vaulted classrooms. The uninitiated were bound to get lost in the labyrinth of its shaded courtyards. Its arcades and halls might just as easily have been located in Padua or Bologna. Once Jesuits used to teach the sons of the nobility in this building; but at the time when I was studying there, lay professors were teaching young people whose parents were for the most part small landholders, tenant-farmers, or Jewish merchants.
+There is so much more to do. We need to envision a lower-consumption world of decentralized, clean energy and politically empowered communities. Like the antinuclear activists of 30 years ago, who halted the first wave of nuclear power in the US, while articulating an inspiring vision of directly democratic, solar-powered towns and neighborhoods, we need to again dramatize the positive, even utopian, possibilities for a post-petroleum, post-mega-mall world. The technical means clearly exist for a locally-controlled, solar-based alternative, at the same time that dissatisfaction with today’s consumption-oriented, highly indebted “American way of life” appears to be at an all time high. Experiments in raising and distributing food more locally are thriving everywhere—as are some efforts toward community-controlled renewable energy production—and enhancing many people’s quality of life.
-It was in that building that I met Gamma. He was an ungainly, red-faced boy, coarse and boisterous. If Vilna itself was provincial, then those who left their backward villages to come there to study were doubly so. Muddy country roads made communication practically impossible in spring and autumn; peasants’ horses were seized by fits of terror at the sight of an automobile; in many villages, homes were still lit by twig torches. Home handicrafts and lumbering were the only occupations, outside of farming, that the people knew. Gamma came from the country. His father, a retired officer of the Polish army, had a farm. The family had lived in those regions for generations, and its name can be found in the registers of the lower nobility of that land. Gamma’s mother was Russian and he grew up bilingual. Unlike the majority of his companions who were Catholic, he was Orthodox, a faith he inherited from his mother.
+Still, despite the urgency of the problem and the viability of many positive, life-affirming solutions, climate justice activists often find themselves on the defensive, particularly in North America. Greenhouse gas emissions are still rising and environmental disasters continue to unfold from the devastated mountaintops of the Appalachian coal country to the indigenous communities living amidst the tar sands of western Canada. Efforts to create a more unified climate justice movement remain largely under the radar in a political environment still often dominated by reactionary, right wing demagoguery, attacks on organized labor, and increasing economic marginalization of millions of people.
-Our first conversations did not portend a close understanding between us. True, we were bound by a common interest in literature, but I was offended by his behavior, by his piercing voice—he just did not know how to speak in a normal tone—and by the opinions he uttered. He always carried a heavy cane of the type that was the favorite weapon of young people given to anti-Semitic extravagances. His violent anti-Semitism was, in fact, his political program. As for myself, I despised such nationalists; I thought them dangerous blockheads who, in order not to think, were raising a loud hue and cry, and stirring up mutual hatreds in various national groups. There are certain conversations that stick in one’s memory; and sometimes what one remembers, even more than the actual words, is what one was looking at then. When I recall our talk about racism, I see his legs, the round paving stones of the street, and his cane leaning against the gutter. He spoke of blood and earth, and of how power should be vested not in the whole of the citizenry regardless of race or native tongue, but in the dominant national group, who should take measures to safeguard its blood against contamination. Perhaps his nationalist zeal was an effort to compensate for his own deficiencies; his mixed, half-Russian origin and his Orthodox faith must surely have caused him much unpleasantness at the hands of his provincial and primitive schoolmates. His voice rang out, belligerent and permeated by a sense of his own superiority. iMy arguments against racist theories awakened a profound disgust in him; he considered me a person whose thinking was an obstacle to action. As for him, he wanted action. This was the year 1931. We were both very young, very poor, and unaware of the unusual events we were to be thrust into later.
+A March 2010 discussion paper from the European Climate Justice Action network suggested one promising approach. “Climate Justice means linking all struggles together that reject neoliberal markets and working towards a world that puts autonomous decision making power in the hands of communities,” the paper stated. “We look towards a society which recognizes our historical responsibilities and seeks to protect the global commons, both in terms of the climate and life itself.” It concluded, “Fundamentally, we believe that we cannot prevent further global warming without addressing the way our societies are organized—the fight for climate justice and the fight for social justice are one and the same.”[39]
-I visited him in 1949 in one of the capitals of Western Europe where he was the ambassador of Red Poland, and a trusted member of the Party. His residence was guarded by a heavy wrought-iron gate. A few minutes after one rang, an eye would appear at the aperture, hinges would rattle, and one would see the big courtyard with a few shining cars in it.
+In stark contrast to mainstream trends in the US and beyond, many climate justice activists embrace a counter-hegemonic worldview that has often renewed environmentalism since the 1970s: the promise that reorienting societies toward a renewed harmony with nature can help spur a revolutionary transformation of our world. This outlook has helped inspire anti-nuclear activists to sit in at power plant construction sites, forest activists to sustain long-term tree-sits, and environmental justice activists to stand firm in defense of their communities. It has mobilized people around the world to act in solidarity with indigenous peoples fighting resource extraction on their lands. With climate chaos looming on the horizon, such a transformation is no longer optional. Our survival now depends on our ability to renounce the global status-quo and create a more humane and ecologically balanced way of life.
-To the left of the entrance stood the sentry-box of the chauffeur on duty, who was armed with a pistol against any eventuality. Standing in the middle of the courtyard, one perceived the proportions of the fagade and the wings. This was one of the most beautiful palaces in that beautiful capital. A certain eighteenth-century aristocrat had built it for his mistress. The interior retained its former character; the big rooms, their walls covered with gilded wainscoting, contained furniture, rugs and Gobelin tapestries of that century. Gamma received me in the midst of gilt and marble; he was cordial; the years had worn the roughness off his gestures, and injected a slightly artificial sweetness into his manner. In this palace he had his apartment, reception salons, and offices. Many of the most eminent representatives of Western art and science visited him frequently. A well-known English scholar called him a charming man, liberal and free of fanaticism. This opinion was shared by many members of the intellectual elite, among them Catholics, liberals, and even conservatives. As for the luminaries of Western Communist literature, they admired him both because he was an emissary of the East they worshipped, and because he was extremely acute in his Marxist appraisal of literary problems. Obviously, they did not know his past nor the price one pays in order that an unseasoned youth, raised in one of the most forsaken corners of Europe, may become the master of an eighteenth-century palace.
+=== {{anchor|4CarbonTradingandOtherFalse}} {{anchor|4CarbonTradingandOtherFalse1}} {{anchor|Topofpart0007html}} 4. Carbon Trading and Other False Solutions ===
-Gamma felt fine in this Western capital. He loved to visit night spots and cabarets and was so well-known in them that whenever he entered, the maitre d’hotel would lead him ceremoniously to the best table. Seeing that nonchalant man watching people through narrowed eyes from behind champagne bottles ranged in ice buckets, one could easily have mistaken him for an English squire who had managed to salvage something of his fortune. Tall, slightly stooped, he had the long, ruddy face of a man who has spent much time with guns and dogs. He looked very much like what he really was: a member of the lower Polish nobility, which once hunted passionately, drank passionately, fulfilled its political duties by delivering orations plentifully interspersed with Latin, and quelled opposition by a choral shout of protest or, when necessary, by fencing duels amid overturned benches and tables. The freedom of his gestures was the freedom of a man conscious of his privileges. Toward his subordinates who, as part of their job, often accompanied him on his nocturnal expeditions, he behaved with benevolent disdain. In the office he would at times, out of an excess of high spirits, pull the noses of the embassy secretaries or give them a resounding slap on the behind. But he was also prone to attacks of unbridled anger. Then his ruddy face would turn purple, his blue eyes would become bloodshot, and his voice recapture its former piercing, savage note. No wonder that Western diplomats, scholars, and artists considered him a none too psychologically complicated bon viveur. Even his tactlessness seemed to stem from a broad, open nature that offended at times out of excessive sincerity but that was, in any case, free of guile. The lack of embarrassment with which he spoke of matters considered touchy by other Communists won the confidence of his listeners. This was no Communist— they would agree after a visit to the embassy—or if he was, then how broad and civilized his outlook! What they thought was naturalness was for him sheer artifice. Conscious of his resemblance to a country squire, he used his simple, good-natured mannerisms with deliberate skill. Only those who knew him very intimately saw the cold calculation that lay beneath his feigned effusiveness. In his bosom he carried an invisible dagger with which he could strike unexpected and treacherous blows. But at the same time, this dagger, from which he was never parted either by day or by night, chilled his heart. He was not a happy man.
+One of the central contributions of the emerging climate justice movement has been to open an evolving conversation about the numerous false solutions to the global climate crisis. From the worldwide expansion of natural gas drilling through technologies of hydrofracking and horizontal drilling to the proliferation of biofuel plantations worldwide, as well as the creation of markets in tradable greenhouse gas emissions permits, elite interests have been promoting nearly everything imaginable as a global warming “solution.” Often these claims go hand in hand with efforts to forestall more transformative measures that could actually reduce carbon pollution. Major climate justice groups from the Indigenous Environmental Network to Rising Tide have published comprehensive pamphlets reviewing the myriad false solutions (both in collaboration with the international research group, Carbon Trade Watch),[1] and countless local environmental justice and climate groups have grappled with the local impacts of these measures. As with climate changes overall, the consequences of various false solutions fall disproportionately on marginalized communities that scarcely contribute to the problem of excess greenhouse gas emissions. This chapter will attempt a broad overview of the “false solutions” discussion, offer some historical background, and examine how a thoroughly corporate-driven approach to capping emissions has dominated climate policy discussions in the US.
-Wearing his most enchanting smile, he convinced diplomats suspected of not wanting to return behind the iron curtain of his personal benevolence toward them. He thundered against the idiots in Warsaw who did not understand how matters had to be handled in the West. After which he proposed a joint excursion to Warsaw by air, for a few days, to explain to those fools how to settle some question that had occasioned the exchange of numerous telegrams. The delinquent reflected: Gamma’s good will was obvious; every trip to Warsaw was a proof of loyalty toward the government and so prolonged one’s stay abroad; and, as far as he could see, no risk was involved. In a festive mood, exchanging little jokes with Gamma, the diplomat boarded the plane. No sooner had he reached the airfield in Warsaw than he realized that he had fallen into a trap. Having accomplished his mission, Gamma took the first plane going in the other direction. To supervise the consciences of his personnel was not the least of his duties; it was, in fact, an honor, a sign of trust. His dagger always worked best whenever the talents of a psychologist were required, that is, in cases normally assigned to the political police.
+Indeed since the turn of the 21[st] century, the world has been inundated with countless seductive, but ultimately false solutions to the threat of catastrophic climate changes. While such measures are put forward by corporations, governments, and many policy analysts as climate solutions, it is clear that they generally present far greater problems than benefits, both for the global environment and locally-affected communities. These false solutions to the climate crisis fall into two broad categories. First are a series of technological interventions that aim to either increase energy supplies while nominally reducing climate pollution, or to intervene on a massive physical scale to counter the warming of the earth’s atmosphere. The latter approach, broadly described as “geoengineering,” threatens to create a host of new environmental problems in the pursuit of a world-scale techno-fix to the climate crisis.[2] The other broad category of false solutions aims to utilize tools of the capitalist “free market” as a means to reduce pollution. These measures include the creation of regional and national markets in tradable carbon dioxide emissions allowances (often termed “cap-and-trade”), as well as the use of carbon offsets, ''i.e.'' encouraging investments in nominally low-carbon technologies in other parts of the world as a substitute for reducing an individual or a corporation’s own emissions profile.
-But let me return to the past. Then, he did not know the taste of champagne. Faithful to ancient tradition, the University cafeteria in which we ate bore, as did many institutions of the University, a Latin name, mensct. The meals cost very little, but were as bad as they were cheap. Consequently they were the favorite subject of satiric verse which sang the unparalleled hardness of the meat balls and the wateriness of the soups. Amid the smoke of bad cigarettes, we used to sit there discussing poetry and reciprocally meting out laurels that interested no one but ourselves. Still, our group of beginning writers was to interest many people in the future and to play an important role in the history of our country. While our comrades were concerned with their studies or with winning good jobs in the future, we longed for fame and dreamt of reshaping the world. As so often happens, what intelligence and talent we had was paid for by a disturbance of our internal balance. In each of us were deep wounds dating from our childhood or adolescence, different in each of us but identical in one basic element, in something that made it impossible for us to live in harmony with others of our age, something that made us feel “different” and hence drove us to seek compensations. The subjective motives that breed immoderate ambition are not easy to track down. Gamma was, I believe, extremely sensitive about his family. Another factor that might have affected him deeply was something that occurred when he was a schoolboy: he accidentally killed a friend while hunting. The feeling of guilt that arose as a result of this accident probably helped to mold his future decisions.
+==== {{anchor|WhichEnergyChoices}} Which Energy Choices? ====
-Perhaps even more important was a disturbance of our social equilibrium. We were all in revolt against our environment. None of us was of the proletariat. We derived from the intelligentsia, which in that part of Europe was a synonym for the impoverished nobility or the lower middle class. Gamma’s father was, as I said, a retired officer; George, a poet, was the son of a provincial lawyer; Theodore, a poet (later shot by the Polish underground as a Party propagandist), bore an aristocratic name although his mother was an employee in a bank; Henryk, an orator, writer, and politician (later shot by the Germans), was the son of a railroad engineer who prided himself on bearing one of the most well-known names in Poland; Stefan, a poet who later became a prominent economist, came of an unsuccessful, half-German mercantile family; my family belonged to the Lithuanian nobility, but my father had migrated from the country to the city to become an engineer. The revolt against one’s environment is usually shame of one’s environment. The social status of all of us was undefined. Our problems were those of the twentieth century, but the traditions of our families bound us to concepts and customs we thought ridiculous and reactionary. We were suspended in a void, and in this we were no exceptions. The country had never experienced a real industrial revolution; the middle class was weak; the worker was for some people a brutal dirty-faced creature who worked hard or drank hard, and for others a myth, an object of worship. Our society was divided into an “intelligentsia” as opposed to the “people.” To the latter belonged the workers and peasants. We were of the “intelligentsia,” but we rebelled against it because it was oriented toward the past rather than the future. One could compare our situation, in some respects, to that of the sons of impoverished first families of the South in the United States. We were adrift, and we could find no place to anchor. Some people called us the “intellectuals’ club” in an effort to oppose the intellectuals to the “intelligentsia.”
+Among the many technological false solutions, efforts to expand the use of nuclear power may be the most insidious, as they have been supported by some knowledgeable climate scientists despite nuclear power’s inherent flaws. Nuclear power has been subsidized for over fifty years by various governments—amounting to over a hundred billion dollars in the US alone—yet it still presents intractable technical and environmental problems, as revealed yet again by the catastrophic multiple meltdown of nuclear reactors near Fukushima, Japan in 2011. Nuclear scientists and engineers still have no clue what to do with ever-increasing quantities of nuclear waste that will remain highly radioactive for millennia. Any expansion of nuclear power would expose countless more people to the threat of radiation-induced cancer that critical scientists such as Ernest Sternglass have documented since the 1960s, and threaten several indigenous communities with the even more severe consequences of uranium mining and milling. With an estimated 70 per cent of world uranium supplies located underneath indigenous lands, many communities are still experiencing health effects from radiation released during the first uranium boom of the 1970s. There are reportedly over a thousand abandoned uranium mines on Native lands in the American Southwest, where communities have faced epidemics of cancer ever since the earlier wave of mining.[3]
-These were years of acute economic crisis. Unemployment spread throughout wide spheres of the population. The university youth, living without money and without hope of finding work after finishing his studies, was of a radical temper. This radicalism took two forms. Some, like Gamma, at the beginning of his stay at the University, became intensely nationalistic. They saw the answer to all difficulties in a vaguely defined “national revolution.” In practice, this meant a hostile attitude toward their Jewish comrades, who as future lawyers and doctors would be their professional competitors. Against these nationalists emerged the “left” whose program, depending on the group, vacillated between socialism and a variation on the New Deal. During annual elections to “The Fraternal Aid,” which was something in the nature of an autonomous student government that administered student houses, the mensa, etc., these two camps waged battles with words and sometimes with fists.
+Recent studies of the implications of an expanded nuclear industry have also revealed some new problems. First it appears that supplies of the relatively accessible, high-grade uranium ore that has thus far helped contain the nuclear fuel cycle’s greenhouse gas emissions are rather limited. If the nuclear industry ever begins to approach its goal of doubling or tripling world nuclear generating capacity—enough to displace a significant portion of the predicted ''growth'' in carbon dioxide emissions—they will quickly deplete known reserves of high-grade uranium, and soon have to rely upon fuel sources that require far more fossil fuel energy to mine and purify.[4]
-Both the Communists and the government tried to win over the “left,” if I may use this term to describe a conglomeration of differing groups. Pilsud-ski’s mild semi-dictatorship, lacking a clear-cut program, timidly courted the favor of the young people in an effort to recruit new leaders. Seeing the growing radicalism of the universities, it wooed the “left” by promising reforms. For a certain time, our group was the mainstay of the government’s attempts to consolidate its position among the university youth. Our friends, Stefan and Henryk, were considered the most promising of the young “government” politicians in the country. But these attempts ended in failure. “The most promising young politicians” broke with the government and went further to the left; whereas the mechanism of events pushed the government ever more to the right. Nationalism—if not downright totalitarianism in a local edition—began to gain ever greater victories. The government abandoned its support of the patchwork “government left” and started to flirt with the nationalists.
+Additionally, the economics of nuclear power rule it out as a significant aid in alleviating the climate crisis. In one recent study, energy systems analyst Amory Lovins compared the current cost of nuclear power to a variety of other sources, both in terms of their power output and their CO2 emissions savings. He concluded that from 2 to 10 times as much carbon dioxide can be withheld from the atmosphere with comparable investments in wind power, cogeneration (simultaneously extracting electricity and heat from the burning of natural gas), and especially energy efficiency.[5] Efforts to export what is often touted as the most successful example of nuclear development—the French model—have utterly failed, as demonstrated by France’s own legacy of nuclear contamination, as well as years of delays, quality-assurance problems, and a near tripling of construction costs at the €9 billion French nuclear construction project in Finland.[6] Such findings, however, are far from adequate to sway either industrialists or politicians who are ideologically committed to the nuclear path. Well known environmental advocates, including the British scientist James Lovelock and ''Whole Earth Catalog'' founder Stewart Brand, have reaped the unending adoration of the mainstream press for their advocacy for nuclear power, while former US Senator John Kerry offered generous new subsidies to the nuclear industry in his effort to win Republican Senators’ support for proposed climate and energy legislation.[7]
-Let this suffice as a general picture of pre-war politics in the now lava-deluged city of Vilna. My account covers many years. During that time, every spring just when we had to study for exams the trees would turn green; and ever since, nowhere else has the green seemed so joyous to me. On the river, little boats appeared taking trippers out to nearby beaches, and long logs floated out of the forests down to the sawmills. Young couples, holding hands, strolled under the arcades of the University. To rise before daybreak, take a kayak at the landing stage and, in the light of the rising sun, paddle on the river whose swift waters pushed between sandy cliffs and clumps of pines—that was pure joy. We often made excursions to nearby lakes in whose midst whole archipelagos of islands thrust up like big bouquets. The grass on the islands was buoyant, untouched by human feet; nightingales shouted in the willows. We would swarm into the water and swim out, troubling the reflections of clouds and trees on its smooth surface; or we would float on our backs in the water, look up at the sky and sing happy, inarticulate songs. We lived through betrayals of love, sorrows over failed exams, mutual intrigues and envies. Our articles and poems appeared in print. Over the hard meat balls in the mensa,, the topics of conversation changed. Disputes over the significance of metaphor in poetry yielded to discussions of the theories of Georges Sorel, and later Marx and Lenin.
+Claims that the coal industry may be able to clean up its act and reduce its contribution to the climate crisis are equally fanciful. While politicians promote the false promise of “clean coal,” and the World Bank has established a carbon capture trust fund for developing countries, scientists engaged in efforts to capture and sequester CO2 emissions from coal plants admit that the technology is decades away, at best. Many are doubtful that huge quantities of CO2 can ever be stored permanently underground, and project that attempting to do so will increase the energy consumed by coal-burning plants by as much as 40 percent to achieve the same energy output.[8] Still, the myth of “cleaner” coal is aggressively promoted in the US and around the world, partly to justify plans to build a new generation of coal-burning plants that are misleadingly marketed as “capture-ready.” To make matters worse, CO2 pumped underground is most often used to add pressure to existing or already-depleted oil wells and thus increase their output, with little examination of how much of the carbon will remain beneath the earth’s surface.
-Gamma parted with the nationalists rather quickly; still, he had little sympathy for the “government left” or for the Catholic left. He wrote poetry which was printed in magazines issued by our group; but his poems, unlike those written by Theodore, George, or myself, were the object of neither attack nor praise. The critics received them in silence. He had that mastery of technique that modern poetry requires, but what he wrote was lifeless. Those he envied wrote, I believe, stupidly; but their style was individual, their rhythmic incantations expressed the authors’ feelings, their fury and sarcasm irritated the readers, but caught their attention. Gamma’s poems were studied arrangements of carefully selected metaphors that said nothing.
+The downside of efforts to minimize pollution from coal plants was dramatized by a massive spill of hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic coal ash in 2008, following the breach of a massive dam in the US state of Tennessee. That incident literally buried the valleys below the dam in up to six feet of sludge, which is mainly the byproduct of scrubbers installed to make coal burning somewhat cleaner; contaminants that were once spewed into the air are now contaminating waterways instead. Investigations following the breach of another large coal ash dam in North Carolina in 2014 exposed how that state’s entire environmental enforcement apparatus had been redirected to serve coal-dependent utility companies.[9] Another investigation by ''New York Times'' revealed that more than 300 coal plants violated US water pollution rules during a recent five year period, while only 10 percent of those were fined or sanctioned in any way.[10] People in regions of the Appalachian Mountains that have relied on coal mining for over a century continue to protest the practice of “mountaintop removal” mining, in which mountaintops are literally blasted off to reveal the coal seams below. It is clear that the only way to reduce the climate, environmental, and public health impacts from coal is to further curtail its use.
-Our group became more and more radical. After the collapse of the “government left,” the question arose: what “left”? Social democracy in our country shared the faults of all the social democratic parties of the continent—it was weak and willing to compromise. Russia began to figure in our conversations ever more frequently. We lived less than a hundred miles from the borders of the Soviet Union, yet we had no more knowledge of it than did the inhabitants of Brazil. The border was hermetically sealed. We were situated on the peripheries of a world that differed from the East as much as if it were another planet. That Eastern world, which we knew only from books, seemed to us like a world of progress when we compared it with conditions we could observe at first hand. Weighing the matter rationally, we were convinced that the future lay with the East. Our country was in a state of paralysis. The masses had no say in the government. The social filter was so contrived that the peasants’ and workers’ youth had no access to secondary schools and universities because the expenses, though low, were nevertheless beyond their means. Infinitely complicated national minority problems (and our country had a high percentage of minorities) were resolved in the most chauvinistic spirit. The nationalist movement, supported by the petty bourgeoisie and the penniless intelligentsia, drove the government to ever sharper discrimination. The country was heading toward a variation on what was happening in neighboring Germany, the same Germany that threatened war and the destruction of Poland. Can one wonder that we looked to Russia as the country where a solution had been found to all the problems that beset us, as the country which alone could save us from the misfortunes which we could so easily visualize as we listened to Hitler’s speeches over the radio?
+So-called “biofuels” present a more ambiguous story. On a hobbyist or farm scale, people are running cars and tractors on everything from waste oil from restaurants to homegrown oil from sunflowers. But industrial-scale biofuels present a very different picture; activists in the global South use the more appropriate term, “agrofuels,” as these are first and foremost products of global agribusiness. Running American cars on ethanol fermented from corn and European vehicles on diesel fuel pressed from soybeans and other food crops contributed to the worldwide food shortages and price spikes that brought starvation and food riots to at least 35 countries in 2007–08.[11] The amount of corn needed to produce the ethanol for one large SUV tank contains enough calories to feed a hungry person for a year. and researchers have documented an expanding legacy of disturbing environmental and human rights impacts from the development of agrofuels around the world, including a global epidemic of land grabs for biofuel crop production.[12] One study by the International Land Coalition revealed that over 203 million hectares of land was purchased by wealthy overseas interests between 2000 and 2010, with nearly 60 percent aimed toward growing biofuel feedstocks.[13] Those land purchases often result in the expulsion of inhabitants, the loss of food production for local consumption, and sometimes escalate into violent conflicts.
-Still, it was not easy to become a Communist, for Communism meant a complete revision of one’s concepts of nationality. For centuries Poland had been in a state of permanent war with Russia. There was a time when Polish kings had led their troops to the very gates of the “Rome of the East.” Then the scale tipped in favor of Moscow until at last, throughout the whole nineteenth century, the greater part of Poland was under Tsarist rule. In accepting Communism, one agreed to consider those old conflicts between the two nations to have been conflicts between their ruling classes only. It was necessary to forget the past. One conceded that Poland—after its short period of independence resulting from the Versailles peace—would, in the event of the victory of Communism, become once again a province of Russia. Poland’s eastern territories, and the city in which we lived, were to be incorporated directly into the Soviet Union because Moscow regarded them as part of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian republics. As for the rest, that obviously would become one more republic in the Union. Polish Communists made no attempt to conceal that such was the Party program.
+Even if the entire US corn crop were to be used for fuel, it would only displace about 12 percent of domestic gasoline use, according to University of Minnesota researchers.[14] The push for agrofuels has consumed a growing share of US corn—up to 40 percent by 2010—and encouraged growers of less energy and chemical-intensive crops such as wheat and soybeans to transfer more of their acreage to growing corn. Land in the Brazilian Amazon and other fragile regions is being plowed under to grow soybeans for export, while Brazil’s uniquely biodiverse coastal grasslands are appropriated to grow sugarcane, today’s most efficient source of ethanol. A series of studies beginning in 2008 suggested that the consequences of converting pasture and forest land to the production of fuel crops are severe enough to make most agrofuels net contributors to global warming.[15]
-To renounce loyalty toward one’s country and to eradicate patriotic feelings inculcated in school and in the University—this was the price of entrance upon the road of progress. Not everyone was prepared to pay this price. Our group disintegrated. “The most promising young government politicians,” Stefan and Henryk, became Stalinists; George and I withdrew. Those who crossed the line thought the rest of us weak poets, bookworms incapable of action. Perhaps their opinion was not far from the truth. I am not sure, however, that cast-iron consistency is the greatest of human virtues.
+Commercial supplies of biodiesel often come from soybean or canola fields in the US Midwest, Canada, or the Amazon, where these crops are genetically engineered to withstand large doses of chemical herbicides. Increasingly, biodiesel originates from the vast monoculture oil palm plantations that have in recent years displaced more than 80 percent of the native rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia. As the global food crisis has escalated, some agrofuel proponents suggest that using food crops for fuel is only a temporary solution, and that someday we will run our vehicles on so-called “cellulosic” biofuels extracted from grasses and trees; that myth is exacerbating the widespread conversion of forests to timber plantations, and helping drive a new wave of subsidies to the US biotechnology industry to develop faster-growing genetically engineered trees.[16] Various researchers have documented corporate strategies for advancing a sweeping new “bioeconomy,” based on synthetic biology and other recent innovations, and dramatically expanding the biotechnology industry’s efforts to commodify all of life on earth.[17]
-Gamma became a Stalinist. I think he felt uneasy writing his passionless poetry. He was not made for literature. Whenever he settled down before a sheet of paper he sensed a void in himself. He was incapable of experiencing the intense joys of a writer, either those of the creative process or those of work accomplished. The period between his nationalism and his Stalinism was for him a limbo, a period of senseless trials and disillusionment.
+==== {{anchor|TradingPollution}} Trading Pollution ====
-The Communist Party was illegal in our country. Membership in it was punishable under a paragraph of the law that defined any attempt to deprive Poland of any part of her territory as a criminal offense. Party leaders, realizing they had nothing to gain at the time from illegal activity, tried to reach and sway public opinion through sympathizers not directly involved in the Party. A number of publications appeared in Poland which followed the Party line, adapting it to the level of unwary readers. The group in which Gamma found himself started to edit one such periodical. Contacts with Party messengers took place in secret, often on trips to the neighboring forests. By now, most of the members of our original group had completed their course of studies. This was the period of war in Spain and of the Communist front “in defense of culture,” when the Party was trying to rally all the forces of liberalism under a popular slogan.
+The notion that new commodity markets can become a tool for reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases is perhaps the most brazen expression of capitalist ideology in the climate debate. When Al Gore—then US Vice President—addressed the UN climate conference in Kyoto in 1997, he offered, as we have seen, that the US would sign on to what soon became the Kyoto Protocol under two conditions: that mandated reductions in emissions be far less ambitious than originally proposed, and that emissions reductions be implemented through the market-based trading of “rights to pollute” among various companies and between countries. Under this “cap-and-trade” model, companies are expected to meet a quota for “capping” their emissions; if they fail to do so, they can readily purchase the difference from another permit holder that may have found a way to reduce its emissions faster or more cheaply. While economists claim that this scheme induces companies to implement the most cost-effective changes as soon as possible, experience shows that carbon markets are at least as prone to fraud and manipulation as any other financial markets. More than fifteen years after the Kyoto Protocol was signed, many industrialized countries were still struggling to bring down their annual rate of ''increase'' in global warming pollution.[18]
-Gamma wrote articles, spoke at meetings, marched in May Day parades. He acted. When the authorities closed down the periodical, arrested the editors and put them on trial, he, together with the others, found himself in the dock. The trial created a great sensation in the city; it was a considerable blow to the government because it showed that this youth, on which it had counted most, had rapidly evolved toward Communism. Many liberals were incensed by the severity of the authorities toward these university graduates, these young doctors of law or philosophy. The best lawyers in the city defended them. The accused argued and lied convincingly and often; they were mentally better trained than the prosecutor, nor did they yield to him in knowledge of the law. They received mild sentences. Gamma was acquitted for lack of evidence.
+The ideological roots of carbon trading go back to the early 1960s, when corporate managers were just beginning to consider the consequences of pollution and resource depletion.[19] Chicago School economist R. H. Coase published a key paper in 1960, where he challenged the widely accepted view of pollution as an economic “externality”—an approach that originated in the 1920s—and proposed a direct equivalence between the harm caused by pollution and the economic loss to polluting entities if they are compelled to curtail production. “The right to do something which has a harmful effect,” argued Coase, “is also a factor of production.”[20] He proposed that steps to regulate production be evaluated on par with the value of the market transactions that those regulations aim to alter, arguing that economics should determine the optimal allocation of resources needed to best satisfy all parties to any dispute.
-During the years that immediately preceded the outbreak of the Second World War, Gamma worked at his profession, doing literary research. He wrote a book on the structure of the short story which in no way betrayed his political convictions. It would have been equally difficult to discover any particularly revolutionary notions in the two volumes of verse that he published. He married, and a daughter was born to him, His life was a constant struggle against financial troubles. Because he was known to be a Communist, he could not hope for a government position, so he supported himself by occasional literary jobs. From time to time, he published a temperate article about literature in leftist publications. He awaited his hour.
+The Canadian economist J.H. Dales, widely acknowledged as the founder of pollution trading, carried the discussion two steps further. First, he echoed the neoclassical view that charging for pollution, via a disposal fee or tax, is more efficient than either regulation or subsidizing alternative technologies. Then, as an extension of this argument, Dales proposed a “market in pollution rights” as an administratively simpler and less costly means of implementing pollution charges. “The pollution rights scheme, it seems clear, would require far less policing than any of the others we have discussed,” Dales suggested—a proposition thoroughly at odds with the world’s experience since Kyoto.[21] In 1972, California Institute of Technology economist David Montgomery presented a detailed mathematical model, purporting to show that a market in licenses to pollute indeed reaches a point of equilibrium at which desired levels of environmental quality are achieved at the lowest possible cost.[22]
-That hour came shortly. Hitler attacked Poland, and his march was swift. The Red Army moved to meet him and occupied, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, those territories which the Party program had always openly proclaimed should be joined to the Union. The effect of these attacks was like that of a fire in an anthill. Thousands of hungry and frightened people clogged the roads: soldiers of the beaten army trying to get home, policemen getting rid of their uniforms, women searching for their husbands, groups of men who had wanted to fight but who had not found arms. This was a time of universal migration. Throngs of people fled from the East to German occupation in the West; similar throngs fled from the Germans to the East and Soviet rule. The end of the State was marked by a chaos that could occur perhaps only in the twentieth century.
+By the mid-1970s, the new US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was actively experimenting with pollution trading, initially through brokered deals, where the Agency would allow companies to offset pollution from new industrial facilities by reducing existing emissions elsewhere or negotiating with another company to do so. The next significant breakthrough was a 1979 Harvard Law Review article by US Supreme Court Justice (then a law professor) Stephen Breyer. Breyer’s article proposed that regulation is only appropriate to replicate the market conditions of a “hypothetically competitive world” and introduced a broader array of policymakers to the concept of “marketable rights to pollute,” as a substitute for regulation.[23]
-Gamma was mobilized but he spent only a few days in the army, so quickly did defeat come. The Soviet Union magnanimously offered the city of Vilna to Lithuania, which was to enjoy the friendship of its mighty neighbor for a year before it was finally swallowed up. Gamma, craving action, moved to Lvov, the largest city under Soviet occupation. There he met other pro-Stalinist writers, and they quickly organized. With the support of the new authorities, they acquired a house in which they set up a canteen and living quarters; and there they went to work on the new type of writing—which consisted mostly of translations from Russian, or else not overly fastidious propaganda.
+By the late 1980s, Harvard economist Robert Stavins, associated with the uniquely corporate-friendly Environmental Defense Fund, was collaborating with environmentalists, academics, government officials, and representatives of corporations such as Chevron and Monsanto to propose new environmental initiatives to the incoming presidency of the elder George H.W. Bush. These initiatives featured market incentives as a supplement to regulation. Seeking to distance himself from his predecessor Ronald Reagan’s rabidly anti-environmental policies, Bush announced a plan based on tradable permits to reduce the sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants that were causing acid rain throughout the eastern US.[24]
-In these new circumstances Gamma very quickly won the trust of the literary specialists who had been sent from Russia to supervise the “cultural clean-up” of the newly acquired territories. Many of his companions, although theoretically Communist, were torn by internal conflicts. The misfortunes of their fatherland were reducing them to a state of nervous breakdown. The savagery of the conquerors and their enmity toward all Poles filled them with fear. For the first time, they were in contact with the new and ominous world which, until now, they had known only from embellished accounts. But Gamma showed no doubt; his decision was made. I am tempted to explain this on the basis of his voice and his dry, unpleasant laugh, which could lead one to suspect that his emotional life was always rather primitive. He knew anger, hatred, fear, and enthusiasm; but reflective emotion was alien to him—in this lay the weakness of his talent.
