Author Archives: Stephen Hanrahan

Degrowth and the Green New Deal: More of the same? Less of the same? Or something simply different

Options of growth

Climate change and economic insecurity has pushed our civilization to a crisis point. We have to decide now on what path we want to take for the future. Do we want more of the same, or do we want to try for something simply different?

If we want more of the same, that option would be green growth. Green growth promises to invest in renewable technologies that would produce energy by not relying on fossil fuels. Economic insecurity would be remedied by the creation of new high paying jobs like solar panal technicians. However, there have been some doubts as to if this green growth will really work. A Romanian mathematician named Georgsecu-Roegen suggested that renewable technology would only provide a fraction of the energy that fossil fuels does, and we’ll never be able to rely on it for flying an airplane or the average car ride. The materials used to make solar panals require fossil fuels in their construction, and the mineral components of them are limited. The land that it would require to build a wind farm sufficient to power a city risks chopping down more forests. Even if successful in certain countries, the drop in price in fossil fuels might make them adopted more in other areas, leading to increased planetary carbon emissions. If we end up making more of the same ‘better,’ it still might end up destroying us in the end.

Broken solar panel =(

Degrowth offers an alternative: “An equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long-term.” (Giorgos Kallis) Born in the theories of post development and ecological economics, degrowth presupposes that because of entropy any economic production will degrade natural resources, and that at out current rate we must drastically use less if we want to save any for future generations. Conversely, post development strives to reimagine ways of development that don’t lead to further capitalist exploitation and environmental destruction. Instead of saying the global south has too little, degrowth says the global north has too much, and maybe we should consume less, and from places much closer.

How do we go about consuming less? And what about climate change? What if by the time we start consuming less we’ve warmed the planet up past the point of no return? There are no easy answers to these questions. And degrowth serves to critique and improve strategies rather than offering a subscribed path forward.

A GND in line with green growth, something degrowth critiques

However, we do have the Green New Deal. Billed as “Jobs and Justice,” there really are two potential pathways for the GND. One is seen in the first picture above, corporate font, investments in renewables, the ‘green growth’ side of the GND. The other image shows the ‘justice,’ side, with state investments into welfare, and a racial justice and democratizing focus with renewable technologies. One of these is more of the same, and the other is something different. And whatever Green New Deal is passed will come down to us, and how we strive for it’s active implementation. Because ultimately the choice is ours: Do we want more of the same? Or do we want to try for something simply different?

GND focused on justice, in line with ideas of degrowth

What would this look like? Investing in schools, health departments and public transportation not an Exxon Mobil solar farm. Giving money to non-profits. Reimagining what a ‘job’ is, and if that work is helpful or hurtful to people and the planet. Degrowth can strive to highlight that second half of the GND, the one focused on people, justice and basic rights. We can get to a better place, but green growth alone will not take us there. It is the growth of our souls and the degrowth of our economies that will.

Links:

Three Ways a Green New Deal Can Promote Life Over Capital

A Farewell to Growth

#Degrowth #greengrowth #greennewdeal #capitalism #climatechange

Sowing Seeds of a New World in Climate Dystopia

Butler, Octavia.  Parable of the Sower.  Grand Central Publishing Edition: New York, 1993.

Summary:

Parable of the Sower is a story of a destroyed world and a young black woman who believes that it requires a new philosophy to navigate it and tries to carve out a space.  The world is 21st century California, and some of socio-ecological crises of water, fire, violence, and racism are terrifying lessons of a potential future.  The story is told by Lauren through her journal entries and starts out in her childhood home of Robeldo, a gated/walled predominately colored community.  Her father is a reverend at the only church, and is somewhat of a town leader, fostering community and activism to preserve the ‘town’ through the church.  The outside world, is filled with violence, and scavengers and thieves constantly threaten the not so safe walls of the community.  As events unfold, Lauren is forced to leave and head north, in search of better land, water and safety meeting some new companions along the way that she builds a community herself with.  As an alternative to her father’s Christian church, Lauren becomes a preacher of a new religion ‘Earthseed,’ which believes God is change, and accepts the agency and responsibility that we all have in a socio-ecologically collapsed world. The world died of growth and now she will grow a new one.

Recommended Reading:

Kat, Anderson.  Tending the wild Native American Knowledge and the management of California’s natural resources.  Berkley: University of California Press, 2005.

            Lauren loves to read and write, which are abilities that most people do not even have in the Parable world.  In her childhood community she was teaching people how to read and write and along the journey to Acorn she was also teaching.  One of the first books though not mentioned by title was a book on native plant species and the ways they were used by the indigenous communities in Southern California.  This knowledge ended up getting her in trouble in her community for trying to think of alternative ways of living, and also ended up giving her some knowledge to help her survive throughout her journey to Acorn.  One major theme of Parable of the Sower is stewardship, and a book on indigenous management of natural resources could be a great selection that ties into the themes of this novel. 

Tweedy, Clarence W, III.  “The Anointed: Countering Dystopia with Faith in Octavia’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 1900 – Present, vol 13 iss 1.  Spring 2014.

