An Insurgency of Interconnectedness: Bridging Gaps in Jamil Dehlavi’s The Blood of Hussain

Opening of The Blood of Hussain

One of the most common themes this semester and the 21st century world, has been interconnectedness. Whether it’s the interconnectivity of the global climate project with local grassroots efforts, or the ways in which time is reworked through weather patterns shifting the lengths of days, for example or how the duality of two worlds – East and West – can converge through the channels of Capitalism and the effects of Climate Change, interconnectedness seems to be at the core of understanding Climate Change in the contemporary period. This sense of disparate spaces – the global, the local, yesterday (the past), today (the present), East and West – becoming increasingly interconnected lies at the heart of my analysis of Jamil Dehlavi’s 1980 Pakistani film, The Blood of Hussain.

Jamil Dehlavi

The film is about the insurgency of farmers and villagers against the local tyrannical and shrewd army. Taking place in the Punjab region of Pakistan, the film follows two brothers – Salim, the Western educated banker who acts as a power broker for the newly established tyrannical government and Hussain, the sympathetic farmer who becomes inspired by a holy soothsayer to hold an uprising against the same government for whom his brother works. Along with the obvious themes of fratricide and the East and West dialectic, Dehlavi’s choice of the farmer as the central figure and the materialistic neoliberal as the brother invites an analysis of the film from a contemporary environmental perspective, with a refined definition of “eco-cosmopolitanism” at the crux of the analysis.

Though a debated term, I conceptualize “eco-cosmopolitanism” in Pakistani terms, as a tool that can be used to study the ways in which characters with nationalistic tendencies (Hussain and his followers) and imperialistic characteristics (Salim and the army) are exposed as such through their relationship with their local environment. With their connection to the local environment, such relationships inevitably relate to the greater, global project of Climate Change.

This conceptualization of “eco-cosmopolitanism” is grounded by Shazia Rahman’s paper on eco-cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel Trespassing, “Karachi, Turtles, and the Materiality of Place: Pakistani Eco-cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing.” In the paper, Rahman explains that Ursula K. Heise’s idea of eco-cosmopolitanism as an “attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of a planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both humans nonhuman kinds” (Heise 61) is a “way of extending nationalism to include the planet and nonhumans” (Rahman 261). Rahman offers an alternative conception of eco-cosmopolitanism, using Khan’s novel as the site through which her definition is presented, for “Khan posits an eco-cosmopolitanism that is rooted in the local in such a way that it implicated the planet globally. This local rootedness is not nationalism but a materiality of place, and the global thinking not necessarily imperialist cosmopolitanism but rather a kind of planetarity” (262). 

Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet

Similarly, in this analysis, I highlight how Jamil Dehlavi’s film showcases such a brand of “eco-cosmopolitanism” through the filmmaker’s depiction of the ways in which the unseen, marginalized class in society associates with nature through agrarianism and a conservative lifestyle and the ruling, tyrannical class relates to nature through their use of modern weaponry and advanced technology.

Shazia Rahman’s Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism

In addition to eco-cosmopolitanism being used to show how the local connects to the global, the story of Hussain leading a rebellion against the dominant classes while protecting his own kin is a modern rendition of Imam Hussain’s demise from the Quran (the holy soothsayer makes reference to this tale when speaking with the film’s Hussain about his destiny) and like eco-cosmopolitanism threads the line between the local and global, the film’s reference to and manifestation of an older Islamic story mitigates the distance between the past and the present, mirroring the interconnectivity of different fields of time in a Climate Change-ridden world. Here, I use anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner’s conceptualization of the temporal reality of Australian Aboriginals, “everywhen.” In Stanner’s essay from 1953, “The Dreaming,” the anthropologist writes of “The Dreaming” as conjuring “up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past” which is, “in a sense, still part of the present” (58). For Stanner, one “cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time; it was, and is, everywhen” (58). With “everywhen” defined as the ontological marker of the temporal character of Aboriginal reality, it is important then to use it to describe the temporal interconnectedness of the climax in The Blood of Hussain as the parameters of time collapse, with the past of Islam standing with the present conflict of the Hussain’s group of insurgents.

In addition to the interconnectedness of different parameters of time and the global and local, this analysis of The Blood of Hussain gives rise to studying the East/West dialectic of the film’s characters, most specifically the brothers and their respective insurgencies, with Salim representing Western imperialism and Hussain, religious nationalism. Such a tension and dialectic between Western imperialism and religious nationalism is a Pakistani motif, with Dehlavi contending with the presence of “both religious nationalism” and “imperialism” for “anti-imperialism has historically been linked with religious nationalism in the region” (Rahman 263). As mentioned, this East/West dialectic is captured in the background of Dehlavi himself, who is both French and Pakistani, raised in Pakistan but educated in both America and Britain. 

A Bloodied Horse in the middle of a Muharram ceremony, in commemoration of prophet Hussain

As mentioned in the opening paragraphs, interconnectedness is the most apparent theme of Jamil Dehlavi’s film. This evidenced by the characters who are connected to the environment in an eco-cosmopolitan sense to the life of the filmmaker himself, whose East/West life story can be projected and connected to the political battle at the heart of Pakistan, where Pakistani nationalism coexists with Western imperialism, mirroring the internal conflicts of Salim and Hussain to the Imam Hussain story, which the film manifests, connecting the present moment to the “sacred, heroic past.” With this, it can be observed that the film’s interconnectedness demonstrates the kind of interconnectedness central to the project of Climate Change, where the local and global converge and spatial and temporal gaps are mitigated.

Astoundingly enough, Dehlavi’s chosen artform is film and considering the film is not directly about environmentalism nor does it lay bare its environmentalism, in this essay, it is looked at as an environmentalist film, a form of allegory that can help shed light on the most important environmental project of the contemporary world.

Soldiers of the local army face the valleys of Punjab

Main Sources:

Ahmad, Ali Nobil. “Meeting Jamil Dehlavi – Pakistan’s Most Intriguing Filmmaker.” The National, The National, 9 Aug. 2018, www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/meeting-jamil-dehlavi-pakistan-s-most-intriguing-filmmaker-1.758505#2.

Bhutto, Fatima. “Jamil Dehlavi: ‘In Pakistan, There Is Always Something in the Offing’.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 9 Aug. 2018, www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/09/jamil-dehlavi-pakistan-film-maker-blood-hussain-interview.

Crossette, Barbara. “Mahbub Ul Haq, 64, Analyst And Critic of Global Poverty.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 July 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/07/17/world/mahbub-ul-haq-64-analyst-and-critic-of-global-poverty.html.

