Category: The environment

Plunder and romanticism are so rife precisely because ordinary citizens are insufficiently informed about the opportunities and threats that nature poses to have forced governments into effective regulation. In the task of building an informed citizenry the starting point is an ethics of nature that people in societies with widely different value systems can understand and accept. Neither the romantic variant of environmentalism that sees nature as an end in itself, nor the austere universalism of economic Utilitarianism, can provide such a foundation. The most difficult wars to win are those that must be fought on two fronts. It is more straightforward, psychologically more satisfying and dramatic to have only a single enemy. The romantics among environmentalists and the Utilitarian Platonic Guardians among economists see nature as a single-front war. The romantics regard economic growth as the enemy; the Platonic Guardians regard the values of ordinary citizens as the enemy. But most struggles in development are not like that: sanity lies in the middle rather than at the extremes. Aid provides an example. It is neither a panacea nor a menace.

Collier, Paul. The Plundered Planet: Why We Must – and How We Can – Manage Nature for Global Prosperity. 2010. p. 12 (paperback)

Regardless of whether you think the commitment is credible, a position on climate change adopted by the G7 bears consideration:

“At yesterday’s summit in Bavaria, the G7 leading industrial nations agreed to phase out fossil fuels by the end of the century.”

For one thing, it’s questionable when politicians set goals so far off in the future. For another, we need to phase out fossil fuels much more rapidly if we’re to avoid catastrophic climate change. Nonetheless, there’s one important message here: fossil fuels have no long-term future, and that is increasingly being recognized by the world’s most powerful governments.

Hopefully, this will help people come to grips with the implications of the carbon bubble, and make people think more critically about the appropriateness of building long-lived new fossil fuel infrastructure like pipelines.

We know that we are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture, and that, if imagined differently, could build the kind of caring society we need.

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. p. 347 (hardcover)

The power of this ferocious love [for places where people live and where they care about] is what the resource companies and their advocates in government inevitably underestimate, precisely because no amount of money can extinguish it. When what is being fought for is an identity, a culture, a beloved place that people are determined to pass on to their grandchildren, and that their ancestors may have paid for with great sacrifice, there is nothing companies can offer as a bargaining chip. No safety pledge will assuage; no bribe will be big enough. And though this kind of connection to place is surely strongest in Indigenous communities where the ties to the land go back thousands of years, it is in fact Blockadia’s defining feature.

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. p. 342 (hardcover)