Tag Archives: climate change

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.

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. 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, Candice; Zoe 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

Duncan, Sophie. “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.

30 Percent of California’s Forest Firefighters Are Prisoners

Rakia, Raven. “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.

Climate Apartheid Is the Coming Police Violence Crisis

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:

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?
If prisons are abolished, what about social safety? Is investing in the community and social welfare programs really a more dignified, effective solution?
What does a “Marshall Plan”-like economic aid look like for social inequalities, or for climate change initiatives? How would this money get handled?
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?
Is climate change the next big shift in policing and incarceration? How does this tie directly into capitalism and, even, racism?
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.

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

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

Against the Anthropocene, by Thomas.J. Demos

An annotated bibliography, by Lala St. Fleur.

Core Text

Demos, Thomas J. “Against the Anthropocene.” Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017): 132.

Summary

Demos’ 2017 book is firmly against using the term “Anthropocene” in reference to the ongoing concerns around climate change. In Demos’ view, it only foists the blame of the military-state-corporate interests off onto universal accountability held by all of humanity, rather than to those truly at fault or most responsible for the world’s mounting eco-catastrophes (Demos, 2017: 19). He also challenges the emphasis put on geoengineering projects as solutions to environmental problems. Because the authority to conduct such experiments inevitably favors an imbalance of power between individuals, governments and corporations, Demos is skeptical of anthropocenologists (i.e.: military-state-corporate agents) having the final say as to what measures should be taken to see positive change and real environmental improvement.

Because the “Anthropocene” holds all humans accountable for global climate change, Demos argues that it disavows the unequal distribution of resources, aid, and responsibility between parties who either suffer or benefit the most from its causes and effects. It is the “underlying heteropatriarchal and white supremacist structures” whose fossil fuel industries are the worst perpetrators of environmental abuse, (Demos, 2017: 53). Meanwhile, disenfranchized and poor minorities are most severely affected by the slow violence of government policy, corporate interests, and climate impact. But the consolidated efforts of grassroots activism inside those very communities are also in a position to resist such pressures and hold corporations accountable for their harmful operations. In place of “Anthropocene,” Demos proposes the adoption of the term “Capitalocene” instead. Demos sees this as a “more accurate and politically enabling geological descriptor” for more precisely putting the blame on corporate globalization and industrialization as the main culprits of unchecked climate change (Demos, 2017: 54).

Demos’s methodology involves looking at the utilization of photo imagery circulated by the media and academia, as visualizations that either help shed light on climate crises that corporations would otherwise see silenced (local activism against fracking or development in communities; the victims of marine pollution and oil spills); or help divert attention away from environmental concerns by glorifying mankind’s dominion over nature (incredible mines seen from space; the downplay of the effect of said oil spills; etc.).

Teaching Resources

Crutzen, Paul J. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” In Earth system science in the anthropocene, pp. 13-18. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006. Atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen is the scholar who popularized the use of the term “Anthropocene,” in 2000. In this 2006 article, he doubles down on his notions that the current Anthropocene age (starting with the Industrial Revolution) is distinct from the Holocene’s epoch of pre-industrial human activity. Despite Earth’s cycles and systems of global change, Crutzen argues that anthropogenic activity has gone far beyond the bounds of natural atmospheric, chemical, and geological fluctuations.
Stengers, Isabelle. In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. Open Humanities Press, 2015. In this rapidly changing epoch, Stengers’ book acknowledges the sense of impotency that the climate crisis can often put in the mindset of people today, who can be informed and educated about the causes of and effects of climate change (and capitalism) yet still participate in overbearing systems that perpetuate it. Stengers challenges the notions of progress and barbarism in the context of modern capitalist structures.
Stoekl, Allan. “Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy.” In Materialism and the Critique of Energy,” edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti, 1-29. MCM, 2018. Though Stoekl’s article focuses on Marxist concerns of capitalist fetishism that turns both people and nature alike into commodities, he ultimately argues that “merely changing the name of the Anthropocene (to Capitolocene or whatever) would not solve the underlying social and material contradictions” of today’s climate crises (Stoekl, 2018: 55). Market-based approaches to environmental issues only serve to abstract, invert, obscure, and detract from the root problems inherent within fossil duel industries and corporate interests. Geoengineering solutions, therefore will only be protracted over millennia, “effectively implicating dozens of future generations” in an ongoing climate crisis that might never be resolved (Stoekl, 2018: 59).

