False Solutions and Real Solutions to Climate Change

Thurs. Jun 24 2010 – 1-5 pm               Cobo Hall: D3-22

Cosponsored with the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities

Collaborating Organizations: Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Biofuelwatch, Rising Tide, Institute for Policy Studies (with ETC Group, Global Justice Ecology Project and others)

The challenge of global climate disruption has created new opportunities for corporate profiteering, marketing of “technofixes” and further commodification of the earth. Many of these “false solutions” will in fact worsen global warming and stand in the way of changes that must be made. Policies to market carbon and offset emissions, unproven and costly technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration (“clean coal”), “advanced” bioenergy, GMO “climate ready” crops, nuclear expansion, and natural gas as a “bridge fuel” are all examples of false solutions. Real solutions do exist! This workshop will begin with discussion of false solutions and their direct impacts on our communities, and then turn toward a collaborative and wide ranging discussion of genuinely renewable, community-centered solutions, rooted in the principles of climate justice. This is part of an ongoing effort to build a “People’s Vision” for U.S. climate action that is just, effective, realistic and potentially transformative.

1 – 2:10 pm: False solutions: Energy technology

Diane D’Arrigo (Nuclear Information and Resource Service), Rachel Smolker (Biofuelwatch), Kerwin Olson (Citizens Action Coalition/IN), Pat Mooney (ETC Group)

2:15 – 3:30 pm: False solutions: Carbon markets, offsets and policies:

Michael Dorsey (Dartmouth College), Daphne Wysham (Inst. for Policy Studies), Brihannala Morgan (Rising Tide NA), Maggie Zhou (Mass. Coalition for Healthy Communities).

3:40 – 4:15 pm: Speak-out on real solutions.

Bring a summary of what’s happening in your community!

4:15 – 5:30 pm:  Wrapup panel:  Real solutions and ways forward

Howard Ehrman (Little Village Environmental Justice Organization), Emily Kirsch (Ella Baker Center), Edgardo García (Vía Campesina Nicaragua), Aaron Lehmer (Bay Localize).

From Climate Crisis to Collective Commons: Renewable Energy from Below

Fri. Jun 25 2010 – 1-3 pm               WSU Old Main: O134

Control over energy technologies and resources has long been a major factor in defining human power relations. In the current transition to renewable energy, social justice is far from inevitable and will only come about as the result of decisive collective action. If strategic steps are taken, the transition to renewable energy can offer an historic opportunity for communities to assume democratic control over their territories, resources and lives; to build more egalitarian relations of production and exchange; and to catalyze a global reawakening to the social and ecological importance of the “collective commons.” Join us in discussion with activists, theorists and community leaders as we look at new models for a just transition to renewable energy. Speakers will address the global threat of community displacement and exploitation by multinational energy corporations; the difference between “green jobs” and community / worker control over green industries; current models for community controlled energy projects, with a particular focus on Indigenous territories; legislative requirements for a decentralized and democratic energy system; and ideas for building a movement for collective commons around green technologies.

Panelists:

Moderator — Brooke Lehman: Institute For Social Ecology and the Yansa Foundation
Kandi Mosset: Tribal Campus Climate Challenge Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network
Nikke Alex: Executive Director of the Black Mesa Water Coalition
Yvonne Liu: Senior Research Associate at the Applied Research Center
Deborah Groban Olson: Executive Director the Center for Community Based Enterprises

ISE Director Brian Tokar is also scheduled to speak on:

The Capitalist Roots of the Ecological Crisis
Weds. Jun 23 2010 – 1:00pm               WSU Manoogian: 112

with Joel Kovel, Terisa Turner, and Chris Williams.
Ecotopia or capitalist ecocide?
Fri. June 25 2010 – 3:30 pm             UAW-Chrysler Building: 1

with Richard Greeman, Victor Wallis, and others

False Solutions and Real Solutions to Climate Change
Thurs. Jun 24 2010 – 1-5 pm Cobo Hall: D3-22
Co-sponsored with the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities

From Climate Crisis to Collective Commons: Renewable Energy from Below
Fri. Jun 25 2010 – 1-3 pm WSU Old Main: O134

Capitalist Roots of the Ecological Crisis
Weds. Jun 23 2010 – 1:00pm               WSU Manoogian: 112
Panel with Brian Tokar, Joel Kovel, Terisa Turner, Chris Williams

Ecotopia or capitalist ecocide?
Fri. June 25 2010 – 3:30 pm             UAW-Chrysler Building: 1
With Richard Greeman, Victor Wallis, Brian Tokar, and others

Full details…

The summer and fall of 2009 will surely be noted in the annals of environmental history. This period could be remembered as the time when the world’s elites slowly began to crawl toward a meaningful solution to the threat of accelerating global climate disruptions. But if events continue along the path of recent months, it could mark the beginning of an inexorable slide toward an increasingly unstable planetary climate regime, an unstable and chaotic world that our ancestors would barely recognize.

Relying on the mainstream media for news, you’d think the outlook was fairly rosy. For example, a somewhat cautious note of triumph accompanied the G8’s pronouncement in early July that the world was committing to holding the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius. The obstacle? “Developing Nations Rebuff G-8 on Curbing Pollutants,” proclaimed the New York Times headline.

You had to read through most of the article to discover that the main objection of those pesky “developing nations” representatives was to establishing a long-range goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (50 percent by 2050), without proportionate commitments from the major industrialized countries to nearer-term commitments—at least 20 percent reductions by 2020, as accepted by most European governments—that would facilitate meaningful progress toward the more distant goal. One astute European activist pointed out that the G8 outcome was “nothing but hot air,” akin to pronouncing that there would be luxury resorts on Mars by 2050. With no intermediate goals nor tangible steps toward implementation, politicians can pledge to do anything at all 40+ years into the future.

What, then, does 2 degrees of global warming mean? Last April, following a series of articles in the prestigious journal Nature that offered some important new revelations about the state of our climate projections, the climatologists who edit the indispensable scientific blog, RealClimate.org, wrote, “We feel compelled to note that even a ‘moderate’ warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, calling 2°C a danger limit seems to us pretty cavalier.”

Two degrees also turns out to be a rather daunting goal, in terms of the current world economy. At pre-recession rates of economic growth, with CO2 emissions increasing 2 percent per year, we are almost certain to exceed 2 degrees of warming by 2100, according to the European researchers whose results were reported in Nature last spring. To keep the odds below 50 percent, developed countries would need to reduce their emissions by at least 80 percent over the next 40 years, but there is a large uncertainty in that prediction, depending on the vagaries of the global carbon cycle and other hard-to-predict factors. The only reliable way to meet such targets for minimizing the global temperature rise is for cumulative world emissions to be kept below a rather austere target, equivalent to a total of 400 billion tons of carbon between 2000 and 2050. Emissions since 2000 “have used up almost a third of that allowance already,” according to a commentary by one of Nature’s US editors. And for all the trading and offsetting of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, only the past year’s economic recession has led to substantial reductions in those emissions. The Kyoto agreement, which required wealthy countries to reduce their emissions by 2012 to 6-8 percent below 1990 levels, “has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions, or even in anticipated emissions growth,” according to a widely quoted report published in Nature in 2007.

In the diplomatic sphere, the world’s hopes for an agreement to curtail emissions and forestall more catastrophic climate changes currently rest on the outcome of the next UN climate summit, scheduled for December 7-18th in Copenhagen. While some are hoping for a breakthrough in back-channel discussions between the US and China, together responsible for 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the US continues to play a largely obstructive role in the negotiations leading up to the Copenhagen summit. So does Japan, which announced in June that it would only aim to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions another 2 percent beyond its Kyoto Protocol obligation over the next decade.