+Then as now, advocates promoted the idea that the most efficient pollution reductions would come from such emissions trading schemes: the government sets a cap, reduces it over time, and encourages companies to buy and sell pollution permits in order to nominally promote development of the most cost-effective pollution reductions. The Acid Rain Program succeeded modestly, but mainly because regulated electric utilities in the pre-Enron era were mandated by state officials to reduce their output of acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide. Utilities increased their purchases of increasingly available low-sulfur coal, mainly from Western strip-mines. According to many analysts, emissions trading contributed only marginally to the 50 percent pollution reductions from that program. An effort to reduce air pollution in southern California by a similar scheme appeared to mainly delay the installation of emission controls, and that region still has the dirtiest air in the country. In the EPA’s Acid Rain Program, trading might have helped reduce the cost of some companies’ compliance with the rules, but also may have limited the spread of some promising new pollution control technologies.[25]
-Condemned to purely cerebral writing. Gamma clung to doctrine. All he had to say could have been shouted at a meeting or printed in a propaganda leaflet. He could move forward without being swayed by any affective complications; he was able to express himself in a single tone. His success (not as a writer but as a literary politician, which is the most important type of literary success in the Stalinist system) was also promoted by his fluent knowledge of Russian. He was, after all, half-Russian, and so he could arrive more easily than others at an understanding with the new rulers. He was regarded as one of the “surest.”
+That didn’t stop the Environmental Defense Fund’s senior economist, Daniel Dudek, from proposing that the limited trading of acid rain emissions in the US was an appropriate “scale model” for a much more ambitious plan to trade global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Al Gore first endorsed the idea in his best-selling 1992 book, ''Earth in the Balance'', and Richard Sandor, then the director of the Chicago Board of Trade, North America’s largest commodities market, co-authored a study for UNCTAD (UN Conference on Trade and Development) that endorsed international emissions trading. Sandor went on to found the now-defunct Chicago Climate Exchange, which at its peak engaged nearly 400 international companies and public agencies in a wholly voluntary carbon market.
-But most people in the newly acquired areas were not so well off. They trembled with fright. The first arrests told them to expect the worst; and their fears were well-founded for the worst came quickly, in the form of mass deportations. At dawn, agents of the NKVD knocked at the doors of houses and huts; they allowed little time for the arrested families to gather together even the most essential articles; they advised them to dress warmly. Bolted cattle cars carried away the prisoners, men, women, and children. Thousands upon thousands ebbed away to the East. Soon the number was tens of thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands. After many weeks or months of travel, the human transports arrived at their destinations: forced labor camps in the polar regions, or collective farms in Asia. Among the deportees were Gamma’s father, mother, and teen-aged sisters. The father—it is said—cursed his unnatural son who could write eulogies of the rulers who were the cause of his countrymen’s sufferings. The father died somewhere in those vast expanses where a thousand miles seems a modest distance, but the mother and daughters lived on as slaves. At the time, Gamma was delivering inflammatory speeches about the great joy it was to live and work in this new and best of orders that was turning man’s dreams into reality. Who can guess what he felt then? Even if he had tried to defend his family, he could not have saved them; and besides, although he was in the good books of the NKVD, he was afraid.
+While the US never adopted the Kyoto Protocol, the rest of the world has had to live with the consequences of Gore’s intervention in Kyoto, which created what George Monbiot has aptly termed “an exuberant market in fake emissions cuts.”[26] The European Union’s Emissions Trading System, for example, created huge new subsidies for highly polluting corporations without corresponding reductions in pollution. In 2006, the value of European carbon allowances plummeted and the carbon trading system almost collapsed under the weight of excess permits that were freely granted to favored industries, and by 2013 the European carbon price was consistently below €5 per ton, leading a broad coalition of environmental groups to propose that the European Trading System was an unmitigated failure and should be abolished. Meanwhile, European countries also directly support energy conservation and renewable energy technologies with public funds, whereas in the US we are told that solar and wind technologies mainly need to prove their viability in the so-called “free market”—in marked contrast to rarely unchallenged subsidies for nuclear power and agrofuels.
-The Russians distrust Communists of other nationalities; and most of all, Polish Communists, as specific examples from the years 1917–39 demonstrate. Many active Polish Communists fleeing to the Soviet Union in fear of persecution were there accused of imaginary crimes and liquidated. That happened to three well-known Polish Communist poets: Wandurski, Stande, and Bruno Jasienski. Their names are never mentioned today; their works will never be re-edited. Yet once Jasieiiski’s novel I Burn Paris appeared serially in France’s VHumanite, and he had the same international fame that Communist poets like Nazim Hikmet and Pablo Neruda enjoy today. He died in a slave labor camp near the Arctic Circle.
+Carbon offsets are another central aspect of the “market” approach to global warming, and offer a massive loophole for companies that exceed their share of emissions allowances. These investments in nominally emissions-reducing projects in other parts of the world are a nearly-universal feature of carbon markets, and represent an even greater obstacle to real solutions. Larry Lohmann of the UK’s Corner House research group has demonstrated in detail how carbon offset schemes are subsidizing the replacement of native forests by monoculture tree plantations, lengthening the lifespan of polluting industrial facilities and toxic landfills in Asia and Africa in exchange for only incremental changes in their operations, and ultimately perpetuating the very inequalities that must be eliminated if we are to create a more just and sustainable world.[27] Even where offset credits occasionally do help support beneficial projects, they serve to postpone investments in necessary emissions reductions in the North and represent a gaping hole in any mandated “cap” in carbon dioxide emissions. At best, they maintain current emissions levels; at worst, they make it possible for domestic emissions in Northern countries to continue to rise. Offsets are a means for polluting industries to continue business as usual at home while contributing, marginally at best, to emission reductions elsewhere.
-The wave of arrests did not by-pass the little group of “sure” individuals. Polish Communists were always suspected of nationalist tendencies. The discovery that they suffered over the plight of their nation was sufficient cause for repression. Suddenly one day, the NKVD started house-cleaning in the circle that Gamma belonged to. One of the men arrested was the famous poet W. B. If Communist authorities in France were to arrest Aragon, or if American Communists were to imprison Howard Fast, the effect on the public would be more or less the same as that created by W. B.’s arrest. He was a revolutionary poet worshipped by the entire left and too respected by everyone, even his political adversaries, to be prevented from publishing his verse. Consequently, he held an exceptional position in our country. Fleeing from German-occupied Warsaw, he had taken refuge in the Soviet zone.
+In the late 2000s, individual purchases of carbon offsets became the basis for a lucrative new business in their own right. Online purchases of tickets for air travel and some major cultural events were routinely accompanied by pleas to purchase offsets to alleviate one’s personal contribution to global warming. These are aptly compared to the “indulgences” that sinners used to buy from the Catholic church during the Middle Ages. On a global scale, with corporations instead of individuals as the main players, offsets became a problem of gigantic proportions. Rather than promoting innovative measures to reduce energy use and sequester carbon in poor countries, as they are usually advertised, carbon offsets instead have subsidized tree plantations in the tropics, methane capture from expanding toxic landfills, minor retooling of highly polluting pig iron smelters in India, and even the routine destruction of byproducts from China’s expanding production of ozone-destroying hydrofluorocarbons.[28]
-After the arrest of his colleagues, Gamma succumbed to a violent attack of fear. Never before in his life had he been so frightened. He assumed that this was just the beginning and that on the next round all the writers who were still at liberty would find themselves under lock and key. Feverish and wild-eyed, he ran to his fellow Communists with a proposal for immediate preventive measures. He wanted to issue a public manifesto condemning the arrested, among them W. B., as fascists. He argued that such a manifesto, signed by scores of names, would constitute a proof of orthodoxy. But his colleagues were reluctant to make a public statement denouncing their friends as fascists. This was, in their opinion, too drastic a step. They were experienced Communists and explained to him that such a move would be politically unwise. It could only prove harmful to those who signed because it was dictated so transparently by cowardice. Besides, it was hard to foresee the shape events would take in the future. Caution was indicated. The manifesto was not issued.
+One of the most notorious cases was that of the French chemical company, Rhodia, which reaped nearly a billion dollars in carbon offset credits in exchange for a $15 million investment in 1970s-vintage technology to destroy the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide in its facility in South Korea.[29] Carbon offsets became the company’s most profitable line of business. Major hydroelectric projects, mainly in China, India and Brazil, represented a quarter of all applications for credits through the UN’s offset program, the so-called Clean Development Mechanism, and nearly all of these were already under development before they applied for their credits. As the International Rivers Network and others have pointed out, large-scale hydro, far from being green, is responsible for huge quantities of methane and other greenhouse gases.[30] A German study of UN-approved carbon offset projects in 2007 reported that as many as 86 percent of all offset-funded projects would likely have been carried out anyway.[31] This ran counter to the Kyoto Protocol’s guideline requiring that projects granted emissions offsets must be “additional,” that is the qualifying projects cannot already be underway.
-At that time Gamma was just beginning his career and had not yet mastered the canons of complicated political strategy. His reactions were uncontrolled. He had yet to learn how to act with true cunning.
+Nearly two decades of experience has shown that capitalist techno-fixes, trading and offsets will not likely usher in the zero-emissions future that we know is both necessary and achievable. Nevertheless, markets in greenhouse gas emissions allowances continue to be a central feature of proposed climate policies in the US and worldwide.
-Then Hitler attacked Russia, and in a few days his army reached Lvov. Gamma could not remain in the city; he was too well-known as a Communist writer and speaker. In the general panic that accompanied the hasty evacuation of offices, NKVD men, and the fleeing army, he succeeded in hopping a train bound for the East. He left his wife and daughter in the city. To tell the truth, the married life of this couple left much to be desired. The wife disliked the new order, as did nearly everyone who had occasion to watch it operate. She disapproved of her husband’s new career. They parted, and their separation was to prove definitive.
+==== {{anchor|FalseSolutionsintheUSCongre}} False Solutions in the US Congress ====
-Gamma found himself in Russia. His years there were years of education. Many Poles who had arrived in bolted cattle cars were scattered throughout Russia at that time. Their number, including the interned soldiers and officers of the Polish army, amounted to some one and a half millions. Moscow regarded them as a hostile element and treated them accordingly. The Kremlin never, even at the time of its military setbacks, abandoned its far-sighted plans for the new Poland that was to arise in the future. Poland was the most important country in the Kremlin’s calculations because it was a gangplank to Europe. Since the “cadres” of the new Poland could not be recruited from among the deportees, the Party had to use the little group of “sure” Communist intellectuals. In Russia Gamma met the university colleagues with whom he had once stood trial; and it was they, together with a few others, who founded a society nobly christened the Union of Patriots. This society became the nucleus of the government that rules in Warsaw today.
+When the US House of Representatives passed a first-ever climate bill in June of 2009, it was received by the mainstream press, and many environmentalists, with a palpable sense of triumph. Representative Henry Waxman of California, one of the bill’s main sponsors, called it a “decisive and historic action,” and President Obama described the bill as “a bold and necessary step.” Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) called it no less than “the most important environmental and energy legislation in the history of our country.”
-Even before the war the members of the Union of Patriots had agreed to renounce independence for their country in the name of the logic of History. While in Russia, they began to pay this price in practice, for they were not free to show any solidarity with the masses of Polish prisoners and slave laborers. The deportees (among them were not only former landowners, manufacturers, and government functionaries, but mostly poor people—peasants, woodsmen, policemen, small Jewish merchants, etc.) were nothing but human pulp. Their thinking was branded with the stamp of noble and bourgeois Poland; they invoked pre-war days as a lost paradise. What else could one do with them except keep them in labor camps or on remote collective farms? The members of the Union of Patriots could sympathize with them as people, but their sympathy was not to be permitted to influence their political decisions. In any case, typhus, hunger, and scurvy were destroying this human material so effectively that in a few years it would cease to exist as a problem.
+EDF, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Nature Conservancy, played a central role in the development of the 2009-’10 climate bill. As initiators of the US Climate Action Partnership, a collaboration with highly polluting corporations such as Alcoa, BP, Dow, DuPont, GE, and the former “big three” US automakers, among others, they articulated what would become the bill’s broad outlines: an emphasis on long-range goals, trading of emissions allowances, initially free distribution of those allowances to polluting corporations, and a generous offset provision that permits companies to defer significant pollution reductions well into the future.[32]
-Gamma, whose family was among the deportees, understood why they thought of pre-war Poland as a lost paradise. Their lot, though not very different materially from that of millions of Soviet citizens, was particularly hard because they were unaccustomed to hunger and a severe climate. When the London Government-in-Exile concluded a pact with Moscow that called for the formation of a Polish army within the Soviet Union and an amnesty for Polish political prisoners, masses of people poured out of the northern slave labor camps and rushed to the south. The corpses of these ragged beggars littered the streets of the cities of southeastern Russia. Out of the totally exhausted, half-dead people who survived the trek, an army was formed that took its orders from the exile government in London. For Gamma, as for the Russian rulers, this was the army of the class enemy; like the English and Americans, it was only a temporary ally.
+While many environmentalists suggested that any step in the direction of regulating carbon dioxide and other climate damaging greenhouse gases is better than nothing, others remained skeptical. Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, and Greenpeace issued sharp critiques of the bill’s focus on corporate-friendly cap-and-trade measures. Even more scathing were analyses from smaller independent groups such as Chesapeake Climate Action, Climate SOS, and the influential Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity. The bill that passed the House in 2009 fell far short of international standards in mandating a meaningful level of reductions in global warming pollution, and relied heavily on market-based emissions-trading, especially in the longer-term. It also contained a number of Trojan Horse provisions that would likely forestall, rather than encourage, genuine climate progress.
-The Polish command was seeking officers. Several thousand Polish officers had been interned in conformance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Now they could not be found. Gamma knew that the London Poles’ search would not be crowned with success. This was a delicate matter. Civilized nations do not, in general, kill interned members of the military forces of countries they are not even at war with; still, the logic of History sometimes demands such measures. Polish officers were the “cadre” of the old order in Poland. Most of them were reserve officers; in civilian life they were teachers, lawyers, doctors, government officials, in short, the intelligentsia, whose ties to the past obstructed the way of the revolution that was to be imposed on Poland. Considering that the Germans, on their part, were doing an excellent job in that country of wiping out its intelligentsia, a cadre of over ten thousand constituted an impressive number, and one was not completely unjustified in using drastic methods to get rid of them. Whenever they heard of the London government’s fruitless efforts to find some trace of the internees, Gamma and the other members of the Union of Patriots exchanged ironic glances.
+By the time the bill had passed through the relevant committees, as well as last-minute horse-trading on the House floor, the loopholes were staggering to behold. Most analysts by then agreed that greenhouse gas emissions on the order of 20-40 percent were needed within a decade or so to prevent a slide toward uncontrollable global climate chaos, with reductions on the order of 80-95 percent for the leading industrial economies required by mid-century. The House bill first attempted to shift the terms of the discussion by measuring emissions relative to 2005 levels rather than the accepted Kyoto Protocol benchmark of 1990. It promised a 17 percent reduction by 2020, relative to 2005, which only translates into 4 or 5 percent less global warming pollution than the US produced in 1990. This was the nominal basis for the US negotiating position in Copenhagen, and was promoted by President Obama as his administration’s central climate goal for many years afterward. The much-touted cap-and-trade provision of the bill accounted for only a 1 percent reduction by 2020, according to the Center for Biological Diversity’s analysis, with the remainder coming from traditional performance standards for smaller pollution sources, including automobiles, and from a controversial USAID effort to reduce deforestation in poorer countries. For comparison, recall that most wealthy countries agreed more than fifteen years ago in Kyoto to reduce their emissions to 6-8 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.
-One of the interned officers was a young professor from the University where Gamma and I had studied. The professor was a liberal who had commiserated with Gamma and his comrades over their arrest. He was, however, the author of several economic studies which presented the Soviet Union in a none too flattering light. Somewhere in the security files in Moscow his name had been written down. It took a number of months before NKVD authorities identified him in a camp. Their discovery came just in time: the telegram demanding his immediate transfer to a prison in Moscow arrived at the railroad station where the transports of internees were actually in the process of being unloaded, preparatory to their being taken into the nearby forests and shot. The professor did not share this fate because, as bureaucracy would have it, complicated cases must be studied with special diligence. After the amnesty he got out of Russia.
+The deforestation provisions of the bill mirrored a highly controversial international climate mitigation strategy, promoted by the UN and the World Bank under the name of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). REDD mainly targets intact forested lands, largely occupied by indigenous peoples, which are now threatened with privatization for use as carbon offsets.[33] Soon after the climate bill passed the House, an Anglo-African brokerage firm announced that it would sell “avoided deforestation” credits to buyers of voluntary carbon offsets in the US, threatening a new wave of corporate takeovers of African forest lands.
-Many Poles who observed life in the Soviet Union at first hand underwent a change of heart. After a sojourn in prisons or labor camps, former Communists entered the army of the London government. One of those released as a result of the amnesty was the poet W. B. When the Polish army was evacuated from Russia to the Near East (later to take part in the battles in Italy), W. B. was happy to leave the country of hopes unrealized after thirty years. Yet after the end of the War, he could not bear to remain an exile. He returned to a Poland ruled by Gamma and others like him. He forgave. Today every school child learns his Ode to Stalin by heart.
+Under the House bill, some 7400 facilities across the US would receive annual allowances to continue emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.[34] As many as 85 percent of the allowances would initially go to polluting companies for free, reversing Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge that they should mainly be auctioned off. (In Europe, utilities routinely bill their customers for these annually acquired new assets.) Meanwhile, the quantity of available pollution allowances would have increased for several years, only falling gradually thereafter, and companies would be allowed to indefinitely “bank” them for future use, borrow from their future allocations, and trade allowances on the open market with other companies as well as with Wall Street firms and an emerging cadre of brokers in carbon futures. For many observers, this was highly reminiscent of the financial machinations that nearly brought down the world’s financial markets just a year earlier; meanwhile carbon market boosters were projecting a worldwide trading system that would eventually be valued at $10 trillion a year—sufficient to launch yet another destabilizing financial bubble.
-Despite any internal vacillations or moments of despair, Gamma and his comrades in the Union of Patriots persevered. They played for high stakes, and their expectations were fulfilled. The tide of victory swung in Russia’s favor. A new Polish army started to form in the Soviet Union. It was to enter Poland with the Red Army and to serve as a mainstay of the new pro-Soviet Polish government. Gamma was among the first organizers of this army. Since there were no Polish officers, the higher ranks were filled by Russians. But one could not complain of a lack of soldiers. Only a small number of the deportees had managed to make their way to Persia together with the London army. For those who were left behind the only remaining chance of salvation, that is of escape outside the borders of the Soviet Union, was enlistment in the new army politically supervised by the NKVD and the Union of Patriots.
+The bill’s supporters argued that, for all their uncertainty, these highly manipulable financial measures are worth the risk because they facilitate the phase-in of an enforceable cap on global warming pollution. But the legislation replicated another of the most egregious features of the Kyoto Protocol: a virtual “hole in the cap,” in the form of an offset feature that allows companies to meet their obligations without reducing their own emissions at home, but rather by investing in pollution control projects anywhere in the country and even overseas. Companies would have been able to satisfy their full obligation to reduce CO2 by buying offsets until 2027; those familiar with the bill’s fine print suggested that companies could stretch this out for 30-40 years.
-The summer of 1944 arrived. The Red Army, and with it the new Polish army, set foot on Polish soil. How the years of suffering, humiliation, and clever maneuvering were repaid! This was what came of betting on a good horse! Gamma joyously greeted the little towns ravaged by artillery fire, and the narrow plots of land which were a relief for the eyes after the monotonous expanses of Russian collective farms. His jeep carried him over roads bordered by the twisted iron of burnt-out German tanks toward power and the practical embodiment of what had hitherto been theoretic discussions full of citations from Lenin and Stalin. This was the reward for those who knew how to think correctly, who understood the logic of History, who did not surrender to senseless sentimentality! It was they, and not those tearful fools from London, who were bringing Poland liberation from the Germans. The nation would, of course, have to undergo a major operation; Gamma felt the excitement of a good surgeon entering the operating room.
+Allowing companies to postpone their own greenhouse gas reductions by buying offsets was one Trojan Horse provision in the climate bill that threatened future climate progress. Another such measure would have largely prohibited the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to establish future regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. It is important to note it was a 2007 Supreme Court decision allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant that finally forced the G.W. Bush administration to start talking about global warming. Removing this authority represented a defining concession to polluting industries, one that would have virtually removed any teeth of enforcement from future measures to forestall climate chaos. It would become one of the main reasons that so many US environmentalists ultimately refused to support the bill, and instead encouraged the Obama administration to base its climate policies on the Clean Air Act’s regulatory mandates.
-Gamma, now a political officer with the rank of major, brought with him from Russia a new wife, a Polish soldier-wife. In uniform, wearing heavy Russian boots, she looked as if she might be of any age. In reality she was very young, but she had lived through many hardships in Russia. She was barely in her teens when she, her sister, brother, and mother were arrested and deported from the center of Europe to the Asiatic steppes. Summers there are as hot as they are in tropical countries; winters so severe that the tears that flow from the cold are instantly transformed into icicles. A loaf of bread is a small fortune; hard work breaks the strength of undernourished bodies. Police supervision and the vastness of the Asiatic continent kill all hope of escape. The young girl, a daughter of a middle-class family, was not accustomed to hard, physical toil, but she had to support her family. She succeeded after a while in entering a course on tractor driving, and after completing it she drove huge Russian tractors on the steppes of Kazakhstan. Her sympathy for the Stalinist system, after these experiences, was not great. In fact, like almost all the soldiers of the new Polish army, she had come to hate it. At last, however, she found herself in Poland, and the game for high stakes that Gamma was playing was also her game.
+Still, these damaging measures built into the climate bill weren’t enough to assuage corporate lobbyists, so politically powerful industries were allowed to write in even more concessions. (The Center for Public Integrity reported in early 2009 that some 2340 lobbyists were working in Washington on this issue.[35]) The coal industry would have until 2025 to comply with the bill’s mandated pollution reductions, with ample means for gaining further extensions. Agribusiness, which is responsible for as much as a quarter of US greenhouse gas emissions, was exempt from most of the bill’s provisions, but large scale farmers who reduce tillage by growing crops genetically engineered to withstand megadoses of herbicides would be eligible for offset credits paid for by industrial polluters. Assessments of ethanol’s eligibility as a “renewable fuel” would exclude its effects on land use, a factor that researchers from Princeton University and the University of Minnesota proved decisive in a pair of landmark studies, showing how industrial biofuels are often net contributors to global warming when impacts from land use changes are included in the assessments.[36] Finally, the nuclear industry expected to be a leading beneficiary of the bill’s free allocation of emission allowances; a memo leaked to the ''Huffington Post'' reported that Exelon, the largest US nuclear power company, expected a $1-1.5 billion annual windfall from the bill.[37] This despite the problem of greenhouse gas emissions throughout the nuclear fuel cycle. With horse-trading continuing on the House floor right up to the time of the vote, the bill ultimately included billions of dollars in “special-interest favors,” according to the ''New York Times''.[38] These included $1 billion for green jobs programs in low income communities, viewed as a small concession to inner city environmental justice activists; the biggest favors were clearly reserved for oil, coal and gas producers.
-The Red Army reached the Vistula. The new government, which was as yet known only as the Liberation Committee, began to function in the city of Lublin. Great tasks and great difficulties faced the Union of Patriots. There was little fear that the Western allies would cause any trouble. The obstacles were of an internal nature; they sprang from the hostile attitude of the people. Once again the old conflict between two loyalties flared up. In the territories now held by the Russians large units of partisans, the so-called Home Army, affiliated with the London Govemment-in-Exile, had operated against the occupying Germans. Now these units were disarmed, their members drafted into the new Polish army or else arrested and deported to Russia. Gamma humorously recounted what happened in Vilna, the city of our youth. An uprising against the Germans broke out, and detachments of the Home Army entered the city simultaneously with the Russian troops. Then the Soviet command gave a magnificent banquet to which it invited the officers of the Home Army. This was, as Gamma said, a feast in the ancient Slavonic manner, a sumptuous repast during which, according to legend, midst friendly embiaces, toasts, and song, invited kinsmen were quietly poisoned. In the course of the banquet, the officers of the Home Army were arrested.
+Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer eventually released a Senate version of the climate bill, nominally developed in collaboration with Republican and independent colleagues. In the hope of gaining more bipartisan support, their bill included even more blatant giveaways to the fossil fuel, coal and nuclear industries. This bill’s excesses were so egregious that several environmental groups that had expressed a skeptical but conciliatory view toward the House bill were far more willing to speak out in opposition to Kerry’s version; many veteran political observers pronounced the Senate bill “dead on arrival.”
-From Lublin, Gamma observed that much the same thing, but on an incomparably larger scale, was happening in Warsaw. At that time the Red Army stood on the line of the Vistula, with Warsaw on the opposite side of the river. The radio of the Liberation Committee urged the inhabitants of the capital to revolt against the Germans. Yet once the uprising broke out, the radio, receiving new instructions, began to heap abuse on the leaders. Of course: they were acting on orders from the Soviet Union’s rival in the struggle for power. A feast in the Slavonic tradition was an inadequate measure in this instance; Warsaw itself, a center of opposition to the Russians just as much as to the Germans, had to be destroyed. The officers of the Red Army gazed through their binoculars at the street fighting on the other side of the river. Smoke obscured their field of vision more and more. Day after day, week after week, the battle went on, until at last the fires merged to form a wall of flame. Gamma and his friends listened to awkward accounts of what was happening in this hell, from the lips of insurgents who managed to swim across the river. Indeed, the price one had to pay to remain true to the logic of History was terrible. One had to behold passively the death of thousands, take on one’s conscience the torture of women and children transformed into human torches. Who was guilty? The London Government-in-Exile because it wanted to use the uprising as a trump card in its play for power? The Kremlin because it refused to aid the stricken city out of its conviction that national independence is a bourgeois concept? Or no one?
+While Kerry’s giveaways to the energy industry were too much even for some believers in environmental “consensus” and market-based carbon trading, Senate Republicans still boycotted the first committee hearing that was convened to address the proposal. Kerry shifted his focus toward crafting an even more “bipartisan” compromise, in collaboration with Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, a notorious “independent” war hawk, and South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham. One of the first public announcements of this unlikely collaboration was a ''New York Times'' opinion piece in which Kerry and Graham called for streamlining regulation of nuclear power and expanding offshore oil drilling.[39] Even after BP’s catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the bill continued to offer huge new concessions to oil companies seeking to drill offshore. Kerry stated publicly that the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases would be leveraged as a bargaining chip to help gain more Republican support for his bill.
-Leaning over a table, Communist intellectuals dressed in heavy wool uniforms listened to the tale of a young girl, one of those who had succeeded in swimming the river. Her eyes were crazed, she was running a high fever as she spoke. “Our unit was smashed and pushed to the river. A few succeeded in joining other units. All of those who remained on the bank were wounded. At dawn the SS would attack. That meant that all of us would be shot. What was I to do? Remain with my wounded comrades? But I couldn’t help them. I decided to swim. My chances of getting across were small because the river is lit by flood lights. There are German machine-gun nests everywhere. On the shoals in the middle of the river I saw lots of corpses of people who had tried to swim across. The current carries them to the sandbanks. I was very weak. It was hard for us to find food, and I was sick. The current is very strong! They shot at me, so I tried to swim under water as much as possible.”
+While some Washington insiders believed that these giveaways might help rally corporate support for a climate bill, President Obama went ahead and offered up many of the Kerry’s team’s bargaining chips even before the Senate began its debate. Obama’s early 2010 budget proposal included nearly $55 billion in new loan guarantees for the nuclear industry. In late March, he offered a nationwide expansion of offshore oil drilling, a plan that was withdrawn only after BP’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. According to Ryan Lizza of the ''New Yorker'', there was no coordination with Senate staffers around these proposals; instead, “Obama had now given away what the senators were planning to trade.”[40] Officials in the Obama White House also apparently sabotaged a pending deal with the oil companies to streamline their purchases of emissions permits; a White House staffer’s leak to Fox News turned the deal into political poison for Graham by recasting the carbon credits as equivalent to a gas tax. An alternative bipartisan proposal, offered by senators from Washington State and from Maine, was praised by many environmentalists as it featured a substantially more progressive plan to tax CO2 emissions and also returned rebates or “dividends” to taxpayers; however this proposal received little serious consideration.
-After two months of battle, the Germans were masters of the ruins of the city. But Communist intellectuals had too much work before them to have time to brood over the misfortunes of Warsaw. First of all, they had to set the printing presses into motion. Because Communism recognizes that rule over men’s minds is the key to rule over an entire country, the word is the cornerstone of this system. Gamma became one of the chief press organizers in the city of Lublin.
+A 2013 study of the 2009-10 US climate debate by Harvard University sociologist Theda Skocpol correctly placed much of the blame for the larger climate bill’s demise on the excessively corporate-friendly approach advocated by EDF and USCAP. By attempting to enlist the most polluting corporations on their side, and largely neglecting a broad range of political and even business interests that might benefit from meaningful climate legislation, they ended up promoting a bill that hardly anyone could enthusiastically support. The effort was further sabotaged by political consultants urging the bill’s advocates to only speak in the most euphemistic terms about global warming, focusing instead on “‘green jobs,’ ‘threats to public health,’ and the need to ‘reduce dependence on foreign oil to bolster national defense’.”[41] The increasing political divide around environmental issues in the US renders the notion of a non-partisan advocacy for cap-and-trade legislation as “a dangerous fantasy” that drives proponents to “misunderstand the political realities they must face,” wrote Skocpol.[42]
-In the course of these years, he became a better writer than he had been before the war. He thrived on a strict diet of the doctrine, for “socialist realism” strengthens weak talents and undermines great ones. His primitivism, of which he had long since ceased to be ashamed, now lent the semblance of sincerity to his works. His true voice, which he had once tried to smother, now spoke in his verse, sharp and clamorous. He also wrote a number of orthodox stories about the War and Nazi atrocities, all of them modeled on the pattern that was to produce thousands of pages of Russian prose.
+A few years later, the Obama administration’s record on climate issues remained mixed at best. Rhetorically, Obama has maintained a forthright emphasis on the significance of climate change along with an appropriately sarcastic stance toward the climate denialists who have shaped the official posture of congressional Republicans. The administration also raised the fuel efficiency standards that automobile manufacturers must comply with to an average of 54.5 miles per gallon of gasoline (by 2025), a process that had been stalled since 1990. As of this writing, Obama has continued to delay construction of the northern portion of the notorious Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would transport 830,000 barrels of heavy bituminous material every day from the tar sands fields of Alberta, Canada to Gulf of Mexico oil refineries. However, he has also presided over an expansion of US infrastructure for transporting, processing, and perhaps soon exporting fossil fuels; such a pace of fossil fuel infrastructure expansion has not been seen since the 1950s. Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy encourages the development of solar and wind energy, but mainly emphasizes expanded production of natural gas through hydrofracking, new loan guarantees for nuclear power, and continued granting of new leases for offshore oil exploration.
-In January 1945, the Red Army began its offensive, crossed the Vistula and swiftly neared Berlin. Gamma also moved to the west. The Party directed him to Cracow, the city in which the greatest number of writers, scholars and artists had sought refuge after the fall of Warsaw. There he tasted the delights of dictatorship. Strange creatures dressed in remnants of furs, belted peasant jerkins and clumsy rope-laced boots began to swarm out of holes in old houses, indeed from beneath their very floors. Among them were the intellectuals who had survived the years of German occupation. Many remembered Gamma as a young pre-war poet whose works they had ignored. Now they knew he was all-powerful. On his word depended the possibility of their obtaining a chance to publish, a house, an income, a job with a newspaper, magazine, or publishing firm. They approached him apprehensively. Neither before the war nor in their underground activity were they Communist. But the new government was a fact. Nothing could prevent events from evolving as Moscow, as well as Gamma and his friends, desired. With a broad smile of friendship, he pressed the extended hands of these people and amused himself. Some were recalcitrant; some tried not to show how much his favor meant to them; some were openly servile. In a short time, he was surrounded by a court of yes-men who frowned when he frowned or guffawed loudly whenever he deigned to tell a joke.
+In June of 2014, Obama announced a new proposal aimed at reducing CO2 emissions from the electric power sector, particularly from older coal-fired power plants that have long been exempted from key requirements of the Clean Air Act. While headlines emphasized the overall goal of reducing power plant emissions by 30 percent by 2030, the details left much to be desired. First, the end goal is overly modest, as utilities had already reduced emissions by half that amount since the policy’s baseline year of 2005. This was largely a product of the economic recession and continuing stagnation, coupled with successful local opposition to most newly proposed coal plants; coal use in the US fell by nearly 20 percent in just a few short years.
-Possibly he would not have become such a popular figure so quickly had he behaved as impetuously and brutally as before. But years of schooling stood him in good stead. Observation of life in Russia and long hours spent discussing Stalinist strategy and tactics prepared him and his companions for the work that awaited them. The first and most important maxim was not to frighten people, to appear liberal, helpful, and to give men an opportunity to earn a living while posing only minimal demands. Most people were not ready for diamat; their mentality still resembled that of the fools in the West. It would be a criminal mistake to create points of psychological resistance. The process of re-education had to be gradual and imperceptible. His second principle was to side immediately and indignantly with anyone who rebelled against the drastic methods of the government, the censors, or the political police. His third precept was to accept everyone who could be useful regardless of his political past, with the exception of confirmed fascists or Nazi collaborators.
+Second, the plan calculated a goal for each state to reduce its emissions intensity—CO2 per unit of power production—so states with growing economies could still increase their overall emissions while meeting the plan’s requirements. Each state’s goal was to be based on four key benchmarks: a modest improvement in the efficiency of its coal-burning facilities, a rising capacity for gas-fueled generation, modest annual increases in energy efficiency, and efforts to sustain recent trends in renewable energy development.[43] States that have difficulty meeting those goals would be encouraged to trade emissions with other states, and subsidies were offered for such perverse measures as prolonging the life of economically unviable nuclear power plants. The overall 30 percent goal is merely an estimate of the emissions reductions that could result from fully implementing these policies; the details will likely shift significantly as policymakers respond to public comments and probable lawsuits. All indications are that this will prove to be yet another example of doing far too little, and far too late, to address the full magnitude of the climate crisis.
-By adhering faithfully to these principles, he brought many captives into the government camp. They became followers of the government not because they wanted to, nor even because of their public statements, but because of stern facts. The government took possession of all the printing shops and all the larger publishing firms in the country. Every writer or scholar had many manuscripts dating from the War when printing houses were inactive, and everyone was anxious to publish. From the moment his name appeared on the pages of a government-controlled periodical, from the moment his book was printed by a government-owned firm, the writer could not assert that he was hostile to the new authorities. In time, concessions were made to a few Catholic publications and to a certain number of small private publishers, but they were carefully kept as parochial as possible so as not to attract the best writers.