Dehlavi, Jamil, director. The Blood of Hussain. Dehlavi Films, 1980.

Haq, Mahbub ul. Human Development in South Asia: 1997. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Rahman, S. “Karachi, Turtles, and the Materiality of Place: Pakistani Eco-Cosmopolitanism in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 18, no. 2, 2011, pp. 261–282., doi:10.1093/isle/isr040.

Ruddiman, W.F. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago. Climatic Change 61, 261–293 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:CLIM.0000004577.17928.fa

Sayeed, Raza Ali. “Weekly Classics: The Blood of Hussain.” DAWN.COM, DAWN, 7 Sept. 2012, www.dawn.com/news/747719/weekly-classics-the-blood-of-hussain.

Talpur, Mustafa, et al. “The World Bank in Pakistan: See No Suffering, Hear No Cries, Speak No Truth.” The Reality of Aid 2008: Aid Effectiveness: “Democratic Ownership and Human Rights”, IBON Books, 2008, pp. 86–94.

“The Blood of Hussain (Dual Format Edition).” BFI Shop, British Film Institute, 2018, shop.bfi.org.uk/the-blood-of-hussain-dual-format-edition.html.

“The Dreaming.” The Dreaming and Other Essays, by W. E. H. Stanner, Black Inc. Agenda, 2009, pp. 57–72.

FYI: I have included a link to the film below (it is available ad free on YouTube):

Rectifying the Intersection of the Prison Industrial Complex and Climate Change

by Christopher Hongach

Often neglected from the discourse of climate change environmentalism are prisons and prison inmates. By exposing the embedded social injustices that have structured the prison industrial complex in the United States, the overlapping and intertwined effects of racism, capitalism, and imperialism reveal how certain bodies, particularly Black bodies, are targeted, exploited, and made disposable, at the sanction of state and neoliberal powers. 

U.S. Prisons have significantly increased since the 1970's. This is the central feature of the prison industrial complex. 

Photo from https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-prisons-building-catalogs-of-inmates-voices-report/1380458

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-prisons-building-catalogs-of-inmates-voices-report/1380458

One of the most challenging components of climate change discourse is the establishment of inclusivity. With a society structured on differences and divisions, it seems collectivizing politically for climate change initiatives is nearly impossible. Even emphasizing democratic principles has its short-comings in the establishment of inclusivity, specifically as they operate within state power, both ideologically and institutionally. In order to uphold the essential democratic principles, a policing and a “securitizing” system must exist within state power over society. Understanding this means understanding that there is inherent “otherness” to a society. Upon conviction of certain violations, “others” become “the incarcerated,” who, then, endure the oppression enforced upon them by state power and its supported agencies.  

Once convicted, persons are completely dehumanized; closed off from society and open social and political participation, prisoners are cut off the world.  

Prisoners line up to vote at the D.C. Jail in Washington, DC.Jacquelyn Martin/AP. https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/02/the-race-gap-in-u-s-prisons-is-glaring-and-poverty-is-making-it-worse/

Due to the war on drugs and the war on crime, from the 1970’s onward, America saw the rise of prisons and, with that, an increase in incarceration in the population. These changes, occurring after the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, most effectively targeted Black communities. Today, while there are between 1.7 – 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S. (or 1/200 people), Black men make up the largest percentage of the incarcerated population in the U.S. (about 1/100 Black people are incarcerated; with 1/3 Black men being incarcerated).  

The increase of prisons and prisoners are part of the prison industrial complex, which seeks to address social issues with incarceration, rather than with sophisticated investments in true rehabilitative resources or social equity. 

https://www.ted.com/playlists/651/truths_about_the_us_prison_system

Other features of the prison industrial complex reveal neoliberal agendas that further imprison the incarcerated and violate their human rights, such as the cost-cutting effects on prisoner’s essential needs or through the violating practices of prison labor. 

In circumstances of climate change, prisons have especially experienced exploitation and disposability by state and neoliberal forces. 

Prisons like SCI Fayette in Pennsylvania, built near a coal dumping grounds, seemingly geographically out of reach of social centers, endure the toxicity of coal ash contamination of water and air, leaving prisoners with serious complications to their health. 

Other prison issues pertaining to climate change, like in California, where global warming has significantly contributed to the damages caused by forest fires, exposes the issues of prison labor.  Inmate firefighters, who make up 30-40% of California’s fire fighters, receive barely any training and close to nothing in compensation to be on the frontlines of service.  

An inmate firefighter pauses during a firing operation as the Carr fire continues to burn in Redding, California on July 27, 2018. 

An inmate firefighter pauses during a firing operation as the Carr fire continues to burn in Redding, California on July 27, 2018. Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/14/california-is-paying-inmates-1-an-hour-to-fight-wildfires.html

Understanding how the incarcerated are exploited, abused, and discarded is only the first step to rectifying the faults in our “liberal democracy.”  

The racial aspect of prisons, as it relates specifically to climate change environmentalism, is a particular point of focus which highlights the layers of racism, capitalism, and the unconstitutional practices of imperialism that are embedded in the greater issues of climate injustice for the prison population of the United States.  

Arguing for the remembrance of “the disposable” mass of the incarcerated, who, in various locations across the U.S., are left out of the discourses on climate change injustice, helps reveal the hypocrisies of our American liberal democracy, by exposing the deeply embedded social injustices that have structured the prison industrial system and by exposing the cruel and unusual punishments put upon them from the unconstitutional practices by biopolitical power forces. 

We must not only remember the incarcerated in the discussions of climate justice, but we must critically address the embedded social injustices that structure the prison industrial complex and allow climate injustice to persist.  

We must put aside structural racism and clauses of biopolitical eugenics written in our legal codes; rectify the symbolics of our certain harmful social understandings; and end the infrastructures of oppression, by legitimate democratization of social and climate participation. 

By outlining community efforts inside, between, and outside prisons in the U.S., such as by the involvement of advocacy groups and media enhancement, we make achievable the possibilities of social and climate solidarity.  

 Main Sources

Barroca v. Bureau of Prisons. District of Colombia, Case 1:18-cv-02740-JEB, Document 12. 23 April 2019.  

http://abolitionistlawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/amended-complaint-Barroca.pdf

Bernd, CandiceZoe Loftus-Farren; and Maureen Nandini Mitra. “America’s Toxic Prisons: The Environmental Injustices of Mass Incarceration,” Earth Island Journal and Truthout. 2018. 

https://earthisland.org/journal/americas-toxic-prisons/

Borunda, Alejandra. “Climate change is contributing to California’s fires,” National Geographic. 25 October 2019.  