            This article frames Earthseed as a representation of black identity within the church.  Earthseed is an attempt to free one’s identity from the subservient position of the Christian God with one that is both empowering and also a responsibility.  In some way it is a critique against institutions like the church that have pledged to help African-Americans but have also perpetuated systems of racism.  Earthseed is a way to free blacks from this paradigm and help them forge their own paths.   

Melzer, Patricia.  ‘”All that you touch you change’: Utopian Desire and the Concept of Change in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” San Francisco Vol 3, Iss 2, (Jun 2002): 31. 

            This article talks about how Butler both constructs and challenges the classic utopian narrative.  She sets up that there is a destroyed world and a chance to make a new one.  But with part of her focus with characters who are BIPOC, her emphasis on change in earthseed, she doesn’t replicated classic utopian narratives.  Rather, at the end of the story there is a question of whether or not Acorn will succeed, will they survive at all.  Butler uses this example to illustrate challenges that marginalized people face in society, and a notion of a utopia that is in flux, that is something to constantly work for rather than a privileged entitlement.   

Discussion Questions:

  1. How does Lauren compare to her father?  What are the similarities and differences between Earthseed and Acorn and Robledo and her father’s church?  On a side note:  Where did her father disappear too?  And is it somewhat strange that Lauren enlopes with Bankrole, a very similar character to her father?  Does Lauren possess a father complex?
  2. What is the significance of race in the novel?  What was the affect that Lauren being black and the majority of the characters being BIPOC have on the novel?
  3. What do you think of Earthseed?  Do you think Acorn will survive?  Do you think that they will reach their destiny and land among the stars?  If a central tenant of Earthseed is change, do you think that a sedentary lifestyle, and the eventually institutions that come with expansion will counter the philosophy of Earthseed? 

#socio-ecologicallycollapse #climate_dystopia #earthseed #new_world #violence #newworld #father_complexes #theworlddiedofgrowthsowemustgrowanewone

Art and Translocal Solidarity

Brooke Singer, Excess NYC Compost-Bike Design

Art can be key in creating translocal solidarity. In his article, “Translocal Climate Justice Solidarity,” Paul Routledge describes different local groups, located in global north and south (though with a case study in the south,) who are trying to organize to resist capitalism and also share in the negative effects of climate change. In dealing with the negative effects of climate change and capitalism, there is the assumption that natural bonds would form that would ally groups together and share resources, or help them take larger global initiatives against capitalism/climate change in what is deemed ‘translocal solidarity.’ But Paul points out crucial barriers that exist such as language, time, the physical spaces of where these groups are, are completely different from those of other groups and they struggle to unite even though they share a common enemy. He writes:

“Therefore, a key issue concerning the forging of meaningful solidarities is how the
network’s ‘imaginary’ is visualized and developed at the grassroots: how to construct
senses of shared (or ‘tolerant’) identities (della Porta 2005) concerning climate justice
amongst very different place‐based communities.” (Routledge, 2011).

A powerful way in which to share this sense of identity concerning climate justice is through art; a universal symbolic language that transcends local spatial boundaries. One example of this would be found in the photographs of Edward Burtynsky.

Edward Burtynsky, Anthropocene, Makoko #2 Lagos, Nigeria, 2016
Highway #8
Santa Ana Freeway, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2017

The juxtaposition of these two photographs from his Anthropocene series show how the scale of human development goes beyond any particular locality and is a global phenomenon. In both of these photos, the edges become an endless horizon of houses, crowded together and completely filling up all the space of the image. They convey the largeness of human dwelling on this planet, and challenge viewers to futilely try to reconcile that. They are very different localities, one being a slum in a ‘developing’ nation, the other being a suburb in one the richest countries in the world. However, these divisions become irrelevant when viewed as outcomes of the same anthropogenic growth.

Art like these photographs can help establish translocal solidarity when it can be seen that different localities share similarities. Both of these deal with how to manage growth, what to do with all their waste, where they get their energy from, and how they are at risk from climate change. This will still require being “attentive to the place specificity of each movement,” as there is an unequal distribution of vulnerabilities and material wealth. But art can help localities relate to each other, and strive for solidarity.

Green New Deal: Economy or Ecology?

The Green New Deal: The top-down initiative that is going to save us from ourselves!

Based off of the New Deal, everyone’s new favorite part of 20th century United States. (Though no one ever talks about the square deal anymore, poor Theodore Roosevelt and his racist statue in front of the Natural History Museum. You naughty rough rider you).

Yes, that is what we need. Because according to history, life was bad, but then it got markedly worse with industrial capitalism in the late 19th century. And it was the New Deal: Government, Keynesian Economics, and investments into social services that steered capitalism onto it’s famously somewhat equitable run post WWII. (Though let’s not mention the Housing Act, a centerpiece to the New Deal and the subsequent redlining of every city in America. Equitable for who?)

And since then we’ve had neoliberalism, which has put us back in the ‘markedly worse,’ section, and we need to shift back to Keynesian economics, to ‘marxism,’ as some would call it, to shore up capitalism yet again and have it more evenly distribute things.