+Today it is clearer than ever that a much more forward-looking, even revolutionary approach is necessary to reduce climate-destabilizing pollution and achieve meaningful steps toward a fossil fuel-free economy. Such a transition threatens the global economy’s most powerful corporate empires; indeed the very shape of modern capitalism is a product of fossil fuel expansion and is sustained by the myth of unlimited “cheap energy.” Not only is the evolution of the economic system historically inseparable from the exploitation of fossil fuels but, as a recent report from the UK’s Corner House research group explains, “the entire contemporary system of making profits out of labor depended absolutely on cheap fossil carbon…”[44] To meaningfully challenge this system requires not only a resolute opposition to the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, but a rethinking of the underlying assumptions and beliefs of our society, a goal the remainder of this book aims to illuminate and encourage.
-Not too much pressure was exerted; no great demands were made on anyone. National flags flew in the cities, and the arrests of members of the Home Army were carried out quietly. There was a determined effort to grant sufficient outlets for patriotic sentiment. The catchwords were freedom and democracy. Following Lenin’s tactics, the government proclaimed a division of the landed estates among the peasants. Whoever dared to speak of collectives at that time was punished as an enemy of the people for spreading alarm and slandering the government.
+=== {{anchor|5OnUtopianAspirationsinthe}} {{anchor|5OnUtopianAspirationsinthe1}} {{anchor|Topofpart0008html}} 5. On Utopian Aspirations in the Climate Movement ===
-Obviously, the landowners whose property was confiscated were not content. Still, most of the estates, like the factories and mines, had been placed under compulsory German management during the Nazi occupation and their owners had been, in effect, dispossessed. The peasants’ class hatred of the manor was not violent in our country so the expelled proprietors were not harmed. City-dwellers felt no particular sympathy for that feudal group of landholders; in fact, no one was upset by their loss of power. As for the intellectuals, they thought it just that factories and mines should become the property of the state. We must remember that five and a half years of Nazi rule had obliterated all respect for private property. A radical agricultural reform also seemed, in general, justified. The intellectuals were concerned about something else, about the boundaries of freedom of speech. At the time, they were rather broad. One thing was certain: one was not free to write anything that might cast aspersion on the institutions of the Soviet Union. The censors made sure that this rule was strictly enforced. However, praise of Russia was not, as later, obligatory; one could remain silent on the subject. Outside this sphere, writers were given considerable freedom.
+It can be difficult to closely follow developments in climate science without simultaneously falling prey to a rather grim, even apocalyptic view of the future. Predictions of impending disaster look more severe with every new wave of extreme weather and each new study of the effects of the rising levels of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere. Steadily rising levels of drought, wildfires and floods have been experienced on all the earth’s inhabited continents, and people in the tropics and subtropics already face far more difficulty growing enough food due to increasingly unstable weather patterns. Studies predict increasing mass migrations of people desperate to escape the worst consequences of widespread climate disruptions. And persistent diplomatic gridlock and obstruction at the UN level has raised the possibility that temperature increases could even exceed 10˚C in the Arctic and in parts of Africa.[1]
-In spite of everything, the entire country was gripped by a single emotion: hatred. Peasants, receiving land, hated; workers and office employees, joining the Party, hated; socialists, participating nominally in the government, hated; writers, endeavoring to get their manuscripts published, hated. This was not their own government; it owed its existence to an alien army. The nuptial bed prepared for the wedding of the government with the nation was decked with national symbols and flags, but from beneath that bed protruded the boots of an NKVD agent.
+In this context, the utopian ecological visions that inspired earlier generations of environmental activists can seem quaint and out-of-date. The images of autonomous, self-reliant, solar-powered cities and towns that illuminated the first large wave of anti-nuclear activism in the 1970s and eighties sometimes feel more distant than ever. Since those years, we have seen an unprecedented flowering of local food systems, natural building, permaculture design, urban ecology, and other important innovations that first emerged from that earlier wave of activism. Yet today’s advocates of local self reliance and ecological lifestyles seem to engage only on rare occasions in the political struggles that are necessary to advance their visions for a better future.
-The people who fawned on Gamma also hated. He knew it, and this was the source of not the least of his pleasures. He would hit sore-spots, and then observe the reactions of his listeners. The terror and fury that appeared on their faces would give way, in an instant, to an ingratiating smile. This was as it should be. He held these people in his hand. A stroke of his pencil could remove their articles or poems from the page proofs of a magazine; his word could cause their books to be rejected by a publishing house. They had to behave themselves. Yet even as he played with them, he was friendly and helpful; he allowed them to earn a living, he watched over their careers.
+For social ecologists seeking to further the forward-looking, reconstructive dimensions of an ecological world view, this presents a serious dilemma. From the 1960s onward, Murray Bookchin, the founding theorist of social ecology, proposed that the critical, holistic outlook of ecological science was logically and historically linked to a radically transformative vision for society. A fundamental rethinking of human societies’ relationship to the natural world, he proposed, is made imperative by the understandings of ecological science, furthering the potential for a revolutionary transformation of both our philosophical assumptions and our political and social institutions. Can this approach to ecology, politics and history be renewed for our time? What kinds of social movements have the potential to express these possibilities? Can we meaningfully address the simultaneous threats of climate chaos and potential social breakdown while renewing and further developing the revolutionary outlook of social ecology?
-I met him in Cracow. Many years had elapsed since our discussions in the mensa—during one I had deliberately thrown a box of matches into his soup and since he was subject to attacks of rage, the incident had ended in fisticuffs. In the intervening years I had completed my studies in Paris, and later lived in Warsaw. I left our university city because I was thrown out of my job at the request of the city administration. I was suspected of Communist sympathies (it seems that differentiation between the Stalinist and anti-Stalinist left presents insurmountable difficulties to all the police in the world) and of being too well-disposed toward the Lithuanians and Byelorussians. The latter suspicion was completely justified. Now I was a refugee from Warsaw. My fortune consisted of the work-clothes I was wearing plus a hemp sack which contained my manuscripts, shaving kit, and a two-penny edition of Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. From the point of view of the Soviet Union’s interests, I did not deserve anything for what I had done during the War; on the contrary, I had committed certain sins. Nevertheless, now I was needed and useful; my record from the period of German occupation was not so bad; my pen could be of value to the new order.
+==== {{anchor|EcologyandCapitalism}} Ecology and Capitalism ====
-My meeting with Gamma was almost friendly. Two dogs—rather stiff, yet courteous. We were on our guard lest we bare our teeth. He remembered the literary rivalry between us which had formerly caused him so much vexation; he also remembered my open letter against the Stalinists, which had placed me more or less in the position of present-day Western dissidents. Still he had a sentimental attachment—as did I—toward his former university comrades. This helped to break the ice. That meeting was the first move in a game between us that was to last a long time.
+From the 1960s until his passing in 2006, Murray Bookchin insisted that the ecological crisis was a fundamental threat to capitalism, due to the system’s built in necessity to continuously expand its scope and its spheres of control. In a 2001 reflection on the origins of social ecology, Bookchin wrote:
-This game was not limited to the two of us. All the intellectuals who had remained in Poland during the Nazi occupation were teamed against the group that had returned from the East. The division was clear. Much more important matters than mere personal rivalry were at stake. After the experiences of the War, none of us, not even former nationalists, doubted the necessity of the reforms that were being instituted. Our nation was going to be transformed into a nation of workers and peasants and that was right. Yet the peasant was not content even though he was given land; he was afraid. The worker had not the slightest feeling that the factories belonged to him, even though he worked to mobilize them with much self-denial, and even though the propaganda assured him that they were his. Small contractors and merchants trembled at the knowledge that they were destined to be exterminated as a group.
+===== I was trying to provide a viable substitute for Marx’s defunct economic imperative, namely an ecological imperative that, if thought out […] would show that capitalism stood in an irreconcilable contradiction with the natural world […] In short, precisely because capitalism was, by definition, a competitive and commodity-based economy, it would be compelled to turn the complex into the simple and give rise to a planet that was incompatible environmentally with advanced life forms. The growth of capitalism was incompatible with the evolution of biotic complexity as such—and certainly, with the development of human life and the evolution of human society.2 [emphasis in original] =====
-This was, indeed, a peculiar Revolution; there was not even a shadow of revolutionary dynamics in it; it was carried out entirely by official decree. The intellectuals who had spent the War in Poland were particularly sensitive to the temper of the country. Gamma and his friends glibly ascribed the mood of the people to a “survival of bourgeois consciousness,” but this formula failed to encompass the truth. The masses felt that nothing depended on them, and that nothing ever would. Henceforth all discussion would serve merely to justify the Center’s decisions. Should one resist? But in a system in which everything gradually becomes the property of the state, sabotage strikes at the interests of the entire population. Only mental opposition was possible; and the intellectuals, at least the majority of them, felt very deeply that this was their duty. By publishing articles and books they satisfied the fisherman. The fish swallowed the bait and, as we know, when that happens one should slacken the line. The line remained slack; and until the fisherman resolved to pull out the fish, certain valuable cultural activities went on that were impossible in such countries, for example, as the Baltic states which were directly incorporated into the Union. The question was how long this state of affairs could continue. It might easily last five, ten, or even fifteen years. This was the only game that was possible. The West did not count, and the political emigration mattered even less.
+For a couple of decades, however, it appeared to many that capitalism had found a way to accommodate non-human nature and perhaps to “green” itself. This notion can be traced to the period leading up to the 20[th] anniversary of the first Earth Day. By the spring of 1990, many of the largest, most notoriously polluting corporations had begun to incorporate environmental messages into their advertising. By reducing waste, partially restoring damaged ecosystems, investing in renewable energy, and promoting an idealized environmental ethic, the oil, chemical, and other highly polluting industries would portray themselves as stewards of the environment. Prominent authors promised a “sustainable,” even “natural” capitalism, whereby production and consumption would continue to grow and large corporations could join with a new generation of “green” entrepreneurs to solve our environmental problems.[3]
-Certain personal factors, however, entered into the game between Gamma and me. His solicitude toward the members of our old group was not motivated entirely by fond memories of our university days. He could never free himself of a feeling of guilt that dated back to his childhood; and only by converting those of us who were not Stalinists could he feel that his past actions were at last justified. The trouble was that he was deeply pessimistic about the future of mankind, whereas those whom he tried to convert were not. Loyal to the Center, he voiced official optimism, while in reality, after the years he had spent in Russia, he was convinced that History is the private preserve of the devil, and that whoever serves History signs a Satanic pact. He knew too much to retain any illusions and despised those naive enough to nourish them. To bring new damned into the fold was his one means of reducing the number of internally free people, who, by the mere fact of their existence, judged him.
+As awareness of the climate crisis rose together with the cost of energy during 2006-7, the “green consumerism” that was promoted as a conscientious lifestyle choice in the 1990s became an all-encompassing mass culture phenomenon. Mainstream lifestyle and even fashion magazines featured special “green” issues, and the ''New York Times'' reported that 35 million Americans were regularly seeking out (often high-priced) “earth-friendly” products, “from organic beeswax lipstick from the west Zambian rain forest to Toyota Priuses.”[4] But the ''Times'' acknowledged rising criticism of the trend as well, quoting the one-time “green business” pioneer Paul Hawken as saying, “Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” and acknowledging that truly green living might indeed require buying less. With rising awareness of the cost of manufacturing new “green” products, even the iconic Prius was criticized for the high energy costs embedded in its manufacture.
-Nor was our game played only within the confines of Poland. With Gamma’s assistance, George, who became a Catholic poet, was sent to France as a cultural attache; and I was appointed cultural attache to the United States. A sojourn abroad presented important advantages. From that distance, I could publish impudent articles and poems whose every word was an insult to the Method. Whenever I felt that the line was too taut, I would write something that could be interpreted as a sign of approaching conversion. Gamma wrote me warm, lying letters. Both of us committed errors. He knew that the risk of my defecting was not great. Almost more than anyone else, I felt tied to my country. I was a poet; I could write only in my native tongue; and only in Poland was there a public—made up chiefly of young people—with which I could communicate. He knew that I was afraid to become an exile, afraid to condemn myself to the sterility and the vacuum that are proper to every emigration. But he overestimated my attachment to a literary career. On the other hand, I knew that his letters were false, but I could not renounce the idea that there was at least an iota of sincerity in his professions of friendship. I also believed that he was sufficiently intelligent not to expect me to sign the pact as he did. But I was wrong, for the day came when he decided to convert me by both trickery and force. His dagger missed me, which is why I am free to write this portrait.
+More forward-looking capitalists have had to admit in recent years that an increasingly chaotic natural and social environment will necessarily limit business opportunities.[5] Some critics have suggested that this is one underlying reason for the increasing growth and influence of the financial sector:
-Gamma, too, went abroad. He left Poland after the initial post-war disorder had been mastered. A period of relative stability was in sight. The Peasant Party had to be eliminated and the Socialist Party absorbed, but these operations did not promise to be too troublesome. In general this was to be the era of the NEP. Liberalism was the word in cultural matters. Gamma, believing he needed a bit of peace after the nervous tension of the last years, took a post in the diplomatic service.
+===== In its disciplinary zeal, capitalism has so undermined the ecological conditions of so many people that a state of global ungovernability has developed, further forcing investors to escape into the mediated world of finance where they hope to make hefty returns without bodily confronting the people they need to exploit. But this exodus has merely deferred the crisis, since “ecological” struggles are being fought all over the planet and are forcing an inevitable increase in the cost of future constant capital.6 =====
-He sent his new wife to school in Switzerland to learn foreign languages and proper manners. In a very short time she was transformed from a soldier-bride wearing clumsy Russian boots into a doll with bleached hair and long, painted eyelashes. She became very chic, and dressed in the finest Paris fashions. He, meanwhile, devoted much of his time to writing. He wrote a novel about the trial of the group of young Stalinists in our university city, the trial in which he himself had been a defendant. It was published at once, and favorably reviewed. Still, it was not so warmly praised as one might have expected. “Socialist realism” had not yet made Polish prose sterile; whereas his book was one of those ideological exercises called novels in Russia.
+The result is an increasingly parasitic form of capitalism, featuring widening discrepancies in wealth, both worldwide and within most countries, and the outsourcing of production to the countries and regions where labor costs and environmental enforcement are at the lowest possible levels. As the profitability of socially useful production has fallen precipitously, we have seen the emergence of a casino-like “shadow” economy, in which a rising share of society’s material resources are squandered by elites in the pursuit of socially parasitic but highly lucrative profits from ever-more exotic financial manipulations.[7]
-When we were young, Vilna was an unusually picturesque city, not only because of its architecture or its setting amidst forests and hills, but also because of the number of languages and cultures that coexisted there. None of this found its way into his novel. Colorless, unable to evoke tangible things, liis prose was merely a tool with which to etch in events and people. Events and people did not fare very well, however. Recognizing real persons in his heroes, I could see how inaccurately he drew his characters. A novelist often modifies the people he has known; he concentrates his colors, selects and stresses those psychological traits which are most characteristic. When a writer strives to present reality most faithfully he becomes convinced that untruth is at times the greatest truth. The world is so rich and so complex that the more one tries not to omit any part of the truth, the more one uncovers wonders that elude the pen.
+As we have seen, numerous questionable responses to the threat of climate change have emerged from this political and economic context. The previous chapter addressed the consequences of both technological false solutions and those derived from the machinations of financial markets. Different sectors of industrial and finance capital favor differing variations on the general theme, but the overarching message is that solutions to global warming are at hand and everyone should simply go on consuming. More hopeful innovations in solar and wind technology, “smart” power grids, and even energy saving technologies are promoted by some “green” capitalists as well, but these technologies continue to be marginalized by the prevailing financial and political system, raising serious questions about how such alternatives can be implemented.
-Gamma’s inaccuracy was of a different order. In :accordance with the Method, he created abstract political types. Into these prefabricated forms he tried to squeeze living people; if they did not fit, he unhesitatingly chopped off their legs or their heads. Stefan and Henryk, his heroes, were reduced to the sum total of their political activity. But knowing them well, I know how complicated their personalities were. Henryk, who died before a German firing squad, was an unhappy man, internally at war with himself; he was the most glaring and tragic example of a Polish Communist torn between two loyalties. Stefan, who after his return from Moscow became one of the dictators of Poland’s economy, was always a riddle to me. Now a heavy-set, sullen man, a perfect prototype of the Soviet official, he had changed completely from the days when he had hesitated about embracing Stalinism. I knew him when he used to write poems and intelligent literary essays. Then, he was a young Faust—drunk with the beauty of the world, ironic, brilliant, and rapacious. Gamma’s novel was entitled Reality, but there was little reality in it. It was a travesty on pre-war Poland that attempted, unsuccessfully, to present as demons the rather inefficient police and the sluggish judges of that time.
+==== {{anchor|AUtopianMovement}} A Utopian Movement? ====
-After completing his novel, Gamma began to feel somewhat bored. He started to travel. He visited many European countries, he went to Africa. Once, as we debated in the mensa, we used to dream of traveling. Our doubts as to whether we would ever realize our dreams turned out to have been unnecessary; we were to come to know this type of diversion all too well. The pleasures he got out of traveling were not, it seems, overly refined. He had little appreciation for architecture and art; he had no great curiosity about patterns of life in different civilizations. Had it been otherwise, he would have been a better writer. Travel for him was a pleasant way of killing time and of satisfying the youthful ambitions of a former provincial.
+The last time a forward-looking popular movement in the US compelled widespread changes in environmental and energy policies was during the late 1970s. In the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo, imposed during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the nuclear and utility industries adopted a plan to construct more than 300 nuclear power plants in the United States by the year 2000. Utility and state officials identified rural communities across the US as potential sites for new nuclear facilities, and the popular response was swift and unanticipated. A powerful grassroots antinuclear movement emerged, and in April of 1977, over 1400 people were arrested trying to nonviolently occupy a nuclear construction site in the coastal town of Seabrook, New Hampshire. That event helped inspire the emergence of decentralized, grassroots antinuclear alliances all across the country, committed to nonviolent direct action, horizontal forms of internal organization, and a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between technological and social changes. Not only did these groups adopt an uncompromising call for “No Nukes,” but many promoted a vision of an entirely new social order, rooted in decentralized, solar-powered communities empowered to decide both their energy future and their political future. If the nuclear state almost inevitably leads to a police state—due to the massive security apparatus necessary to protect hundreds of nuclear plants and radioactive waste facilities all over the country—activists proposed that a solar-based energy system could provide the underpinning for a radically decentralized and directly democratic model for society.
-Outside of travel, his greatest pleasure was to play games with foreigners. Their conviction that he was basically “liberal” was not too far from the truth. The outrage with which he stormed against certain overly brutal methods of Stalinism cannot be described as completely false. He considered himself a servant of the devil that ruled History, but he did not love his master. By rebelling against him he not only eased his own internal tension, but won a good opinion for himself in the West. His demon-lord was lenient, granting him the delights of sporadic mutiny —just so long as it was useful. Gamma, observing the faces before him, smiled at people’s credulity.
+This movement was so successful in raising the hazards of nuclear power as a matter of urgent public concern that nuclear power projects all across the US faced cancellation. When the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania partially melted down in March of 1979, it spelled the end of the nuclear expansion. No new nuclear plants were licensed or built in the United States for more than 30 years after Three Mile Island. The antinuclear movement of the late 1970s also helped spawn the first significant development of solar and wind technologies, aided by substantial but temporary tax benefits for solar installations, and helped launch a visionary “green cities” movement that captured the imaginations of architects, planners and ordinary citizens alike.
-Whenever he was not busy with diplomatic duties, receptions, or the political training of his personnel, he gave bridge parties. He was an excellent, and a fanatic bridge player. He complained that he was too tired after work to do anything except play cards, that diplomacy kept him from writing. Actually, this was not quite true. At an early age he had already reached the summit of his career. Had he so wished he could have become a minister of state in a country where a minister is ruled by the decisions of the Central Committee of the Party. He was a member of the Central Committee. What next? During his stay in the lovely Western capital, he took stock and discovered he had nothing. Well might he cry, “Qu’as-tu fait, toi que voila, de ta jeunesse?” What, indeed, had he done with his youth? Where was there something he could call his own and not just the product of historic determinism? He was nearing forty, and he was clear-sighted. The old feeling of literary defeat was returning. He felt as empty as a sieve with a wind blowing through it. That wind of historic necessity swept all the meaning out of literature. One more astute ideological equation, several more pages of doctrinal prose! Why write when everyone knew in advance exactly what was to be said? He played bridge in his gilded and mirrored salon not because he was tired but because he was afraid to find himself alone before a sheet of blank paper.
+The 1970s and early eighties were relatively hopeful times, and utopian thinking was far more widespread than it is today. This was prior to the “Reagan revolution” in US politics and the rise of neoliberalism worldwide. The political right had not quite begun its crusade to depict the former Soviet Union as the apotheosis of utopian social engineering gone awry. Many antinuclear activists looked to the emerging outlook of social ecology and the writings of its founding theorist, Murray Bookchin, as a source of theoretical grounding for a revolutionary ecological politics. Social ecology challenged activists by overturning prevailing views about the evolution of social and cultural relationships to non-human nature and examining the roots of domination in the earliest emergence of human social hierarchies. For the activists of that period, Bookchin’s insistence that environmental problems are fundamentally social and political in origin encouraged forward-looking responses to ecological concerns and reconstructive visions of a fundamentally transformed society. Social ecology’s emphasis on popular power and direct democracy continued to inspire activists in the global justice movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the Occupy movement more recently.
-Gradually he grew accustomed to this mode of life. But the Party does not like comfort to become a habit. Changes were occurring in Poland. At last strict orthodoxy was required of all writers. Gamma was needed on the spot. He left his eighteenth-century palace and the beautiful Western capital with sorrow. He knew that Eastern world to which he was returning much too well. Fierce battles and intrigues, constant dread of Moscow’s frown awaited him. Sorrow was pointless; he had to go.
+While radically reconstructive social visions are far less prevalent in today’s social and political climate, dissatisfaction with the status quo is wide-reaching throughout many sectors of the population. The more people consume, and the deeper they fall into debt, the less satisfied they are with the world of business-as-usual. Though elite discourse and the corporate media continue to be confined by a narrowly circumscribed status-quo, there is also the potential for a new opening, reaching far beyond the narrow limits of what is now deemed politically “acceptable.”
-The position he received upon his return was higher than the rank of ambassador to a major Western country. He became, this time officially, the political overseer of all the writers, the keeper of their consciences. It was his duty to make certain that Polish literature developed in harmony with the Party line. The government had just offered the Writers’ Union a newly constructed building in Warsaw that housed a huge modem amphitheatre, conference rooms, offices, a restaurant, and living quarters for writers. That was where he officiated, attending numerous conferences with writers, publishers, security police, and representatives of kindred unions.
+Activists hesitant to question the underlying assumptions of capitalism tend to focus on various techno-fixes. While these are generally far more benign than the false solutions proposed by the coal, nuclear and agrofuel industries, they are inherently limited in the absence of broader, systemic changes. Clearly, such proposals are often compelling on their own terms. For example, the acclaimed advocate Van Jones, who advised the Obama White House on green jobs policies before he fell victim to a vicious attack from right wing media apparatus in the US, suggests that:
-He was given an apartment in a government building reserved for higher dignitaries. Admission to this block of apartments is possible only after a previous arrangement by telephone. But these telephone numbers are not listed in the directory; they are issued only to trusted individuals. The member of the security police at the entrance telephones upstairs to verify whether the meeting was actually agreed upon; after which he takes the guest’s personal papers and permits him to enter.
+===== Hundreds of thousands of green-collar jobs will be weatherizing and energy-retrofitting every building in the United States. Buildings with leaky windows, ill-fitting doors, poor insulation and old appliances can gobble up 30 percent more energy […] Drafty buildings create broke, chilly people—and an overheated planet.8 =====
-Gamma was right in foreseeing a period of intrigue. In general, he had little to fear from other writers because he was, hierarchically speaking, their superior; although even among them there were certain dangerous individuals who were stronger in dialectical materialism than he, and more rabbinical in their mentality. The real struggle for power was waged higher up, in the top brackets of the Party. There he had many enemies. Despite his long years of training, the fiery squire in him would still fall into a rage whenever someone crossed him. In such moments, he treated people as he would servants in his private manor. As ambassador, he could permit himself such brutality without fear of reprisal, but now it caused him trouble. Besides, the line had stiffened so much in Poland that a single sincere word, even if it was uttered only to win converts, could give rise to fatal consequences. Shortly after his return, he made one of the gravest blunders of his political career. This occurred at a meeting which took place directly after the outbreak of the war in Korea. Gamma, replying to “whispered propaganda,” shouted heatedly, “Yes, we attacked first, because we are stronger.” It took a lot of work to patch up the damage caused by his unfortunate outburst. As we know, according to the official line, North Korea was attacked.
+Clearly, practical measures to address these problems will offer an important benefit for those most in need, and are an essential step toward a greener future. But can such near-term measures be sufficient? In technical terms, there is no shortage of feasible solutions to ending excessive energy consumption and rapidly curtailing the use of fossil fuels. For example since the 1970s, Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory Lovins has been a tireless advocate for dramatically increased energy efficiency throughout the US and global economies. He has demonstrated in exhaustive detail how we can feasibly reduce energy consumption by at least 40 percent, and how many promising changes in technology will result in an unambiguous economic gain. In a recent book, he projected that the US can reduce CO2 emissions by 85 percent over 40 years with a $4.5 trillion total investment and achieve net savings of $5 trillion in energy costs.[9] Lovins’ pitch is unapologetically aimed at believers in the “free market” and those whose primary concern is market profitability, yet the market’s adoption of his ideas has been spotty at best. Mark Jacobson’s research group at Stanford University has developed detailed proposals for replacing all new energy with wind, water and solar power by 2030 and the world’s entire energy supply by 2050.[10]
-He also had to settle down seriously to his writing. Only an “active” writer can be a member of the Writers’ Union. Every author is compelled to publish under threat of expulsion from the Union and consequent loss of all his privileges. The obligation to keep active is doubly binding on the bosses.
+A central problem, however, is that capitalism aims to maximize profits, not efficiency. Indeed, economists since the 19th century have suggested that improvements in the efficiency of resource consumption often tend to ''increase'' demand as capitalists learn how to do more with less, while continuing to grow the economy.[11] Richard York from the University of Oregon has calculated that just a quarter of non-fossil energy currently replaces fossil fuels, and only a tenth of non-fossil electricity; the rest is simply adding more new capacity to the system.[12] While efficiency improvements can significantly reduce the costs of production, corporations will generally accept the added cost of sustaining existing methods that have proven to keep profits growing. Corporations almost invariably prefer to lay off workers, outsource production, or move factories overseas than to invest in environmentally meaningful improvements in production methods. The ''New York Times'' reported that corporations are hesitant to invest in measures to save energy and make their operations more efficient unless they can demonstrate a two year payback—a constraint rarely imposed on other forms of investment.[13] Lovins’ focus on efficiency runs counter to the inclinations of a business world aggressively oriented toward growth, capital mobility and accumulation. While important innovations in solar technology, for example, are announced almost daily, its acceptance in the capitalist marketplace still falls far behind many other, far more speculative and hazardous alternatives.
-Someone in Warsaw said of Gamma, “He fights this war against imperialism and Western propaganda in the cause of peace, but he dreams of one thing: war. For if the war broke out, then there would be speeches, airplane flights, news reports from the front; and he wouldn’t have to sit down every day behind his desk and torture himself over a novel. But just for spite, there will be peace; and he’ll have five desks in that elegant apartment of his, and on each one, the beginning of a novel. And every day he’ll howl with despair knowing that everything he writes is as dead as a stone.”
+==== {{anchor|HopeandDespair}} Hope and Despair ====
-One cannot envy this man his choice. Looking at his country, he knows that an ever greater dose of suffering awaits its people. Looking at himself, he knows that not one word he pronounces is his own. I am a liar, he thinks, and makes historical determinism responsible for his lies. But sometimes he is haunted by the thought that the devil to whom men sell their souls owes his might to men themselves, and that the determinism of History is a creation of human brains.
+If technological fixes are insufficient to usher in an age of renewable technologies, is the situation hopeless? Is a nihilistic response, anticipating a cataclysmic “end of civilization” as suggested by several popular authors today, the only viable alternative? Are we limited to a future of defensive battles against an increasingly authoritarian world of scarcity and climate chaos? Or can the prefigurative, forward-looking dimensions of earlier, more hopeful radical ecological movements be renewed in our time?
-** Chapter Seven Delta, the Troubadour
+Dystopian outlooks are clearly on the rise in popular culture, among environmentally-minded radicals, and in much of the anti-authoritarian left today. “Anarchists and their allies are now required to project themselves into a future of growing instability and deterioration,” writes Israeli activist and scholar Uri Gordon. He acknowledges the current flowering of permaculture and other sustainable technologies as a central aspect of today’s experiments toward “community self-sufficiency,” but views these as “rear guard” actions, best aimed to “encourage and protect the autonomy and grassroots orientation of emergent resistances” in a fundamentally deteriorating social and political climate.[14]
-In Central and Eastern Europe, the word “poet” has a somewhat different meaning from that which it has in the West. There a poet does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a “bard,” that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all the citizens. Every period of history has understood the poet’s obligations differently. Probably Delta would have been happiest in the days when kings and nobles assured the poet a place at their table in exchange for a song or a jest. Even the dress of former ages would have suited his appearance better than the business suit of our century; and only long hair and a lute in his hand could have created a picture in keeping with his character.
+Derrick Jensen, one of the most prolific and popular anti-authoritarian writers in recent years, insists that a rational transition to an ecologically sustainable society is impossible, and that the only sensible role for ecologically aware activists is to help bring on the collapse of Western civilization. Hope itself, for Jensen, is “a curse and a bane,” an acceptance of powerlessness, and ultimately “what keeps us chained to the system.” Well before Barack Obama adopted a vaguely defined “Hope” as a theme of his first presidential campaign, Jensen argued that hope “serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.”[15]
-Delta had dark, gypsy coloring, was freckled, not tall, and when he laughed his thick mouth was distorted by a jocular grimace. He brushed his hair back from a high forehead. His head was so disproportionately big for his short body that he looked somehow like a dwarf or jester, as one sees them in court paintings. He wore his neckties in a loose, big knot and otherwise betrayed a penchant for eccentric clothes. Often, those who resort to superficial quirks to identify themselves as members of the artistic clan are second-rate artists. But his “artiness” was part of his over-all act. With every gesture, every intonation of his voice, he played, so to speak, with the world; he accented the difference between his own rhythm and that of his environment. His rhythm was suggestive. He recited his verse magnificently in huge halls filled with people. He was a good actor; he dominated the audience, and he knew how to key his listeners up to a climax without once letting the mounting tension drop. He imposed his poems slowly, pausing between words; and though he was speaking, he sang. At such times, he was a living rhythmic incantation; he changed, he grew in stature.
+This view is considerably at odds with many decades of historical scholarship and activist praxis. Radical despair may be sufficient to motivate some young activists to confront authorities when necessary, but it seems unlikely to be able to sustain the lifetimes of radical thought and action that are necessary if we are to create a different world. As social movement historian Richard Flacks has shown, most people are only willing to disrupt the patterns of their daily lives to engage in the project he terms “making history” when social grievances become personal, and they have a tangible sense that a better way is possible. This, for Flacks, is among the historic roles of democratic popular movements, to further the idea “that people are capable of and ought to be making their own history, that the making of history ought to be integrated with everyday life, that [prevailing] social arrangements […] can and must be replaced by frameworks that permit routine access and participation by all in the decisions that affect their lives.”[16]
-No one knows his origins. He altered his biography to fit the needs of the moment. Once his father was a sexton; once, a restaurant owner. At times his family was Czech; at times it had Muscovite connections. The boundaries between fantasy and truth did not exist for him.
+Flacks’ expansive view of democracy resonates well with social ecology’s long-range, community-centered vision (see Chapter 6). Bookchin’s reconstructive outlook is rooted in direct democracy, in confederations of empowered communities challenging the hegemony of capital and the state, and in restoring a sense of reciprocity to economic relationships, which are ultimately subordinated to the needs of the community. His view resonates with economic historian Karl Polanyi’s piercing analysis of the origins of the mythical “self-regulating” market and its imposed separation of economics from society.[17] Bookchin viewed the subordination of economics as an essential step toward restoring harmony to human relations, and to the reharmonization of our communities with non-human nature.
-How he came by his knowledge of foreign languages was another mystery. It would be hard to imagine him sitting down to a dictionary and a grammar. Yet he cited copiously from Latin, English, French, and German poets. For a short while he studied at the University, where he became famous for writing an essay on a seventeenth-century English poet who never existed. After giving an extensive biography of the poet, the essay went on to a detailed analysis of the circumstances in which his individual works appeared. A charlatan, a hoaxer— this is what he wanted to be then, and always, enjoying himself mightily when his pedantic professor found himself in trouble, overwhelmed by such obvious proof of erudition.
+Further, in his 1970s and eighties’ anthropological studies, Bookchin sought to draw out a number of ethical principles common to preliterate, or “organic” societies, that could further illuminate the path toward such a reharmonization. These include anthropologist Paul Radin’s concept of the irreducible minimum—the idea that communities are responsible for satisfying their members’ most basic human needs—and an expanded view of social complementarity, where communities accept responsibility to compensate for differences among individuals, helping assure that variations in skill or ability in particular areas will not serve to rationalize the emergence of new forms of hierarchy.[18]
-Delta was an inveterate alcoholic, usually in cycles that lasted several days. Alcohol brought him to a state of hallucination marked by actions which rarely occur to other drunkards. In a travel bureau he would order a glass of beer. He would hire a hack, order it to stop at a main intersection and, after delivering a speech to an astonished crowd, he would throw off his coat and phlegmatically relieve himself on it. Or he would come to his friends complaining that he had had trouble in finding their homes because, as he said, “his people,” whom he had stationed throughout the city to point him the way, had so disguised themselves that he could not recognize them. Such extravagances indicated that alcohol plunged him into the world of Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe. He became a legendary figure whose latest escapades were the talk of the literary cafes.
+Rather than prescribing blueprints for a future society, Bookchin sought to educe principles from the broad scope of human history that he saw as expressing potentialities for further human development. His outlook on social change is resonant with the best of the utopian tradition, as described in a recent essay by Randall Amster, who describes utopia as
-Delta’s poetry was an added source of legend. It was unlike anything written in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. No literary school influenced him. He dwelt in the aura of the Italo-Latin civilization whose mark was still deeply graven on our country. The accessories he borrowed from the poetry of the past he then put together in a manner reminiscent of his drunken fantasies. His poetry was a kaleidoscope of chubby baroque angels, magicians carried off through the window by some unknown power (they are retained, at the last moment by a wifely bite on the ear), falconry, astrologists prophesying the end of the world. Interspersed in it were phonograph records playing the music of Bach or Mozart, potatoes in the soil dreaming of the vodka that would be made of them, planets in the shape of young women dressed in blue pants, and folk dances in the suburbs. His poetry was tragic and comic, senseless yet full of sense. This alogical hodgepodge of disparate elements differed from confessedly decadent types of modern poetry in one respect: despite the peculiar assemblage of images it presented, it was not unintelligible. The reader surrendered to its musical charm, swallowed portions of abstraction that annoyed him in other poets, laughed at the sudden twists of the author, in short, unsuspectingly entered a realm ruled by laws unlike those of everyday life.