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/10/climate-change-california-power-outage/

The Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons. “No Escape: Exposure to Toxic Coal Waste at State Correctional Institution Fayette.” Abolitionist Law Center and Human Rights Coalition. 

https://abolitionistlawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/no-escape-bw-1-4mb.pdf

Carson, E. Ann. “Prisoners in 2018.” Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, NCJ 253516. April 2020. 

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p18.pdf 

Democracy Now. “$1 an Hour to Fight Largest Fire in CA History: Are Prison Firefighting Programs Slave Labor?” Democracy Now. 9 August 2018. 

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/9/1_an_hour_to_fight_largest

DuncanSophie. “Prison Labor in a Warming World: When floods and fires strike, who has to clean up the mess?” The Free Radicals. 14 August 2018. 

Equal Justice Initiative, “News: Investigation Reveals Environmental Dangers in America’s Toxic Prisons.” 16 June 2017. 

https://eji.org/news/investigation-reveals-environmental-dangers-in-toxic-prisons/

Evans, Brad and Henry A. Giroux. Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle. City Lights Books. 2015. 

Flood the System. “Infographic: Prisons and Climate Change,” Flood the System. 

 
Gotsch, Kara and Vinay Basti. “Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons,” The Sentencing Project. 2 August 2018.  

Greenfield, Nicole. “The Connection Between Mass Incarceration and Environmental Justice,” NRDC. 19 January 2018.  

https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/connection-between-mass-incarceration-and-environmental-justice

LeRoy, Carri J; Kelli Bush, Joslyn Trive, and Briana Gallagher. “Suitability in Prisons ProjectL An Overview (2004–12),” Washington State Department of Corrections & The Evergreen State College. 2013. 

http://sustainabilityinprisons.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Overview-cover-text-reduced-size.pdf

Lorie, Julia. “30 Percent of California’s Forest Firefighters Are Prisoners,” Mother Jones. 14 August 2015. 

RakiaRaven. “A sinking jail: The environmental disaster that is Rikers Island,” Grist. 15 March 2016. 

https://grist.org/justice/a-sinking-jail-the-environmental-disaster-that-is-rikers-island/

Sabalow, Ryan. “These California inmates risked death to fight wildfires. After prison, they’re left behind,” The Sacramento Bee. 23 July 2020. 

https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article244286777.html

The Sentencing Project, “Issues: Felony Disenfranchisement,” 

https://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/felony-disenfranchisement/

Taiwo, Olufemi O. “Climate Apartheid Is the Coming Police Violence Crisis,” Dissent Magazine. 12 August 2020.  

Tsolkas, Panagioti. “Prisoners File Unprecedented Environmental Lawsuit against Proposed Federal Prison in Kentucky,” Nation Inside. 7 December 2018. 

https://nationinside.org/campaign/prison-ecology/posts/prisoners-file-unprecedented- environmental-lawsuit-against-proposed-federal-prison-in-kentucky/ 

Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series, 21. 2018. 

Yusoff, Kathryn. “Geology, Race, and Matter,” A Billion Black Anthropocenes of None. University of Minnesota Press. 2018. 

https://manifold.umn.edu/read/untitled-5f0c83c1-5748-4091-8d8e-72bebca5b94b/section/6243cd2f-68f4-40dc-97a1-a5c84460c09b

Further Questions:

  1. How does the prison industrial complex affect other communities–such as Latin-x communities, LGBTQ+ communities, and women? What can we say about intersectionality and the prison industrial complex?
  2. If prisons are abolished, what about social safety? Is investing in the community and social welfare programs really a more dignified, effective solution?
  3. What does a “Marshall Plan”-like economic aid look like for social inequalities, or for climate change initiatives? How would this money get handled?
  4. Even if prisons are reformed, to the extent that living and working conditions are improved, and prisoners are not recruited into the front lines of climate change clean up, what is there to say about neoliberal privatized police and prisons, as climate change continues to increasingly effect the way we live?
  5. Is climate change the next big shift in policing and incarceration? How does this tie directly into capitalism and, even, racism?
  6. Is an universal, all-inclusive climate change discourse possible?

Connecting Communities to Coastal Resilience: How Can Public Participation in Wetland Restoration and Management Enhance Sustainability for New York?

Abstract

Coastal resiliency, or the defense against extreme weather events, is becoming significantly more critical to the livelihood of coastal communities as the frequency and intensity of storms increases and is exacerbated by rising sea levels due to climate change. In 2012 Superstorm Sandy cost $42 billion across New York State in structural damage and displaced many residents from their homes for prolonged periods of time as storm surges surpassed record highs for the region. New York’s coastal communities need to be better prepared for future climate related scenarios and resiliency planning needs to include protection of public health and safety, reduced risk of structural and non-structural damage, and improved recovery strategies. Coastal wetlands provide a critical line of defense against more intense and frequent weather events due to their ability to mitigate storm damages by providing natural resistance from flooding through rainwater absorption, protecting shorelines from erosion by buffering wave action and sediment capture, as well as their capability to naturally accrete, or build up vertically, to contend with sea level rise trends. In this paper I will explore how to best bring the scientific research and evidence of the anthropogenic impacts to tidal wetlands to a practical level of understanding on the community level. By building connections between the community and the natural coastal landscape, a sense of care for the environment and a relationship to the value it has for coastal resiliency is more likely to develop among residents, which may significantly improve the success and sustainability of coastal wetland restoration and management initiatives. 

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo speaking during a tour of storm damage on Staten Island after Sandy, with President Obama, Senator Charles E. Schumer and, second from left, Shaun Donovan, the federal housing secretary.
Credit…Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Significance of coastal wetland ecosystems

Coastal wetlands are highly productive areas that provide important ecosystem services. These environments contain a diversity of native vegetation and support abundant aquatic, avian, and terrestrial wildlife. Healthy functioning wetlands also improve water quality by filtering stormwater runoff and metabolizing excess nutrients which is critical for clarifying the water and creating more suitable conditions for natural resource and commodity production and supporting commercial and recreational estuary-related business.

These ecosystems are also vital in in the context of climate change and sea level rise. Tidal wetlands have important carbon sequestration abilities and may be significant in relation to the urgency to reduce global carbon footprints contributing to planetary warming. Vigorous wetland conditions also provide protection to public health and infrastructure by providing natural resistance to storms and flooding which is increasingly becoming more important with rising seas and more frequent extreme weather events. Protection and restoration of the natural estuarine environment and its ability to mitigate storm damages should be of the highest priority for New York’s coastal communities.