Discussion Questions

Beyond Crutzen’s interpretation, there are various other understandings of when the Anthropocene began, and what its catalysts were. Is the Anthropocene indeed the product of the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, or is it instead a far older culture we inherited from the Agricultural Revolution and the rise of the first major civilizations, over 10,000 years ago?
Stengers’ book focuses a light on the issue of capitalism not being all that is was cracked up to be. In the face of the various problems of modernity (climate change being only one crisis of many), what is progress, and what is barbarism? Is it progressive or barbaric to keep pushing forward with technological advancement, even at the cost of environmental decay? Or, is it progress or barbarous to actively try to dismantle institutional systems that have proved ineffective, and even dangerous to humanity and Gaia’s (the very world’s) well-being?
What does a world without capitalism look like, and is it at all possible as long as people continue to be reliant on carbon-based technology? To what ends would any geoengineering models benefit the environment, so long as the earth’s natural resources are commodified and exploited for fuel?

Reaching the Grassroots across the World: Suffering as Motive for Global Climate Justice

In his essay “Translocal Climate Justice Solidarities,” Paul Routledge emphasizes the significance of transcending personal and spatial limitations by widening basic conceptions of solidarity, particularly as it pertains to climate justice and climate-related conditions of hegemonic structures, so as to posit achievable means to alternative models for just and efficient co-habitation.

Touching on capitalism’s structural “accumulation by dispossession,” especially in contrast to factors such as “food sovereignty,” Routledge’s essay harks on the understanding that the current climate system already works translocally but by the means of exploitation of resources and of peoples. The political counter-power rests, therefore, in the people affected by these exploitations.

But which people? How are they affected? These questions may not be able to be answered by those functioning at the top of the hegemonic power structures, but rather, the answers to these questions, too, emerge from below, from the people affected by the injustices. There are differences between peoples and differences between consequential climate injustices.

Image by Sam-Lund Harket

https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2018/nov/19/climate-justice-and-extinction

Routledge writes:

[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. This will require the co‐recognition and

internalization of others’ struggles in a ‘global’ community. In part this must be based on

shared values and principles (common ground) concerning economic and political justice

and ecological sustainability (9).

Local, cultural and linguistic differences may pose further limitations, but, as Routledge supports, co-recognition and solidarity based through chains of equivalence can be the starting point of a power that rises against the hegemony at the strings of climate change. Routledge believes that climate justice networks can be formed from this starting point and can develop a medium through which local place-based and group-based concerns can be acknowledged and implemented.

Determining an “imaginary” of the network, as Routledge describes it, relies, at root, on the basis of shared values and principles. This inevitably roots the issue in discourse; but through discourse, what is at heart of the issue can extend beyond discourse, into practical and effective bonding for social change. As Rob Leurs explains, Laclau’s and Mouffe’s “chain of equivalence” provides a discursive practice that goes beyond essentialism, without turning things into eclecticism. Meaning of the issue may be subjective to local groups, but meaning from the issue, as it is agonistic to hegemonic injustices, becomes grounds for solidarity translocally.

Upon first reading, Routledge’s essay appears a bit dense in build-up of referential discourse on the challenges and pathways to solidarity; but further analysis has me wondering whether communication technologies (such as social media) could facilitate climate justice network models and whether third spaces and fourth spaces could produce alternative effects through changing cultural structures and avenues to access of information and participation. Routledge believes that the imaginary must begin at the grassroots, but how is a grassroots accurately conceptualized without linguistic and cultural conventions? We end up at de-contextualized values and principles that discursively operate as a mode of charged symbolic meaning-for (for justice) in order to reach a meaning-from (from structural change). The core grassroot non-distinction, therefore, is a matter of mutual impressions of suffering.