Following the latest in a series of UN meetings in advance of Copenhagen, Martin Khor of the Malaysia-based Third World Network, a decades-long participant in the UN process, wrote “not only is the climate in crisis, the climate talks are also in crisis.” Corporate representatives have been hovering like vultures over UN climate meetings, seeking to define the terms of what they hope will be a rapidly expanding market in tradable carbon allowances, and the World Bank is jockeying to control the funds to curtail deforestation, which is responsible for as much as a quarter of current global warming. Given the pivotal role of the US in these upcoming proceedings, it is important to understand what is wrong with the current domestic debate on global warming, now playing out in the US Senate.

Climate Politics in Washington

Even more than the G8 discussions on climate, the US House of Representatives’ passage of a significant global warming bill in late June was received by the mainstream press, and many environmentalists, with a palpable sense of triumph. Rep. Henry Waxman of California, one of the bill’s two main sponsors, called it a “decisive and historic action,” and President Obama described the bill as “a bold and necessary step.” Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund, among the most corporate-friendly of the major environmental groups, called it no less than “the most important environmental and energy legislation in the history of our country.”

Environmental Defense, along with NRDC and the Nature Conservancy, played an important role in the development of the bill. As members of the US Climate Action Partnership, a collaboration with corporations such as Alcoa, BP, Dow, DuPont, GE, and the former big three US automakers, among others, they helped articulate what would become the bill’s broad outlines: an emphasis on long-range goals, trading of emissions allowances, initially free distribution of those allowances, and a generous offset provision that permits companies to defer significant pollution reductions well into the future.

While many environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief, and suggested that any step in the direction of regulating carbon dioxide and other climate damaging greenhouse gases is better than nothing, others remained skeptical. As the bill meandered its way through various House committees, groups like Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, and Greenpeace issued sharp critiques. Even more scathing were analyses from smaller independent groups such as Chesapeake Climate Action and the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). The bill that passed the House falls far short of international standards in mandating a meaningful level of reductions in global warming pollution, and seeks to implement decades of emissions cuts through the market-based device known as “cap-and-trade.” It also contains a number of Trojan Horse provisions that could ultimately forestall, rather than encourage, genuine climate progress.

By the time the bill had passed through the relevant committees, as well as last-minute horse-trading on the House floor, the loopholes were staggering to behold. Recall that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions on the order of 20-40 percent are needed in the next decade or so to prevent a slide toward uncontrollable global climate chaos, with reductions on the order of 80-95 percent by the leading industrial economies required by mid-century. The House bill—cosponsored by Reps. Waxman of California and Markey of Massachusetts, and now up for debate in the Senate—first attempts to shift the terms of the discussion by measuring emissions relative to 2005 levels rather than the accepted Kyoto Protocol benchmark of 1990. It promises a 17 percent reduction by 2020, relative to 2005, which only translates into 4 or 5 percent less global warming pollution than the US produced in 1990. The much-touted cap-and-trade provision of the bill accounts for about a 1 percent reduction by 2020, according to the Center for Biological Diversity’s analysis, with the remainder coming from regular, old-fashioned performance standards for smaller pollution sources, including automobiles, and from a controversial USAID effort to reduce deforestation in poorer countries. For comparison, recall that most wealthy countries agreed over a decade ago in Kyoto to reduce their emissions by 2012 to 6-8 percent below 1990 levels.

It’s important to note that the deforestation provisions of the bill mirror a highly controversial international climate mitigation strategy, promoted by the UN and the World Bank under the name of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries (REDD). REDD mainly targets intact forested lands, largely occupied by indigenous peoples, which are threatened with privatization for use as carbon offsets. Soon after the current US bill passed the House, an Anglo-African brokerage firm announced that it would sell “avoided deforestation” credits to buyers of voluntary carbon offsets in the US, threatening a wave of corporate takeovers of African forest lands.