Interacting stresses on tidal wetlands

Historical anthropogenic impacts to New York’s coastal wetlands over the last century such as grid-ditching existing marshes for mosquito control, filling of wetlands for development, construction of infrastructure segmenting habitat, and displacing native species with human introduced non-natives has caused ecosystem degradation and loss of wetland acreage. Further degradation of tidal wetland habitat has occurred due to urbanization and indeed much of New York’s population is concentrated around these coastal environments. In fact, coastal wetland systems arguably serve more human uses than any other ecosystem and are the sites of the world’s most intense commercial activity and population growth with approximately 75% of the worldwide human population living in coastal regions.

Anthropogenic eutrophication, or excess nutrient inputs to coastal system from human activities, has become a serious problem; nitrogen being the primary nutrient of concern for waters in the New York region. Nitrogen inputs to New York’s coastal estuarine systems from human land uses generally originate from fertilizers, stormwater runoff and combined sewer overflows (CSOs), and wastewater systems. Excess anthropogenic nitrogen inputs promote a series of positive feedbacks by altering ecosystem processes leaving coastal wetlands more susceptible to the erosive forces of storms, sea level rise, and gravitational slumping. This cascade of changes can eventually result in deficient ecosystem functioning, threaten the long-term stability of marsh systems, and cause wetland acreage loss. Climate change can further compound these issues since areas in the Northeast U.S., including New York, are expected to experience increases in precipitation as well as warmer conditions during the winter months, resulting in more precipitation as rain and less as snow, which can increase the frequency of runoff events. More stormwater runoff and CSOs translates to higher levels of nitrogen reaching estuarine habitats and increased levels of degradation to wetlands.

Calving of vital creek bank as a result of low marsh cordgrass.
Mark Bertness. http://www.bertnesslab.com

Connecting communities to wetlands through management and restoration

Nutrient management policy implementation paired with wetland restoration projects can potentially repair damages to tidal marsh habitats and thus preserve their healthy ecological functioning and the ecosystem services that they provide to coastal communities including coastal resilience. However, many residents in New York’s coastal communities who live in close proximity to these habitats and are largely contributing anthropogenic eutrophication through their everyday activities, may not see the intricate connections, which I have endeavored to lay out in my paper, that wetland ecosystems indeed have to their everyday lives. I argue that improvements in communication and engagement with local communities as well as fostering an environmental ethic can significantly improve wetland restoration and management efforts.

Fresh Kills in Staten Island, NY was wetland habitat that was valued so low that is was opened as a landfill in 1948 to be a receptacle for New York City’s garbage and became one of the world’s largest dumps. Fresh Kills Landfill was closed by Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2001 and the site is currently undergoing restoration. This work includes restoring 360 acres of wetlands and  reclaiming 1,000 acres of higher elevated areas previously altered by landfill operations as grasslands (also an important carbon sink) to transform the area into “an extraordinary 2,200 acre urban park that will be a model for sustainable waterfront land reclamation, a source of pride for Staten Island and New York City, and a gift of open space for generations to come” (https://freshkillspark.org/). This is a really beautiful and, for me, emotional “ugly duckling story” and may serve as an inspiration for other potential ecological restoration and reclamation projects which will be so important for coastal resiliency, carbon sequestration, climate change, and our future.

Garbage scows bring solid waste to Plant #2 at Fresh Kills Landfill, 1973.
Chester Higgins, Jr. – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
https://freshkillspark.org/blog/wetland-restoration-freshkills-park
(Photo: Alex MacLean)

Public education and outreach campaigns are valuable for cultivating community engagement with wetland protection, management, and restoration efforts but importantly need to focus on creating a dialogue and participation between scientists, government, and the public. Communities especially need to be persuaded that a series of incremental actions and behavior changes that they are indeed themselves capable of carrying out has the potential to accomplish significant changes to our coastal wetland ecosystems. The incorporation of in-field education and volunteer activities as well as recreational opportunities is also essential to create a sense of place and can very often, in turn, bring a sense of care to the environment. In these ways new frameworks for environmental stewardship could be better put into action both on the ground within local communities and at broader national and international socio-ecological levels.

Planting the Seeds of Change in Education: Why Climate Crisis Activism through the Lens of Racial Justice is Critical to Creating and Sustaining a More Equitable Society

Transform Don’t Trash – NYC Environmental Justice Alliance: “On the ground and at the table” Photo credit Matt Davis

Abstract:  The climate crisis must now be addressed in an urgent, radical way, before the harm we do to our environment is irreversible; in 2020 we are presented with an opportunity of unprecedented scope to reset society on multiple, interlocking levels.  The pandemic and resulting societal disruption reveal in stark contrast inequities in economic opportunity, as well as access to healthcare and education, due to the continuing governmental legacy of racist policy that targets Black Americans.  In the de facto segregated New York City public school system, activism that links environmental and racial justice with the climate crisis, building on the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement, is growing.  It is a necessary connection that will unify and strengthen our collective efforts–and unite Americans–to make critical progress on both critical fronts.  Racial justice and environmental justice are inextricably linked with the worsening climate crisis. On the local level, in New York City, we can empower current and future generations of learners through education. the racism that produced segregated housing in toxic environments and neighborhoods, and subsequently in largely segregated school districts, cannot be perpetuated as we emerge from quarantine.  As we unite to address police brutality against Black Americans, the urgent call to address underlying issues of climate justice that affect health and healthcare–and the climate crisis that enables pandemics to roar across the planet–must be the focus of our individual and governmental efforts.

Key Terms:  Racism, Environmental Justice, Climate Justice, Black Lives Matter, Climate Crisis

Learning where our food comes from and where our waste goes is all part of understanding the climate crisis and environmental justice.

Harvesting healthy food at Red Hook Farms

A sampling of curriculum content, particularly in the high school curriculum, though adaptable to younger students, follows.  They are envisioned to foster interdisciplinary engagement.  In schools, curriculum surrounding waste generation and processing—where does our garbage go?—recycling, composting, community gardens, greenspaces, and green market economies should be studied, inspiring future engineers, scientists, writers, artists, and architects. 