+===== a dynamic process and not a static place […] attaining a harmonious exchange with nature and an open, participatory process among community members are central features of these [utopian] endeavors; that resistance to dominant cultures of repression and authoritarianism is a common impetus for anarcho-utopian undertakings; and that communities embodying these principles are properly viewed as ongoing experiments and not finished products.19 =====
-He published much humorous verse, signing it with a variety of pseudonyms. His inventiveness in finding subjects seemed inexhaustible. Among other things, he wrote a cycle entitled Little Songs of the Chief of the Office of Graves. He liked to include a fictitious list of his works in each book; I remember such a title as “An Introduction to Cannibalism— stenographed university lectures: Troilus Drug Store, Publisher, out of print.” Because he was popular with the readers, he never lacked offers from publishers and the radio. His pen, which was his sole means of support, could have earned him a good living; but he constantly needed money because he immediately drank up his fees.
+While people of different material circumstances and cultural backgrounds would surely emphasize differing needs and inclinations in their search for a better society, such a long-range utopian outlook can help us comprehend the fullest scope of human possibilities.
-When he was sober, no one could have guessed that he was the author of poems that made the public laugh. Taciturn, gloomy, sly, he became animated only at the sight of money. In bargaining, he was inexorable. Once he named a sum, no argument could induce him to make a concession. What was worse, he demanded payment at once, which posed a terrible dilemma for his editors. They wanted his poems; but giving him money involved the risk that he would begin his drinking cycle and forget his commitments. Some editors found a solution: they would give him the money, then refuse to leave him for a single second until he handed them a manuscript. Such transactions often occurred in coffeehouses. The banknote would lie on the table between the two contracting parties. Delta, after fruitless efforts to soften his opponent, would take out his pen, write the poem (which, depending on his mood, might be excellent or mediocre), and picking up his note go off to drink.
+This view has far more to offer than a bleak “end of civilization” outlook, both for people in Northern countries facing increasingly chaotic weather and for people around the world who are experiencing more extreme consequences of climate disruptions. It is the hope for a better society, along with the determination and support necessary to intervene to challenge current inequities, that has inspired movements of land-based peoples around the world to refuse to accept an oppressive status quo and act to take the future into their hands.
-Sometimes he landed in a sanatorium for alcoholics. The results of the “cures” were not good. His victories in his battles against the medical profession were widely recounted. In one of the sanatoriums, story has it, his triumph was so absolute that both patients and doctors, equally drunk, held bicycle races through the corridors.
+Still, since the collapse of the authoritarian, nominally socialist bloc of countries that was dominated by the Soviet Union and spanned nearly all of eastern Europe, many authors have cast doubt on all forms of radical speculation about the future. Utopian political thought—with its legacy reaching back to Plato and to the writings of Thomas More in the early 16[th] century—is now seen by many as thoroughly discredited. Liberal centrists, as well as ideologues of the political right tend to dismiss the pursuit of any comprehensive alternative political outlook as if it were merely a potential stepping stone to tyranny. Even forward-looking thinkers such as the literary critic Frederic Jameson suggest that utopia “had come to designate a program which neglected human frailty” implying “the ideal purity of a perfect system that always had to be imposed by force on its imperfect and reluctant subjects.”[20]
-Charlatan, drunkard—and yet he was an outstanding and, despite appearances, tragic poet. He began his literary career in years of economic crisis. Unemployment, universal hopelessness, the growth of Nazism in neighboring Germany all shaped the character of his writing. He was rightly called the “king of nonsense.” Yet readers who were not deceived by his superficial buffoonery saw in his poetry an ominous vision of the end of civilization, of an approaching “iron age,” of catastrophe. He spoke as if everything were lost years before Europe plunged into darkness and cruelty. The dread and beauty of past ages lived again in his work, but there was no hope of rest in them. The concepts and images he used had the consistency of dreams; they chased one another with the speed of a hurtling train. The Madonna who often figured in his poems was not the Madonna of the pious but merely a stylistic ornament. Fascists and Communists killed each other off in his verse with the gory ardor of actors in the Grand Guignol, while he mockingly cried: “O reality! O my sweet mother! For you killing flies is the same kind of bother!” He defined himself exactly when he said: “Braced on my Waterman/ I go off to the abyss/ of eternal doubt.”
+This is in stark contrast to the view of Ernst Bloch, the mid-20th century chronicler of the utopian tradition who, instead, in Jameson’s words, “posits a Utopian impulse governing everything future-oriented in life and culture.”[21] Bloch’s exhaustive and free-ranging three-volume work, ''The Principle of Hope'' begins with the simple act of daydreaming, and then embarks on an epic journey through the myriad expressions of the utopian impulse throughout Western history, spanning folktales, the arts and literature, along with the perennial search for a better world. “Fraudulent hope is one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators of the human race,” states Bloch, while “concretely genuine hope its most dedicated benefactor.”[22]
-The End of the World is his title for a poem in which scholars and politicians, revolutionists, lovers and drunkards, canaries and cats are all swept away in the end by a cosmic catastrophe—to the satisfaction of the author, and the fulfillment of the “vanity of vanities” theme of Ecclesiastes. And all this is described by a pen that is playing. In another of his poems, Folk Fair, there are carrousels, young pairs sitting on the grass, lawns littered with empty bottles, seesaws. Suddenly the sky clouds over, rain begins to fall, and the darkened heavens—in a manner that is a secret of Delta’s art—merge into a sad eclogue by Virgil punctuated by the bark of machine-guns.
+Current scholarship on this tradition often views utopia as a central element in the emergence of a secular social order in the West, marking the decline of religion as the sole means for expressing people’s hopes for the future. French social critic Alain Touraine writes, “Utopia was born only when the political order separated from the cosmological or religious order… Utopia is one of the products of secularization.”[23] Utopian scholar Lyman Sargent quotes the Dutch future studies pioneer Frederick Polak, who wrote in 1961:
-His most unusual poem was Solomon’s Ball. Why does King Solomon give a ball? Why is he living in the twentieth century? Perhaps it is not King Solomon after all, simply Solomon? Why do the unemployed enter the ballroom selling butterflies? Who keeps singing Persian songs about Gulistan, the garden of roses? Where do the hordes of policemen come from who suddenly start performing wild dances? It is pointless to pause over such questions. The special logic of the dream does exist, but only such a poet as he can use it freely. “In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo” was T. S. Eliot’s expression for nonsense. Delta raised the conversations that took place at Solomon’s ball one degree higher, into the realm of delirium and “eternal doubt.”
+===== …if Western man now stops thinking and dreaming the materials of new images of the future and attempts to shut himself up in the present, out of longing for security and for fear of the future, his civilization will come to an end. He has no choice but to dream or to die, condemning the whole of Western society to die with him.24 =====
-The world as reflected in his poetry was oppressive; yet his poems—and here is one more inner contradiction of this queer man—were free of sadness and despair. On the contrary, they said a vigorous “yes” to life. With every word he praised the world as he saw it, a tangle of absurd pleasures, drives, words, and wars. He loved his phantasmagory. He loved carrousels, dancing gypsies, crowded Sunday excursion boats on the Vistula, his wife to whom he addressed his odes, cats sleeping on parapets, blooming apple trees. He loved enthusiasm and joyousness for their own sake. Whatever he touched changed into a scene of movement, color, and music. Subjects were merely a pretext for him. Like a silkworm, he spun out of himself a fine thread which he wrapped around whatever he encountered. He could compose songs and hymns on any topic.
+The pioneering German sociologist Karl Mannheim wrote that “The utopian mentality is at the base of all serious social change” and saw the integrity of human will as resting to a large part on “the reality-transcending power of utopia.”[25] While the popular literature of the century wavers continually between the poles of utopia and dystopia, even many intellectuals who lived through the nightmare of Stalinism and its decline warn against discarding utopia along with the baggage of the 20[th] century authoritarian left. For example the Czech dissident Milan Simecka, who experienced the repression of the Prague Spring of 1968, writes that “A world without utopias would be a world without social hope, a world of resignation to the status quo and the devalued slogans of everyday political life.”[26] Today, if we fail to sustain the legacy of utopia, not only will we miss the opportunity to envision and actualize a humane, post-capitalist, post-petroleum future, but we may inadvertently surrender humanity’s future to the false hopes of an ascendant religious fundamentalism.
-Never displaying any political inclinations, he had always distributed his mockery evenly over all the groups that were vying for power. That is why his conversion, in 1937, to extreme nationalism was received with some amazement. The editor of an important rightist weekly had long tried to capture him, and at last he succeeded in purchasing him as the exclusive property of the periodical. The magazine on whose pages his poems now began to appear was violently anti-Semitic. Its large circulation figures resulted from the spread of nationalist convictions in our country, particularly among the youth. The liberal public could hardly believe this new phase of his shenanigans: he lauded the marching “falangists,” prophesied a “night of long knives,” a new St. Bartholomew’s Eve for the Jews, liberals, and the left. Still, it was obviously a fact; such articles and poems did appear, signed by his name and bearing all the traits of his style.
+The social critic Immanuel Wallerstein is one who has recently sought to rescue utopian thinking from its role as a breeder “of illusions, and therefore, inevitably, of disillusions,” proposing a renewed “utopistics,” which broadly examines the alternatives and reveals “the substantive rationality of alternative possible historical systems.”[27] Wallerstein is one renowned contemporary social theorist who explicitly speaks to the likelihood of a difficult, contentious and unpredictable, but potentially rational and democratic long-term transition to a post-capitalist world. It is in this spirit of exploring rational, liberatory future possibilities that Murray Bookchin developed and elaborated his theory of social ecology, and today’s climate activists are seeking to define the terms of a world beyond petro-capitalism. In the next chapter, we will turn to elaborating the holistic revolutionary outlook of social ecology and its numerous contributions to recent movements.
-Why did he write them? Racial questions were of supreme indifference to him. He had many Jewish friends, and the very day he published his racist statements, he would come to these friends (naturally he was drunk by then) and, falling on his knees, would declare his love for them and beg their forgiveness. The causes of his union with the right must be sought elsewhere than in his political tastes. Delta, buffoon and troubadour, did not lack professional principles. He respected his poetic trade; but his respect was not for what he wrote about. How and for whom—that was important. He scorned esoteric literary schools that catered to a small cluster of connoisseurs. He ridiculed poets whose words could be understood only by a smattering of intellectuals. Solitary meditations that had no hope of finding readers were not for him. Like troubadours of yore, he longed for a lute and a throng of admirers. It would be hard to find a better example of a writer revolting against the isolation of the intellectual in the twentieth century.
+==== {{anchor|LookingForward}} Looking Forward ====
-Delta’s hostility toward the Jews had no racial roots; he confined it to Jewish writers who, in general, were particularly given to celebration of literary “values” and “refinements.” It sprang from his battle against, and struggle to escape from, the literary cafes. Besides, as I have said, he was for enthusiasm.
+From the Zapatistas of southeastern Mexico, who inspired global justice activists worldwide during the 1990s and beyond, to the landless workers of the MST in Brazil, and the scores of self-identified peasant organizations in some eighty countries that constitute the global network La Vía Campesina, people’s movements in the global South in recent decades have challenged historical stereotypes and often transcended the limits of the possible. These grassroots efforts to reclaim the means of life, while articulating far-reaching demands for a different world, represent a starkly different relationship to both the present and the future than is offered by affluent activists and writers in the global North who either contemplate a catastrophic end to civilization, or urge us to go on consuming in the pursuit of a mythical individualist paradise.
-The crowd marched, the crowd brandished canes; this was health, strength, primitiveness, a great popular festival. Where my readers go, there go I; what my readers want, I give them—this is what he confirmed in every poem. As the nationalist “movement” began to take on mass proportions, he moved to keep in stride with the masses. He told with pride of the thousands of young people who knew his verses by heart. His pride was justified. The poets of the sophisticated “avant-garde,” isolated as they were, took pride in their craft; but he beat them even on their own ground. Nor did they dispose over such a range of artistic media as he did. Last of all, we must consider that in order to live he needed a patron, a person who would force him to write, fight his drunkenness and, in short, control and care for him.
+Here in the North, new reconstructive movements have helped make visions of an ecological future far more realizable. At the local level, people are working to regenerate local food systems and develop locally controlled, renewable energy sources, sometimes in active solidarity with kindred movements around the world. Campaigns to create urban gardens and farmers’ markets are among the most successful and well-organized efforts toward community-centered solutions to the climate crisis. In recent years, they have been joined in many areas by nonprofit networks aiming to more systematically raise the availability of healthy, local food for urban dwellers, especially those dependent on public assistance.[28] The local foods movement in the US, still significantly dominated by those affluent enough to seek out gourmet products, may be learning from Slow Food activists in Europe that it is necessary to directly support farmers and food producers, and aim to meet the needs of all members of their communities. As the food system is responsible for at least a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, such efforts are far more than symbolic in their importance.[29]
-The War broke out. He was mobilized as a private. His unit was stationed in eastern Poland, on the borders of the Soviet Union. When the Reds moved to meet the German army, he was captured by the Russians. But along with a number of other disarmed Polish soldiers, Delta was turned over to the Germans. He spent the next five and a half years in a POW camp in the Reich. As a prisoner he was used for various types of work, chiefly agricultural. His qualifications for physical labor were slight. It is hard even to imagine a man less prepared for a mode of life in which the most important and almost unsolvable problem was how to fill one’s stomach. Still, he survived, this strange court dwarf in tatters, wielding a shovel as he recited Horace. Undoubtedly, his fluent knowledge of German came to his assistance.
+Community-based efforts to reduce energy consumption and move toward carbon-free energy systems have seen some important successes as well. More than two hundred cities and towns throughout the English-speaking world have signed on as “transition towns,” initiating local efforts to address the parallel crises of climate chaos and peak oil. While the transition town movement sometimes tends to focus narrowly on personal and domestic-scale transformations, even avoiding important local controversies, the effort is filling an important vacuum in social organization, and creating public dialogues that more politically engaged and forward-looking efforts can build upon as the tangible effects of the climate crisis strike closer to home.[30]
-Meanwhile, terror ruled in Warsaw. Those who only a short while before had used the Germans as a model now became hunted prey. The rightist editor who had been Delta’s patron became one of the most active workers in the Underground. He was a fanatical patriot. I still remember him as I saw him for the last time, in the coffee-house that was the base of his underground group and of the publication he issued. His thin Jewish face (like many anti-Semites in our country, he was half-Jewish) was undermined with fury, fever burned in his eyes, his tight lips urged immediate action. Shortly thereafter, the Gestapo came upon the trail of his organization. The entire personnel of the cafe, made up of his closest co-workers, was arrested; the editor himself spent a long time in prison in Warsaw before a heavily guarded van carried him away for his last ride. He was shot in the woods near Warsaw: sand, pines, words of command. Still, his was a kindly form of death. He would have fared worse had he shared the lot of the three million Jews of Poland among which he, as a half-Jew, could have been counted. In that case, he would have found himself in the ghetto that was created in Warsaw in 1940 by order of the occupying authorities. From there, he would certainly have been sent, like the others, to the gas chamber.
+Still, many chronically vexing questions remain. Can the potential for a more thoroughgoing transformation of society actually be realized? Is it possible for now-isolated local efforts to come together in a holistic manner and fulfill the old left-libertarian dream of a “movement of movements,” organized from the ground up to radically change the world? Can we envision a genuine synthesis of oppositional and alternative-building efforts able to challenge systems of deeply entrenched power, and transcend the dual challenges of political burn-out and the co-optation of aspiring alternative institutions? Can a new movement for social and ecological renewal emerge from the individual and community levels toward the radical re-envisioning of entire regions and a genuinely transformed social and political order?
-The nationalist “movement,” marching columns, the excited crowd! The crushing defeat of 1939 frustrated all this, leaving only the bitter memory of human insanity. The Nazis carried the anti-Semitic program into practice, but no longer as a boycott of Jewish stores or an annoyance of Jewish vendors, nor even as literary bouts like Delta’s. To write of the tragedy of the Warsaw ghetto, to which I was an eyewitness, is hard for me. The vision of the burning ghetto is too welded into all I lived through in my adult years for me to speak of it quietly. But I should like to describe one incident. Often, as I am sitting on the terrace of a Paris cafe or walking through the streets of a large city, I succumb to a certain obsession. I look at the women who pass, at their luxuriant hair, their proudly lifted chins, their slender throats whose lines awaken delight and desire—and then I see before my eyes always the same young Jewish girl. She was probably about twenty years old. Her body was full, splendid, exultant. She was running down the street, her hands raised, her chest thrust forward. She cried piercingly, “No! No! No!” The necessity to die was beyond her comprehension—a necessity that came from outside, having nothing in common with her unprepared body. The bullets of the SS guards’ automatic pistols reached her in her cry.
+In these often cynical times, with ever-increasing disparities in wealth and media-saturated cultures of conspicuous consumption in the North, together with increased dislocations and imminent climate crises in the South, it is sometimes difficult to imagine what a genuinely transformative movement would look like. In the US, right wing demagogues appear to be far more effective than progressive forces in channeling the resentments that have emerged from continuing economic stagnation toward serving their regressive political agendas. But it is clear that when people have the opportunity to act on their deepest aspirations for a stronger sense of community, for the health of their families and neighbors, and for a more hopeful future, people’s better instincts can triumph over parochial interests. This is a feature of community life that illuminates the entire history of popular social movements. It offers an important kernel of hope for the kind of movement that can perhaps reinvigorate the long-range reconstructive potential of a social ecological outlook.
-The moment when bullets pierce the flesh is a moment of amazement for the body. Life and death mingle for a second, before a bloody rag falls to the pavement and is kicked aside by an SS boot. This girl was not the first nor the last of the millions who were killed in the period when the life-force within them was at its height. But the obstinacy with which this image returns—and always when I am drunk with the beauty of being alive amidst living human beings— merits some reflection. This is perhaps a matter that belongs to the same sphere as do the collective sex orgies of some primitive tribes. At such times, this or another object of desire are the same, all women and men are fused by a great feeling of communion through which everyone belongs to all. Monogamy can give no outlet to such urges. In other words, this is a profound basis for love of mankind, a love one cannot really conceive of if, looking at a group of laughing women, one does not recall this young Jewish girl as one of them, as identical and ever present. One of the best poems Delta wrote about his stay in Germany was on the death of a young Venetian girl, arrested and deported to the Reich. This was an erotic poem; the Venetian girl appeared in it not as an individual but as the beauty of youth, as the charm of breasts, arms, hands, thighs destroyed by death.
+A 2009 poll commissioned by the BBC confirmed that people in a dozen key countries agree that capitalism has serious endemic problems, and that we may need a fundamentally different economic system. Only in Pakistan and the US did more than 20 percent of those interviewed express confidence in the present status quo.[31] Perhaps this is the kind of sensibility that will reopen a broader popular discussion of the potential for a different kind of society. Maybe we don’t need to resign ourselves to apocalyptic visions of the end of the world. Perhaps the climate crisis, along with the continuing meltdown of the neoliberal economic order of recent decades, can indeed help us envision a transition toward a more harmonious, more humane and ecological way of life.
-In 1945 he and his fellow prisoners welcomed the arrival of the British troops. Since they were accompanied by units of the London Polish army, he entered upon a round of encounters, drinking, and song. Having dried up those springs of money and alcohol, he set out for France. Once again, as in 1939, this was an era of universal wandering. All of Europe was on the road; millions of forced laborers, prisoners, and slaves were returning to their homes; other millions were fleeing or being expelled from their native lands. Delta met large numbers of Poles everywhere. He wrote patriotic and anti-Russian poems that harmonized perfectly with the mood of his audience. He squeezed money out of every variety of emigre committee. His pre-war admirers, rejoicing that he had survived, did everything they could for him.
+=== {{anchor|6SocialEcologyandtheFuture1}} {{anchor|6SocialEcologyandtheFuture}} {{anchor|Topofpart0009html}} 6. Social Ecology and the Future of Ecological Movements ===
-Gradually, however, his life in Paris and Brussels lost its charm. The possibilities of publishing were small; the public was dispersed over various countries; and there was ever less money. He felt he was becoming an ordinary impoverished exile whose-buffoonery, personal and poetic, passed unnoticed. Gloomy, bitter emigration, a void, and a taste of disaster. Where was the mass of people which could give him back warmth and friendship? It was in his native land. There, too, was his wife, who had lived through the German occupation working as a waitress in Warsaw restaurants. Publications that came from Poland persuaded him that the trend was liberal. The envoys of the Warsaw government assured him that he would be received warmly and that his pre-war rightist sins would be forgotten.
+Today’s grassroots climate movements are engaged in an epochal struggle to protect vital ecosystems and communities from the effects of an increasingly unstable global climate. While people in the global South and in indigenous and land-based communities worldwide face daily life-or-death confrontations with the forces of expanded resource extraction and exploitation, many Northern allies are still reluctant to act on their understanding that a global crisis is already upon us. Indeed, many advocates still limit their efforts to addressing the particulars of present-day energy and climate policies. As important as all of our detailed scientific and policy discussions may be in the near term, they scarcely begin to address the full scope of climate-related problems we face today.
-His return to Poland was accomplished with every prescribed scandal. From the moment he left the boat, he was in a state of alcoholic and patriotic euphoria. He sent telegrams to his wife from every railroad station. When at last he showed up in Cracow (where his wife had gone after the fall of Warsaw), in the company of a girl friend he had brought from Brussels, his wife immediately instituted sharp repressive measures and threw out the girl. His wife came of a Georgian emigre family. She was small, thin, and black-haired; she had oriental features, a slightly humped prominent nose, and fiery black eyes. She liked to wear silver bracelets on her fine wrists. In all, she looked like a Caucasian madonna. Though she was passive and female, she had a good head for business and a gift for keeping her husband in hand.
+Genuinely ecological solutions, on the other hand, will require us to see far beyond the political and economic arrangements that have led us to the present crisis. While public officials and many NGOs will continue to avoid any discussion that deviates too far from business-as-usual, those who embrace a longer-range, more holistic perspective need to actively explore the many paths-not-taken. There are no “easy solutions” to the global climate crisis, no instant policy fixes that will stem the tide of impending climate chaos. This is a serious obstacle. Where solutions are not readily apparent, people tend to focus on the obligations of their daily lives and avoid worrying about what may or may not happen in the distant future.[1] Over time, this can feed a sense of political apathy and despair about the future, fostering a climate that ultimately helps advance the false populism of the ultra-right. It doesn’t have to be that way.
-Delta’s return was convenient for those who directed literature and propaganda. He was a popular poet. That he was known as a rightist only enhanced his value. He was a considerably greater asset to the new regime than many overly zealous leftists.
+Throughout history, numerous forward-looking social movements have contributed to the positive transformation of society, and sustained their efforts over the long term, in times of change and stagnation, and of success and failure, by exploring the possible paths to a fundamentally different kind of society. Over the past half century of ecological activism, many have engaged in the search for a radical, counter-systemic outlook that can help transform our society’s relationship to non-human nature and reharmonize our communities’ ties to the natural world. One such perspective, which has played an important role in many forward-looking movements of the past several decades is that of social ecology.
-He had always needed a patron; now he found one who was really munificent, the state. His became a truly golden pen; its every motion—he wrote in big, decorative letters on long scrolls of paper— brought him larger fees than he had ever earned before. Moreover, his verbal enthusiasm, without which he could not live, now rested on a solid foundation. There were no longer “falangists” nor crowds excited against racial minorities; but there was the rebuilding of the country and the placating of national honor through the acquisition of territories in the West which originally belonged to Germany. His poems were always sunny no matter what he wrote about. That was good. Now he filled them with optimistic subject matter, with pictures of reconstruction and of the happy future; and that was even better. Since he had no trouble in finding remunerative outlets, he went wild. Odes, satiric verse, humorous prose, dialogues flowed from his workshop in an unbroken torrent. One magazine gave him a whole column in which, every week, he lodged his “theatrical pieces.” These were short, little scenes from what he called the “smallest theater in the world,” the Green Goose. In no other language have I read such pure absurdity. The heroes of the Green Goose were people, animals, and objects. The readers who attended these weekly performances of his cabaret were a little ashamed of their liking for these oddities, but they pounced on every issue of the magazine.
+The ideas of social ecology were largely developed by the philosopher and social critic Murray Bookchin, and have been elaborated by many others over the course of their development. Social ecology is viewed by most of its students and adherents as a holistic and evolving outlook that offers a critical and radically reconstructive perspective on ecological and social movements, both past and present. Social ecology encourages a searching historical and philosophical exploration of our evolving relationship to the rest of nature, and proposes a long-range vision of a world of self-reliant and highly interdependent eco-communities.
-His activity was the subject of much controversy. Those who wanted to be considered “sure” and those who took their Marxism seriously were indignant. How could one, they asked, permit this clown to run riot as if he were in a Parisian existentialist cafe? He was a petty bourgeois who had gone mad. Why print his poems on the front pages of leading magazines; why allow him to have a career? Everybody remembered his anti-Semitic days, when he threatened his colleagues with a “night of long knives”! Now, no one was so well off as he. Wasn’t this disgraceful?
+Numerous concepts that became common wisdom among ecological and progressive activists from the 1960s onward were first articulated clearly in Murray Bookchin’s writings, including the socially reconstructive dimensions of ecological science, the potential links between sustainable technologies and political decentralization, and the evolution of the traditional politics of class on the left toward a more comprehensive understanding of social hierarchy in general. Social ecology is highly complementary to, and has learned a great deal from, indigenous world views, environmental justice movements, and practical ecological approaches to energy technology, urban design and permaculture. We will begin here by exploring some of Bookchin’s core ideas, consider social ecology’s contributions to a variety of recent movements, and then reflect on its continuing evolution.
-Experienced members of the Party quieted the outraged puritans, smiling indulgently at their naiveness. Delta was needed and useful at that stage. He had many followers; everything he wrote helped create an atmosphere of patriotism. It was politic to show that even rightists and Catholics had joined forces with the government. The reading public was not as yet ready for serious, sensible literature. At the moment. Delta’s farces best suited its taste. All this was a game, for a time; and then—off with his head.
+==== {{anchor|TheOutlookofSocialEcology}} The Outlook of Social Ecology ====
-When Poland was at last obliged to pass from restrained worship of Russia to outright idolatry, he let no one outdo him. He wrote of the heroism of Soviet soldiers, of the gratitude every Pole should feel toward Russia, of Lenin, of Komsomol youth. He adhered to the Communist line in every respect. As an eminent author, he received a Soviet visa and spent some time in Moscow, sending back enthusiastic reports in prose and verse. In one he announced that the magnificence of Moscow was marred by but a single flaw: it was too much like Taormina; people ate just as many oranges there, and he didn’t like oranges.
+Bookchin’s social ecology emerged from a time in the mid-1960s when ecological thought, and even ecological science, were widely viewed as “subversive.” Even rather conventional environmental scientists were contemplating the broad political implications of an ecological world view, confronting academic marginalization, and raising challenging questions about the largely unquestioned dogma of perpetual economic growth. In a landmark 1964 issue of the journal ''Bioscience'', the ecologist Paul Sears described his field of study as a “subversive science,” and challenged the “pathological” nature of economic growth, inquiring whether ecology, “if taken seriously as an instrument for the long run welfare of mankind, would … endanger the assumptions and practices accepted by modern societies.”[2]
-His correspondence from Moscow drove the puritans crazy. They knew that Moscow was a gloomy and rather forbidding city. His raptures bore all the traits of derision. They seemed to say: “You want me to sing praises; very well. I’ll sing praises till they come out of your ears.” Still, it was not easy to guess his real intentions. It was impossible to tell whether he was lying or telling the truth. Normal criteria did not apply to him. He moved in a different dimension. Like a prestidigitator, he always pulled the proper number of rabbits out of his hat, and all of them rabbits of the required color. He invariably transformed everything into opera bouffe. Because he constantly used exaggeration as his artistic tool, his opponents could prove nothing against him. He neither mocked nor spoke the truth; he performed tricks, he practiced art for art’s sake.
+Bookchin carried the discussion considerably further, proposing that an ecological understanding of the world is not merely subversive, but fundamentally revolutionary and reconstructive. With the World Wars and Great Depression of the 20[th] century appearing to have only strengthened global capitalism, Bookchin saw the emerging ecological crisis as one challenge that would fundamentally undermine this system’s inherent logic. His first book, ''Our Synthetic Environment'', was issued (under the pseudonym, Lewis Herber) by a major New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and cited by authorities such as the microbiologist Réne Dubos as comparable in its influence to Rachel Carson’s ''Silent Spring''.[3] ''Our Synthetic Environment'' offered a detailed and accessible analysis of the origins of pollution, urban concentration, and chemical agriculture.
-He was never “serious.” And as we know, this is the basic requirement of socialist realism. After the writers’ congresses at which socialist realism was proclaimed the sole creative method allowed, the partisans of gravity began their action against him, sure now that they could take their revenge. Analyzing his poetry, they proved that the world for him was nothing but a toy to play with. Once, before the War, he had written An Elegy on the Death of a Butterfly Run Over by a Freight Van. Despite its long title, the elegy consisted of four lines which concluded that the thoughtless butterfly richly deserved its fate. Now he found himself under the wheels of the van. The period of austerity and precision was beginning. He could write on every subject, from the Madonna to Lenin and Moscow, just so long as his master demanded his services, yet his poems never lacked spontaneity. They were always exuberant; but we must add that in them the Madonna as well as Lenin and Moscow became something unreal, a kind of theater in the clouds. Now, however, “the struggle against the spontaneity of the creative process” had become the slogan, which meant that it was no longer enough to write on prescribed subjects; one had to write in a prescribed manner.
+In 1964, in a pamphlet titled “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” Bookchin wrote:
-Delta wanted to serve his lord. In order to exist as a poet he needed a genial, amused seigneur who believed that neither his government nor anything in heaven or on earth deserves to be taken too seriously, that song—half serious, half scoffing—matters more. But such princes have long since ceased to be. The lord who held him in thrall tolerated him for a while not because his songs were pleasing, for song is merely a means to an end. It was when his songs no longer served the desired end that his master knit his brows in anger. Publishers were instructed to print only those of his poems in which he demonstrated that he had reformed. The puritans rubbed their hands in glee. At last they had wrung his neck. They knew that no matter how he tried he could not reform. Deprived of their former exuberance, his poems no longer differed from verse ground out by second-rate rhymesters.
+===== The explosive implications of an ecological approach arise not only because ecology is intrinsically a critical science—critical on a scale that the most radical systems of political economy have failed to attain—but also because it is an integrative and reconstructive science. This integrative, reconstructive aspect of ecology, carried through to all its implications, leads directly into anarchic areas of social thought. For, in the final analysis, it is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment.4 =====
-Thus he entered the realm of living shadows. Nothing should be wasted, however, in a socialist economy. Men who have fulfilled their role can find work enough for their capacities. Delta’s existence was assured; a state publishing house commissioned him to do a translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
+Over the next four decades, Bookchin’s social ecology emerged as a unique synthesis of utopian social criticism, historical and anthropological investigation, dialectical philosophy, and political strategy. It can be viewed as an unfolding of several distinct layers of understanding and insight, spanning all of these dimensions, and more.
-Some two years after his fall from grace he has been given another chance. At this writing, all his past sins are being discussed openly in the leading literary weekly. This is a sort of trial, with a favorable verdict prepared in advance. Delta will return to favor once more; but once more, it will be only for a time.
+At its most basic level, social ecology confronts the social and political roots of contemporary ecological problems. It critiques the ways of conventional environmental politics and points activists toward radical, community-centered alternatives. Bookchin always insisted that environmental problems be understood primarily as social problems, and was impatient with the narrowly instrumental approaches advanced by most environmentalists to address particular issues. The holistic understandings of ecological science, he argued, require a social ecology that examines the systemic roots of our ecological crisis, while challenging the institutions responsible for perpetuating a destructive and irrational status quo. Bookchin was perhaps the first writer on the left to explicitly argue that an ecological outlook is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism’s inherent drive toward unlimited growth and expansion.
-** Chapter Eight Man, This Enemy
+This critical outlook led to many years of research into the evolution of the relationship between human societies and non-human nature. Both liberals and Marxists have generally viewed the “domination of nature” either as a fulfillment of human destiny and human nature or, in more recent decades, as an unfortunate but necessary precondition for the advancement of civilization. Bookchin sought to turn this view on its head, describing the “domination of nature” as a myth perpetuated by social elites in the earliest hierarchically-organized societies. Far from a historical necessity, efforts to dominate the natural world are instead a destructive byproduct of evolving social hierarchies.
-Whoever reads the public statements of the four writers discussed in the previous chapters might say” that they sold themselves. The truth is, however, more involved. These men are, more or less consciously, victims of a historic situation. Consciousness does not help them to shed their bonds; on the contrary, it forges them. At the very best, it can offer them the delights of Ketman as a consolation. Never before has there been such enslavement through consciousness as in the twentieth century. Even my generation was still taught in school that reason frees men.
+Bookchin elaborated these ideas in his magnum opus, ''The Ecology of Freedom'', a book described by the ''Village Voice'' in the early 1980s as belonging “at the pinnacle of the genre of utopian social criticism.”[5] Bookchin closely examined the anthropological literature of the period, seeking forward looking principles and practices that emerge from our understanding of non-hierarchical “organic” societies. These core principles included interdependence, unity-in-diversity, complementarity, and the irreducible minimum: the principle that communities are responsible for meeting their members’ most basic needs.[6] Complementarity for Bookchin meant disavowing the oppressive inequality of supposed “equals” within contemporary societies, instead invoking traditional communities’ efforts to actively compensate for differences in ability among members. Bookchin’s historical and anthropological investigations affirmed his belief that any truly liberatory popular movement needs to challenge hierarchy in general, not only its particular manifestations as oppression by race, gender, or class.
-In the people’s democracies, a battle is being waged for mastery over the human spirit. Man must be made to understand, for then he will accept. Who are the enemies of the new system? The people who do not understand. They fail to understand because their minds work feebly or else badly.
+These explorations of the persistent role of social hierarchies in shaping social evolution and our relationships with non-human nature led Bookchin toward a philosophical inquiry into the evolutionary relationship between human consciousness and natural evolution. He sought to renew the legacy of dialectical philosophy—the philosophical tradition of transformation and becoming—abandoning popular oversimplifications and reinterpreting dialectics through examination of its origins in the works of philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel. Bookchin’s “dialectical naturalism” emphasizes the potentialities that lie latent within the evolution of natural and social phenomena and celebrates the uniqueness of human creativity and self-reflection, even while emphasizing the emergence of human consciousness from the possibilities inherent in biological “first nature.” It eschews the common view of nature as merely a realm of necessity, instead viewing nature as striving, in a sense, to actualize through evolution an underlying potentiality for consciousness, creativity and freedom.[7]
-In every capital of Central and Eastern Europe the windows in the Central Committee buildings are illuminated late into the night. Behind their desks sit men well-versed in the writings of Lenin and Stalin. Not the least of their tasks is to define the position of the enemy. As the situation changes, this military staff pins another little flag on the battle map. Data from each country then aid the supreme command in Moscow to establish an over-all strategy.