Leurs, Rob. “The ‘chain of equivalence’. Cultural studies and Laclau & Mouffe’s discourse theory,” Politics and Culture. Issue 4. NOVEMBER 9, 2009.

https://politicsandculture.org/2009/11/09/the-chain-of-equivalence-cultural-studies-and-laclau-mouffes-discourse-theory/

Memorializing Loss: The Convergence of Funerary Art and Climate Change

An Art Review by Carol Joo Lee

To talk about Climate Change is to lament what we have lost – land, water, air, and the species that depended on them, human and non-human. The onset of the sixth mass extinction looms large over our collective minds – at least those who don’t deny the indisputable data – and it creates existential conditioning that vacillates from dread to despair. Throughout history artists have been moved to memorialize the losses and traumas that have been inflicted upon humanity: a 14th century illustration depicts Black Death; Poussin’s “The Plague of Ashdod” records the horrors of the plague outbreak of the 17th century; and Picasso’s 1937 “Guernica” captures the inhumanities of Nazi bombing. In the face of tragedies of epic scale, art can universalize the unimaginable and humanize the incomprehensible. Contemporary artists of the Anthropocene, for many decades now, have tried to contextualize, eulogize and memorialize the losses/deaths stemming from ecological and environmental collapses. Essentially, the losses spurred by the Climate Crisis is the loss of home – literal and metaphorical, biological and geological, material and immaterial, multitude and one.

An early illustrated manuscript depicts the Black Death (Credit: Courtesy of Louise Marshall/ Archivio di Stato, Lucca)

Poussin’s The Plague of Ashdod in 1630-31 (Credit: DEA / G DAGLI ORTI/ De Agostini via Getty Images)

“I control the pain. That’s really what it is.” – Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres‘s works do not explicitly speak of the climate. Nonetheless, they exemplify governmental negligence and political inertia during the AIDS epidemic, which began in the 1980s, thus in the wake of the woeful bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic on the part of the federal government and the continuing denialism of Climate Crisis, it seems apt to re-examine his most famous piece “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” from 1991 in our current context. Commonly referred to as “candy spill,” this participatory work, a mound of wrapped candies weighing approximately 175 pounds, the healthy weight of his lover before succumbing to AIDS, spill out from one corner of the room. As visitors take candy from the pile, the artwork shrinks then eventually disappears altogether. The candy has a twin function – representing the body and the placebo. In taking the candy, the audience becomes complicit in the erasure and masking. The site of the installation becomes an in-situ memorial to his lover and all who perished during the AIDS epidemic. It is sweet and heartbreaking. It is also a foretelling of Gonzalez-Torres’s own life, who died 5 years later of the same disease. We can very well imagine the mound of candies as our home, Earth, and the work, already powerful, begins to take on a whole new meaning.

How, when, and why do we invest culturally, emotionally, and economically in the fate of threatened species? What stories do we tell, and which ones do we not tell, about them?
– Ursula Heise

“What Is Missing?” is an interactive web project spearheaded by artist and architect Maya Lin, who’s most well-known work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. No stranger to liminal sites where the dead and the living collapse to create a third space, Lin’s “What Is Missing?” is a portal of remembrance, reacquaintance and resurgence that works on several levels: a digital tribute to the now extinct species; an anthropogenic record of places; and a depository of people’s personal biocentric memories of “what is missing.” Flickering dots of various colors and shapes indicating different categories like disaster, conservation, timeline and stories across the darkened map of the world bring to mind constellations in the night sky. One can click on East Asian Cranes (coming back) or Heath Hens of Martha’s Vineyard (extinct) and get an overview of their survival history dating all the way back to 600 in the cranes’ case and 1620 for the hens. Launched in 2009 and updated up to 2018, the site itself feels like a digital relic given the further exacerbation of the planetary conditions under which all living species struggle to survive, and losses of an untold number of species from our biosphere since the site’s launch.