Civics/Government

  • Discussion of the question at the heart of the civil suit Juliana vs. The United States:  do the People have a constitutional right to a healthy environment?  https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/juliana-v-us
  • What duty of care do we owe one another in a society—on an individual level (such as mask-wearing) and on a national/global level? 
  • Study of the Green New Deal as it relates to NYC realities. 

https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf

https://www.sunrisemovement.org/green-new-deal

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02012020/green-new-deal-future-2020-election-climate-change-sanders-ocasio-cortez

  • Discussion of the recently proposed companion Senate bill Environmental Justice for All Act by Senators Harris, Booker, and Duckworth:

https://www.harris.senate.gov/news/press-releases/harris-booker-duckworth-introduce-comprehensive-legislation-to-help-achieve-environmental-justice-for-all

One segment in the documentary included the slogan, “Green jobs, not jails,” a positive example of government-backed support for low-income homeowners to convert their homes to solar power, with people of color from the community participating in jobs training to install the panels.  Energy savings—and clean energy—allowed POC to purchase the panels, making them part of the clean energy movement.  

Environmental Science

  • The Harbor School

A field trip to Governors Island to explore the oyster project at the Harbor School and is an excellent example of positive, cool environmental science.  The oyster middens that used to line the Manhattan shores are testament to the once-teeming food source.  Oysters filter roughly thirty-five gallons of water a day and are quietly cleaning our harbor.  The shell recycling project (you can see it on Governors Island) exists because oyster larvae, called spats, need old oyster shells on which to attach to grow.  It is an inspired way to teach about ecosystems and water health, and a 10-minute ferry ride is a welcome breath of fresh air—when we can emerge.  https://untappedcities.com/2017/08/30/the-harbor-school-nycs-only-maritime-high-school-partners-with-billion-oyster-project-on-governors-island/

Red Hook Farms educational and volunteer programs inspire the next generation of leaders
  • Red Hook Farms is a truly inspiring effort surrounding farming, gardening, and education, involving public housing and NYC communities, not to be missed.
  • Red Hook Farms Composting Facility is “the largest community composting program in the United States run entirely on renewable resources.”

Composting is an elemental way to empower individuals to assert control over daily consumption and waste disposal.  Over 1/3 of NYC waste is compostable food waste; in landfills, it emits greenhouse gases and increases the trucking of waste.  [source https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/nyregion/nyc-compost-recycling.html]

History

  • Innumerable examples, through Jim Crow and Civil Rights struggles, to present,  beginning with this accessible and vital resource:  Reconstruction:  America After the Civil War, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a 4-part PBS Documentary.  Part I is linked here:  https://www.pbs.org/video/reconstruction-part-1-hour-1-n0g1em/

Environmental Justice and Community engagement

Excellent and engaging curricula can be accessed through We Act, an organization that powerfully links the issues of climate justice to education and activism and provides templates for action.  We Act programming, such as Environmental Health and Justice Leadership Training (EHJLT), online learning mini-modules, and environmental and healthcare careers networking, are all part of this vibrant organization’s initiatives.

  • Climate Justice Agenda 2020

The Climate Justice Agenda 2020:  A Critical Decade for Climate, Equity, and Health published in April by the New York City Climate Alliance offers a fantastic roadmap for environmental issues facing NYC communities.  Its overarching goals are to reduce harmful greenhouse gases and localized emissions; advance a just transition towards an inclusive, regenerative economy; and cultivate healthy & resilient communities.  Educators can cull local topics most relevant to students in the neighborhoods in which their schools are housed.  Issues surrounding waste transfer stations, truck traffic, pollutants, storm water treatment, coastal resilience, and the sustaining of a green jobs economy are a few of the items on this comprehensive and exciting agenda.

What Is Lost? What Remains? Assessing Climate Rupture Through Funerary Art

A Summary of Conference Paper by Carol Joo Lee

Summary of Topic and Argument

Losses abound in the age of Climate Crisis. Faced with science that irreversible chain of events beyond human control is imminent if status quo remains, humans race to mediate and minimize the permanent disappearance of species and habitable places. These ecological and environmental disappearances, losses of our companion species and homes, are an impetus for recognizing mourning as an ethical and political response in the presence of a profound loss. In the paper, I examine the object and function of memorializing grief in relation to the ruptures in our ecosystem and biosphere through examples of contemporary “funerary art”: “Ontological turn” and new materialism offer ways in which artists are reimagining the body as a container of violent history and pollutants; and interpretations of disaster represent displacement of time and the local. In assessing artworks that respond to the urgency of these climate ruptures, I ask whether art as activism can overcome aestheticized objectification to be useful in a world defined by an existential crisis.

Summary of Research and Claims

Through examples of contemporary artworks that address climatic and environmental disharmonies head on, I demonstrate mourning as an ethical and political response to ecological loss and memorializing as visualization of mourning encompassing multifaceted functions and potentials – a space for collective healing (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial); a site of recalling and confronting uneasy history (the Holocaust Memorial, “Candy Spill,” “Malinche” & “Cortés”); a point of departure for rethinking the human body in relation to nonhuman, derealized species (“States of Inflammation,” “Mushroom Burial Suit”); a template for transposing one’s own memory (“Abschlag”); and a localized cautionary tale (“Into Taihu” & “Out of Beichuan”). 

Not satisfied with widely used terms for describing our current climatic condition, I leaned into Climate Rupture to describe a breach of a harmonious relationship with the ecosystem and biosphere; ecological and environmental degradation and disappearance with implications of another mass extinction; and a culmination of disharmonies found in habits, habitats and weather. Disaster is another impetus to mourning and memorializing with additional dimension – a discombobulated time. A nexus of suddenness with permanence is one of disaster’s principal characteristics and a temporal and environmental displacement is another, as such disaster exists in the future and the present is cannibalized by the past. Anticipation of disaster is a perpetual conditioning of existing marked by anxiety of time as we race to limit global warming below 1.5°C.

Artists Thomas Hirschhorn and Liu Xiaodong confront the complex web of effects and affects of disaster directly in their work by constructing disaster as an imminent and generic phenomenon in its anywhere-ness and at once mundane and pernicious presence in the form of polluted waterway and devastating earthquake told as a localized cautionary tale. In both Hirschhorn’s and Liu’s work, a discombobulated time is woven in as an integral part of disaster: the past shows itself in the ruins of the present and resettles in the future. 

