Tag Archives: global warming

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.

The 'chain of equivalence'. Cultural studies and Laclau & Mouffe's discourse theory

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.

Petro-masculinity: History Recycled, Reified

At first glance, the relationship between fossil fuels and white male patriarchy may be difficult to evince, but if captured through the prism of the cultural history of the West, especially of America, the relationship becomes anything but unclear. This is one of the more sobering points of Cara Daggett’s essay, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire” wherein the linkage between authoritarianism impulses and white male patriarchy is contextualized around the usage of fossil fuels, hence the provocative term “petro-masculinity.” 

Though the paper veers too deep into psychoanalytic territory and at times reads more like a rant than a journal article, simplistically accounting the “shared frustration among white men who have struggled to find a housewife willing to receive their veneration” for one of the reasons how the psychology of Trump supporters worked to elect the current president, the essay nonetheless engages provocatively with the Climate Change crisis. The paper connects masculinity with the usage of fossil fuels and the practice’s pointed, destructive tendencies. Whether it be a clever display of environmentally-focused analysis of semantics (Daggett deconstructs the word “petro” by presenting the diametrically opposed forces within, those of dead/rigidity (fossils) and those of life/flow (energy brought about through death)), a socio-historical reading of white male cultural bonding with fossil fuels (a leitmotif is the link between the boom of cars and the stable jobs and social positioning that American white man procured after World War II) or a psychologically engaged approach to defining authoritarianism (studies of Nazi psychology is keenly used) as an unrelenting entity hellbent on violently spreading its order and influence, Daggett’s paper impressively covers the paper’s complex topic in a rich, interdisciplinary way.

The essay leaves the reader with enough meat to chew on for days. What’s especially striking is grounding the fossil fuel-American masculinity dialectic as a response to World War II gender dynamics:

Instead of sturdy husbands and firm fathers controlling their wives and children, lisping bureaucrats and social workers were now running the show. World War II exacerbated the problem; with so many men away at the front, and women working in the factories, male authority was further eroded (37). 

Though this isn’t Daggett’s words (she references Corey Rubin here), the essay is filled with this sentiment. Daggett’s arguments tend to connect the response of American white men to the World War II “re-gendering” of society (which consisted of fossil fuels usage ala energy consumption) to the present moment when American white voters, as an aggregate, have channeled their masculinity through damning global warming movements by doubling down on fossil fuel usage (i.e. the support of bringing back coal power despite the industry’s economic impotency) in their unbridled support of Trump and his dangerous climate politics. Such connections lead us to ponder interesting questions about the effect of culture on one’s politics and consider how the refusal to let go of power is manifested in one’s political stances. Trump’s detrimental positions on Climate Change  aren’t just based in an anti-science ideology, but also a politics rooted in a nostalgia for a past for which a certain group can feel; the idea that this nostalgia is inherently related to fossil fuel usage is both a disturbing but vital thought in perhaps understanding the Trump phenomenon. 

It is disturbing in that, like the flow/rigidity dynamic that Daggett professes as the bizarre  dialectic within the fossil fuels-American masculinity model (with “rigidity” representing the blockade of culture destruction and “flow” representing the perpetuation of a dominant culture and its systemic rule), nostalgia, normally attributed to preciousness and innocence, is juxtaposed with ecosystem destruction and violence. However, it’s essential to recognize this “destructive nostalgia” since “The novelty and freedoms enabled by fossil-fuelled civilization are entangled with horrific violence, such that to embark upon fossil-fuelled life is to spark off mass species extinction just as much as it is to make possible the internet or global social movements” (31). 

Accepting this allows us to see the rubric of Daggett’s thesis as re-contextualizing the simultaneous “creation-destruction” element of the industrialization-natural environment dynamic around white male masculinity, authoritarianism and fossil fuels. Despite its engrossing angle regarding the stabilization of patriarchy in relation to the destructive usage of fossil fuels, the essay is built on a point with which many readers may be too familiar; that is, our treasures and freedoms are predicated on the evaporation of our planet. If climate deniers are to accept this, we could all be one step closer to ending the recycling of a culture and identity that preserves ecological demolition and gross exploitation of natural resources.