+For Bookchin, a dialectical outlook on human history compels us to reject what merely is and follow the potentialities inherent in evolution toward an expanded view of what could be, and ultimately what ought to be. While the realization of a free, ecological society is far from inevitable, it may be the most rational outcome of four billion years of natural evolution. This dialectical view of natural and social evolution led to the sometimes controversial claim that nature itself can be viewed as an objective grounding for our social ethics.
-Different groups of people are the main object of study. The least important is the propertied class which was dispossessed by the nationalization of factories and mines and by the agricultural reform. Their number is insignificant; their way of thinking amusingly old-fashioned. They are no problem. In time they will die off—if need be, with a little help.
+Social ecology also proposes a distinct approach to political praxis, aimed at realizing the ecological reconstruction of society. Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism” draws on what he viewed as a fundamental underlying conflict between communities and the nation-state as well as on historical examples of emerging direct democracies from the Athenian ''polis'' to the New England town meeting. Bookchin sought a non-exclusive redefinition of citizenship and a reinvigoration of the public sphere, with popular assemblies moving to the center of public life in towns and neighborhoods, taking back control of essential political and economic decisions. Representatives in city councils and regional assemblies would become mandated delegates, deputized by their local assemblies and empowered only to carry out the wishes of the people.
-The petty bourgeoisie, that is the small merchants and craftsmen, cannot be taken so lightly. They constitute a powerful force, one that is deeply rooted in the masses. Hardly is one clandestine workshop or store liquidated in one neighborhood or city than anothei springs up elsewhere. Restaurants hide behind a sliding wall of a private house; shoemakers and tailors work at home for their friends. In fact, everything that comes under the heading of speculation sprouts up again and again. And no wonder! State and municipal stores consistently lack even the barest essentials. In the summer, one can buy winter clothes; in the winter, summer wear—but usually of the wrong size and of poor quality. The purchase of a spool of thread or a needle is a major problem, for the one state store in the town may not carry them for a year. Clothes that are given to be mended are held by the local crafts’ cooperative for six months. The inns (“Points of Collective Nourishment”) are so crowded that people lose the desire to drink with their friends. They know they will have to sit down at a table with strangers and wait, sometimes as long as an hour, before the waiter appears.
+Confederation is also a central aspect of libertarian municipalism, with communities joining together to sustain counterinstitutions aimed at challenging centralized power and advancing a broad liberatory agenda. In contrast to many ecologists who write about politics and society, Bookchin embraced the historic role of cities as potential sites of freedom and universalism, viewing the expanded practice of citizenship in empowered neighborhood assemblies as a means for educating community members into the values of humanism, cooperation, and public service.[8] The stifling anonymity of the capitalist market is to be replaced by a moral economy in which economic, as well as political relationships, are guided by an ethics of mutualism and genuine reciprocity.[9]
-All this creates a field for private services. A worker’s wife goes to a nearby town, buys needles and thread, brings them back and sells them: the germ of capitalism. The worker himself of a free afternoon mends a broken bathroom pipe for a friend who has waited months for the state to send him a repair man. In return, he gets a little money, enough to buy himself a shirt: a rebirth of capitalism. He hasn’t time to wait in line on the day that the state store receives a new shipment of goods, so he buys his shirt from a friend. She has cleverly managed to buy three, let us say, through her friendship with the salesgirl and now she resells them at a small profit. She is speculating. What she earns as a cleaning-woman in a state factory is not enough to support her three children since her husband was arrested by the security police. If these manifestations of human enterprise were not wiped out it is easy to guess what they would lead to. A worker would set up a plumbing repairs shop. His neighbor, who secretly sells alcohol to people who want to drink in relative privacy, would open a cafe. The cleaning-woman would become a merchant, peddling her goods. They would gradually expand their businesses, and the lower middle class would reappear. Introduce freedom of the press and of assembly, and publications catering to this clientele would spring up like mushrooms after the rain. And there would be the petty bourgeoisie as a political force.
+Libertarian municipalism offers both an outline of a political strategy and the structure underlying social ecology’s long-range social vision: a vision of directly democratic communities challenging all forms of centralized power while evolving in harmony with the rest of nature. This vision draws on decades of research into political structures, sustainable technologies, revolutionary popular movements, and the best of the utopian tradition in Western thought. Bookchin spent his last decade intensively researching the history of revolutionary movements in the West from the Middle Ages to the mid-20[th] century, drawing out the lessons of the diverse, often subterranean, popular currents that formed the basis for revolutionary movements in England, France, the US, Russia, Spain, and beyond.[10]
-What is worse, this matter involves the peasant problem. Peasants, who make up the majority of the population of the country, have a middle-class mentality. They are more deeply attached to their few little hectares of field than the storekeepers are to their little shops. As late as the nineteenth century they were still living in bondage. They oppose collectivization because they see it as a return to a state their fathers found unbearable. To leap out of bed at the signal of an official on a collective farm is just as hateful as to do so at the sound of a gong rung by the overseer of an estate. The peasants’ blind hatred worries the Party. Its more sensitive members secretly bow to the necessity of making concessions. They believe that collectivization should be preceded by cooperative use of machinery on private fields, and that it can come only after a long introductory phase of education, extending possibly over decades. This temporizing spirit breeds trouble; that is why the whispered slogans of the “national Communists” are always so popular. But the Center exacts a certain tempo. The structure of every dependent country must be brought to resemble that of Russia as quickly as possible.
+==== {{anchor|SocialEcologyandSocialMoveme}} Social Ecology and Social Movements ====
-This problem, in turn, affects the cities. Peasants are divided into three categories—“poor,” “middle,” and “kulak”—in an effort to break their solidarity by engendering mutual antagonisms. A peasant’s wealth is rated not only by the amount of land he holds, but by how many horses, cows, and pigs he owns, how he lives, eats, and dresses. Lest he fall into an uncomfortable classification, he drops farming and flees to the city; or else he keeps only a minimum amount of livestock and pretends to be poor. As a result, the city suffers from a lack of provisions.
+The influence of this body of ideas upon popular ecological movements began with the largely underground distribution of Bookchin’s essays during the 1960s. Ideas he first articulated, such as the need for a fundamentally radical ecology in contrast to technocratic environmentalism, were embraced by growing numbers of ecologically-informed radicals. Bookchin and his colleagues, including Institute for Social Ecology co-founder Dan Chodorkoff, also participated in some of the earliest efforts to “green” cities and bring alternative, solar-based technologies into inner city neighborhoods.
-But the peasants are not dangerous. They may beat up a Party boss or even kill him in a burst of desperation, but nothing more. When the state is the sole buyer of their produce, and when they cannot voice their protest at the amount of tribute the state demands of them, they are powerless. The security police can easily handle recalcitrants, especially since it can complain of no lack of informers, now that informing has become an excellent means of saving oneself. The peasants are a leaderless mass. History shows few instances when they seriously threatened the rulers. The term “peasant revolt” sounds nice in textbooks and has a certain propaganda value, but only for the naive. In reality, the peasants have almost always served as a tool; their leaders, most often of non-peasant origin, have used them for their own ends. The power of the peasants lies in their number; it is a power only when a man like Lenin comes along and throws the weight of their numbers into the scale of events. Obviously, peasants can cause trouble in such moments of upheaval as wars. As long as a private peasant economy exists it acts as a natural base for partisan operations. A peasant hut is the ideal place for partisans to eat, sleep, and work out plans of action. Therefore, a collective farm, where a man’s every step is easy to trace, guarantees a degree of control that is indispensable if one wants to preclude hostile underground activity.
+By the late 1970s, social ecology was playing a much more visible role in the rapidly growing movement against nuclear power. As we have seen, rural communities across the US were being surveyed as potential sites for new nuclear power plants in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The movement that arose to counter this new colonization of the countryside united traditional rural dwellers, and those who had recently moved “back-to-the-land,” with seasoned urban activists, as well as a new generation of radicals who came of age in the aftermath of the ferment of the 1960s. Following the mass arrest of people who sought to nonviolently occupy a nuclear construction site in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977, decentralized anti-nuclear alliances began to appear all across the US. These alliances were committed to direct action, non-violence, and grassroots organization. Many were captivated by the utopian dimension of the emerging “appropriate technology” movement for which Bookchin and other social ecologists provided an essential theoretical and historical grounding.
-Workers are far more important than peasants. Most of them are antagonistic to the new system. That is understandable. They resent the norms they must fill. Those norms are constantly rising. Though the “solidarity of the workers” makes a fine slogan, it -does not mean that the solidarity of the crews in a factory is to be tolerated. Their ranks are split by the institution of “shock-workers” which is fostered by an appeal to ambition and enforced by pressure from members of the Party cell. A man may at first refuse to become a shock-worker. But gradually he learns it does not pay to be stubborn; because when workers are being chosen for a course in bookkeeping, for instance, his application is rejected, or when his turn comes for a free vacation he is declared ineligible, etc.
+New England’s anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance was the first to adopt the model of the “affinity group” as the basis of a long-range regional organizing effort.[11] Murray Bookchin introduced the concept of ''grupos de afinidad''—borrowed from the Spanish FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation)—into the US in an appendix to his influential 1968 pamphlet, “Listen, Marxist!”[12] Bookchin initially compared the revolutionary Spanish affinity groups of the 1930s to the countercultural collectives that were appearing in cities across the US during the late 1960s. Quaker activists advocated the formation of affinity groups as a structure for personal support and security at large demonstrations at Seabrook. But after the mass arrests and two weeks of incarceration in New Hampshire’s National Guard Armories, participants began to view the affinity groups as the basis for a much more widely participatory, directly democratic form of social movement organization than had ever been realized before.
-The attitude of the workers toward the regime is ambivalent. On the one hand, they prize its positive contributions. Unemployment is a thing of the past; in fact, there is a constant lack of skilled labor. Not only the head of a family but most of its members are employed. This accumulation of wages means that a family would be able to live better than ever before if only the stores were fairly well stocked; but given the shortage of food and consumer goods, this is rarely, if ever, the case. For workers’ children, social advancement is easy because the Party must recruit the cadres of the new intelligentsia from their ranks. The worker can educate himself by attending countless evening courses. If he stands in good favor with the Party he can enjoy a vacation in a rest home, all expenses paid. On the other hand, he cannot defend himself against exploitation by his employer, the state. His trade union representatives are Party tools. They team together with the factory managers for one purpose: to raise production. Workers are told that a strike is a crime. Against whom are they to strike? Against themselves? After all, the means of production belong to them, the state belongs to them. But such an explanation is not very convincing. The workers, who dare not state aloud what they want, know that the goals of the state are far from identical with their own.
+Bookchin’s original “Note on Affinity Groups” was distributed widely in the lead-up to a planned follow-up action at Seabrook in June of 1978, and activists in Vermont, Boston, and elsewhere in New England worked hard to help the Clamshell Alliance live up to the most profoundly democratic potential of this organizational model. Anti-nuclear alliances across the US followed the Clamshell in taking their names from local species of animals and plants that were endangered by the spread of nuclear power, and adopted affinity groups and spokescouncils as their fundamental organizational and decision-making structures. While internal divisions would eventually undermine the affinity group-based internal democracy of this movement, Bookchin’s writing significantly helped sustain the anti-nuclear movement’s powerful utopian impulses. Meanwhile, annual summer sessions at the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) in Vermont offered students some of the first intensive, hands-on experiences in organic gardening and alternative technology, combined with in-depth discussions of social ecology, ecofeminism, reconstructive anthropology, and other important political and theoretical topics that have significantly helped shape today’s movements.[13]
-Central and Eastern Europe produce in order to raise the military and economic potential of the Center and to compensate for the industrial backwardness of Russia. Workers and theii needs have no influence on production plans. Most of the goods produced ebb away to the East. Besides, every product of a worker’s hands is the object of innumerable bookkeeping operations. A whole staff of functionaries sits in every factory, counting, writing reports, compiling statistics; the same thing happens on every rung of the state hierarchy, right through to the state wholesale houses and retail stores. If, at last, the article reaches the consumer, it is very expensive; into its cost are counted the salaries of the swarms of bureaucrats through whose hands it must pass. Factory machines are ovei-aged; there is a scarcity of essential spare parts. So workers are ordered to replace broken parts by whatevei homemade means they can devise. Production comes first, even at the price of using up the machines. Discipline is severe; negligence or even a few minutes’ lateness are strictly punished. No wonder, then, that the bad side of the system outweighs the good in the worker’s mind. Still, he dares not complain. If he betrays any signs of discontent the security police, whose secret agents are his co-workers and sometimes his friends, takes care of him.
+==== {{anchor|FromGreenPoliticstoGlobalJu}} From Green Politics to Global Justice ====
-The wildcat strikes that break out from time to time are no threat in themselves, for peace returns quickly after mass arrests of all participants. They are, however, ominous signs that discontentment has reached a tension that can find release only in desperate acts. A strike requires a certain minimum of organization. That is why nothing else makes Party dialecticians so uneasy. The workers are the only class capable of organized action—that Marxist principle has never been forgotten. No action, however, is possible without leaders. If the leaders reason correctly, that is, if they understand the necessities of the historic process, then the workers as a mass will be unable to protest.
+During the 1980s, social ecologists were intimately involved in the founding of Green political movements in the US and elsewhere. Many were inspired by the way in which the German Green Party emerged out of a variety of social movements, practiced a politics of grassroots democracy in its early years, and came to articulate a sweeping ecological critique in all areas of public policy, from urban design, energy use and transportation, to nuclear disarmament and support for democratic movements in Eastern Europe. But by the early 1990s, a growing tension had emerged between US Greens committed to a localist, decentralized approach, and those advocating for a national Green Party that would mainly run candidates for national office. As the US Greens began to splinter, social ecologists initiated a Left Green Network, many of whose policy positions were adopted at several national Green conferences. Those promoting a more mainstream agenda aggressively resisted this tendency, leading to many years of internal debates and divisions.[14]
-Everything, thus, takes us back to the question of mastery over the mind. Every possible opportunity for education and advancement is offered to the more energetic and active individuals among the workers. The new, incredibly extensive bureaucracy is recruited from among the young people of working-class origin. The road before them is open, open but guarded: their thinking must be based on the firm principles of dialectical materialism. Schools, theaters, films, painting, literature, and the press all shape their thinking.
+Meanwhile, a group of recent social ecology students formed a youth caucus in the Greens, which eventually became an independent organization known as the Youth Greens. The Youth Greens attracted a significant base of young radicals largely from outside the Greens and joined with the Left Greens to initiate a major direct action to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the original Earth Day in April of 1990. On the day following the official Earth Day commemorations—a Sunday filled with polite, heavily corporate-sponsored events—several hundred Left Greens, Youth Greens, ecofeminists, environmental justice activists, Earth Firsters and urban squatters converged on Wall Street seeking to block the opening of the New York Stock Exchange. Activists based around the ISE in Vermont had prepared a comprehensive action handbook, featuring a variety of social ecology writings and helped create a broad, empowering coalition effort. The next day, columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote in the ''New York Daily News'',
-We should also call attention to a new institution, the “club,” whose significance is comparable to that of the chapel in the middle ages. It exists in every factory, every school, every office. On its walls hang portraits of Party leaders draped with red bunting. Every few days, meetings following pre-arranged agendas take place, meetings that are as potent as religious rites. The Catholic Church wisely recognized that faith is more a matter of collective suggestion than of individual conviction. Collective religious ceremonies induce a state of belief. Folding one’s hands in prayer, kneeling, singing hymns precede faith, for faith is a psycho-physical and not simply a psychological phenomenon. Edward Gibbon, describing the effects of Theodosius’s decrees forbidding pagan rites (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXVIII), says: “The devotion of the poet, or the philosopher, may be secretly nourished by prayer, meditation, and study; but the exercise of public worship appears to be the only solid foundation of the religious sentiments of the people, which derive their force from imitation and habit. The interruption of that public exercise may consummate, in the period of a few years, the important work of a national revolution. The memory of theological opinions cannot long be preserved, without the artificial helps of priests, of temples, and of books. The ignorant vulgar, whose minds are still agitated by the blind hopes and terrors of superstition, will be soon persuaded by their superiors to direct their vows to the reigning deities of the age; and will insensibly imbibe an ardent zeal for the support and propagation of the new doctrine, which spiritual hunger at first compelled them to accept.” The Party has learned this wise lesson from the Church. People who attend a “club” submit to a collective rhythm, and so come to feel that it is absurd to think differently from the collective. The collective is composed of units that doubt; but as these individuals pronounce the ritual phrases and sing the ritual songs, they create a collective aura to which they in turn surrender. Despite its apparent appeal to reason, the “club’s” activity comes under the heading of collective magic. The rationalism of the doctrine is fused with sorcery, and the two strengthen each other. Free discussion is, of course, eliminated. If what the doctrine proclaims is as true as the fact that 2X2 equals 4, to tolerate the opinion that 2X2 equals 5 would be indecent.
+===== Certainly, those who sought to co-opt Earth Day into a media and marketing extravaganza, to make the public feel good while obscuring the corporate root of the Earth’s pollution almost succeeded. It took angry Americans from places like Maine and Vermont to come to Wall Street on a workday and point the blame where it belongs.15 =====
-From his first day in school, the young citizen receives an education based on this truth. There is a great difference between schools in the people’s democracies and schools in the West, for example the schools I attended in pre-war Poland. My friends and I were exposed to a dual system of values. Mathematics, physics, and biology taught us scientific laws, and inculcated respect for a materialistic outlook inherited from the nineteenth century. History and Letters seemed to elude scientific laws, while the history of the Catholic Church and Apologetics cast doubt, though often naively, on what physics and biology taught. In the people’s democracies, the materialistic outlook of the nineteenth century has been extended consistently to every subject; history and every branch of human creativity are presented as governed by unshakable and already known laws.
+During the 1980s and nineties, social ecologists also played a central role in the development and elaboration of ecofeminist ideas. Ynestra King’s classes on ecofeminism at the ISE during the late 1970s were among the first to be offered anywhere, and annual colloquia on feminism and ecology were organized by Chaia Heller and other social ecologists throughout the early 1990s. Ecofeminist activists played a central role in initiating two Women’s Pentagon Actions and a Women’s Peace Camp alongside the Seneca Army Depot in New York State, while self-identified ecofeminists with a rather eclectic mix of political outlooks played a central role in the evolution of Green politics in the US.[16] While social ecologists became more skeptical toward ecofeminism ''per se'' as it evolved in a more cultural and spiritual direction during the 1990s, discussions of the links between ecology and feminist thought continued to be a centerpiece of the Institute’s educational offerings.[17]
-In the nineteenth century, with the rise of literacy, brochures popularizing scientific theories made their appearance. Regardless of the intrinsic worth of these theories, we must grant that from the moment they take on a popular form they become something other than what they were as hypotheses of scientific research. For example, the simplified and vulgarized version of Darwin’s theory of the origin of species and the struggle for existence is not the same concept that it was for Darwin or for his scholarly opponents. It takes on emotional coloration, and changes into an important sociological element. The leaders of the twentieth century, like Hitler for instance, drew their knowledge from popular brochures, which explains the incredible confusion in their minds. Evidently, there is no place in such digests for the humble remarks of true scientists who assure us that the laws discovered are hypothetical and relative to the method chosen and the system of symbols used. Vulgarized knowledge characteristically gives birth to a feeling that everything is understandable and explained. It is like a system of bridges built over chasms. One can travel boldly ahead over these bridges, ignoring the chasms. It is forbidden to look down into them; but that, alas, does not alter the fact that they exist.
+In the later 1990s, social ecologists played important roles in the rapidly growing movement to promote global justice and challenge the institutions of capitalist globalism, a movement that became an important precursor to today’s climate justice movements. They raised discussions of the potential for direct democracy as a counter-power to centralized economic and political institutions, helped further the evolution of a longer-range reconstructive vision, and established grassroots democratic structures within the movement that came of age on the streets of Seattle in 1999. After Seattle, an ISE booklet titled ''Bringing Democracy Home'' highlighted the writings of various social ecologists on potential future directions for that movement. Global justice activists from across the US attended programs at the ISE in Vermont during the early 2000s to further their political analysis and join Bookchin and other faculty members in wide-ranging discussions of where the movement might be heading.
-Once the science of nature taught that a forest was a collective of trees governed by a few elementary laws. It seemed that if one cut out the forest and replanted it, after a definite period of years a new forest, exactly like the old, would appear. Today we know this is not so; a forest is an organism arising out of complicated interactions of mosses, soil, fungi, trees, and grasses. The moment these mosses and fungi are destroyed by the cutting out of the forest, the symbiotic pattern is disturbed and the new forest is a completely different organism from what might be expected by someone who ignored the sociology of plants. Stalinists have no knowledge of the conditions human plants need in order to thrive. Forbidding any research in this direction because such study contradicts orthodoxy, they bar mankind from the possibility of acquiring fuller knowledge of itself.
+During the 1990s, Bookchin and his colleagues found themselves increasingly at odds with an anti-authoritarian youth culture that was increasingly fascinated with New Age spirituality, punk-inspired disdain for organization, and “neo-primitivist” notions of an impending “end of civilization.” In response, Bookchin rose in defense of such unfashionable notions as reason, civilization, historical continuity, and the philosophical legacy of the European Enlightenment. Facing an increasingly hostile audience in anarchist-oriented activist circles, Bookchin cast aside his once-fervent hopes for reviving and updating the anarchist tradition. Encouraged by international colleagues, particularly in the Scandinavian countries, he articulated a new framework that he called “communalism,” and redoubled his focus on the need for sustained political engagement and revolutionary organization.[18] Communalism, Bookchin argued, required a “new and comprehensive revolutionary outlook” drawing on the best of Marxism and the libertarian socialist tradition and rooted in an expansive view of confederal, municipally-centered direct democracies developing non-statist counterinstitutions capable of contesting political power. Speaking of his new communalist synthesis, Bookchin wrote:
-Dialectical materialism, Russian-style, is nothing more than nineteenth-century science vulgarized to the second power. Its emotional and didactic components are so strong that they change all proportions. Although the Method was scientific at its origins, when it is applied to humanistic disciplines it often transforms them into edifying stories adapted to the needs of the moment. But there is no escape once a man enters upon these convenient bridges. Centuries of human history, with their thousands upon thousands of intricate affairs, are reduced to a few, most generalized terms. Undoubtedly, one comes closer to the truth when one sees history as the expression of the class struggle rather than a series of private quarrels among kings and nobles. But precisely because such an analysis of history comes closer to the truth, it is more dangerous. It gives the illusion of full knowledge; it supplies answers to all questions, answers which merely run around in a circle repeating a few formulas. What’s more, the humanities get connected with the natural sciences thanks to the materialistic outlook (as, for example, in theories of “eternal matter”), and so we see the circle closing perfectly and logically. Then, Stalin becomes the crowning point of the evolution of life on our planet.
+===== From Marxism, it draws the basic project of formulating a rationally systematic and coherent socialism that integrates philosophy, history, economics, and politics. Avowedly dialectical, it attempts to infuse theory with practice. From anarchism, it draws its commitment to antistatism and confederalism, as well as its recognition that hierarchy is a basic problem that can be overcome only by a libertarian socialist society.19 =====
-The son of a worker, subjected to such an education, cannot think otherwise than as the school demands. Two times two equals four. The press, literature, painting, films, and theater all illustrate what he learns, just as the lives of saints and martyrs serve as illustrations of theology. It would be wrong to assert that a dual set of values no longer exists. The resistance against the new set of values is, however, emotional. It survives, but it is beaten whenever it has to explain itself in rational terms. A man’s subconscious or not-quite-conscious life is richer than his vocabulary. His opposition to this new philosophy of life is much like a toothache. Not only can he not express the pain in words, but he cannot even tell you which tooth is aching.
+During the same period, the ISE’s Biotechnology Project pioneered the use of New England’s Town Meetings as a primary organizing vehicle to express opposition to the genetic engineering of food in the US. In March of 2002, residents in 28 Vermont towns voted for labeling genetically engineered (GE) foods and a moratorium on GE crops.[20] Eight towns took the further step of declaring a moratorium or otherwise discouraging the planting of GE crops within their town; in northern California, several counties outright banned the cultivation of genetically modified organisms in 2003-04. By 2007, 85 Vermont towns and 120 across New England had passed resolutions questioning genetically engineered agriculture. At a time when efforts to adequately regulate biotech products at the national level had become hopelessly deadlocked, this campaign invigorated public discussion of genetic engineering in the region and across the US, gained international attention, and articulated a broader analysis of the social and ecological implications of genetic engineering and the commodification of life.
-Thanks to excellent means of vulgarization, unprepared people (i.e., those whose minds work feebly) are taught to reason. Their training convinces them that what is happening in the people’s democracies is necessary, even if temporarily bad. The greater the number of people who “participate in culture”— i.e. pass through the schools, read books and magazines, attend theaters and exhibitions—the further the doctrine reaches and the smaller grows the threat to the rule of philosophers.
+==== {{anchor|JusticeFreedomandTechnology}} Justice, Freedom, and Technology ====
-But some people, even with sufficient education, reason “badly.” They are impervious to the influence of Hegelian philosophy. A chicken cannot be taught to swim; just so, those who belong to the social groups condemned to disappear cannot be convinced of the truth of dialectics. According to the Party, if these people were clearly aware of their situation, they would have to confess that there is no hope for them. Therefore they look for mental subterfuges. Those people are enemies. They must be ejected to the margins of society not because of what they do, but because of what they are. Despite the fact that their intentions may be subjectively good, their guilt has an objective character.
+Two additional themes, first elaborated by Bookchin in ''The Ecology of Freedom'', are also of potential interest to climate activists today. The first addresses the historical ambiguities that underlie the dual legacy of justice and freedom in the West; the second concerns the evolution of ideas about technology’s role in society. The discussion of justice and freedom sheds light, for example, on a debate that arose among some activists in Copenhagen as to whether a justice-centered perspective—even the discussion of climate debts—could inadvertently bind activists to measures of value determined by the capitalist market. The discussion of technology arises in response to those who tend to view technological developments as the central driving factors in our social evolution.
-Dialecticians have to know the enemy’s mentality. Studying the reactionary as a social type, they establish certain features by which he can be recognized. The reactionary, they argue, even though he be an educated man, is incapable of grasping the concept of the interdependence of phenomena. Therefore his political imagination is limited. A man who has been trained sociologically can deduce a whole line of reasoning as to the causes and consequences of every phenomenon. Like a paleontologist, he can divine a whole formation from a single fossil. Show him the verse of a poet from any country, a picture, even an item of clothing and he immediately fits it into a historical context. His line of reasoning may be false; nonetheless he sees everything within the sphere of a given civilization as a symptom, not an accident. The reactionary, incapable of this type of thinking, sees the world as a series of unrelated, parallel occurrences.
+In Bookchin’s account, modern notions of justice began to emerge during ancient times, when a Greek-inspired cult of warrior elites was beginning to reshape social expectations and entrench patterns of exploitation, social coercion, and rule by privileged minorities. Whereas many traditional communities embodied an expansive sense of freedom rooted in reciprocity and complementarity, subjugated peoples had to settle for a more objectively neutral, nominally “blind” approach, relying on more limited standards of balance and equivalence.
-Thus, Nazism was for the reactionary merely the result of the activity of Hitler and his clique; revolutionary movements are the effects of Moscow’s machinations, etc. All the changes occurring in the people’s democracies seem to him to resolve themselves into a question of superior force; if some miraculous accident were to remove this force, everything would return to “normal.” He is like a man whose garden has been inundated by a raging river, and who expects to find his old flower beds intact after the waters subside. But a flooding river does not merely exist; it tears up and carries away whole banks of soil, fells trees, piles up layers of mud, overturns stones, until the garden of old becomes nothing more than a given number of square meters of unrecognizable land. The reactionary cannot grasp movement. His very language is static; his concepts, unchangeable, never renewed by observation. Laurel and Hardy once made a film in which Laurel, an American soldier in the First World War, is ordered to remain in the trench at his machine-gun post when the company moves to attack. Immediately thereafter the Armistice is signed, and in the resultant confusion he is forgotten. They find him twenty years later, his trench surrounded by a mountain of empty cans. He is still at his post, shooting at every commercial airplane that flies by. The reactionary, like Laurel, knows he must shoot, and he cannot realize that the plane is no longer what it was when he got his orders.
+Oppressed peoples have raised the banner of justice through the ages and have won countless epochal victories against elites who came to view themselves as naturally superior. Societies rooted in principles of justice are often less parochial and more inclined to accept strangers into their midst. At the same time, however, justice is often a poor substitute for the more expansive view of human freedom, rooted in an ethic of complementarity, which still thrives in many indigenous communities. Justice emerged, says Bookchin, “first, as a surrogate for the freedom that is lost with the decline of organic society,” but “later as the ineffable protagonist of new conceptions of freedom.”[21] Even as we struggle for justice in the present day, we can simultaneously strive to actualize our most far-reaching visions of a more fully liberatory society.
-No matter how many books the reactionary reads about the dialectical method, he cannot understand its essence. Some little spring is missing in his mind. As a result he cannot properly evaluate human psychology. Dialecticians work on the premise that a man’s mental and emotional life is in constant motion, that it is senseless to treat individuals as if they retained a certain stable, innate character in all circumstances. They know that by changing living conditions they change people’s beliefs and reflexes. The reactionary is amazed by the changes people undergo. He awkwardly explains his friends’ gradual conversion to the system as “opportunism,” “cowardice,” “treachery.” Without such labels he feels lost. Reasoning on the principle of “either—or,” he tries to divide the people about him into “Communists” and “non-Communists”; but such a differentiation loses all meaning in a people’s democracy. Where dialectics shapes life whoever tries to resort to old-world logic must feel completely out of his depth.
+At the same time, climate activists and many others often hold to the view that new technologies, from agriculture to forms of warfare to the discovery of fossil fuels, are often the primary causes that impel the evolution of societies. Social ecology offers an important challenge to this view. Bookchin offers a compelling argument, supported by many other writers and historians, that technology is not an autonomous driving force nor an overarching principle of human evolution, but rather a reflection of its underlying “social matrix.” Societies as radically different as the despotic Inca empire and the relatively egalitarian Iroquois confederacy had very similar, rather basic tools, yet these societies evolved in starkly different ways. As the historian Lewis Mumford has revealed, many technologies we take for granted today—from glass to waterwheels—had largely ceremonial or religious functions before they came to be tapped for productive or practical purposes.[22] For Mumford, the first “megamachine” was not technological in any sense, but rather the massive bureaucratic organization of human labor that built the Egyptian pyramids. Long before machines were invented to take advantage of centralized human labor, the earliest factories merely concentrated and intensified human labor, physically centralizing traditional practices such as spinning, weaving and dyeing that used to be performed at home.
-Such misfortune always befalls the reactionary. The content suddenly flees from his concepts, and all he has left are empty words and phrases. His friends, who only a year ago used these words and phrases fondly, have rejected them as too general, too ill-defined, too remote from reality. He despairingly repeats “honor,” “fatherland,” “nation,” “freedom,” without comprehending that for people living in a changed (and daily changing) situation these abstractions take on a concrete and totally different meaning than before.
+Today’s mega-technologies are not only products of the particular social relations of industrial capitalism, but were developed specifically to reinforce and strengthen those relationships. David Noble, a leading critical historian of technology, described in detail how the automation of machine tools after World War II was developed explicitly to disempower skilled labor and helped set the stage for a permanent war economy in the United States.[23] Similar concerns can be raised about many of today’s advanced communication technologies, for example the surveillance techniques and software devices to convey our personal information to advertisers that are often embedded in the very structure of advanced web pages and mobile applications. From the design of our cities to the ways we use energy, the tools and technics that shape our lives are most often products of capitalist social relations, and have therefore served to reinforce and perpetuate patterns of hierarchy and rule. Rather than blame our social problems on technology, it is imperative that we work to envision a qualitatively different kind of eco-technology that helps us create a radically transformed, more humane and ecological society.
-Because they so define a reactionary, dialecticians consider him a mentally inferior, and therefore not very dangerous, creature. He is no match for them. Once the propertied class is liquidated, the old intelligentsia (which was reactionary in these terms) can be brought to heel with no great difficulty. Its more vigorous representatives cross over to new ideological positions, while the rest lag further and further behind the transformations occurring all about them and so sink ever lower both socially and mentally.
+==== {{anchor|SocialEcologyandtheFuture}} Social Ecology and the Future ====
-The new and the old intelligentsia no longer speak a common language. Reactionary tendencies exist in the peasants and the former petty bourgeoisie, but they are unexpressed. The masses are being educated by their new living conditions, and though they are discontented, with every month the mental distance between them and the program of the reactionaries increases. Emigre politicians help greatly to facilitate the work of the government. Ninety per cent of them are, according to the above definition, reactionaries. Their appeals and radio talks resemble poor Laurel’s barrages at the airplanes. Their listeners are not displeased to hear them abuse a government they, too, dislike; still they cannot treat their formulations seriously. The discrepancy between these politicians’ favorite words and the real situation is too clear; the superiority of the dialecticians, whose reasoning is always adapted to actuality, is too obvious. The reactionaries always lose by such comparison; the people’s instinctive judgment is tinged with something like embarrassment, with shame that those who oppose dictatorship are not mentally up to its stature. Because man instinctively senses weakness, the people become ever more reluctant to side with the reactionaries. Thus, the feeling of fatalism grows stronger.
+In recent decades, a flowering of popular movements for land rights, for community survival, and against new land enclosures emerged throughout the global South. From the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico to “water wars” in Bolivia and India, permanent land occupations by Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), and global resistance to corporate land-grabs, among many others, these movements have increasingly captured the imagination of global justice advocates, even those who for a time seemed to take environmental concerns for granted. These movements also offer a profound challenge to traditional environmentalism, as usually practiced in the North, and have challenged conventional approaches to land conservation as practiced by northern NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund.[24] While some authors have appropriately cautioned against the automatic labeling of indigenous, land-based movements as ecological, the resurgence of interest in these movements has furthered the evolution of many activists’ ecological outlook.[25] It has also encouraged many thoughtful urban activists to broadly identify with the world views of those whose livelihoods are still principally derived from the land.
-Rule over the minds of the masses, therefore, is not seriously threatened. Wherever it appears, intellectual energy can find only one outlet. It is a different matter, however, when one considers the emotional life of the masses and the terrible hatred that dominates it. This hatred cannot be explained on purely economic grounds. The Party senses that in this realm, which Marxism has studied least, surprises and real threats lie hidden.