In more internalized works, novel philosophical approaches such as new materialism, speculative realism and object-oriented ontology play an important role in artists’ conscious shift away from anthropocentric orientation to incorporate nonhuman perspectives and interconnectedness of natural, social and spiritual worlds. Ane Graff and Jae Rhim Lee, through their widely divergent interpretations, situate the human body as one part of the larger natural system and as both the emitter and the host of toxins with deleterious effects on nonhuman, derealized species. In Jimmie Durham’s sculptures history, ancestors and spirits are implicated (and perhaps even felt) in the heterogeneity of materials that represent the uneasy interpenetration of natural and manmade worlds, and indigenous and Western cultures. 

In assessing Climate Funerary Art, I framed mourning as an ethical act (Sontag) that is constitutive, rather than depreciative, with the potential to be animated for hopeful politics (Eng and Kazijian ), and the “work of mourning” as an expression of empathy “for those whom we do not know, for those whom we will not know” (Cunsolo). I argued that Climate Funerary Art in the face of large-scale losses due to climate volatility and ecological and environmental ruptures holds agency and utility, and mediates collective recognition of the loss and facilitates space for mourning and memorializing. It also enables communication between us and with the future generation. 

Funerary art by definition is companion art to the body and the spirit of the dead and serves a dual function of utility and art. This allows Climate Funerary Art to escape the Groysian aestheticization conundrum and in its capacity to mourn, memorialize and accompany the dead, I argue, makes itself useful and furthermore its “being in the world” contributes to the larger discourse and visibility of the ruptures in the environment and ecosystem. Climate Funerary Art in its multitude of forms asks that we contemplate loss, what is being lost, what is being implicated in this loss and chaos, and how to care for what remains. If Max Ernst’s image of Europe after the war is a cautionary tale for the future generation, it behooves us to heed the lesson and reassess our priorities.

Top image: Max Ernst, Europe After the Rain II, 1940-1942

Examples of Climate Funerary Art

Thomas Hirschhorn, Abschlag, 2014
Liu Xiaodong, Out of Beichuan, 2010
 (l-r) Jimmie Durham, Malinche, 1988-1992; Jimmie Durham, Cortés, 1991-1992
Ane Graff, States of Inflammation, 2019
Jae Rhim Lee, Mushroom Burial Suit, 2008

Sources

  1. Cunsolo, Ashlee. “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning.” Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, edited by Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/ethicsenviro.17.2.137
  1. Demos, T.J. “Rights of Nature: The Art and Politics of Earth Jurisprudence.” Nottingham Contemporary, 2015, https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/0/196/files/2015/10/Demos-Rights-of-Nature-2015.compressed.pdf
  1. Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian, eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, https://books.google.com/books?id=JkNoeXNopDQC&pg=PR5&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
  1. Groys, Boris. “On Art Activism.” e-flux, June 2014, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/56/60343/on-art-activism/
  1. Lee, Jae Rhim. “My Mushroom Burial Suit.” July 2011, https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee_my_mushroom_burial_suit
  1. Solnit, Rebecca. “’The Impossible Has Already Happened’: What Coronavirus Can Teach Us About Hope.” The Guardian, April 7, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit?
  1. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003

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

airplane with contrail

Green Responses to Flight Shaming

With a rising global middle class and decline in inflation-adjusted airfares, the number of air passengers is forecasted to double in the next 20 years, which also means an increase in greenhouse gases emitted by airplanes — taking up as much as 27 percent of our carbon budget.

Flying also has a significant impact on one’s individual carbon footprint compared to other measure individuals can take, such as carpooling or giving up meat. Flight Free USA offers a calculator, where one can enter a flight route and see the climate impacts of flying — or avoiding — that flight.

Awareness of the impact of these emissions has given birth to “flight shaming” –  or “flygskam” in Sweden, where it originated – a movement that seeks to discourage flying for environmental reasons. Climate activist Greta Thunberg gave the movement a significant boost in 2019 when she made a high-profile crossing of the Atlantic on a carbon-neutral boat, consistent with her own pledge to avoid air travel. 

While dozens of media stories have reported on flight shaming, it is not (yet) a mainstream movement. Even committed environmentalists continue to fly, and many individuals have offered their own “green” responses to the movement, which include: 

  • Continue to fly because of the many benefits of travel, including building global empathy, supporting local economies and keeping poachers at bay
  • Cut down on flying without totally eliminating it. The problem may lie less with those who fly once or twice a year and more with the 12% of Americans who fly six or more times per year who are responsible for about two-thirds of all flights. For those who do fly, the following practices are recommended:
    • travel with less baggage (lighter planes require less fuel)
    • avoid business class (larger seats make this option two to four times as carbon intensive as economy class)
    • choose nonstop flights (takeoff is the most carbon-intensive portion of the flight, making one flight significantly more efficient than two) 
  • Purchase carbon offsets when you fly. This involves investing a small amount of money into a project that is said to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make up for a traveler’s share of carbon emitted from a flight — including planting trees, maintaining forests, building a wind farm. Many environmentalists criticize this practice, saying there is no scientific basis that these projects actually counter the carbon emissions of flying and that the purchase of carbon offsets perpetuates the myth that it is possible to fly without increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. 
  • Fight for systemic change in the form of a carbon tax that will discourage air travel on a large scale. 

Recent air travel numbers show the movement may be having an effect in Sweden and Germany, where pre-pandemic domestic air travel showed slight declines from previous years, while more-sustainable rail travel posted record numbers.  

While the skipped-trips of flight-shamers themselves may not have a significant impact on greenhouse gases, the voices of the movement are being heard and influencing policy proposals: 

Airlines, too, are taking note, with many promoting their own sustainability credentials. Below are two examples. The first, from Ryanair, has been heavily criticized as “greenwashing.” The carrier advertises itself as Europe’s lowest emissions airline, based on carbon emissions per seat-kilometer flown, because it has a younger, more fuel-efficient fleet and fills 96 percent of its seats. The ads do not mention that Ryanair is the tenth-largest carbon emitter in Europe (the first nine are coal-fired power plants). KLM, on the other hand, recommends exploring other travel options besides flying. 

Unfortunately, Americans have few green options for inter-city travel. Rail is by far more sustainable than air or car travel. And while extensive high-speed rail networks link hundreds of cities across Europe and Asia, the United States’ only “high-speed” rail corridor, connecting Boston and Washington, D.C., moves at an average of 66 mph. Rail travel in the rest of the country is worse: A train trip from New York City to Chicago takes 19 hours (for comparison, Beijing and Shanghai, an equivalent distance, can be covered in 4 hours and 20 minutes by train). 

If implemented, the Green New Deal could make massive investments in our rail network, though the infrastructure would likely take years to build, years we do not have to wait if we are going to limit warming of the planet.