In 1982, Hungarian American land artist Agnes Denes transformed 2 acres of landfill in lower Manhattan into a wheat field. Created at the foot of the World Trade Center and a block from Wall Street, the golden patch of agriculture, titled, “Wheatfield – A Confrontation,” on the land valued at $4.5 billion, which has since become Battery Park City, was “an intrusion of the country into the metropolis, the world’s richest real estate.” Denes and volunteers cleared the piles of trash brought in during the construction of the Twin Towers, then dug furrows and sowed seeds by hand. In four months time, the land yielded 1000 pounds of wheat. The harvest became horse feed for the city’s mounted police and the rest traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger.” The seeds were also given away in packets for people to plant them wherever they may end up in. Denes, in her prescient ways, was calling attention to what she deems as our “misplace priorities”: “Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns.”

The harvest also marked the end of the physical artwork but the idea lives on through the visual documentation which offers a surreal angle and an uncanny audacity imbedded in the work. It is a rather strange coincidence that the work happened 19 years before the destruction of the World Trade Center and we are now 19 years out from the 9/11 attacks. In 1982, the field was a living, breathing counterpoint to the unbounded appetite for capitalism. Today, the work, at least the photographs with the towers in the background, function as a memorial for both.

Whether imbued with soft activism like Lin’s digital project or offering interventionist criticism like Dene’s wheat field, art under the umbrella of environment and climate challenges may not offer solutions but by showing and making us confront the losses and our lost ways, art does what it has always done throughout history, it reveals the nature of our time.

Top Image: Plaque Memorializes First Icelandic Glacier Lost to Climate Change
(Dominic Boyer/Cymene Howe)

To ignore or not to ignore?…There is no question

Stengers encourages her audience to see beyond the superficial fallback excuses and typical ways of viewing the problems of the climate crisis. She invites us to catch common phrases which do us no good, but rather keep us in different forms of division. She sees the consistent default being that there is no confidence in “the guardians,” there is no choice, there are no alternatives (save the “infernal alternatives,” resulting in different forms of division).

Her sharp terms “cold panic,” “infernal alternatives” play on the situation as metacommentary on the climate crisis. They operate in the rhetoric of the climate crisis, and, by such a way, remind us of the layered political issues that result from the debates.

In her chapter on capitalism, Stengers writes that an idea or party will mobilize, claiming to transcend the conflicts and unite everyone. She writes: “I anticipate and equally dread such appeals to sacred unity and the accusations of betrayal that automatically accompany them” (57). Alliances, as she sees them, are inevitable. I follow Stengers by adding that choice of alliance, it seems, could fall on minor issues, but, with the current lack of accurate information, access, and trust, the general arguments seem stuck on the topical surface—is climate change really happening? what do we call this climate issue? Etc.

Image by Garry Knight

Reflecting on Democracy, Corruption and Climate Change in the COVID-19 Era

In his article “Will Climate Change Destroy Democracy?,” Damon Linker writes: “There’s an oddly apolitical character to most of our talk about environmental threats… Arguably the problem of politics is getting individuals and groups in a given political community to put aside their own self-interest in favor of the common good.”

Linker’s argument meshes well with Stengers’s understanding of what is actually going on with climate change issues. We are stuck in the theory side of “climate change”–remote, inaccessible, and, therefore, apolitical. The “right to not to pay attention,” as Stengers calls it, is deeply protected by default from these conditions. This right being upheld leads to incremental corruption, further instability, and an inability to trace where it all went wrong (Povitkina). The right to not pay attention to climate change stems from “the guardians'” policy of not paying attention to citizens: it has become a mutual looking away.