+Today, with a growing awareness of climate disruptions and the profound social and ecological upheavals that we face, environmental politics may once again be ascendant. But often we see similar forms of narrowly instrumental environmentalism to those Bookchin critiqued in the 1960s and seventies. “Green consumerism,” which first emerged as a widespread phenomenon around the 1990 Earth Day anniversary, has returned with a vengeance, incessantly promoted as the key to reducing our personal impact on the climate. Even some critical observers, such as the popular British columnist George Monbiot, have focused on the feasibility of a “least painful” lower-energy scenario, rather than posing a fundamental ecological challenge to the further destructive development of global capitalism.[26]
-Above all, there exists the question of religion. This problem still persists despite the many weak points in Christianity that can be attacked successfully. Not without reason did the Catholic Church defend the feudal structure against nascent capitalism during the Reformation. Capitalism created scientific thinking and dealt a powerful blow to religion in Europe by removing the best minds from the confines of theology. Modem society reveals how swiftly ideas that were at first the property of the intellectual few can spread; to discover along what lines society will develop, it is sometimes useful to trace the trend in the thinking of a small number of clear-sighted sensitive people. What is on the surface at a given moment, e.g. a literary style, gives way to new elements, though it may survive for a long time on a second or third level. (Revivals are, of course, possible.) This is what happened to theology in Europe. The Church lost its top-level position when, during the industrial upheavals, it lost the intellectuals and failed to win the new class of workers. And these are the two groups to which the Party attaches most importance. Today, the intellectual life of Christianity grows on the outer fringes of the Church, in little circles that are trying to adapt Christian philosophy to the new needs of the century.
+In this disturbingly constrained political and intellectual environment, what does the future hold? Will capitalism finally come to terms with the environmental crisis, perhaps driven by the dynamic movement to withdraw university and public funds from investments in fossil fuel corporations? Or are such campaigns mainly a step toward a more fundamental political challenge and a movement toward a thoroughly transformed future? To address these questions it is useful to consider some of the particular ways that social ecology may continue to inform and enlighten today’s emerging social and ecological movements.
-Still, religious needs exist in the masses and it would be a mistake, from the Party’s point of view, to deny them. Perhaps they will disappear once the entire population has been transformed into workers; but no one knows when that will happen. We are dealing here with imponderable elements. Mysterious, indeed, is the instinct which makes man revolt against a reasonable explanation of all phenomena.
+First, social ecology offers an uncompromising ecological outlook that challenges the entrenched power structures that underlie the systems of capitalism and the nation-state. A movement that fails to confront the underlying causes of environmental destruction and climate disruption can, at best, only superficially address those problems. Capitalism continually promotes false solutions such as carbon trading, geoengineering, and fracked gas as a “bridge fuel,” which serve the system’s imperative to keep growing. Ultimately, to fully address the causes of climate change and other compelling environmental problems requires us to raise long-range, transformative demands that the dominant economic and political systems may prove unable to accommodate. We can structure our activist campaigns in a manner that illuminates hidden structures of oppression and hierarchy, and reveals how various oppressions intersect, even while joyfully and dramatically illustrating the long-range, reconstructive potential of our movement.[27] Such a systemic approach can help guide our movements further in the direction of the social transformation that we know is necessary, challenge the continuing sellouts of corporate-friendly “official” environmentalism and help us “keep our eyes on the prize.”
-Christianity’s armor is so thin in the twentieth century, a child in school is so deeply immersed in the new way of thinking, and yet the zone of shadow eludes the light of reason. We suddenly stumble upon puzzles. Professor Pavlov, who originated the theory of conditioned reflexes, was a deeply religious man. Moscow caused him no trouble over this because he was an eminent scientist and because he was old. The creator of the theory of conditioned reflexes —the very theory that constitutes one of the strongest arguments against the existence of some sort of constant called “human nature”! The defenders of religion maintain that this “human nature” cannot change completely; that gods and churches have existed over thousands of years and in all kinds of civilizations, and that one can expect this to be true of the future as well. What went on in Professor Pavlov’s head if two systems of concepts, one scientific and one religious, existed simultaneously there?
+Second, social ecology offers us a lens to better comprehend the origins and the historical emergence of ecological radicalism, from the nascent movements of the late 1950s and early sixties right up to the present. Over five decades, the writings of Murray Bookchin and his colleagues have reflected upon the most important on-the-ground debates within ecological and social movements with passion and polemic, as well as with humor and long-range vision. Movements that are aware of their history, and comprehend the lessons of their many ebbs and flows over time, are much better equipped to discuss where we may be headed.
-The Party teaches that “existence shapes consciousness,” that circumstances alter men. But it matters little whether religious drives result from “human nature” or from centuries of conditioning; they exist. During the war against Hitler, the Soviet Union had to dust off its priests as well as appeal to nationalistic feelings. When imminent death brings that moment of absurd revelation that everything is senseless, dialectical materialism suddenly discloses its mathematical structure. Man falls from the industriously built bridges. He prefers to surrender to the magic of icons.
+Third, social ecology offers the most comprehensive theoretical treatment of the origins of human social domination and its historical relationship to abuses of the earth’s living ecosystems. Social ecology has consistently pointed to the origins of ecological destruction in social relations of domination, in contrast to conventional views suggesting that impulses to dominate non-human nature are a product of mere historical necessity. Social ecologists celebrate the ways that humans can participate meaningfully and supportively in the processes of natural evolution, rather than pretending that we can live as merely passive observers. Evolving eco-technologies, from permaculture to green urban design, can help point the way toward new relationships of harmony between our own communities and the rest of nature, prefigure new kinds of social relationships, and help us usher in more profound changes that reach beyond the local level.
-In its own fashion, the Party too is a church. Its dictatorship over the earth and its transformation of the human species depend on the success with which it can channel irrational human drives and use them to its own ends. No, logical arguments are not enough. “Club” ceremonies, poetry, novels, films are so important because they reach deeper into the stratum on which the emotional conflict rages. No other church can be tolerated; Christianity is Public Enemy No. 1. It fosters all the skepticism of the masses as to the radical transformation of mankind. If, as the Gospel teaches, we must not do harm unto others, then perhaps we must not harm kulaks? If the highest glory does not belong to man, then perhaps worship of Lenin and Stalin is idolatry?
+Fourth, social ecology presents a framework for comprehending the origins of human consciousness and the emergence of human reason from its natural context. Bookchin’s philosophy reaches far beyond popular, often solipsistic notions of an “ecological self,” grounding the embeddedness of consciousness in nature in a coherent theoretical framework with roots in both classical nature philosophies and modern science. It advances a challenge to overturn popular acceptance of the world as it is, and to persistently inquire as to how things ought to be.
-I have known many Christians—Poles, Frenchmen, Spaniards—who were strict Stalinists in the field of politics but who retained certain inner reservations, believing God would make corrections once the bloody sentences of the all-mighties of History were carried out. They pushed their reasoning rather far. They argue that history develops according to immutable laws that exist by the will of God; one of these laws is the class struggle; the twentieth century marks the victory of the proletariat, which is led in its struggle by the Communist Party; Stalin, the leader of the Communist Party, fulfills the law of history, or in other words acts by the will of God; therefore one must obey him. Mankind can be renewed only on the Russian pattern; that is why no Christian can oppose the one—cruel, it is true—idea which will create a new kind of man over the entire planet. Such reasoning is often used by clerics who are Party tools. “Christ is a new man. The new man is the Soviet man. Therefore Christ is a Soviet man!” said Justinian Marina, the Rumanian patriarch.
+Fifth, social ecology offers activists an historical and strategic grounding for political and organizational debates about the potential for direct democracy. Social ecologists have worked to bring the praxis of direct democracy into popular movements since the 1970s, and Bookchin’s writings offer an essential historical and theoretical context for this continuing conversation. When environmental organizations refuse to be accountable to their membership, we can offer a principled challenge, and also develop new forms of organization that help illuminate the potential for a fundamentally different kind of social and political power.
-In reality, such Christians (even omitting men like Marina) perpetuate one of the greatest lies of all centuries. They renounce their faith but are ashamed to admit it. The contradiction between Christianity and Stalinist philosophy cannot be overcome. Christianity is based on a concept of individual merit and guilt; the New Faith, on historical merit and guilt. The Christian who rejects individual merit and guilt denies the work of Jesus, and the God he calls upon slowly transforms himself into History. If he admits that only individual merit and guilt exist, how can he gaze indifferently at the suffering of people whose only sin was that they blocked the path of “historical processes”? To lull his conscience he resorts to the thesis that a reactionary cannot be a good man.
+Sixth, at a time when the remaining land-based peoples around the world are facing unprecedented assaults on their communities and livelihoods, social ecology reminds us of the roots of Western radicalism in the social milieu of peoples recently displaced from their own rural, agrarian roots. Bookchin’s four-volume opus, ''The Third Revolution'', describes in detail how revolutionary movements in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Spanish Civil War were often rooted in pre-industrial social relations, an understanding which can serve to historicize and deromanticize our approach to contemporary land-based struggles. Rather than an exotic other, vaguely reminiscent of a distant and idealized past, current peasant and indigenous movements offer much insight and practical guidance to help us live better on the earth, reclaiming both our past and our future.
-Who is the reactionary? Everyone who opposes the inevitable historical processes, i.e. the Politburo police. The thesis of the “sin of the reactionary” is argued very cleverly: every perception is “oriented,” i.e. at the very moment of perceiving we introduce our ideas into the material of our observations; only he sees reality truly who evaluates it in terms of the interests of the class that is the lever of the future, i.e. the proletariat. The writings of Lenin and Stalin teach us what the interests of the proletariat are. Whoever sees reality otherwise than as the proletariat sees it falsely; in other words, his picture of reality is deformed by the pressure of the interests of classes that are backward and so destined to disappear. Whoever sees the world falsely necessarily acts badly; whoever acts badly is a bad man; therefore the reactionary is a bad man, and one should not feel sorry for him.
+Seventh, social ecology offers a coherent and articulate political alternative to economic reductionism, identity politics, and many other trends that often dominate today’s progressive left. Bookchin polemicized relentlessly against these and other limiting tendencies, insisting that our era’s ecological crises compel a focus on the general interest, with humanity itself as the most viable “revolutionary subject.” Social ecology has helped connect contemporary revolutionaries with the legacies of the past and offered a theoretical context for sustaining a coherent, emancipatory revolutionary social vision.
-This line of reasoning has at least one flaw—it ignores the facts. The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts. When people are divided into “loyalists” and “criminals” a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling; whereas among the “criminals” one finds a singularly high percentage of people who are direct, sincere, and true to themselves. From the social point of view these persons would constitute the best guarantee that the future development of the social organism would be toward good. From the Christian point of view they have no other sin on their conscience save their contempt for Caesar, or their incorrect evaluation of his might.
+Finally, Bookchin insisted for four decades on the inseparability of oppositional political activity from a reconstructive vision of an ecological future. He viewed most popular leftist writing of our era as only half complete, focusing on critique and analysis without also proposing a coherent way forward. At the same time, social ecologists have often spoken out against the increasing accommodation of many “alternative” institutions—including numerous once-radical cooperatives and collectives—to a stifling capitalist status quo. Opposition without a reconstructive vision often leads to exhaustion and burnout. “Alternative” institutions without a link to vital, counter-systemic social movements are cajoled and coerced by market forces into the ranks of non-threatening “green” businesses, merely serving an elite clientele with products that are “socially responsible” in name only. A genuine convergence of the oppositional and reconstructive strands of activity is a first step toward a political movement that can ultimately begin to contest and reclaim political power.
-The assertion that historical guilt is individual guilt per se is nothing more than the subterfuge of a guilty and lying conscience. This does not mean that one can put off the problem of historical guilt with easy generalizations. Stupidity, i.e. inability to understand the mechanism of events, can cause tremendous suffering. In this sense, the Polish commanders who gave the order to start the Warsaw uprising in 1944 are guilty of stupidity, and their guilt has an individual character. Another individual guilt, however, weighs upon the command of the Red Army which refused to aid the insurgents—not out of stupidity, but on the contrary out of a full understanding of “historical processes,” i.e. a correct evaluation of power.
+Some defenders of the status quo would have us believe that “green” capitalism and the “information economy” will usher in a transition to a more ecological future. But, like all the capitalisms of the past, this latest incarnation relies ultimately on the continued and perpetual expansion of its reach, at the expense of people and ecosystems worldwide. From urban centers to remote rural villages, we are all being sold on a way of life that can only continue to devour the earth and its peoples. Today’s high-tech consumer lifestyles, whether played out in New York, Beijing, Bangalore, or the remotest reaches of human civilization, defy all meaningful limits, ultimately raising global inequality and economic oppression to previously unimaginable proportions while profoundly destabilizing the earth’s ability to sustain complex life.
-One more example of guilt through stupidity is the attitude of various societies toward thinkers, writers, or artists whose vision reached into the future and whose works were largely incomprehensible to theii contemporaries. The critic who denied the value of these works might have acted in good faith, but by his stupidity he condemned men of incomparably greater worth than himself to poverty, even persecution. The specific trick of the Christian-Stalinists is to lump these two concepts of guilt, individual and historical, together, while it is only in a few instances that these concepts coincide.
+The corrosive simplification of living ecosystems and the retreat into an increasingly synthetic world that Murray Bookchin warned of in the early 1960s has evolved from a disturbing future projection into an impending global reality. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to challenge economic and social systems at their core and evolve a broad, counterhegemonic social movement that refuses to compromise its values or settle for partial measures. Nearly fifty years ago, Bookchin observed and reported on the dramatic May-June revolt in Paris in 1968, when huge crowds of students and workers united to occupy the universities and the streets. One of their popular slogans, inspired by the writings of the French Situationists in the late 1950s and early sixties, is usually translated as, “Be realistic—do (or ‘demand’) the impossible.” In response to the emerging ecological crisis, Bookchin urged his readers to consider a “more solemn injunction”: “If we don’t do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.”[28] Facing a future of unstoppable climate chaos if we fail to act quickly, we need to set our sights on nothing less.
-Catholics who accept the Party line gradually lose everything except the phraseology of their Christian metaphysics. The true content of their faith becomes the Method by a psychological process well-known to Christians in the people’s democracies. The existence of a large number of loyal half-Christians in the subjugated part of Europe could have a tremendous effect on the Imperium’s political plans. Toleration and even support of these “Christian-patriots,” as they are called, enables the Center to avoid a dangerous conflict. The transition from Christianity to a cult of History takes place imperceptibly. Without doubt, the greatest success of the Imperium would come if it could install a Party-line pope in the Vatican. A mass in the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome performed by such a pope, with the assistance of dignitaries from those subjugated countries which are predominately Catholic, would be one of the most important steps toward the consolidation of the world empire.
+=== {{anchor|NotesPrefacetotheRevised}} {{anchor|Topofpart0010html}} {{anchor|Notes}} Notes ===
-Christians who serve the Eastern Imperium ingeniously resolve the problem posed by Jesus’ words “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Until now the contrast between the ordinary man and Caesar has never been effaced. Christianity guaranteed this division by teaching that every man had his own history, distinct from the history of the social group or the nation to which he belonged. If, as is taught today from the Elbe to Vladivostok, the history of every man is nothing more than the reflection of the history of his class, and if his class is personified in Caesar, then it is clear that the man who rebels against Caesar rebels against himself. Christians who agree to this thesis prove they no longer believe in God’s judgment of each man’s acts. Fear that History will damn them eternally motivates their submission.
+==== Preface to the Revised Edition ====
-The Party knows that the conflict between true Christianity and the Revolution is fundamental. The Revolution aims at the highest goal the human species has ever set for itself on earth, the end of “man’s exploitation of man.” To do this, it must replace man’s desire for profit with a feeling of collective responsibility as a motive for action. This is a distant and honorable goal. Probably it will not be reached quickly; and probably, too, for a long period it will be necessary to maintain a constant terror in order to instill that feeling of responsibility by force. But Christianity contains a dual set of values; it recognizes man to be a “child of God” and also a member of society. As a member of society, he must submit to the established order so long as that order does not hinder him in his prime task of saving his soul. Only by effacing this dualism, i.e. raising man as a purely social creature, can the Party release the forces of hatred in him that are necessary to the realization of the new world.
+# ''Climate Change Impacts in the United States: Overview and Report Findings'' (Washington, DC: US Global Change Research Program, 2014), p. 9. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that atmospheric water vapor has risen by 4 percent since the 1970s, with a likely 5-10 percent effect on amplification of precipitation and storms: his article is “Framing the way to relate climate extremes to climate change,” ''Climatic Change ''115:2 (2012) pp. 283-29.
+# James Hansen, ''et al''., “Perception of climate change,” ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,'' 109 (2012), pp. 14726-14727. Temperatures are defined as far warmer than normal here if they deviate from the norm by more than three standard deviations.
+# James Samenow, “February caps 29-year streak of warmer than normal months on Earth,” ''Washington Post online'', at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/03/19/february-completes-29-year-streak-of-warmer-than-normal-months-on-earth (March 19, 2014).
+# Pardeep Pall, ''et al''., “Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000,” ''Nature'' 470 (2011), pp. 382-86.
+# Matthias Dietz & Heiko Garrelts, eds., ''Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement'' (Oxford: Routledge International Handbooks Series, 2013).
+# Michael T. Klare, “The New ‘Golden Age of Oil’ That Wasn’t,” TomDispatch.com (2012), http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175601/klare_the_new_golden_age_of_oil_that_wasn.
+# For more details see Brian Tokar, “Tar Sands, Extreme Energy and the Future of the Climate Movement,” in T. Black, ''et al''., eds., ''A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice'' (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2014).
+# Subhankar Banerjee, “Shell Game in the Arctic,” TomDispatch.com (August 2, 2012), http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175577/subhankar_banerjee_arctic_shell_game; Clifford Krauss, “Shell Vessels Sidelined, Imperilling Arctic Plans,” ''New York Times'' (February 11, 2013).
+# Tricia Shapiro, ''Mountain Justice'' (Oakland: AK Press, 2010).
+# See, for example, Marc Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, “A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030,” ''Scientific American'' (November 2009), pp. 58-65, and further discussion of these issues in Chapter 5 of this book.
-The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States, or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures. The erosion of religious beliefs is also taking place in Central and Eastern Europe. There, the core of the problem is to avoid galvanizing the forces of Christianity by some careless misstep. It would be an act of unforgivable carelessness, for example, to close the churches suddenly and prohibit all religious practice. Instead, one should try to split the Church in two. Part of the clergy must be compromised as reactionaries and “foreign agents”—a rather easy task, given the utterly conservative mentality of many priests. The other part must be bound to the state as closely as the Orthodox Church is in Russia, so that it becomes a tool of the government. A completely submissive Church—one that may on occasion collaborate with the security police—loses authority in the eyes of the pious. Such a Church can be preserved for decades, until the moment when it dies a natural death due to a lack of adherents.
-So there are measures that can be taken even against the Church, this last stronghold of opposition. Nevertheless, the masses in the people’s democracies behave like a man who wants to cry out in his sleep and cannot find his voice. They not only dare not speak, they do not know what to say. Logically, everything is as it should be. From the philosophical premises to the collectivization of the farms, everything makes up a single closed whole, a solid and imposing pyramid. The lone individual inevitably asks himself if his antagonism is not wrong; all he can oppose to the entire propaganda apparatus are simply his irrational desires. Should he not, in fact, be ashamed of them?
-The Party is vigilantly on guard lest these longings be transmuted into new and vital intellectual formulas adapted to new conditions and therefore capable of winning over the masses. Neither the reaction nor the Church are as great a menace as is heresy. If men familiar with dialectics and able to present dialectical materialism in a new light appear, they must be rendered harmless at once. A professor of philosophy who clings to obsolete “idealistic” concepts is not particularly dangerous. He loses his lectureship, but he is allowed to earn a living by editing texts, etc. Whereas a professor who, using the names of Marx and Engels, permits himself departures from orthodoxy sows seeds from which alarming crops may grow.
+==== Global Warming and the Struggle for Justice ====
-Only the bourgeois persists in thinking that nothing results from these nuances of thought. The Party knows that much can come of them: there was a time when the Revolution was merely a nuance in the thinking of a little group of theoreticians led by Lenin, quarreling around a cafe table in Switzerland. The most neuralgic points of the doctrine are philosophy, literature, the history of art, and literary criticism; those are the points where man in his unfortunate complexity enters the equation. The difference of a tiny fraction in the premises yields dizzying differences after the calculation is completed. A deviation from the line in the evaluation of some work of art may become the leaven of a political upheaval. The Party rightly and logically condemned the foremost Marxist literary scholar of the twentieth century, the Hungarian professor Lukacs. Deep, hidden reasons lay behind the enthusiasm his works aroused in the Marxists of the people’s democracies. They saw in him the harbinger of a new philosophy and a new literature. The dislike of “socialist realism” that he betrayed corresponded to the belief, prevalent in the first years after the Second World War, that in the people’s democracies the science of Marx and Engels would blaze new paths, unknown in Russia. Because Lukacs expressed this belief in his books, the Party had no course but to stigmatize him.
+# A thoughtful early response from US climate scientists to the widely publicized leaked emails from the University of East Anglia in the UK can be found at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack. For a thorough review of the scientific response to these allegations, see Michael Mann, ''The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 207-248.
+# On corporate funding of climate denial, see for example, ''Koch Industries Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine'' (Washington, DC: Greenpeace USA, March 2010), at http://greenpeace.org/kochindustries.
+# Anthony Leiserowitz, ''et al''., “Climate Change in the American Mind: Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in January 2010,” (New Haven and Washington, DC: Yale Project on Climate Change and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, 2010), at http://environment.yale.edu/uploads/AmericansGlobalWarmingBeliefs2010.pdf.
+# Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons,” ''New York Times'' (May 24, 2010).
+# Anthony Leiserowitz, ''et al''., ''What’s In A Name? Global Warming vs. Climate Change'' (New Haven and Washington, DC: Yale Project on Climate Change and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, 2014), p. 23.
+# David Leonhardt, “On Climate, Republicans and Democrats Are From Different Continents,” ''New York Times'' (May 8, 2014), at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/upshot/on-climate-republicans-and-democrats-are-from-different-continents.html.
+# ''IPCC Working Group I Summary for Policymakers (September 2013), p. SPM-32, from ipcc.ch.''
+# The emerging conflict between technocratic environmentalism and social ecology was first explored by social ecologist Murray Bookchin in the 1970s; several of his essays from that period are compiled in his ''Toward an Ecological Society'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980).
+# Andrew C. Revkin, “The Climate Divide: Reports From Four Fronts in the War on Warming,” ''New York Times'' (April 3, 2007).
+# Kathy Marks, “Global Warming Threatens Pacific Island States,” ''The Independent'' (October 27, 2006).
+# Nicholas Schmidle, “Wanted: A New Home for My Country,” ''New York Times'' (May 10, 2009). An award-winning 2011 film, ''The Island President'', further documented Nasheed’s efforts.
+# Naomi Klein, “Rapture Rescue 911: Disaster Response for the Chosen,” ''The Nation ''(November 19, 2007).
+# See, for example, Ernest Waititu “Drought Spurs Resource Wars,” Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, reprinted in ''The Indypendent'' (New York City), No. 119 (April 25, 2008).
+# Jim Yardley, “Drought Puts Focus on a Side of India Left Out of Progress,” ''New York Times'' (September 5, 2009).
+# Rahul Goswami, “The Road From Drought: The Monsoon Crisis of 2009,” Pune: ''InfoChange India'', September 2009, at http://infochangeindia.org/200909167941/Agriculture/Analysis/The-road-from-drought.html.
+# ''No Place Like Home: Where Next for Climate Refugees? ''(London: Environmental Justice Foundation, 2009), p. 4.
+# For further explanation see the Preface to this volume.
+# The various IPCC reports, and condensed “Summaries for Policy Makers,” can be downloaded from http://www.ipcc.ch.
+# Reported in James Hansen, ''et al''., “Climate change and trace gases,” ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', A 365 (2007), pp. 1925–1954 and James Hansen, ''et al''., “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” (unpublished manuscript), available from http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf.
+# The IPCC’s conclusions in this and the next two paragraphs are from their 2007 Working Group II Report, titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” and available from http://www.ipcc.ch.
+# IPCC Working Group II Report (2007), p. 393.
+# ''Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability'', IPCC Working Group II Summary for Policymakers (March 2014), p. 12, from ipcc.ch.
+# For example, the IPCC’s latest report mentions that the number of available citations on climate and health alone doubled between 2007 and 2009. See “Human Health: Impacts, Adaptation and Co-Benefits,” Chapter 11 of the full IPCC Working Group II report (2014), p. 5.
+# ''World Resources Institute, Synthesis: Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, A Report of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), p. 119.''
+# Juliet Eilperin, “New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast Of 6.3-Degree Temperature Increase,” ''Washington Post'' (September 25, 2009), at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/24/AR2009092402602.html; David Adam, “Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes,” ''The Guardian'' (September 28, 2009), at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/28/met-office-study-global-warming
+# See Mark New, ''et al''., “Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications, ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', A 369 (2011), pp. 6-19.
+# ''Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World (United Nations Development Program, 2007), p. 16.''
+# ''The Right to Survive: The humanitarian challenge for the twenty-first century (London: Oxfam International, April 2009).''
+# Rafael Reuveny, “Climate change-induced migration and violent conflict, ''Political Geography'' 26 (2007), pp. 656-673.
+# Praful Bidwai, “Climate change, equity and development—India’s dilemmas,” in Niclas Hällstrom, ed., ''What Next Volume III: Climate, Development and Equity'' (Development Dialog No. 61; Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 2012), p. 148.
+# Dan Smith and Janani Vivekananda, ''A Climate of Conflict: The links between climate change, peace and war'' (London: International Alert, November 2007), p. 3.
+# Michael T. Klare, “The Pentagon vs. Peak Oil: How Wars of the Future May Be Fought Just to Run the Machines That Fight Them” (2007), at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174810.
+# ''Human Development Report 2007/2008, p. 27.''
+# Peter Baker, “Developing Nations Rebuff G-8 on Curbing Pollutants,” ''New York Times'' (July 8, 2009).
+# “Hit the brakes hard,” ''Real Climate'' (April 29, 2009), at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/04/hit-the-brakes-hard.
+# Malte Meinshausen, ''et al''., “Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2ºC,” ''Nature'' 458 (April 30 2009), pp. 1158-1163.
+# Richard Monastersky, “A burden beyond bearing,” ''Nature'' 458 (April 30 2009), pp. 1091-1094.
+# IPCC Working Group I Summary for Policymakers (September 2013), p. SPM-20, from ipcc.ch; Meinshausen, ''et al''., “Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2ºC,” supra note 33.
+# Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner, “Time to ditch Kyoto,” ''Nature'' 449 (October 25, 2007), pp. 973-975.
+# Joeri Rogelj, ''et al''., “Global warming under old and new scenarios using IPCC climate sensitivity range estimates,” ''Nature Climate Change'' 2 (2012), pp. 248–253; Glen P. Peters, ''et al''., “The challenge to keep global warming below 2°C,” ''Nature Climate Change'' 3 (2013), pp. 4-6.
+# James Hansen, ''et al''., “Assessing ‘Dangerous Climate Change’: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature,” ''PLOS One'' 8:12 (2013), p. 8.
-When one considers the matter logically, it be-comes obvious that intellectual terror is a principle that Leninism-Stalinism can never forsake, even if it should achieve victory on a world scale. The enemy, in a potential form, will always be there; the only friend will be the man who accepts the doctrine 100 per cent. If he accepts only 99 per cent, he will necessarily have to be considered a foe, for from that remaining 1 per cent a new church can arise. The explanation Stalinists often advance, that this is only a stage resulting from “capitalist encirclement,” is self-contradictory. The concept of a stage presupposes planning from the top, absolute control now and always. Eastern rulers are aware of this contradiction. If they were not, they would not have to present forced participation in clubs and parades, forced voting for a single list, forced raising of production norms, etc. as spontaneous and voluntary acts. This is a dark, unpleasant point for even the most passionate believers.
-This way of posing the problem discloses the madness of the doctrines. Party dialecticians know that similar attempts on the part of other orthodoxies have always failed. In fact, History itself exploded one after another the formulas that have been considered binding. This time, however, the rulers have mastered dialectics so, they assert, they will know how to modify the doctrine as new necessities arise. The judgments of an individual man can always be wrong; the only solution is to submit unreservedly to an authority that claims to be unerring.
-But what can the doctrine do about the unformulated longings of men? Why does a good Communist, without any apparent reason, suddenly put a pistol to his head? Why does he escape abroad? Isn’t this one of those chasms over which the scientifically constructed bridges pass? People who flee from the people’s democracies usually give as their chief motive the fact that life in these countries is psychically unbearable. They stammer out their efforts to explain: “The dreadful sadness of life over there”; “I felt I was turning into a machine.” It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
+==== The UN Climate Negotiations and Beyond ====
-To forestall doubt, the Party fights any tendency to delve into the depths of a human being, especially in literature and art. Whoever reflects on “man” in general, on his inner needs and longings, is accused of bourgeois sentimentality. Nothing must ever go beyond the description of man’s behavior as a member of a social group. This is necessary because the Party, treating man exclusively as the by-product of social forces, believes that he becomes the type of being he pictures himself to be. He is a social monkey. What is not expressed does not exist. Therefore if one forbids men to explore the depths of human nature, one destroys in them the urge to make such explorations; and the depths in themselves slowly become unreal.
+# http://www.350.org/en/story, accessed April 2013.
+# Martin Khor, “Climate talks facing crisis,” Shah Alam, Malaysia: ''The Star'' (June 15, 2009), via email.
+# Naomi Klein elaborated the link between Obama’s renewed multilateralism and Europe’s capitulation in “Obama isn’t helping. At least the world argued with Bush,” ''The Guardian'' (October 16, 2009).
+# Praful Bidwai, “Climate change, equity and development—India’s dilemmas,” in Niclas Hällstrom, ed., ''What Next Volume III: Climate, Development and Equity ''(Development Dialog No. 61; Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 2012), p. 158.
+# Lim Li Lin, “Why we need to save the Kyoto Protocol” (Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network: November 2009).
+# Obama pledged that the US would reduce emissions approximately 17% from 2005 levels by 2020, echoing a bill that passed the House of Representatives in June of 2009, This was equivalent to only a 4-5 percent reduction from 1990 levels, the baseline established in Kyoto. EU countries, in contrast, agreed in Kyoto to an 8 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2012.
+# Michael A. Levi, “Copenhagen’s Inconvenient Truth: How to Salvage the Climate Conference,” ''Foreign Affairs'' 88:5 (September/October 2009), pp. 92-104.
+# See, for example, I. Allison, ''et al.'', ''The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science'' (Sydney: University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, November 2009); on the British study, see David Adam, “Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes,” ''The Guardian'' (September 28, 2009).
+# Rachel Smolker, personal communication (December 9, 2007).
+# Full reports on these actions were posted at actforclimatejustice.org.
+# Becca Connors, email message from Friends of the Earth (December 18, 2009); George Monbiot, “Copenhagen Negotiators Bicker and Filibuster While the Biosphere Burns,” ''The Guardian'' (December 19, 2009), at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-negotiators-bicker-filibuster-biosphere; Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Obama as Climate Change Villain” (December 21, 2009), from www.project-syndicate.org (accessed June 2010).
+# Martin Khor, “Climate: Talks end by only ‘noting’ an Accord after much wrangling,” ''South-North Development Monitor'' No. 6840 (December 22, 2009).
+# Joeri Rogelj, ''et al.'', “Copenhagen Accord pledges are paltry,” ''Nature'' 464 (2010), pp. 1126-1128.
+# ''ibid. ''p. 1128.
+# People’s Agreement, World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, at http://pwccc.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/peoples-agreement.
+# Martin Khor, “Complex implications of the Cancun Climate Conference” ''Economic and Political Weekly'' 45:52 (Mumbai, December 2010).
+# Both are quoted in Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle, “The Durban Disaster,” ''Z Magazine'' (February 2012).
+# Todd D. Stern, “The Shape of a New International Climate Agreement” (London, UK, October 2013), at http://www.state.gov/e/oes/rls/remarks/2013/215720.htm.
-I should like to clear up in advance a possible misunderstanding. Personally, I am not in favor of art that is too subjective. My poetry has always been a means of checking on myself. Through it I could ascertain the limit beyond which falseness of style testifies to the falseness of the artist’s position; and I have tried not to cross this line. The war years taught me that a man should not take a pen in his hands merely to communicate to others his own despair and defeat. This is too cheap a commodity; it takes too little effort to produce it for a man to pride himself on having done so. Whoever saw, as many did, a whole city reduced to rubble—kilometers of streets on which there remained no trace of life, not even a cat, not even a homeless dog—emerged with a rather ironic attitude toward descriptions of the hell of the big city by contemporary poets, descriptions of the hell in their own souls. A real “wasteland” is much more trouble than any imaginary one. Whoever has not dwelt in the midst of horror and dread cannot know how strongly a witness and participant protests against himself, against his own neglect and egoism. Destruction and suffering are the school of social thought.
-Yet, if the literature of socialist realism is useful, it is so only to the Party. It is supposed to present reality not as a man sees it (that was the trait of the previous realism, the so-called “critical”), but as he understands it. Understanding that reality is in motion, and that in every phenomenon what is being born and what is dying exist simultaneously—dialectically speaking, this is the battle between the “new” and the “old”—the author should praise everything that is budding and censure everything that is becoming the past. In practice, this means that the author should perceive elements of the class struggle in every phenomenon. Carrying this reasoning further, the doctrine forces all art to become didactic. Since only the Stalinists have the right to represent the proletariat, which is the rising class, everything that is “new” and therefore praiseworthy results from Party strategy and tactics. “Socialist realism” depends on an identification of the “new” with the proletariat and the proletariat with the Party. It presents model citizens, i.e. Communists, and class enemies. Between these two categories come the men who vacillate. Eventually, they must—according to which tendencies are stronger in them—land in one camp or the other. When literature is not dealing with prefabricated figures of friends and foes, it studies the process of metamorphosis by which men arrive at total salvation or absolute damnation in Party terms.
-This way of treating literature (and every art) leads to absolute conformism. Is such conformism favorable to serious artistic work? That is doubtful. The sculptures of Michelangelo are completed acts that endure. There was a time when they did not exist. Between their non-existence and existence lies the creative act, which cannot be understood as a submission to the “wave of the future.” The creative act is associated with a feeling of freedom that is, in its turn, bom in the struggle against an apparently invincible resistance. Whoever truly creates is alone. When he succeeds in creating, many followers and imitators appear; and then it seems that his work confirms the existence of some sort of “wave of history.” The creative man has no choice but to trust his inner command and place everything at stake in order to express what seems to him to be true. This inner command is absurd if it is not supported by a belief in an order of values that exists beyond the changeability of human affairs, that is by a metaphysical belief. Herein lies the tragedy of the twentieth century. Today, only those people can create who still have this faith (among them are a certain number of Stalinists who practice Ketman), or who hold a position of lay stoicism (which, after all, is probably another form of faith). For the rest there remains the sorry lie of a safe place on the “wave of the future.”
+==== Toward a Movement for Climate Justice ====
-This is the framework within which life develops in the people’s democracies; but it is a life that moves at a frenzied tempo. “Socialist construction” is not merely a slogan; it is taken in a quite literal sense. The observer’s eye meets scaffolding everywhere; new factories, offices, and government buildings spring up almost overnight; production curves rise; the masses change character with unheard-of rapidity; more and more persons become state functionaries and acquire a certain minimum of “political education.” The press, literature, films, and theater magnify these attainments. If a man from Mars, knowing nothing of earthly affairs, were to judge the various countries of the world on the basis of Soviet books, he would conclude that the East is inhabited by rational, intelligent beings, while the West is peopled by dwarfs and degenerates. Small wonder that so many intelligent Westerners, for whom the Soviet Union and its satellites are the legendary isles of happiness, arrive at a similar conclusion.