While flight shaming remains a radical notion in the United States, environmentalists are clear that radical change is needed to avoid a climate catastrophe. Is flight shaming is the radicalism we need?

Resources/further reading:

Fast Fashion Brands Can Never be Sustainable By:Tina Trupiano

Fast Fashion is a term that describes cheaply made clothing manufactured at rapid rates by mass market retailers. It has become a growing problem negatively affecting our environment and the people who make our clothes. With the enormous growth of Fast Fashion, a counter movement has appeared that is promoting “Sustainable” Fashion in response to the increasing consumer awareness of where clothes are made and of what materials. Even though this is a positive and necessary shift in consciousness, there is confusion over what “sustainability” means within the Fashion Industry. 

This individual project will discuss whether Fast Fashion brands are hurting climate change initiatives by advertising sustainable clothing line offerings withing their product categories. This topic is important because there has been an increase in greenwashing among all product categories but specifically fashion brands as an attempt to drive consumer loyalty.

As a fashion industry professional working in the New York Garment District for the last decade, I have had the opportunity to work behind the scenes, predominantly working in design and production of women’s apparel. I have worked alongside domestic manufacturers and garment workers.  Seeing firsthand how fashion is made, I have experienced the many issues regarding sustainable and ethical practices. The fashion industry has large supply chains which leads to a lack of transparency on ethical and sustainability issues. I have become interested in this topic while working for fashion labels that portray environmental and ethical concerns outwardly either through company branding and marketing yet convey a different story internally and behind the scenes.

I begin my project with an introduction on what Fast Fashion is. Although this term has gained popularity, it is still not widely understood by all consumers. In Amanda Koontz Anthony and Ian Taplin’s article, “Sustaining the Retail Pilgrimage; Developments of Fast Fashion and Authentic Identities” historical changes leading to Fast Fashion are discussed as well as analyzes the way in which the consumer affects and is affected by this revolution in apparel manufacturing. Discussing the differences of pre- and post-1950 mass consumption, Anthony and Taplin show how consumer demands shifted during those times. The ability of manufacturers to produce goods at a faster rate in response to those demands are responsible for the Fast Fashion model.

Although I have worked for dozens of top designers and brands, I am not privy to information on corporate carbon footprints or a company’s sustainability initiatives, although this should be transparent, not just for consumers but employees as well. In order to find out more about what popular brands are promoting versus what they are actually doing to combat climate change, I looked to Guy Pearse’s book Greenwash: Big Brands and Carbon Scams. In this book Guy Pearse discusses the ‘climate-friendly’ revolution being advertised among many industries. “Almost every major global brand has embarked on a campaign designed to persuade us that it is cutting its carbon footprint. Thus marketing, rather than politics, seems a more relevant window onto the issue of climate change for most people.” Pearse compares the climate friendly campaigns and claims by leading brands and what they are doing with the carbon footprint to what they are selling. Although this book covers many industries, Pearse offers an entire chapter on Fashion where he looks at brands such as Levi’s, Diesel, Patagonia, Timberland and Zara to name a few. It’s a great in depth look offering real statistics that not only correlate with my argument that most climate change advertising is not actually effective on fighting climate change but offers additional insight on brands that actually are trying to make an impact.

In addition to big brands being dishonest about their carbon footprints, unethical labor practices in foreign as well as domestic factories are a huge issue. The collapse of the Rana Plaza Factory in Bangladesh brought global attention to the fashion industry’s ethical problem. The collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building outside Dhaka in Bangladesh is the deadliest disaster in garment industry history. Over 1,000 workers were killed in a preventable tragedy. The collapse of the Rana Plaza building has brought global attention to the working conditions of garment factory workers worldwide.

Positively, there has been a growing awareness amongst conscious consumers to question how the clothes they buy are affecting the environment, their bodies and the workers who make them. In response to this, brands are re-branding themselves as sustainable and environmentally concerned however, little of it is real or impactful.  Fast Fashion cannot be sustainable with the very business model which promotes waste and unethical labor with its excessive lead times and cheap prices. Even with the death of 1,000 garment factory workers in Bangladesh, fast fashion companies are thriving. Ironically, brands such as Levi’s, Diesel, Patagonia, Gap and Nike to name a few are claiming they are sustainable.  It appears saving the environment has become a trend and markets, as well as retailers are jumping on board, yet they have somehow forgotten the people who are making the clothes. Corporate Social Responsibility should not just be a ploy to lure consumers or benefit employees but should assist in increasing competitive advantage and the bottom line long term, by creating new job roles utilizing sustainable technology, as well as innovating product development that is environmentally friendly.

What can you do to make an impact? Educating yourself and others on this issue, as well as bringing awareness to the topic are a great start. Consumers need transparency and information on how clothing is made, by what materials and by whom. Greater visibility allows consumers to make educated choices with their purchases in addition to knowing what to hold corporations responsible for.  The consumer also needs to be made aware of not just how things are made but what the end life of their favorite products entail. Consumer identities should be challenged to include ideas of re-use and recycling and not creating more waste just because something is inexpensive or easy to acquire.

In conclusion, accountability needs to happen in legislature. Sustainability cannot be seen, as a political platform, but as a basic social and physical science. More regulations are needed and must be enforced with regards to fabrics, notions, and trim’s chemical and, or fiber content. The banning of certain materials harmful to the environment, such as non-recycled polyester should be implemented. Companies should be required to submit their total carbon footprint, as well as be required to report annual plans to decrease it and held accountable to meet their goals. Supply Chains should be visible. Vendors should be required to include addresses for every step of the process, outsourced to other factories or within their own, so that large brands can produce accurate accountability. Fabric content in addition to where fabric is made should be included on every bolt and yard sold. Lastly, garment workers’ rights should be non-negotiable. With mandated increased visibility of supply chains, working conditions would no longer be hidden from view and working environment, as well as livable wages could be properly enforced. No garment should be manufactured or bought at the expense of human life or the protection of the environment we inhabit.

Lost at Sea: Criminalization of Migration and the Barbaric Indifference of Civilized Society

Exodus by Dan Williams

Summary of Topic

As the physical world is being reshaped by climate crises, nations around are the world are faced with an existential crisis of their own. The concepts of property, border, and nations are losing meaning because sea level is rising and some lands are becoming uninhabitable. Nations are grappling with this loss by criminalizing migration and movement because nations themselves are built on the foundation of sedentism. Therefore, historical narratives privilege sedentism over mobility. While sedentary populations are considered civilized nomadic population are stigmatized as “barbaric”. The influence of this biased historic narrative can be seen in the tension between nation-states and migrants today. While nation-states and their citizens represent sedentary society, migrants represent a nomadic society. However, to alleviate the stresses and trauma of forced migration that will be induced by climate crises, migration must be decriminalized and the right to move must be protected as an inalienable human right.