The point, however, is to understand what does not work, in order to fix the issue—capitalism, the impossibility of “meddling with” governance by asking questions (55), lack of clarity and trust in leadership…

Fair, efficient assemblage on the climate crisis has been foreclosed for a long time, but it is Stengers’s hope that with open interactive questions and with reconceptualizations of “the guardians” as human, citizens as participants affected, and of capitalism as an evil spirit preventing unity and stability, collaborative efforts to mitigate panic and to establish a proactive defense against climate change and political risk-offsetting could be achieved.

Stengers’s underlying message could be read as a call for a true, active democratization of climate crisis discussions. Her chapters here advance the discourse by demonstrating alternative ways to seeing oneself (whether “guardian” or citizen) in the space of climate change discourse and participation.

References:

Linker, Damon. “Will Climate Change Destroy Democracy?” The Week.

https://theweek.com/articles/839648/climate-change-destroy-democracy

Povitkina, Marina. “Reflecting on Democracy, Corruption and Climate Change in the COVID-19 Era,” E-International Relations. 6 May 2020.

Reflecting on Democracy, Corruption and Climate Change in the COVID-19 Era

Will We Enter a New Wave of Energy Development? Shifting Capital via Shifting Paradigms

Andres Malm’s “Long Waves of Fossil Development: Periodizing Energy and Capital” analyzes how the historic phases of capitalism’s evolution required technological leaps in the sources of energy that drive production. Based on Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff’s theory that capitalism moves in waves consisting of “two phases: an ‘upswing’ characterized by boom conditions, succeeded by a ‘downswing’ of persistent stagnation” (162), we can see how the first long wave of capitalism beginning around 1780 denoted by water-powered industries such as cotton and iron gave way to a second wave propelled by steam, a third run on electricity, the fourth driven by gas and oil, and the fifth long wave we are currently in, typified by computerization of the economy. The transitioning from one long wave to another is not even, incremental growth but rather “proceeds through upsetting contradictions…which impel the expansion and renew the momentum again and again, and it might be these contradictions and the convulsions they generate that do most to produce and reproduce the fossil economy on ever greater scales.” (162).

But it seems that now we have come to an impasse because science is unanimously conveying that humankind has thrown off the balances and processes of the Earth System due directly to continued, elevated levels of C02 emissions from burning fossil fuels. And to reproduce the fossil economy on a larger scale than we are currently maintaining in the name of capitalist gain would have dire consequences to our planet and human civilization. Malm speculates that capitalism could instead propel itself into a sixth long wave by casting off fossil fuels and transition to renewable sources of energy which is exactly what humanity would require to prevent the disastrous scenarios of climate change. Solar, hydro, and wind powered technologies are already established and proven to effectively integrate into our electricity grids but still, our dependency on fossil fuels has not yet been curbed. Malm suggest that a “universal rollout” of these advantageous technologies might “breathe fresh air into languishing capitalism and ensure that we collectively back off from the cliff in time” (181).

Following the theory of long waves of capitalist development and arguing that we have been on the downswing of the fifth wave since the global recession of 2008, Malm implies that we are in fact on the brink of a turning point to a sixth phase. Historically the transitions between phases “are determined by such unforeseeable events as wars and revolutions, the colonization of new countries, or the discovery of new resources—‘those external conditions through whose channel capitalist development flows’” (167). Our current state of affairs is, quite literally, a crossroads of “upsetting contradictions” inclusive of the consequences of climate change compounded by a global pandemic, severe economic downturn, and political and social instability. Could COVID-19 be the existential threat that pushes us past our paralyzed response to emissions reductions and the climate crisis into the sixth long wave?

Malm asserts that “the eruption of a structural crisis is usually attended by high unemployment, deflation or inflation, deteriorating working conditions, aggressive wage-cuts as capital seeks to dump the costs on labor and widen profit margins—all conducive to intensified class struggle” (171). And I would argue that we are amid these occurrences right now! But “capital has the power to “lay the foundations for a new epoch of expansion” by creating “a technological revolution, concentrated to one particular sphere” (171). Historical revolutions, between the first and the fifth long waves of capitalist development have remolded the entire economy, reimagining the technologies of transport and communications systems time and again. “If new life is to be breathed into sagging capitalism, it must come in the most basic, most universal guise: energy” (172).