Cap-and-trade, of course, is the latest catch phrase for attempting to control pollution by establishing an artificial market in permits to emit carbon dioxide. Since George Bush Senior’s Acid Rain Program of the early 1990s, advocates have aggressively promoted the idea that the most efficient pollution reductions come from the government setting a cap, and then allowing companies to freely trade pollution permits in order to nominally encourage development of the most cost-effective technologies. The Acid Rain Program succeeded modestly, but mainly because still-regulated electric utilities (this was the pre-Enron era) were mandated by state officials to hold true to their obligations and actually reduce their output of acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide. Trading contributed only marginally to the 50 percent pollution reductions from that program. An effort to reduce air pollution in southern California by a similar scheme appears to have mainly delayed the installation of emission controls, and the region still has the dirtiest air in the country. In Europe just three years ago, the value of tradable carbon dioxide allowances plummeted and the carbon trading system almost collapsed under the weight of excess permits that were freely granted to favored industries.

Under the House bill, some 7400 facilities across this country would be given annual allowances to continue emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. As many as 85 percent of the allowances would initially be given to polluting companies for free, reversing Obama’s campaign pledge that they should mainly be auctioned off. (In Europe, utilities routinely bill their customers for these newly acquired credits.) Meanwhile, the quantity of available pollution allowances would actually increase through 2016, only falling gradually thereafter, and companies would be allowed to indefinitely “bank” them for future use, borrow from their future allowances, and finally trade them with other regulated companies as well as with Wall Street firms and an emerging cadre of brokers in carbon futures. If all this reads a little too much like the financial machinations that nearly brought down the world’s financial markets in 2008, consider that carbon market boosters are projecting a worldwide trading system ultimately valued at $10 trillion a year—perhaps launching the next major financial bubble. All this potential for increased financial fraud and manipulation is for a mere 1 percent in CO2 reductions over the next decade, and a questionable promise of 70 percent by mid-century.

Many argue that, for all their uncertainty, these highly manipulable financial dealings are worth the risk because they facilitate the phase-in of an enforceable cap on global warming pollution. But the legislation replicates another of the most egregious features of the largely failed Kyoto Protocol: a virtual “hole in the cap,” in the form of an offset feature that allows companies to meet their obligations by investing in pollution control projects anywhere in the country, and even overseas. Companies could satisfy their full obligation to reduce CO2 by buying offsets until 2027; those familiar with the bill’s fine print suggest that companies could stretch this out for 30-40 years.

An entirely new global mythology has arisen around the idea of carbon offsets. Nearly every time you buy tickets for an airplane flight, or for some major cultural events, someone is out to sell you offsets to alleviate your contribution to global warming. Carbon offsets have become the postmodern version of the indulgences the Catholic church used to sell in the Middle Ages to buy your way out of sin. But on a global scale, with corporations instead of individuals as the main players, they have become a scam of gigantic proportions. Rather than promoting innovative measures to reduce energy use in poor countries, as they are usually advertised, carbon offsets are subsidizing the already routine destruction of byproducts from China’s rising production of ozone-destroying hydrofluorocarbons, minor retooling of highly polluting pig iron smelters in India, and methane capture from a notoriously toxic landfill in South Africa.

One of the most notorious cases is that of the French chemical company, Rhodia, which is anticipating a billion dollars in carbon offset credits in exchange for a $15 million investment in 1970s-vintage technology to destroy the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide in its facility in South Korea. Carbon offsets have become the company’s most profitable line of business. Major hydroelectric projects, mainly in China, India and Brazil, represent a quarter of applications for offset credits, and nearly all of these projects are already under development before applying for the credits. As the International Rivers Network and others have pointed out, large-scale hydro, far from being green, is responsible for huge quantities of methane and other greenhouse gases. A German study of UN-approved carbon offset projects in 2007 reported that as many as 86 percent of offset-funded projects would likely have been carried out anyway. This runs counter to the Kyoto Protocol guidelines requiring that projects granted emissions offsets must be “additional,” that is they cannot already have been planned.

Allowing companies to postpone their own greenhouse gas reductions by buying offsets is one Trojan Horse provision in the climate bill that could forestall future progress against the continued disruption of the climate. Another such measure largely prohibits the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to impose future regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Recall that it was a 2007 Supreme Court decision allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant that forced the Bush administration to finally start talking about global warming. Removing this authority represents a massive concession to polluting industries, one that would essentially remove the teeth of enforcement from future measures to forestall climate chaos.