+# Classic photos from Bali and subsequent UN climate conferences can be viewed in slides from an exhibit assembled by photojournalist Orin Langelle for the 2013 conference in Warsaw, at http://photolangelle.org/2013/11/09/the-warsaw-poland-exhibit.
+# “Mobilization for Climate Justice Open Letter to the Grassroots,” at http://www.actforclimatejustice.org/about/open-letter-to-the-grassroots/.
+# CJA declaration, as conveyed via personal communication from Tadzio Müller (July 16, 2009).
+# Kenny Bruno,'' et al., Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice'' (San Francisco: Transnational Resource & Action Center, 1999).
+# ''Toxic wastes and race in the United States: A national report on the racial and socioeconomic characteristics of communities with hazardous waste sites (New York: United Church of Christ, 1987). The conclusions were updated in Robert D. Bullard, et al., Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty 1987—2007: Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the United States (Cleveland: United Church of Christ, 2007).''
+# Brian Tokar, “Environmental Justice,” in ''Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash'' (Boston: South End Press, 1997), pp. 125-140.
+# Available from http://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html.
+# Downloaded from http://www.ejnet.org/ej/climatejustice.pdf, accessed June 14, 2012.
+# Downloaded from http://www.ejnet.org/ej/bali.pdf, accessed June 14, 2012.
+# The climate-centered activities of GJEP are highlighted on their blog, at http://climate-connections.org and IEN’s at http://ienearth.org/climatejustice.html.
+# http://www.durbanclimatejustice.org/durban-declaration/english.html.
+# Climate Justice Now press statement, Bali, Indonesia, December 14, 2007, via Durban Group email list.
+# “Climate Justice Now: Principles of Unity,” May 12, 2008 draft, via Climate Justice Now email list.
+# A full listing as of November 2010 is at http://www.climate-justice-now.org/category/climate-justice-movement/cjn-members (accessed August 11, 2010).
+# Statement of Henry Saragih, general coordinator of La Vía Campesina, to the Klimaforum alternative summit, December 7, 2009, via ''CommonDreams.org'', accessed December 9, 2009.
+# J. Andrew Hoerner and Nia Robinson, ''A Climate of Change: African Americans, Global Warming, and a Just Climate Policy in the U.S.'' (Oakland: Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, June 2008).
+# ''Rachel Morello-Frosch, et al., The Climate Gap: Inequalities in How Climate Change Hurts Americans and How to Close the Gap (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, May 2009).''
+# WEACT’s origins are discussed in Ashley Dawson, “Climate Justice: The Emerging Movement against Green Capitalism,” ''South Atlantic Quarterly'' 109:2 (Spring 2010), pp. 325-326. Also see ''Advancing Climate Justice: Transforming the Economy, Public Health and Our Environment: Conference Agenda and Resource Guide'' (New York: WEACT, 2009).
+# Comments of Robert Bullard at “Advancing Climate Justice: Transforming the Economy, Public Health and Our Environment” conference, New York: Fordham University (January 30, 2009).
+# “What does Climate Justice mean in Europe? A Discussion Paper,” via Climate Justice Action email list (March 26, 2010).
+# http://www.risingtidenorthamerica.org/about-rising-tide-north-america/our-history/, accessed June 18, 2012; “Remember, Remember: Climate Camp,” ''Shift Magazine'' No. 12, at http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=461.
+# See Brian Tokar, “Organization profile—Rising Tide,” in Matthias Dietz & Heiko Garrelts, eds., ''Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement'' (Oxford: Routledge International Handbooks Series, 2013), pp. 255-257.
+# Nicola Bullard & Tadzio Müller, “Beyond the ‘Green Economy’: System change, not climate change?” ''Development'' 55:1 (2012), p. 57.
+# Movement Generation’s outlook and activities are described at http://www.movementgeneration.org. Their distinct approach to climate justice organizing, developed in collaboration with the Ruckus Society and other groups, is most fully explored in Hilary Moore and Joshua Kahn Russell, ''Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections on Navigating the Climate Crisis'' (Oakland: PM Press, 2011).
+# Available at http://www.climate-justice-now.org/cj-in-the-usa-root-cause-remedies-rights-reparations-and-representation (accessed June 14, 2012).
+# See http://www.ourpowercampaign.org.
+# Jacqueline Patterson, “And the People Shall Lead: Centralizing Frontline Community Leadership in the Movement Towards a Sustainable Planet” (October 2013), via email.
+# Moore and Russell, ''Organizing Cools the Planet'' (supra note 24), p. 15.
+# See Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle, “The Durban Disaster,” ''Z Magazine ''(February 2012).
+# GGJ’s activities at the “Rio+20” environmental summit in Brazil in 2012 are outlined at http://ggjalliance.org/node/982. On climate justice and organized labor, see http://www.labor4sustainability.org and http://energydemocracyinitiative.org.
+# Patrick Bond, ''The Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below'' (Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012), especially pp. 188-194.
+# Rising Tide North America’s sit-in at EDF’s offices in Washington, DC in December of 2008 is described at http://www.risingtidenorthamerica.org/wordpress/2008/12/01/first-hand-account-of-environmental-defense-occupation; the November 30, 2009 demonstration at NRDC headquarters is at http://www.risingtidenorthamerica.org/wordpress/2009/09/24/nyc- climate-activists-expose-the-true-“green”-of-big-enviros-deliver-giant-climate-“bill”-to-offices/.
+# La Via Campesina and ASEED Europe, “Call to the Climate Agriculture Action Day December 15th, 2009” (November 2009), via email.
+# Numerous such initiatives are described in detail in Tommy Linstroth and Ryan Bell, ''Local Action: The New Paradigm in Climate Change Policy'' (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2007).
+# Michael T. Klare, “The New ‘Golden Age of Oil’ That Wasn’t,” ''TomDispatch.com'', at http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175601/klare_the_new_golden_age_of_oil_that_wasn.
+# See http://www.tarsandsblockade.org.
+# Mark Hertsgaard, “Climate Activists Put the Heat on Obama,” ''The Nation'' (February 18, 2013).
+# “Uranium Hype Hits Indigenous Opposition Globally, Provokes Conflict in the North” (Ottawa: Mining Watch Canada, 2007), at http://www.miningwatch.ca/uranium-hype-hits-indigenous-opposition-globally-provokes-conflict-north; Ramsey Hart, “Indigenous Rights and Mining—Recent Developments, Opportunities and Challenges” (2011), at http://www.miningwatch.ca/article/indigenous-rights-and-mining-recent-developments-opportunities-and-challenges.
+# “What does Climate Justice mean in Europe? A discussion paper,” supra note 20.
-The citizen of the people’s democracies is immune to the kind of neurosis that takes such manifold forms in capitalist countries. In the West a man subconsciously regards society as unrelated to him. Society indicates the limits he must not exceed; in exchange for this he receives a guarantee that no one will meddle excessively in his affairs. If he loses it’s his own fault; let psychoanalysis help him. In the East there is no boundary between man and society. His game, and whether he loses or wins, is a public matter. He is never alone. If he loses it is not because of indifference on the part of his environment, but because his environment keeps him under such minute scrutiny. Neuroses as they are known in the West result, above all, from man’s aloneness; so even if they were allowed to practice, psychoanalysts would not earn a penny in the people’s democracies.
-The torment of a man in the East is, as we have seen, of a new, hitherto unknown variety. Humanity devised effective measures against smallpox, typhus, syphilis; but life in big cities or giant collectives breeds new diseases. Russian revolutionists discovered what they claimed were effectual means of mastering the forces of History. They proclaimed they had found the panacea for the ills of society. But History itself repays them in jeers.
-The supreme goal of doing away with the struggle for existence—which was the theoretician’s dream—has not been and cannot be achieved while every man fears every other man. The state which, according to Lenin, was supposed to wither away gradually is now all-powerful. It holds a sword over the head of every citizen; it punishes him for every careless word. The promises made from time to time that the state will begin to wither away when the entire earth is conquered lack any foundation. Orthodoxy cannot release its pressure on men’s minds; it would no longer be an orthodoxy. There is always some disparity between facts and theories. The world is full of contradictions. Their constant struggle is what Hegel called dialectic. That dialectic of reality turns against the dialectic fashioned by the Center; but then so much the worse for reality. It has been said that the twentieth century is notable for its synthetic products—synthetic rubber, synthetic gasoline, etc. Not to be outdone, the Party has processed an artificial dialectic whose only resemblance to Hegel’s philosophy is purely superficial. The Method is effective just so long as it wages war against an enemy. A man exposed to its influence is helpless. How can he fight a system of symbols? In the end he submits; and this is the secret of the Party’s power, not some fantastic narcotic.
+==== Carbon Trading and Other False Solutions ====
-There is a species of insect which injects its venom into a caterpillar; thus inoculated, the caterpillar lives on though it is paralyzed. The poisonous insect then lays its eggs in it, and the body of the caterpillar serves as a living larder for the young brood. Just so (though Marx and Engels never foresaw this use for their doctrine), the anaesthetic of dialectical materialism is injected into the mind of a man in the people’s democracies. When his brain is duly paralyzed, the eggs of Stalinism are laid in it. As soon as you are a Marxist, the Party says to the patient, you must be a Stalinist, for there is no Marxism outside of Stalinism.
+# ''Indigenous Peoples’ Guide: False Solutions to Climate Change'' (Bemidji, Minnesota: Indigenous Environmental Network and Carbon Trade Watch, 2009); ''Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: False Solutions to Climate Change'' (Hood River, Oregon: Rising Tide North America and Carbon Trade Watch (2011).
+# ''See, for example, The Emperor’s New Climate: Geoengineering as 21st Century Fairytale (Ottawa: ETC Group, 2009).''
+# Winona LaDuke'', “''Navajos ban uranium mining,” ''Earth Island Journal ''(Autumn 2005), at http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/navajos_ban_uranium_mining.
+# See, for example, Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, ''Nuclear Power: The Energy Balance''<nowiki>; available at http://www.stormsmith.nl.</nowiki>
+# Amory B. Lovins and Imran Sheikh, “The Nuclear Illusion,” available at http://community.livejournal.com/greenparty/342794.html.
+# Linda Gunter, “The French Nuclear Industry Is Bad Enough in France; Let’s Not Expand It to the U.S.,” ''AlterNet'' (March 23, 2009); Peter Saunders, “More Trouble at Olkiluoto Nuclear Plant” (London: The Institute of Science in Society, March 2014), at http://permaculturenews.org/2014/03/06/trouble-olkiluoto-nuclear-plant.
+# John Kerry and Lindsey Graham, “Yes We Can (Pass Climate Change Legislation),” ''New York Times'' (October 11, 2009); Darren Samuelsohn, “Senate Dems Opening to Nuclear as Path to GOP Support for Climate Bill,” ''New York Times ClimateWire'' (October 7, 2009).
+# See, for example, Emily Rochon, ''et al., False Hope: Why Carbon Capture and Storage Won’t Save the Climate'' (Amsterdam: Greenpeace International, 2008).
+# Trip Gabriel, “Ash Spill Shows How Watchdog Was Defanged,” ''New York Times'' (February 28, 2014).
+# Charles Duhigg, “Cleansing the Air at the Expense of Waterways,” ''New York Times'' (October 13, 2009).
+# Brian Tokar, “Biofuels and the Global Food Crisis,” in Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar, eds., ''Agriculture and Food in Crisis'' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).
+# Lester R. Brown, “Supermarkets and Service Stations Now Competing for Grain,” ''Earth Policy Institute Update'' (July 13, 2006), at http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update55.htm; C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor,” ''Foreign Affairs'', 86:3 (2007), pp. 41–53. A summary of the human rights impacts is in Brian Tokar, “Biofuels and the Global Food Crisis” (''ibid''.). On the problem of global land grabs, see the chapter by the international research group GRAIN, “The New Farm Owners: Corporate Investors and the Control of Overseas Farmland” in Magdoff and Tokar, eds., ''Agriculture and Food in Crisis, ibid''.
+# Ward Anseeuw, ''et al''., ''Land Rights and the Rush for Land'' (Rome: ILC, 2012), p. 4, available at http://www.cirad.fr/en/publications-resources/publishing/studies-and-documents/land-rights-and-the-rush-for-land.
+# Jason Hill, ''et al''., “Environmental, Economic, and Energetic Costs and Benefits of Biodiesel and Ethanol Biofuels,” ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'', 103:30 (2006), pp. 11206–11210.
+# For example, see Joseph Fargione, ''et al''., “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt,” ''Science'' 319:5867 (February 29, 2008), pp. 1235-1238; Timothy Searchinger, ''et al.,'' “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change,” ''Science'' 319:5867 (February 29, 2008), pp. 1238-1240, both also available from www.sciencexpress.org.
+# See Rachel Smolker, ''et al''., “The True Cost of Agrofuels: Impacts on Food, Forests, Peoples and the Climate,” (Asunción, Paraguay: Global Forest Coalition, 2008), especially Chapter 6, available at http://www.globalforestcoalition.org/img/userpics/File/publications/Truecostagrofuels.pdf; for continuing updates see http://www.nogetrees.org.
+# See, for example, ETC Group, ''Who Will Control the Green Economy?'' (Ottawa: ETC Group, November 2011), and Ronnie Hall and Joseph Zacune, ''Bio-Economies: The EU’s real ‘Green Economy’ agenda?'' (London: World Development Movement and Transnational Institute, June 2012).
+# See, for example, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, “Global CO2 Emissions: Annual Increase Halves in 2008”; available at http://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/2009/Global-CO2-emissions-annual-increase-halves-in-2008.html.
+# An updated version of this history can be found in Brian Tokar, “The Myths of “Green Capitalism,” ''New Politics'' (Winter 2014) pp. 62-67.
+# R.H. Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” ''Journal of Law and Economics'', Vol. 3 (1960), p. 44.
+# J.H. Dales, Pollution, ''Property & Prices'' (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), p. 97.
+# W. David Montgomery, “Markets in Licenses and Efficient Pollution Control Programs,” ''Journal of Economic Theory'', 5 (1972), pp. 395–418.
+# Stephen Breyer, “Analyzing Regulatory Failure, Mismatches, Less Restrictive Alternatives and Reform,” ''Harvard Law Review'', 92:3 (1979), pp. 547–609.
+# For a more complete treatment of the origins of the US Acid Rain Program, see Brian Tokar, ''Earth For Sale'' (Boston: South End Press, 1997), pp. 33–45.
+# See, for example, Gar Lipow, “Emissions Trading: A Mixed Record, with Plenty of Failures,” ''Grist'' (February 19, 2007).
+# George Monbiot, “We’ve Been Suckered Again by the US. So Far the Bali Deal is Worse than Kyoto,” ''The Guardian'' (December 17, 2007).
+# Larry Lohmann, “Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatization and Power,” ''Development Dialogue'', 48 (Uppsala: Dag Hammerskjöld Foundation, September 2006).
+# ''ibid''. Lucrative offfset credits for HFC capture are often a perverse incentive for production to continue to rise.
+# Charles Forelle, “French Firm Cashes In Under U.N. Warming Program,” ''Wall St. Journal'' (July 23, 2008); Fiona Harvey, et al., “Producers, traders reap credits windfall,” ''Financial Times'' (April 26 2007).
+# ''Barbara Haya, Failed Mechanism: How the CDM is subsidizing hydro developers and harming the Kyoto Protocol (Berkeley: International Rivers, November 2007).''
+# Lambert Schneider, “Is the CDM fulfilling its environmental and sustainable development objectives? An evaluation of the CDM and options for improvement” (Berlin: Öko-Institut, 2007).
+# For a more complete list of USCAP members, see http://www.us-cap.org.
+# See Hallie Boas, ed., ''No REDD Papers'' (Portland, Oregon: Indigenous Environmental Network and Carbon Trade Watch, 2013).
+# The details of the Waxman-Markey climate bill are best summarized in Climate Law Institute, “Analysis of Key Provisions of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACESA), as Amended June 22, 2009” (San Francisco: Center for Biological Diversity, June 2009).
+# Marianne Lavelle, “Gore business: 2340 climate lobbyists,” Center for Public Integrity (February 25, 2009), at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/19255.html.
+# See J. Fargione, et al., “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt,” and T. Searchinger, ''et al''., “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change,” supra note 15.
+# Ryan Grim, “Internal Memo: Nuclear Power Company Could Make A Billion A Year From Climate Change Law,” ''Huffington Post'' (June 23, 2009), at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/23/internal-memo-nuclear-pow_n_219256.html.
+# John M. Broder, “With Something for Everyone, Climate Bill Passed,” ''New York Times'' (July 1, 2009).
+# J. Kerry and L. Graham, “Yes We Can (Pass Climate Change Legislation),” supra note 7.
+# Ryan Lizza, “As the World Burns: How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change,” ''New Yorker'' (October 11, 2010).
+# Theda Skocpol, “Naming the Problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight against Global Warming,” Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University (January 2013), p. 5.
+# ''ibid.'', p. 99.
+# Brad Plumer, “How the EPA’s new climate rule actually works—in 8 steps,” at http://www.vox.com/2014/6/4/5779052/how-to-figure-out-which-states-get-hit-hardest-by-obamas-climate-rule; David Hawkins, “Unpacking EPA’s Carbon Pollution Proposal,” at http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dhawkins/unpacking_epas_carbon_pollutio.html.
+# Larry Lohmann and Nicholas Hildyard, ''Energy, Work, and Finance ''(Dorset, UK: The Corner House, 2014).
-Naive enemies of the poison may think that they can rid themselves of the danger by locking up the works of Marx and Engels in burglar-proof safes and never allowing anyone to read them. They fail to consider that the very course of history leads people to think about the subject matter of these works. Those who have never personally experienced the magnetic attraction and force of the problems posed in these books can count themselves lucky. Though that does not necessarily mean that they should feel proud of themselves.
-Only the blind can fail to see the irony of the situation the human species brought upon itself when it tried to master its own fate and to eliminate accident. It bent its knee to History; and History is a cruel god. Today, the commandments that fall from his lips are uttered by clever chaplains hiding in his empty interior. The eyes of the god are so constructed that they see wherever a man may go; there is no shelter from them. Lovers in bed perform their amorous rites under his mocking glance; a child plays in the sand, not knowing that his future life has been weighed and written into the general account; only the aged, who have but a few days left before they die, can justly feel that they have to a large extent escaped his rule.
-The philosophy of History emanating from Moscow is not just an abstract theory, it is a material force that uses guns, tanks, planes, and all the machines of war and oppression. All the crushing might of an armed state is hurled against any man who refuses to accept the New Faith. At the same time, Stalinism attacks him from within, saying his opposition is caused by his “class consciousness,” just as psychoanalysts accuse their foes of wanting to preserve their complexes.
+==== On Utopian Aspirations in the Climate Movement ====
-Still, it is not hard to imagine the day when millions of obedient followers of the New Faith may suddenly turn against it. That day would come the moment the Center lost its material might, not only because fear of military force would vanish, but because success is an integral part of this philosophy’s argument. If it lost, it would prove itself wrong by its own definition; it would stand revealed as a false faith, defeated by its own god, reality. The citizens of the Imperium of the East long for nothing so much as liberation from the terror their own thought creates.
+# See, for example, Juliet Eilperin, “New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast Of 6.3-Degree Temperature Increase,” ''Washington Post'' (September 25, 2009); David Adam, “Met Office Warns of Catastrophic Global Warming in Our Lifetimes,” ''The Guardian'' (September 28, 2009).
+# Murray Bookchin, “Reflections: An Overview of the Roots of Social Ecology,” ''Harbinger'', Vol. 3, No. 1 (2002), italics in original.
+# See Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, ''What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism'' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).
+# Alex Williams, “Buying Into the Green Movement,” ''New York Times'' (July 1, 2007).
+# This case is made most comprehensively in Kate Gordon, ''et al., Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States'' (2014), a report commissioned by financiers Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson and Thomas Steyer, and available from http://riskybusiness.org.
+# Midnight Notes Collective, ''Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons'' (April 2009), p. 5.
+# For an insightful discussion of the capitalist trend toward financialization, see John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, “Monopoly Finance Capital and the Paradox of Accumulation,” ''Monthly Review'' 61: 5 (2009).
+# ''Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (New York: Harper One, 2008), pp. 9-10.''
+# Amory B. Lovins, ''et al., Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era'' (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011) p. 235.
+# Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, “Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials,” and “Part II: Reliability, system and transmission costs, and policies,” ''Energy Policy'' 39 (2011) pp. 1154–1169, 1170–1190.
+# John Bellamy Foster, “The Jeavons Paradox: Environment and Technology Under Capitalism,” in ''The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet ''(New York: Monthly Review Books, 2009), pp. 121–128.
+# Richard York, Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” ''Nature Climate Change'' 2 (June 2012), pp. 441-443.
+# Matthew L. Wald, “Efficiency, Not Just Alternatives, Is Promoted as an Energy Saver,” ''New York Times'' (May 29, 2007).
+# Uri Gordon, “Dark Tidings: Anarchist Politics in the Age of Collapse,” in Randall Amster, ''et al., ''eds., ''Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy'' (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 249–58.
+# Derrick Jensen, “Beyond Hope,” ''Orion'' (May/June 2006).
+# Richard Flacks, ''Making History: The American Left and the American Mind'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 7.
+# Karl Polanyi, ''The Great Transformation'' (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
+# Murray Bookchin, ''The Ecology of Freedom'' (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), pp. 43-61.
+# Randall Amster, “Anarchy, Utopia, and the State of Things to Come,” in R. Amster, ''et al. ''(eds.), ''Contemporary Anarchist Studies'' (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 290–301. Emphasis in original; embedded references deleted.
+# ''Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), p. xi.''
+# ''ibid''., p. 2.
+# Ernst Bloch, ''The Principle of Hope'', Vol. 1 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 5.
+# Alain Touraine, “Society as Utopia,” in R. Schaer, G. Claeys, and L.T.Sargent, eds., ''Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 18, 29. Touraine, once a pioneering scholar of social movements, now apparently prefers “moral individualism” to political action as a means for limiting autocratic power.
+# Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopian Traditions: Themes and Variations,” in R. Schaer, ''et al''., eds., ''Utopia'', p. 15.
+# ''ibid''., p. 14; Krishnan Kumar, “Utopia and Anti-Utopia in the Twentieth Century,” in R. Schaer, ''et al''., eds., ''Utopia'', p. 265.
+# Quoted in K. Kumar, ''ibid''., p. 266.
+# ''Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics: Or Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century (New York: The New Press, 1998).''
+# See Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi, ''Food Justice'' (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); Mark Winne, ''Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty'' (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).
+# One study proposed that factory farming may be raising agriculture’s contribution to global warming to as much as 50 percent: see Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, “Livestock and Climate Change,” ''WorldWatch'', (November/December 2009). For an overview of the links between agriculture and climate see Brian Tokar, “Food Sovereignty and Climate Justice,” in Eric Holt-Gimenez, ed., ''Food Movements Unite: Strategies to Transform Our Food Systems'' (Oakland: Food First Books, 2011).
+# For an articulate political critique of the emerging “transition towns” movement, see Paul Chatterton and Alice Cutler, ''The Rocky Road to a Real Transition'' (Leeds: Trapese Collective, April 2008).
+# “Worldwide poll: Vast majority say capitalism not working,” ''The Raw Story'', (November 9, 2009), at http://rawstory.com/2009/11/survey-capitalism-not-working, accessed November 10, 2009.
-In the Central Committee buildings, strategists move the little flags on the battle map of the war for men’s minds. They can pinpoint ever greater successes; the red color, which in 1944 and 1945 was limited to a handful of believers coming from the East, spreads farther every day. But even sages are men, and even they fall prey to anxiety and dread. They compare themselves to the early Christians; they liken the march of the New Faith over the planet to the march of Christianity throughout the decaying Roman Empire. But they envy the Apostles their gift of reaching deep into the human heart. “They knew how to make propaganda! How can we compare ourselves with them?” mourned a certain Party dignitary hearing the Gospel read over the radio. The new (anti-) religion performs miracles. It shows the doubters new buildings and new tanks. But what would happen if these miracles suddenly stopped? Knives and pistols would appear in the hands that applaud today. The pyramid of thought would topple. For a long time, on the ground where once it stood there would be nothing save blood and chaos.
-** Chapter Nine The Lesson of the Baltics
-“If you keep thinking about the Baltics and the camps, do you know what will happen to you?” my friend asked me in Warsaw. He had recently acquired an admiration for the dialectical wisdom of the Center. “You will use up the rest of your time to live and you will present yourself before Zeus; and the god, pointing his finger (here my friend gestured accusingly), will cry: ‘Idiot! You ruined your life by worrying about trifles!’”
+==== Social Ecology and the Future of Ecological Movements ====
-It is true that I cannot stop thinking about the Baltics. Yet I can say something in my defense. Certainly, worry over the fate of nations trampled down by History—that elephant—leads nowhere, and is a proof of sentimentality. This much I grant. The rage one feels on reading sixteenth-century memoirs whose authors, mostly priests, recount the atrocities committed in America by Spanish Conquistadors is senseless. It cannot resurrect the Caribbean population slaughtered by Ponce de Leon, nor shelter the Inca refugees pursued through the mountains by knights fighting with faith and a sword. Those who have been defeated are forgotten forever; and anyone who would look too closely into the record of past crimes or, even worse, try to imagine them in detail, must either turn gray with horror—or become completely indifferent.
+# Yale psychologist Dale Kahan has demonstrated that people’s views on climate correlate most closely with the views of their “cultural community,” whatever their level of education: See his commentary, “Why we are poles apart on climate change,” ''Nature ''488 (August 16, 2012), p. 255, based on a concurrent research paper, coauthored with six others, “The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks,” ''Nature Climate Change'' 2 (October 2012), pp. 732-735.
+# Paul B. Sears, “Ecology: A Subversive Subject,” ''BioScience'' 14 (July 7, 1964).
+# René Dubos, ''Man Adapting'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 196.
+# Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in ''Post-Scarcity Anarchism'' (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 58.
+# Quoted at http://essentialbooks.com/id50.htm.
+# Murray Bookchin, ''The Ecology of Freedom'' (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), especially Chapters 2 and 3.
+# The fullest elaboration of these ideas appears in Murray Bookchin, ''The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism'' (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990; Revised edition 1995). For philosophical and scientific background to these ideas, see Hans Jonas, ''The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
+# Murray Bookchin, “A New Municipal Agenda,” in ''From Urbanization to Cities: Toward a New Politics of Citizenship'' (London: Cassell, 1995), pp. 201–245. Also see his earlier ''Limits of the City'', originally published by Harper & Row in 1974 and in an expanded edition by Black Rose Books.
+# Murray Bookchin, “Market Economy or Moral Economy,” in ''The Modern Crisis'' (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986).
+# Murray Bookchin, ''The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era'', 4 volumes (London: Cassell, 1996, 1998; and Continuum, 2004, 2006).
+# At least one earlier mass action, aimed at shutting down Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War in May of 1971, was organized on the affinity group model, but Clamshell activists were the first in the US to make this the underlying structure of their organization.
+# Murray Bookchin, “A Note on Affinity Groups,” in ''Post-Scarcity Anarchism ''(supra note 4), pp. 221-222.
+# On the history and present activities of the Institute for Social Ecology, see www.social-ecology.org.
+# For more on the US Greens and the role of social ecologists, see Brian Tokar, “The Greens as a Social Movement: Values and Conflicts,” in Frank Zelko and Carolin Brinkmann, eds., ''Green Parties: Reflections on the First Three Decades'' (Washington, D.C.: Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, 2006).
+# Juan Gonzalez, “Getting Serious about Ecology,” ''New York Daily News'' (April 24, 1990).
+# See Greta Gaard, ''Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens'' (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).
+# See Chaia Heller, ''Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature ''(Montreal: Black Rose, 1999); Janet Biehl, ''Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics'' (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
+# See Janet Biehl, “Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism,” ''Communalism'' 12 (October 2007)''.''
+# Murray Bookchin, “The Communalist Project,” in ''Social Ecology and Communalism'' (Oakland: AK Press, 2007).
+# On the evolution of resistance to genetic engineering in the US, see Brian Tokar, “Resisting the Engineering of Life,” in Brian Tokar, ed., ''Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering'' (London: Zed Books, 2001). For a more theoretical treatment, see Brian Tokar, “Biotechnology: Enlarging the Debate,” ''Z Magazine'' (June 2001).
+# ''Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p. 141.''
+# Lewis Mumford, ''Technics and Human Development'' (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967).
+# David Noble, ''Forces of Production: A Social History of Automation'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
+# Mac Chapin, “A Challenge to Conservationists,” ''WorldWatch'' (November/December 2004), pp. 17–31.
+# Larry Lohmann, “Visitors to the Commons,” in Bron Taylor, ed., ''Ecological Resistance Movements'' (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
+# George Monbiot, ''Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning'' (Boston: South End Press, 2007). For a comprehensive review of more radical solutions to the climate crisis, see the “Less Energy” series in the Green politics journal ''Synthesis/Regeneration ''(now ''Green Social Thought''), beginning with the Winter 2007 issue, No. 42 (Available at http://www.greens.org/s-r).
+# Chaia Heller, “Illustrative Opposition: Drawing the Revolutionary Out of the Ecological,” in ''Ecology of Everyday Life'', pp. 149–171.
+# Bookchin'', The Ecology of Freedom'', p. 41. Bookchin’s more detailed account of Paris in 1968 can be found in a pair of essays, reprinted in ''Post-Scarcity Anarchism ''(supra note 4), pp. 249-270.
-Historians know that a long time ago the area known as East Prussia was inhabited by the Prussian nation which, thanks to German-speaiang followers of Jesus, met the same fate as .the people of the Caribbean. But historians do not speak of mothers’ despair or children’s distress; and perhaps it is better so. The civilization that calls itself Christian was built on the blood of the innocent. To be nobly indignant at those who are trying today to create another civilization by similar means is to take a somewhat pharisaic attitude. The records of crime will remain for many years, hidden in some place that is remote and secure; then, a scholar of the future, reaching through dust and cobwebs for the old files, will consider the murders committed as insignificant misdeeds compared with the task accomplished. More probably, however, no such files will exist; for, keeping step with progress, the emperors of today have drawn conclusions from this simple truth: whatever does not exist on paper, does not exist at all.
-Let us assume that this is what will happen. Nevertheless our attitude toward the present differs from our attitude toward the past, be that right or wrong. A living human being, even if he be thousands of miles away, is not so easily ejected from one’s memory. If he is being tortured, his voice is heard at the very least by those people who have (uncomfortable as it may be for them) a vivid imagination. And even if he is already dead, he is still part of the present; for the man who killed him or who gave the order that he be killed is sitting down somewhere, at some precise point on the face of the earth, with his family; bread and tea are on the table, and his children rejoice over a gift he has brought them. To demand that a man regard the present as he would the past without, as my friend said, worrying about trifles, that he gaze at the ripening fruits of tomorrow through the telescope of History—that is asking too much. There must be, after all, some standard one dare not destroy lest the fruits of tomorrow prove to be rotten. If I think thus it is because for the last two thousand years or more there have been not only brigands, conquistadors, and hangmen, but also people for whom evil was evil and had to be called evil. Mass slaughter, the terror of revolution, the craze for gold, the misery of the working classes: who knows what dimensions these flaws might reach if every man believed he must keep silent and accept? In rebelling, I believe I protect the fruits of tomorrow better than my friend who keeps silent. I assume the risk and I pay. If I were not willing to do so, I would now be writing an ode in praise of the Generalissimo. When one has some training in poetic technique, it is not particularly difficult to compose fine-sounding, rhythmical praise of The Glorious Hero.
-The Baltic states—Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia —lie, as we know, on the edge of the great mainland of the continent. A gulf separates them from Finland; the Baltic Sea, from Sweden. Their inhabitants are not Slavic. The language of the Estonians is related to Finnish. The Lithuanian and Latvian tongues, which resemble each other, still constitute a linguistic riddle; no one knows the original home of these tribes who found their way to the lower reaches of the Niemen and Dvina rivers. We know only that the exterminated Prussians spoke a similar language. Of the three Baltic nations, only the Lithuanians succeeded in the past in creating and maintaining for a certain time a large state whose borders extended to the Dnieper.
+=== {{anchor|AbouttheAuthor}} {{anchor|Topofpart0011html}} {{anchor|AbouttheAuthorBrianTokar}} About the Author ===
-These three sparsely settled countries underwent an intensive colonization, chiefly German and Polish, which marked the advance of Christianity. The result was that two different languages entered into use there: the masters, that is the landholders, spoke German (in Estonia and Latvia) and Polish (in Lithuania) in part because the newcomers brought with them their own language and customs, and in part because the local nobility adopted them. The common people, however, spoke their native tongue and preserved their cultural heritage from a legendary past. After the First World War, these three countries ceased to be provinces of the Russian Tsardom and became independent. Radical agrarian reforms curbed the influence of the great landowners. The native tongues became the official languages, while literature and education restored popular traditions.
+Brian Tokar is a long-time activist and author, a lecturer in environmental studies at the University of Vermont, and the current director of the Institute for Social Ecology. He is the author of “The Green Alternative” and “Earth for Sale,” co-editor of “Agriculture and Food in Crisis,” and editor of two books on the politics of biotechnology, “Redesigning Life?” and “Gene Traders.” Tokar lectures internationally on environmental issues and politics.
-In 1939, the population of these three states numbered about six million, that is, a little more than the population of Chile, a little less than that of Sweden. They were agricultural countries whose economies were maintained by a well-organized exportation of bacon, eggs, butter, grain, and fowl to Western Europe. In this, as well as in other respects, they resembled Denmark. Whoever knows the patterns of fanning life can easily picture the mode of existence of these Baltic regions. A widespread system of cooperatives helped the farmer sell his products. His standard of living, judging by his appearance, his house and his diet, was higher than that of the Slavonic countries, with the possible exception of Czechoslovakia. Most Estonians and Latvians were Protestant; most Lithuanians, Catholic. All three nations were characterized by obstinate patriotism, or even chauvinism—which is understandable in terms of their hard past. Militarily, all three were defenseless.
-The fate of these states was decided in the talks between Molotov and Ribbentrop. In the fall of 1939, Molotov demanded military bases; the Baltic governments hurried to grant them. (The press of all three countries consecrated much space, at the time, to articles proclaiming lasting, unshakable friendship for the kind and powerful neighbor to the East.) In June 1940, on the pretext that Soviet soldiers stationed in these bases had not been assured proper security, the Red Army crossed the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the NKVD moved into power, and all former state machinery ceased to exist.