Malm contends that renewable energy technologies “perfectly fit the profile of a wave-carrying paradigm” (181). They are of virtually unlimited supply, allow for costs to be reduced, and have vast potential for applications, “causing productivity to spike, spurring other novel technologies — electric vehicle charging systems, smart grids managed online, cities filled with intelligent green buildings — opening up unimagined channels for the accumulation of capital” (181). The groundbreaking innovation of switching completely to renewable sources of clean, emission-free energy would inevitably call for new government policies and financial systems, public education, and an overhaul of our behaviors and habits. Malm worries that “society, however, is slow in adapting, for unlike technology, social relations are characterized by inertia, resistance, vested interests pulling the brakes, always lagging behind the latest machines” (174). We have seen just that when new, renewable energy technologies emerge. They are initially received by society as a shock and spur push back in the form of skepticism, NIMBYism, etc. which must be overcome in order for them to take hold. In our current situation wherein the COVID-19 pandemic is threatening both global health and economic security, exacerbated by elevated social and political unrest and the ever-looming climate emergency, perhaps a paradigm shift in society at large is inevitably and necessarily what is being set in motion.

A Tutor and its Pupil: An Overhaul of Market Economics

A comparison of two economic models to address Climate Change (from Bina and La Camera’s paper)

In the realm of market economics, though there are several schools of thought, one common denominator remains: the market should be optimized for sufficient gains and growth. As a former economics student, I recognize the importance of governments to balance the desire to sustain economic growth with that of other variables. From Brady Bonds to the market/controlled economy of China to carbon tax initiatives, different economic strategies have been deployed to deal with a host of problematic scenarios from developing countries embroiled in debt to a Communist country wanting to reap the benefits of market economics without succumbing completely to its free enterprise model to the ongoing and existential threat of Climate Change, which, taken to its most logical extreme, represents the most severe threat to our world (not that debt riddled countries and countries desiring to hold onto their customs aren’t important).

Such logic pervades Olivia Bina and Francesco La Camera’s research paper, “Promise and shortcomings of a green turn in recent policy response to the ‘double crisis,’’ which brings into question the efficacy of market economics as an economic system to address the ongoing environmental crisis and a framework to handle contemporary and future economic issues. Bina and La Camera consistently cite “Ecological economics,” drawing on the work of the subfield’s founder, Georgescu-Roegen, whose pioneering work demonstrated the limiting factor of a market economic world is natural capital, for “Historically, the limiting factor that focused attention was that of manmade capital, but as humanity’s impact on resources and the biosphere move us closer to the so-called Anthropocene (Schellnhuber et al., 2005) and to growing scarcity of natural resources (MEA, 2005; Rockström et al., 2009), the limiting factor shifts to natural capital” (2311).

The idea that growth is unsustainable and cannot be endless is central to ecological economics and with that, Bina and La Camera offer an alternative model to modern economies privy to both environmental and economic crises (during a ravaging pandemic, a global recession and unrelenting environmental catastrophes, this article feels far too familiar). In their model (see above), aptly labeled “An Alternative Turn,” “Distributive aspects” replaces “equality of opportunities” in the “mainstream economics perspective” of a system of economics centered around bettering both environmental and economic crises, “Eco-efficient Capitalism.” On this model, the researchers explicate that “justice becomes the expected outcome of a redistribution of wealth through the initial equality of opportunities and, at global level, the ‘trickle down’ effect, whilst sustainability is secured as a result of eco-efficient capitalism” (2314). In contrast, Bina and La Camera’s proposed model “requires that the environment be considered an ultimate means (i.e. not substitutable)” for it “envisages the ‘Ultimate End’ linked to a development that embraces the moral and ethical dimensions of the relationship between humanity and the environment” (2314).