Along with these systemic measures to weaken the climate bill, politically powerful industries wrote in further concessions of their own. (The Center for Public Integrity reported in February that some 2340 lobbyists are working in Washington on this issue.) The coal industry gets until 2025 to have to comply with the bill’s mandated pollution reductions, with ample means for gaining further extensions. Agribusiness, which is responsible for as much as a quarter of US greenhouse gas emissions, is exempt from most of the bill’s provisions, but large scale farmers who may, for example, reduce tillage by growing crops genetically engineered to withstand megadoses of herbicides, may be eligible for offset credits. Assessments of ethanol’s eligibility as a “renewable fuel” are to exclude its effects on land use, a factor that researchers from Princeton and the University of Minnesota proved decisive in a pair of landmark studies last year, which showed that industrial biofuels are often net contributors to global warming. Finally, the nuclear industry promises to be a leading beneficiary of the bill’s free allocation of emission allowances; a memo leaked to the Huffington Post reports that Exelon, currently the largest US nuclear power company, expects a $1-1.5 billion annual windfall from the bill in its current form. This despite the fact that nuclear power is yet another false solution to climate change that results in huge greenhouse gas emissions throughout the nuclear fuel cycle.

With horse-trading continuing on the House floor right up to the time of the vote, the bill ultimately included “billions of dollars in special interest favors,” according to the New York Times. These included $1 billion for green job creation job training in low income communities, viewed as a relatively minor concession by many inner city activists; the biggest giveaways were clearly to oil, coal and gas producers. Requirements for utilities to invest in truly renewable energy were severely curtailed to satisfy some southern Democrats. Still, despite all these concessions, Senators beholden to major polluting industries are already jockeying for much more, threatening to hold up the bill indefinitely if they cannot win even bigger concessions. A bill that passed the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, just a week prior to the final vote on the House bill, would open large new tracts of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling, fund a new gas pipeline in Alaska, and increase funds for scientifically dubious efforts to permanently capture and store CO2 emissions from coal-burning power plants.

Toward a Movement for Climate Justice

At various venues around the world, activists have been meeting for over a year to plan a concerted grassroots response to the upcoming UN climate summit. Anticipating that the forthcoming Copenhagen agreement is likely to fall far short of what the world needs to prevent unprecedented climate disruptions, their focus from the outset was to highlight the limits of business-as-usual and the need for direct action against the root causes of climate change, while demonstrating just and sustainable alternatives. At a meeting this summer of the emerging Climate Justice Action network, participants from more than 20 countries, including several from the global South, agreed on an ambitious alternative agenda to the business-dominated deal-making at the UN level.

“We cannot trust the market with our future, nor put our faith in unsafe, unproven and unsustainable technologies,” the meeting’s declaration reads. “Contrary to those who put their faith in ‘green capitalism,’ we know that it is impossible to have infinite growth on a finite planet.” The statement calls for leaving fossil fuels in the ground, popular and community control over production, reducing the North’s overconsumption, respecting indigenous and forest peoples’ rights and, notably, reparations for the ecological and climate debts owed by the richest countries to those who are most affected by resource extraction and climate-related disasters. The emerging issue of climate debt will be the focus of an entire day of action during the Copenhagen summit, as part of a full week of actions around the summit site. Climate Justice Action has already stirred controversy among European activists for suggesting that they may choose to occupy the summit locations to challenge false solutions and rising corporate influence over the UN proceedings.

The emerging discourse of climate justice reflects a growing understanding that those most affected by accelerating climate-related disasters around the world are usually the least responsible for causing disruptions in the climate (see Z January 2008, February 2008 and February 2009 for more background). Thus any movement seeking an adequate response to global climate changes needs to clearly face this discrepancy and prioritize the voices of the most affected communities. Many people around the world are simultaneously impacted by climate disruptions and by the emerging false solutions to climate change, including carbon trading and offsets, the destruction of forests to create biofuel (agrofuel) plantations, large-scale hydroelectric developments, and nuclear power. Corporate “solutions” to global warming often expand commodification and privatization, whether of land, waterways, or the atmosphere itself, largely at the expense of the same affected communities.