Except now, we have climate change. So no problem, we’ll just invest in renewable energy that will create “jobs,” and we’ll expand the power of our government, even though we also don’t trust our government at all, and have problems with every single leader who rises up to the task.

I guess what I’m saying is, this “Green New Deal,” can’t just be a ‘Greened’, ‘New Deal,’ it truly has to be a paradigm shift in the way we think about growth and the economy in general. As much as everyone loves it, the New Deal created urban sprawl, single family home ownership and segregated redlined cities. The whole socio-ecological mess we are in today is a result of the trajectory of growth that the New Deal put us on.

We need a whole new way of imagining things. The New Deal at the time, was a whole new way of looking at things. Government? Mortgages? Social Security? Until the New Deal, the government in the US was the post office and the armies who chased the Indians off their lands. That was pretty much it. We need a way of looking at things that is not based on Keynesian or classical economics, we need to look at things from a ecological economics perspectives. Cause that is really what this is about, is how to weave our economy in to our larger ecology. It’s not how to weave ecology into our larger economy.

As Bina and La Camera write, “Their framing of problems and solutions remains narrowly confined to the realm of market economies: capital accumulation, innovation, technology and growth remain unquestioned… Ultimately, it is the very notion of goals (ends) that informs the definition of problems and solutions.” (Bina, La Camera, 2314)

The GND proposal put forward by AOC has potential to be many things. It can be either steered towards the economy or our collective ecology. Neither of which would be bad, in fact either would be markedly better than what we have now. But until we reorient ourselves in terms of what we want our societies to do, give us all an “equal” chance at pursuing happiness, or come together and decide on what happiness would mean for each other, we will still be on the same path towards socio-ecological collapse.

Down to Earth: How we must learn to Degrow and embrace the Pluriverse

Patterns of Commoning: Commons in the Pluriverse | P2P Foundation

Climate Change, extraordinary inequities, migrations of people and loss of place, global pandemics – What we are experiencing in 2020 is the socio-ecological collapse of human beings on this planet. As Bruno Latour points out in his essay, “Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime,” the fundamental problem is mentality. It is a mentality that has guided our political economy for the last 400+ years, it is the mentality of modernization, development and growth. This mentality is now seeing it’s limits in the 21st century as we simply do not have the resources in people and planet to sustain this growth.

The Degrowth Alternative

Latour gets a little heavy handed in his categories of ‘globalization +, globalization minus, local plus and local minus,’ and he gets a little hung up in these dualisms that slightly retract from his thesis that we need to look at the world in a new way. He does note that, “everything has to be mapped anew…even the markers of space and time ‘local,’ ‘global,’ ‘future,’ and ‘past.'” But he never quites offers what this new paradigm would be, what it really means to come ‘down to earth.’ At the end of chapter six he states, “It is not a matter of learning how to repair cognitive deficiencies, but rather how to live in the same world, share the same culture, perceive a landscape that can be shared in culture.” (23) Latour is so close, he needs to take it one step further, to realize that he too is still ascribing to the universalistic, single vision theory of growth, development, and modernization.

The answer to Latour’s ontological political crisis can be found in some of the ideas of the post-development theories such as degrowth and the pluriverse. In Design for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar regards these conflicts Latour points out as:

“Ontological Struggles. They refer to a different way of imaging life, to another mode of existence. They point towards the Pluriverse; in the successful formula of the Zapatista the pluriverse can be described as a ‘world where many worlds fit.'”

Escobar, Arturo. Sustainability: Designs for the Pluriverse
Development, 2011, 54(2), (137–140)
2011 Society for International Development 1011-6370/11
www.sidint.net/development/

Latour is struggling to combine notions of global and local, modernity and reactions against it to fit in the same world, when in fact to take the pluriverse perspective, they are of different worlds that can share the same space. This perspective liberates Latour’s categories and celebrates the multiplicity of all the political economic dimensions that the world has to offer.

Similar to Degrowth, the pluriverse offers a perspective in which to construct new realities. Latour was still trapped in the paradigm of the global-capitalist-development schemas, in trying to understand the politics behind them. In a pluriverse perspective, many worlds exist and the narrative of modernity/globalization/development is only one of them. The Paris agreement too is still trapped in that single perspective. The opening language refers to ‘sustainable development,’ ‘eradication of poverty,’ these are all single vision notions that do not take the multiplicity of the world into their perspective. The language of the paris accord agreement is simply greenwashing development, of finding a way to continue the same narrative and paradigm of the last 400 years.

If we want to avoid eco-social collapse, we must embrace the Pluriverse, and transition to economies of Degrowth. Degrowth asks that we consider other social objectives other than economic growth, such as sharing, caring, conviviality and the equitable downsizing of production and consumption. It essentially frees up other ways for other societies to consider paths that they want to take without imposing them to the global capitalistic order through our actions. It embraces the pluriverse, and imagines different ways human beings can exist with each other and this planet.