Summary of Research – Structural Violence

Violence is defined by the World Health Organization as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation”. Citizens of nation-states are implicated in the suffering of migrating populations through their participation in structural violence. Structural violence represents an indirect form of violence that is built into the political structures and systems of civilized society. This kind of violence is evident in the hierarchies and inequalities imbued in nation-states. Citizens of nation-states are complicit in structural violence through their inaction, silence, and indifference.

The term systemic injustice can be used interchangeably with structural violence. It is the outcome of privileged individuals and institutions pursuing their own interests within established political orders to benefit from social norms while disregarding the suffering migrants or stateless people are subjected to within these systems. Systemic injustice is suffered by mobile, stateless people in a global political system that privileges citizenship over non-citizenship. It is perpetuated by citizens who contribute to it by taking harmful socio-political norms for granted and leaving them unquestioned. Though political leaders are often blamed for designing systems that are unjust, the role citizens play in contributing to systemic injustice by electing leaders who uphold damaging political systems is often overlooked. This complicity applies to addressing climate crises and climate induced migration as well. 

More importantly, systemic injustice is built on the principle of misrecognition. Jade Larissa Schiff defines misrecognition as “a disposition that conceals both the contingent character of social life and the forms of domination it sustains” (745). Through misrecognition, we learn to accept injustice as the way of the world, while remaining unaware of contributing to it. For instance, we take it for granted that human rights are associated with national rights. According to Hannah Arendt, most migrants lose their human rights when they lose their national rights. She argues that human rights should be inalienable and separate from all national governments. In other words, those who leave the security of their nation due to climate crises may lose their human rights and be rendered invisible through systemic injustice, just as countless refugees and undocumented workers are already made invisible. Therefore, climate crises and the mass migration it will fuel is a call to challenge the political systems we take for granted and the systemic injustice the inflict. Migration and the right to move must be protected as inalienable human rights, as more people around the world are uprooted due to climate crises.

No where to go, Idomeni by George Butler

Similarly, Isabelle Stengers reminds us that blindness is demanded of us because it is the only way nation-states can uphold the violent political structures that continue to displace and marginalize millions of people. She urges us to practice the “art of paying attention” to counter misrecognition, indifference, and the systemic injustices citizens are complicit in. For Stengers, to question the political systems that have been presented to us as the inevitable outcome of the civilizing process and to imagine alternative systems that are more just are political acts in themselves. Hannah Arendt’s poignant statement sums up what could happen if nation-states and their citizens continue to uphold systems that are structurally violent and exclude masses of people: “For it is quite conceivable,… that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically… that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof” (298-299). Her chilling words have the potential to come true if nation-states and citizens of the Global North remain indifferent and stop paying attention.

Resources

The Language of Climate Justice

We need a better, more truthful and more accurate term for ‘climate change’.  ‘Climate change’ is too vague, with too much space for doubt and not enough of the dynamism the term needs to convey. We’re at a turning point, with perhaps less than a decade to prevent further climate collapse and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths of people and the continued mass extinction of animal and plant species.  At this point, whatever we do will transform the planet. Communicating this is essential, both the problem we face and the solutions to it. Through writing and podcasting, language is the main tool I use for communicating my ideals, which are rooted in climate justice. Language is culture, too, and language influences how we think and vice versa.

I look at the research of Dilling and Moser for insight into where communication turns to action, and where it does not. Many thinkers have grappled with these issues, and I learn that the term ‘climate change’ has been deliberately used to obfuscate the danger implicit in it’s effects, and writers like George Monbiot, Rebecca Solnit and Eileen Crist want terms to reflect both the violence of some humans toward the planet and the beauty of this planet. Other scientists and scholars like Robin Kimmerer and Glenn Albrecht argue for new terms to be adopted instead of English words, either from Native languages or made up completely.

I believe many of the terms we use in climate discussions are lacking – I will investigate how language has deliberately been used to obfuscate this growing threat, and argue that a new, more emotive and more powerful lexicon is needed to convey the urgency of the nightmare we are facing. My focus is on the term ‘climate change’.

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Luthi, D., et al.. 2008; Etheridge, D.M., et al. 2010; Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.

NASA and The IPCC use the term ‘climate change’ because it is scientifically accurate, but I argue that is not enough. The writer Rebecca Solnit does not mince words. “Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.” This is a clear call to action for those of us in the words business; if climate change is violence, then we need to call it that.

Climate crises caused by industrialized nations have ruined homes and livelihoods across the Global South, but industrialized countries do not refer to themselves as displacers, it stays a noun. If we in the Global North admitted to causing displacement, we would surely have to compensate in the form of climate reparations or open borders. That is…unlikely. The passivity of a language that relies on nouns helps to disguise our behaviour, and to take agency away from the creatures and things we describe. I learned from reading Robin Kimmerer that there are other languages, namely her ancestral language Potowatomi, that are largely made up of verbs. This is ‘the grammar of animacy’ and is useful for those of us who want to repair our relationship with the planet. So we see that the English language is not always up to the task, and needs to borrow from other languages or new words.

I settle on ‘climate crises’ as my preferred term, as it implies the serious nature of the mess we are in, but also the opportunity to turn it around. I discover in this paper that it’s more than words we need to change, it’s actually our relationship with the planet and all of the creatures and even ‘things’ around us that we need to transform if we are to thrive here. Words are a good start though, as is silence when needed. 

Some resources

  1. Moser, Susanne C. and Dilling, Lisa. Communicating Climate Change: Closing the Science‐ Action Gap: The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. Edited by John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg. Oxford University Press, 2011

2. Crist, Eileen, “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature”, Environmental Humanities, volume 3 (November 2013): 129-147. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/6904

3. Monbiot, George. Forget ‘the environment’, we need new words to convey life’s wonders. The Guardian Newspaper, August 9th 2017.

4. Albrecht, Glenn.  The Importance of Language: “the expansion of my language means the expansion of my world”. From Glennalbrecht.com June 22 2020

5. Kimmerer, Robin. Speaking of Nature: Orion Magazine, June 2017

 6. Klein, Naomi. “Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence” The Guardian, April 27th, 2014

7. What’s in a Name? Global Warming vs. Climate Change, NASA website August 16 2020