-My account of the Baltic states is not derived from books or manuscripts. The first sunlight I saw, my first smell of the earth, my first tree, were the sunlight, smell, and tree of these regions; for I was bom there, of Polish-speaking parents, beside a river that bore a Lithuanian name. I am familiar with the events of the past years not from the dry notes of historians; they are as vivid for me as the faces and eyes of people one knows well.
-The invasion of the Spanish must have been an appalling experience for the Aztecs. The customs of the conquerors were incomprehensible; their religious ceremonies, strange; the paths of their thought, impossible to follow. The invasion of the Red Army was no less of a shock for the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. Of course, the older people remembered the days of the Tsars; yet this was completely different, and much worse. In the years that had elapsed since the fall of Tsarism, Russia had not evolved closer toward Europe but further away, toward principles of social organization Europe had never before known. The thinking and reactions of these conquerors were just as alien to the conquered as the arcanum of Catholic theology and the Castilian concept of honor had been to the Aztecs.
-New general elections were ordered immediately. But these elections had nothing in common with the elections held before then. There was a single list of candidates, presented by the new authorities. Why, then, were the cities and countryside covered with propaganda leaflets and handbills; why did megaphones shout day and night; why the trucks decorated with huge portraits of the candidates; why the garlands, the meetings, and the platforms? Why the propaganda if one had no choice? No one could understand. Yet on election day everyone flocked to the polls. They had to vote; for when one turned in one’s ballot, one’s passport was stamped. The absence of this stamp meant that the owner of the passport was an enemy of the people who had revealed his ill will by refusing to vote. Some people, naively, handed in torn or crossed-out ballots; but they were declared valid and affirmative. The final tallies were impressive. The first act of the parliaments thus elected was to make a formal request for incorporation into the Soviet Union. That favor was granted.
-One of the new delegates to the Lithuanian parliament was a friend from my early youth. Together we had traveled many kilometers down various European rivers in a canoe, escaped drowning in rapids, wandered over mountain trails, seen the sun rise over the valleys of the Black Forest and the castles of the Rhineland. A few years before the Second World War he became a Stalinist. He was from Warsaw, and his presence in Lithuania at the outbreak of the War was more or less accidental. Nevertheless, he was proposed as a candidate (there were so few Communists in these countries that every one was put to use); and since candidacy was tantamount to election, he became a delegate. It must have been quite an experience of power for him; he could vote the incorporation of a country he had nothing to do with into another country which he knew only from its propaganda literature and official statistics. At the time, that was something new; but other innovations were to come. All over Eastern Europe, foreigners (changing their names, if necessary) vote, represent, and rule.
-Thus the inhabitants of the Baltic states become Soviet citizens. In the eyes of the new authorities this mass of people, who were so well off that they put the rest of the Union to shame, represented a scandalous relic of the past. They had to be educated. Prisons filled and, shortly, certain categories of citizens began to be deported to work camps, mines, and collective farms at the other end of Russia, chiefly in the polar regions. In 1941 the entire area was invaded by the German army. The Nazis, in turn, started to kill off that category of the population which their ideology classified as undesirable, namely the Jews, irrespective of age, sex, or class. To that task they applied their usual precision. At the same time they exported to the Reich a large number of forcibly enlisted workers.
-In 1944 the Baltic states were recaptured by the Red Army and the Center set out to assimilate this area into the Union. The most urgent task was the destruction of the existing and wealthy farming economy. Collectivization met with considerable obstacles, however. The usual method, that of “intensifying the class struggle in the village,” which speculates upon the antagonism between rich and poor farmers, had feeble results. Training in partisan units, together with the large number of arms left from war-time operations, encouraged opposition. Peasants fled to the woods and formed bands. In reprisal, disciplinary expeditions surrounded villages and killed those who had remained at home. This merely increased the opposition; for whole villages, including women and children, often preferred to join the partisans rather than expose themselves to the danger of being taken hostage.
-The hostile attitude of these people forced those in power to resort to radical measures. Big man-hunts were instituted. Thousands of cattle-cars loaded with people moved toward uninhabited areas of Euro-Asia. The years in which Western Europe began to enjoy a precarious peace were far from peaceful for the Baltic countries. Villages whose inhabitants were dead, deported, or in hiding stood plundered and empty. The wind whistled through the apertures of broken windows and smashed doors. “Hitlers come and go, but nations remain,” the Generalissimo declared in the moment when victory over Germany was certain. As far as smaller national groups are concerned, this statement should be amended to read:
-“Nations come and go, but the countries remain.” In the words of an official of the Center, spoken in 1946: “There will be a Lithuania; but there will be no Lithuanians.”
-I do not know how many thousands of men and women these states lost before their economies were “reconstructed,” i.e. before 1950. Perhaps no one knows the exact statistics. The number of foreign settlers ordered to the places left by the departed natives might serve as an index. Moreover, the process is not yet finished. Collective farmers have been imported into the rural areas; administrative cadres and their families, into the cities. In the streets one hears Russian spoken more frequently than Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian. The great majority of the Party leaders and higher government officials have Russian names.
-The aim of all these moves is to inter-mix the population of the Union. Only by dissolving individual nationalities in the “Russian sea” can one attain the goal of a single culture and a single universal language. The territory that once linked the Baltic states with Germany has been settled by Russians. The city of Koenigsberg, within whose walls Kant was bom and spent his entire life, has been renamed Kaliningrad and there is no longer any trace of the mild, orderly world the philosopher knew. On the islands lying off the coast of what was once Estonia, no Estonian fishermen push their boats toward the sea. The pot in which the Baltic peoples are being boiled down has its lid tightly clamped on. Obviously schools and universities, as well as books, all use native tongues. After all, the aim is not to destroy individual nationalities; the aim is to destroy the class enemy. When the young people learn in Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian how to be true patriots of the Union, and how to appreciate all that emanates from the Center, then the Russian language will triumph over all competition. At that point, a new level of understanding will be attained.{1}
-What cause is there for anger? The little world that was the Baltic states is known to us from Breughel’s country scenes: hands clutching jugs, cheeks red with laughter, heavy, bear-like kindness. There lived peasant virtues: industry, thrift, diligence; and peasant sins: greed, stinginess, constant worry about the future. The proletariat scarcely existed; industry was poorly developed; the agrarian reform had divided the large estates among the peasants. But why should this continue? Kulaks were an unforgivable anachronism. They had to be wiped out, and the standard of living had to be lowered to match that of the rest of the Union. As for the drastic methods employed—after all, in the end everyone must die. Let us assume that a large percentage of the population was killed off by a plague, instead of by disciplinary expeditions. From the moment we acknowledge historical necessity to be something in the nature of a plague, we shall stop shedding tears over the fate of its victims. A plague or an earthquake do not usually provoke indignation. One admits they are catastrophes, folds the morning paper, and continues eating breakfast. One can revolt only against someone. Here, there is no one. The people who have brought the plague are convinced they are merely fulfilling their historical duty.
-Yet the letter I one day held in my hand was painful. It came from a family deported to Siberia from one of the Baltic states in March 1949, and was addressed to relatives in Poland. The family consisted of a mother and two daughters. Their letter was a terse account of their work on a kolkhoz. The last letters of every line were slightly stressed, and reading vertically one made out the words “Eternal Slave.” If such a letter happened to fall into my hands, then how many other, similarly disguised expressions of despair must have found their way to people who could not make any use of them. And, calculating the possibilities, how many such letters remained unwritten; how many of those who might have written them died of hunger and overwork, repeating those hopeless words, “Eternal Slave”?
-Perhaps at this very moment the mother and two daughters, if they are still alive, are carrying water in buckets from a well. Perhaps the mother is worrying about the insufficient bread ration which is their only salary. And perhaps, too, she is worrying about the future of her daughters. A citizen of New York transplanted to a native village in the Congo would feel more or less as does an inhabitant of the Baltic countries transported beyond the Ural mountains— such are the differences in standards of cleanliness, hygiene, and the most external evidences of civilization. The mother will die; the daughters will have to remain there for the rest of their lives, for one never returns from such exile. They will have to marry. But they will keep locked within themselves something which is incomprehensible to their environment, something they will never be able to transmit to their Russian-speaking children.
-Possibly neither the mother nor the daughters were possessed of any particularly fine qualities. The mother went to church on Sundays with a thick prayer book, but at home she was a stingy shrew. The daughters had nothing on their minds but frippery and the Saturday dances on the grass that were so loved in their native province. They read no serious books; the names of Plato and Hegel, Marx and Darwin meant nothing to them. These three women were deported because they were kulaks; their farm had nearly thirty hectares of land. The benefit mankind got out of their quiet life in the country was, aside from a certain number of kilograms of butter and cheese, very little.
-The question arises as to whether or not one is allowed to destroy three such creatures in the name of higher ends. The Stalinist will answer that it is allowed; Christians and pseudo-Christians will answer that it is not. Neither the former nor the latter are entirely consistent. Ninety per cent of the arguments used by Stalinists in their propaganda are based on man’s injury to man. The appeal to moral indignation is always present in their slogans. Christians, on the other hand, maintain that it is wrong to harm others because every man has inherent value; but having voiced such a noble opinion, many of them would not move a finger to help another person. It is not merely the fate of the Baltic states that leaves them indifferent. They are equally unconcerned about forms of destruction other than slaughter and compulsory deportation. For example, they regard the spiritual death of people condemned to work hard all day and to swallow the poison of films and television at night as completely normal.
-Pablo Neruda, the great poet of Latin America, comes from Chile. I translated a number of his poems into Polish. Pablo Neruda has been a Communist for some ten years. When he describes the misery of his people, I believe him and I respect his great heart. When writing, he thinks about his brothers and not about himself, and so to him the power of the word is given. But when he paints the joyous, radiant life of people in the Soviet Union, I stop believing him. I am inclined to believe him as long as he speaks about what he knows; I stop believing him when he starts to speak about what I know myself.
-There is a great difference, indeed, between the believers of the East and those of the West. The Western Communist needs a vision of a golden age which is already being realized on earth. The Stalinist of the East does everything in his power to instill this vision in the minds of others, but he never forgets that it is merely a useful lie. His reasoning is correct. Every revolution has known a period of terror directed against the enemies of the new order. No one today weeps for the French aristocrats whose heads fell on the guillotine. Yet former revolutions are insignificant events compared with the revolution going on in our day. They aimed at the overthrow of a small class which stood in the way of artificially restrained, creative forces. The revolution of today cannot content itself with a moment of terror, necessary to the consolidation of the new power; the class struggle must continue until the economic bases for opposition have been destroyed. The class enemy consists of the millions of small producers, that is, of the peasants and artisans, as well as small businessmen. Their steady resistance, and the obstinacy with which they seize every opportunity to revive the old economic order, demand decisive punitive measures.
-It must be added that the Revolution triumphed in a backward country; and ever since 1917 regression, in the form of internal decomposition or external intervention, has been a constant threat. It is, therefore, understandable that the moment of terror, proper to former revolutions, has been prolonged over decades in the greatest revolution the world has ever seen. And wherever terror and misery reign, no one can be happy. The golden age, therefore, belongs to the future. The Center has proclaimed that it has already reached the stage of socialism and is now headed toward the realization of communism. The present moment is dark but, seen from a distance, for example from the year 2953, it will appear as short as the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution seems to us today; and the number of victims (two or three hundred million, more or less) will seem scarcely more important than a few thousand beheaded French aristocrats.
-Let us imagine a meeting between two fervent disciples of the Center—I base my account on personal observation of many such encounters. One is from the East. He has served perhaps three years behind the walls of prisons or slave labor camps there. He was not broken; he did not lose his faith. Wherever trees are being chopped down, splinters must fall. The fact that he, and manv of his fellow-inmates were innocent, proves nothing: it is better to condemn twenty innocent people than to release a single evil-doer. To endure this trial successfully is a source of moral strength for him, and of esteem from his comrades in the Party. Having learned the workings of the machinery behind the scene, he knows the Country of Socialism to be a vale of tears and of gnashing of teeth. Nevertheless, the belief in historical necessity and the vision of the fruits of tomorrow persuade him that the harsh reality of the present—even extended over many years—is unimportant.
-{1} “I approached Stalin’s portrait, took it off the wall, placed it on the table and, resting my head on my hands, I gazed and meditated. What should I do? The Leader’s face, as always so serene, his eyes so clear-sighted, they penetrate into the distance. It seems that his penetrating look pierces my little room and goes out to embrace the entire globe. I do not know how I would appear to anyone looking at me at this moment. But with my every fibre, every nerve, every drop of blood I feel that, at this moment, nothing exists in this entire world but this dear and beloved face. What should I do?
-<br>
-“The Soviet government handles the enemies of the people with a firm hand....
-<br>
-“These are thy words, comrade Stalin. I believe them sacredly. Now I know how to act.”
-<br>
-From Pergale (Victory) magazine, organ of the Soviet Writers of the Lithuanian SSR, No. 4, April 1950, p. 52, cf. The Lithuanian Bulletin, New York, Nos. 7–12, July-December, 1950.
-The other is a Communist from the West. His attention is directed above all toward the injustices of the system in which he lives. He is filled with a noble indignation against what is going on here and with a longing for what is going on there, in the land from which his companion has come. His companion looks at him benevolently, and his words fulfill all expectation. There may at times be a gleam of humor in his eyes; but that is only human, a mere weakness. His humor is lightly spiced with envy; the moral indignation and enthusiasm of the other are for him unattainable luxuries in the sphere of moral comfort. If the other knew, if he had undergone the same trials, what would his faith be like? Experience has proved that those from the West cannot hold up nervously under the strain of a protracted stay in the Center. The dose is too strong for them. They may be extremely useful as missionaries among the pagans, or when their countries are invaded by the “liberating” army. When it is too late, when they no longer have a choice, their inner doubts will do no harm.
-I have spoken of Neruda. The problem of the Baltics is much more important for every contemporary poet than are questions of style, metrics, and metaphor. Today the only poetry worthy of the name is eschatological, that is, poetry which rejects the present inhuman world in the name of a great change. The reader of today is in search of hope, and he does not care for poetry that accepts the order of things as permanent. If someone is loaded with that little-known internal energy which bears the name of poetry, he will not be able to escape this universal expectation and he will search—falling, rising, again falling and searching again—for he knows that such is his duty. Revolutionary poetry is often artistically better than the poetry of cameral artists, for subject matter that is close to the longings of mankind emancipates the written word from the shackles of passing literary fads.
-But revolutionary poetry becomes weak when it begins to extol the longed-for future as already realized, or in the process of realization, in a given part of the earth. To approve convincingly is difficult not because “positive” values are incompatible with the nature of literature, but because approbation, in order to be effective, must be based on truth. The split between words and reality takes its revenge, even though the author be of good faith. Sentimentality, that is, an exploitation of feelings for their own sake, and not for the sake of what occasions them, cannot lead to good writing. Reality puts literature to the test sooner or later. The ingenious methods by which Stalinists isolate themselves from reality are amazing. I know a poet who found himself in a city occupied by the Red Army after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. He was terrified by the mass arrests in which every day some friend or acquaintance disappeared. In panic, he sat down to work, and from his pen flowed gentle poems about the blessings of peace and the beauties of socialist society. I remember a verse in which he praised the “happy, prosperous collective farms” of the Soviet Ukraine. A few months later, when the German army began its invasion, these “happy, prosperous” collective farmers greeted the Nazis as liberators, and only the thoughtless cruelties of the conquerors convinced them they had made a mistake. This is no argument against the system—a few decades is too short a formative period. It is, however, an argument against the poet’s verse.
-The double ethical standard applied to what happens within the Imperium and without its borders makes honest art impossible. Dialectical reasoning may be well balanced, but art is not born of dialectical reasoning. Art is rooted in much deeper, primitive strata laid down in the individual by past generations. This fact may not be entirely convenient to the new rulers, to the philosophers who would like to see a purely dialectical literature, nourished by an understanding of historical processes. Yet what they prize as literature is nothing but its counterfeit. Repressed feelings poison every work, giving it a tinsel varnish which warns everybody: this is a synthetic product. Then, the most beautiful words are as dead as artificial wreaths.
-Let us suppose we admit that terror is quite a useful measure and that the Baltic peoples must be destroyed, to a proper degree, as an anti-revolutionary group. Immediately, a difficulty arises: can one pose an equation sign between terror that is momentary and improvised on the one hand and, on the other, organized terror that extends over a long period? Who can tell whether someone given the perspective of a thousand years will regard the guillotine as identical with the murder or deportation of whole nations over months, years, decades? One month of terror and ten years of it are not the same. The element of time necessarily alters the quality of acts. A long period of terror demands an established apparatus and becomes a permanent institution. Deportees may try to escape. Their relatives can scarcely approve of their disappearance, and it is indicated that they be put on the next list. The families of these relatives are an uncertain element which can be kept in line only under threat. Only fear can inspire diligence in dissatisfied peasants tied to collectives.
-Fear is well known as a cement of societies. In a liberal-capitalist economy fear of lack of money, fear of losing one’s job, fear of slipping down one rung on the social ladder all spurred the individual to greater effort. But what exists in the Imperium is naked fear. In a capitalist city with a population of one hundred thousand people, some ten thousand, let us say, may have been haunted by fear of unemployment. Such fear appeared to them to be a personal situation, tragic in view of the indifference and callousness of their environment. But if all one hundred thousand people live in daily fear, they give off a collective aura that hangs over the city like a heavy cloud. Gold alienates man from himself; naked fear, which has replaced capital, alienates him even more efficiently.
-To transcend this fear new means must be devised: one must breed a new man, one for whom work will be a joy and a pride, instead of the curse of Adam. A gigantic literature is directed toward this end. Books, films, and radio all have as their themes this transformation, and the instilling of hatred against the enemy who would want to prevent it. To the extent that man, terrified as he is, learns to fulfill his obligations to society of his own will and with joy, the dosage of fear is to be reduced. And eventually, a free man will be born.
-Whether he can be born while such methods are applied is a question of faith. If everything in the world is ruled by rational laws, if freedom is nothing but the understanding of that universal rational necessity, if man can achieve that full consciousness to which what is necessary and what should be willed are one and the same thing, then a new, free society is possible in the future. In this sense, the Communist who spent three years in a slave labor camp was free, for he recognized his sentence and that of his fellow-prisoners to be rational and necessary. In this same sense, the writers of the people’s democracies are right when they say that a free man has already been born, and that he is the man of the Soviet Union. But if god-like consciousness (what could choice mean to a god who sees all clearly?) is not accessible to man, then a certain number of people will always make what the ruling philosophers consider to be the wrong choice. That being so, to ease the tension of fear would mean to allow the possibility of revolt. Naked fear is unlikely ever to be inclined to abdicate. A young man in Moscow, bom and raised in the new system, is on the wrong path when he makes his choice and (as, unfortunately, happens more and more often) reads Dostoevski, who posed this problem in most pessimistic terms.
-At the moment we are concerned with the Baltics. They are not being handled with thoughtless cruelty; their lot is exactly the same as that of many nations living within the borders of the Union. There is no reason for their being treated differently. If their case is so striking, it is only because they were incorporated so suddenly, were so totally unprepared for their new circumstances. Moreover, they stood on a definitely higher level of civilization than other Soviet citizens. Not being Slavs, they have difficulty in learning Russian. Their case confronts us with the thorny question of nationalities.
-When victory is won and socialism is realized on the entire face of the planet, nations will—runs the prediction—gradually cease to exist; a single universal language will appear which, according to the Generalissimo, will be neither Russian, nor German, nor English but a synthesis of many tongues. One can assume that before that happens a considerable portion of the world will learn Russian, which later will form the basis of the new universal language. (It is asserted that French is the language of feudalism; English, the language of capitalism; and Russian, the language of socialism.) The existence of nations cannot be justified rationally; at the present stage, however, one must deal with it as a fact. The encouragement of national cultures is indicated to the degree that it prepares the transition to the next phase. Whatever brings a given nation closer culturally to the Russians deserves protection; anything that fortifies the system also merits care. In the realm of science, one can even stimulate competition between nations, so long as Russian superiority is acknowledged. (In one people’s democracy, a group of scholars were delicately persuaded not to publish the results of their scientific research because they were a little too good and so might seem to contest, indecently, Russian superiority in the same field.) One must always keep in mind the eventual goal, which is the melting down of all nations into a single mass. To this end, nationalism must be exterminated. Nationalism rests on the conviction that national culture is the expression of “national content in national form”; whereas, everybody knows that the content of national cultures has had until now a class character.
-The opposite of nationalism is the formula of a “culture that is national in form, and socialist in content.” And since the Russian nation made the Revolution and established the patterns of socialist culture, drawing them from its own past, nationalism can be defined simply as anti-Russianism. If they suffer from that horrible disease, small national groups (like the Crimean Tatars, for example) can be liquidated in their entirety. Larger anti-Russian national groups must be dealt with gradually. Pride can be taken in the outstanding success in the Ukraine. More and more young Ukrainian writers move to Moscow and write in Russian. The poets and critics who dreamt of a separate Ukrainian literature have left this world; departed, also, are the actors whose pride in their national theater made them go a bit too far in competing with the Russians. So the self-congratulatory reasoning goes. One can be fairly satisfied with affairs in the Baltic states. As for the people’s democracies, the pattern imposed there, modified in the light of past experience, is proving the wisdom of long-range planning.
-The task is difficult because individual nations are burdened with their own past; for instance, the Baltic peoples tend to regard the culture of their kulaks as their own. They compare it with the culture of Russia. As if comparison were possible! Russia is a great nation; the Revolution was born in its womb. Only an impious fool could compare its past, pregnant with what was to be the greatest upheaval in history, with the past of the small nations it has liberated. Russia is the savior of the world.
-No atrocities are being committed. One murders only those who must be murdered, tortures only those who must be made to confess, deports only those who must be deported. If deportees die off quickly, that is the fault of the climate, hard work, or insufficient rations, and nothing can be done about those inconveniences at the present stage. One cannot expect a country charged with so great a mission to take care of its prisoners as well as England cares for its soldiers. Perhaps if they were treated better these prisoners would die less quickly, but then their labor would cease to be cheap. In any case, before food can reach prisoners in camps, often situated five days’ travel by boat from the nearest town, camp administrators will steal most of it. Everything will change when the standard of living improves. Then, the prisoners, too, will be better off.
-The promoters of this kind of argument demonstrate by it their admirable far-sightedness. The nations of Central and Eastern Europe were nationalistic to the point of madness. They were ready to massacre each other over a scrap of land. Today they see how senseless this was, though probably that would not prevent them from leaping at each other’s throat if the Center’s control were lifted. Under the rule of the Center they “agree” to mutual compromises. The Poles relinquished their eastern territories; the East Germans accepted the Oder-Neisse line; the Czechs and Hungarians have renounced all claims to the Carpathian Ukraine. Expulsions put an end to minority issues. All the republics follow the same economic and cultural pattern worked out by the Center. The one factor that now separates the individual republics is that of language. The great plan is working.
-The only trouble is the patient. He shrieks and struggles to get away. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert describes an operation on a club-foot performed by Doctor Bovary. This provincial doctor, together with his friend, the pharmacist Homais, decided to cure a servant in the village inn who was lame. After a great deal of difficulty, they persuaded him to surrender himself to their endeavors. Doctor Bovary, with the aid of medical handbooks, devised a wooden box weighing eight pounds, equipped inside with iron hooks, screws, and leather slings. The operation was a marvelous success, and the leg was strapped into the box. “Honor! Threefold honor!” cried the town paper. “Was it not said that the blind would see and the halt would walk! But what fanaticism once promised to the elect, modern science can accomplish for all men!” But alas, five days later something started to go wrong with the patient. He shrieked with pain. When the box was opened, the leg proved to be swollen and covered with sores. The two friends decided that the leg had not been strapped in well. So they tightened the screws. Yet the patient went from bad to worse. A doctor called in from a neighboring village diagnosed gangrene and amputated the leg. Obviously, Flaubert got a lot of malicious pleasure out of deriding Monsieur Homais’s worship of progress. This does not mean that the same operation performed by good doctors would fail. Yet the doubt is always there: is the doctor we are dealing with really a good one?
-“To tell the truth, all this is boring,” an official of one of the people’s democracies said to me. “I have already seen it happen in Russia. The stages are measured out in advance, and they succeed each other with mathematical precision. The only interest lies in watching the reactions of the human material.”
-Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.
-The parliamentary system may in many instances be a fiction designed to secure power to ever the same social groups. Still the possibility of casting a protest vote has a certain tonic value. Taking part in a manifestation against some minister of state, a strike, the reading of the opposition press, all furnish moments of emotional release which are probably good for the health of mankind. National pride may be an absurd feeling, yet a rooster’s pride as he struts about in his own yard amid the hens is biologically useful.
-The Center is, of course, not unaware of man’s psychological needs; hence the parades, banners, posters, portraits, election-time propaganda, and demonstrations of hatred against the enemies of the state. National pride is flattered by the display of national flags as well as by daily announcements of the latest economic achievements, of the buildings, highways, and railroads constructed and the production quotas fulfilled. In general these means seem effective; yet the lack of some intangible element leads the human material to a feeling of fiction. Nothing is spontaneous. Within the limits of his profession a man can acquire some reason for pride. Beyond these limits, everything is predetermined. Overnight a single decree from on high can remove an entire government, change the borders of a country or order people to hate those who were called friends yesterday. Official safety valves are probably insufficient channels for feelings of national pride if most Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, or Rumanians would willingly cut the throat of any available Russian were they not restrained by fear. Even Party cadres, one suspects, would not renounce such a pleasant prospect. One can only complain of the backwardness of these nations and hope that socialist upbringing will enlighten them. But it would be a mistake to deny these unpleasant facts and even worse ones, namely, that such hatred exists even in nations which have undergone a longer period of careful education.
-The incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union may seem an unimportant incident to a Mexican or a Chilean, but not to the millions of people living in the people’s democracies. For years they have been pondering over this rather extraordinary act on the part of a great power, an act analogous only to some of the misdeeds of colonial politics. If the Great Union as a “federation” is capable of assimilating an unlimited number of “republics,” then other countries will one day be swallowed up in their turn. If what happened in the Baltics is a prefiguration of what will happen to them they can look forward to mass deportations and the settlement of colonists from the Euro-Asian continent in their towns and villages. The people of countries that Party propaganda likes to call independent think of that future moment as the Judgment Day. The ]ot of the Baltics has become a serious psychological factor. In keeping the daily ledger of his words and deeds, every citizen evaluates them not only in terms of their present worth but in terms of that future day of reckoning.
-The friend who warned me against incurring the wrath of Zeus is a philosopher. He lives amid his books knowing that no matter how much the human material may tremble, there will be no lack of beautiful editions of Lucretius printed in Moscow. As the new society expands, more and more classics will be re-edited. A wise man, scorning the poor literature of today, will always find much delectation in the history of philosophy, in the ancient authors, and in the complicated but exciting studies of dialectical materialism. Truly, a philosopher cannot be happier than when he is living in a country ruled by men compared with whom the kings and prime ministers of by-gone eras were no more than improvisers. His days are devoted to intellectual effort. And when he meets with his fellow-philosophers he knows that they too are drawing wisdom from the well of dialectics.
-The meetings of such people have nothing in common with the sterile and irresponsible divagations of the intelligentsia; they are the meetings of scientists engaged in erecting a social structure. My friend does not believe in “philosophizing.” He believes that man is a social animal whose thought is the reflection of the movement of matter. Seekers after truth are no more than puppets trying to deny that their ideas are merely the reflection of historical processes. They are reactionaries serving the enemy of the proletariat; for it is the proletariat which, out of inescapable necessity, formulated the one true method of dialectical materialism. The Soviet Union will triumph as surely as trees will bud in the spring. The man who understands necessity is happy and free, for all freedom other than that based on an understanding of necessity is an illusion. My friend believes that those who suffer in the new society have only themselves to blame. Those who are deported or arrested are fools unworthy of our pity. They are so encumbered with the past that they are incapable of understanding the laws of progress. If they did understand, no evil would befall them and their lives would be active and serene.
-My friend liked me because of my hatred of a dull and befogged mentality incapable of seizing a sharp impression of phenomena in full motion. He guessed rightly that I had always longed to see man bright, hard, and pure. Looking at man as he is, I turned my eyes away from him in shame, and I turned my eyes away from myself because I was like him. All my poetry had been a rejection, a derision of myself and others because men delight in what is unworthy of delight, love what is unworthy of love, suffer over what is unworthy of suffering. Did I not belong, on this score alone, to those creators of the new world who have a vision of a new man endowed with superhuman purity? Certainly I was a “good pagan,” for my fury was the fury of the Bolsheviks. Everywhere outside the countries of the new man I would be bound to feel homeless.
-I really had certain assets that could have assured my future happiness. In a Warsaw, rebuilding its ruins, I would have been working in harmony with the laws of history. I would have translated Shakespeare—what joy it is to breach a language barrier and find sentences as concise as the original. I would have undertaken Marxist studies on sixteenth-century England. Maybe I would have become a university professor. From time to time I would have published a poem stating my loyalty to the Revolution and its founders. Moving in the circles of the philosophers and occupying myself with dialectics, I would have treated the efforts of writers, painters, and musicians very lightly, knowing their art is, and must be, bad. I would have listened to Bach, and read Swift or Flaubert.
-Yet I deceived my friend. What led me to do this I myself find it hard to define. If I could express it I would be a wise man, a teacher of philosophers. I believe that my motives lie deep in my past, in an incident I shall recount.
-In my wanderings at the beginning of the Second World War, I happened to find myself, for a very short while, in the Soviet Union. I was waiting for a train at a station in one of the large cities of the Ukraine. It was a gigantic station. Its walls were hung with portraits and banners of inexpressible ugliness. A dense crowd dressed in sheepskin coats, uniforms, fur caps, and woolen kerchiefs filled every available space and tracked thick mud over the tiled floor. The marble stairs were covered with sleeping beggars, their bare legs sticking out of their tatters despite the fact that it was freezing. Over them loudspeakers shouted propaganda slogans. As I was passing through the station I suddenly stopped and looked. A peasant family—husband and wife and two children—had settled down by the wall. They were sitting on baskets and bundles. The wife was feeding the younger child; the husband, who had a dark, wrinkled face and a black, drooping mustache was pouring tea out of a kettle into a cup for the older boy. They were whispering to each other in Polish. I gazed at them until I felt moved to the point of tears. What had stopped my steps so suddenly and touched me so profoundly was their difference. This was a human group, an island in a crowd that lacked something proper to humble, ordinary human life. The gesture of a hand pouring tea, the careful, delicate handing of the cup to the child, the worried words I guessed from the movement of their lips, their isolation, their privacy in the midst of the crowd—that is what moved me. For a moment, then, I understood something that quickly slipped from my grasp.
-Polish peasants were certainly far from the summits of civilization. It is possible that the family I saw was illiterate. My friend would have called them graceless, smelly imbeciles who had to be taught to think. Still, precious seeds of humanity were preserved in them, or in the Baltic people, or in the Czechs because they had not yet been subjected to the scientific treatment of Monsieur Homais. It may well be that the fondness with which Baltic women tended their little gardens, the superstition of Polish women gathering herbs to make charms, the custom of setting an empty plate for a traveler on Christmas Eve betoken inherent good that can be developed. In the circles in which my friend lives, to call man a mystery is to insult him. They have set out to carve a new man much as a sculptor carves his statue out of a block of stone, by chipping away what is unwanted. I think they are wrong, that their knowledge in all its perfection is insufficient, and their power over life and death is usurped.
-Being on the side of that stammering and mumbling with which human beings try to express themselves in their lonely helplessness, could I have walked on the thick carpet of my apartment, in a neighborhood reserved for privileged people, and savored Shakespeare? Instead of the hand through which warm blood flows from the heart to the fingers holding my pen, they would have given me an excellent artificial hand—the dialectic. Knowing there is a light in man, I could never have dared seek it; for light is not, I believe, the same as political consciousness, and it can exist in fools, monks, boys who dislike social duties, and kulaks. Knowing there is crime in man, I could never have pointed it out; for I would have had to believe, as does my friend, that crime is a product of history and not of human beings. There are past crimes: hundreds of thousands of Poles deported in the year 1940–41, those who were shot, or those who were drowned in the Arctic Ocean. But one must learn to forgive. I am concerned with the crimes that are being, and will continue to be, committed. Crimes in the name of the new and radiant man; crimes committed to the sound of orchestras and choruses, to the blare of loudspeakers and the recitation of optimistic poems.
-Now I am homeless—a just punishment. But perhaps I was born so that the “Eternal Slaves” might speak through my lips. Why should I spare myself? Should I renounce what is probably the sole duty of a poet only in order to make sure that my verse would be printed in an anthology edited by the State Publishing House? My friend accepts naked terror, whatever name he may choose to give it. We have parted ways. Whether the side on which I now find myself is the future victor or the future victim is not the issue here. But I know that if my friend tastes the sweet fruits of victory, this planet will be improved according to plan for centuries—but woe to him who lives to see this happen. All over the world people are now sleeping in their beds, or perhaps they are engaging in some idiotic pastime; and one might easily believe that each in his own way is doing his best to deserve destruction. But that destruction will bring no freedom. Should the power my friend worships turn out not to be historical necessity, the earth will enter a period of terrible wars and bloody revolutions. But the quest will never end, and hope will always remain.
-Let Pablo Neruda fight for his people. He is wrong, however, when he believes that all the protesting voices of Central and Eastern Europe are the voices of stubborn nationalisms or the yelps of wronged reaction. Eyes that have seen should not be shut; hands that have touched should not forget when they take up a pen. Let him allow a few writers from Central and Eastern Europe to discuss problems other than those that haunt him.
-When, as my friend suggested, I stand before Zeus (whether I die naturally, or under sentence of History) I will repeat all this that I have written as my defense. Many people spend their entire lives collecting stamps or old coins, or growing tulips. I am sure that Zeus will be merciful toward people who have given themselves entirely to these hobbies, even though they are only amusing and pointless diversions. I shall say to him: “It is not my fault that you made me a poet, and that you gave me the gift of seeing simultaneously what was happening in Omaha and Prague, in the Baltic states and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. I felt that if I did not use that gift my poetry would be tasteless to me and fame detestable. Forgive me.” And perhaps Zeus, who does not call stamp-collectors and tulip-growers silly, will forgive.
-CZESLAW MILOSZ, one of the best-known modern Polish poets, was born in Lithuania in 1911, and educated in Vilna and Paris. When Poland was invaded in 1939, Mr. Milosz became active in the Polish underground in Warsaw. In 1946 he entered the diplomatic service of the new Polish government. He was stationed at the Polish Embassy in Washington until 1930, when he was transferred to the Polish Embassy in Paris as First Secretary for Cultural Affairs. In February 1931 Mr. Milosz broke with the Warsaw government. He continues to live in Paris, and now devotes all his time to writing.
-THE TEXT of this book was set on the Linotype in janson, an excellent example of the influential and sturdy Dutch types that prevailed in England prior to the development by William Caslon of his own designs, which he evolved from these Dutch faces. Of Janson himself little is known except that he was a practicing type founder in Leipzig during the years 1660 to 1683. Composed, .printed, and bound by the colonial press inc., Clinton, Massachusetts. Cover design by Paul rand.

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