In essence, if there is not a significant recall of the market economics model, the current trajectory of the Climate Change crisis may result in a “Green” economy, but, as Bina and La Camera show, if the overarching goal of the model is to sustain economic growth, treating environmental sustainability as an added benefit of the model, the type of systemic overhaul needed to mitigate the damage of Climate Change won’t come from such a model.

In the article, Bina and La Camera keep referencing “Robert Skidelsky’s (2009) observation that economics is the ‘tutor of governments,’” underlining the importance of alternative economic models mainly focused on fighting the Climate Change crisis. Skidelsky’s classification of the role of economics in government is on point and though this paper was published in 2011, a wealth of literature has since been published on economic modeling centered on Climate Change. If economics is indeed the tutor of governments, then we should continue to act as facilitators of education for the pupils that are our governments, bridging gaps between disparate fields and disciplines as we work to better the gap between our present and future.

Radical conversion and our throwaway culture: the intersection of Pope Francis and Naomi Klein

In 2015, Pope Francis published a groundbreaking document, “Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home,” an encyclical defining the environmental movement as a moral issue for the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics and calling all of humanity to a radical conversion.

From the pope’s opening words quoting his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, in praise of “our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us,” the pope rejects the anthropocentrism of Judeo-Christian culture in recent centuries. He also acknowledges something that many in this country do not: that unrestrained capitalism and consumerism have led to a grave environmental crisis, and human beings need to change their lives radically to solve this crisis.

This is not an academic document nor a call for Catholics to recycle, compost, turn down their air conditioners or buy energy-efficient cars, but rather a 246-paragraph statement that our relationship with creation and our relationship with each other are inextricably tied: “We have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

The pope writes in his introduction:

“I will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle.”

While the pope’s language frequently references Catholic tradition, the encyclical is explicitly addressed to all of humanity. And as such, many of the pope’s words will resonate with environmental acivitsts of all backgrounds: He writes about the “sufferings of the excluded,” the “globalization of indifference,” the earth as a “shared inheritance,” the rejection of the absolute “right to private property,” “sustainable development,” “intergenerational solidarity,” “rampant individualism,” “excessive consumption,” “compulsive consumerism,” and “an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded and at the same time protecting nature.”

For those in the United States fighting for a Green New Deal, these words should sound familiar, albeit from a source surprising to some. Just as the Green New Deal takes a wide view, addressing climate change side by side with systemic racial, regional, social, environmental, and economic injustices, Pope Francis calls humanity to a more radical conversion that addresses these injustices together.

The encyclical even led Anglican priest and journalist Giles Fraser to write a piece in The Guardian titled “Pope Francis is a bit like Naomi Klein in a cassock.”

The two certainly have their similarities, at least when they write about the need to reject consumerism. Consider these two passages:

“The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.”
“Policy makers are still dancing around the question of whether we are talking about slapping solar panels on the roof of Walmart and calling it green, or whether we are ready to have a more probing conversation about the limits of lifestyles that treat shopping as the main way to form identity, community and culture.”

Can you tell who wrote what? The first is from Laudato Si, the second is from Klein’s On Fire: The Burning Case for the Green New Deal.

Pope Francis frequently uses the term “throwaway culture.” In On Fire, Klein makes similar references: “It’s a lot like how this culture treats people. It’s certainly how we’ve been trained to treat our stuff — use it once, or until it breaks, then throw it away and buy some more,” or, more bluntly, “it all gets spent on throwaway crap imported from China destined for the landfill.”

Indeed there is a direct connection between the two: Pope Francis asked Klein to co-chair a Vatican conference on the environment upon the publication of Laudato Si, an encounter Klein writes about in On Fire. And Klein urged world leaders attending the Paris climate change conference to read Laudato Si. Not just summaries, she said. The whole thing.

The burning question now is which path this country will take, if any. Should climate activists in this country go big, and seek the radical change that Pope Francis and Klein advocate, and which the Green New Deal calls for? Or focus narrowly on decreasing carbon output? Pope Francis and Klein certainly make convincing cases for the former.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change

MALS 78500 Summer 2020 Dr. Kaitlin Mondello