This outlook was first widely articulated following a meeting in Durban, South Africa in the fall of 2004. Representatives from groups (including social movements and indigenous peoples organizations) based in Brazil, India, Samoa, the US, and UK, as well as South Africa, drafted the Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading, which has since gained over 300 signatories from around the world. The Durban Group has helped bring people to the sites of various UN meetings to represent those affected by increased resource extraction over the past several decades, as well as the accelerating conversion of forests to monoculture plantations that is partly justified by the North’s desire for carbon offsets. In discussions following the December 2007 UN climate summit in Bali, where representatives of affected peoples made a strong showing both inside and outside the official proceedings, a more formal worldwide network emerged under the slogan, “Climate Justice Now!”

In the US, this effort is increasingly led by environmental justice activists, mainly from communities of color that have been resisting daily exposure to chemical toxins and other environmental hazards for more than 20 years. An important two day conference in New York City last January, organized by West Harlem Environmental Action (WEACT) brought together inner city activists, community and youth organizers, indigenous representatives, and farmworker advocates with students, environmental lawyers, scientists, public health advocates and government officials to discuss the relevance of the climate justice framework for communities of color and their allies across the US.

Throughout this event, speakers of widely differing backgrounds and perspectives articulated a sharp critique of carbon trading and offsets. This despite the efforts of a handful of mainstream environmental representatives to paint ‘cap-and-trade’ as a moving train that activists either had to board, or else be excluded from important debates around its implementation. A physician from Los Angeles described carbon trading as yet another means of “redistributing wealth from the poor to the wealthy,” and José Bravo of the Just Transition Alliance suggested that “when we put a price on every square inch of air, there are some of us who won’t be able to afford to breathe.” Many speakers described the emerging climate justice movement as a continuation of the civil rights legacy, and of the continuing “quest for fairness, equity and justice,” to quote the pioneering environmental justice researcher and author, Robert Bullard. Others explained how, in recent years, the environmental justice movement has broadened its scope to areas of food justice, housing justice, and transportation justice. Hence their embrace of the emerging global climate justice agenda is a logical continuation of a vital living legacy.

In the US and around the world, an impressive array of interests is coming together to contribute to shaping the climate justice agenda. First among these are the opponents of mountaintop removal coal mining, who have put their bodies on the line repeatedly to expose the profound hazard posed by this exceedingly destructive practice. Growing numbers of people in coal-dependent communities in Appalachia are expressing the need for an alternative development model that relieves the stranglehold of the coal companies over their communities, protects people’s health, and facilitates the phase-out of the single most climate-destructive form of energy production. Indigenous communities, many organized under the umbrella of the Indigenous Environmental Network, are resisting increased mining of coal and uranium and advancing educational initiatives on the false solutions to global warming. An emerging youth climate movement is carrying out creative direct actions, not only at coal mining sites, but also at corporate headquarters, industry conferences, and even the headquarters of corporate-friendly environmental groups such as Environmental Defense (see risingtidenorthamerica.org).

Internationally, people from Pacific Island nations, in some cases already losing land and groundwater to rising seas, have been in the forefront of calls for immediate action. The worldwide confederation of peasant movements, Vía Campesina, with affiliated groups in more than 80 countries, has joined the call for actions in Copenhagen, challenging the status of carbon as a newly privatized commodity and arguing that the UN climate convention “has failed to radically question the current models of consumption and production based on the illusion of continuous growth.” Critical civil society organizations, many working within the framework of Climate Justice Now! continue to challenge the status quo inside the UN negotiations. Further, hundreds of cities and towns in the US have defied the federal government’s 20-year trend toward inaction and committed to substantial, publicly-aided CO2 reductions of their own.

In the fall of 2008, U.S. organizations actively working for climate justice both nationally and internationally, including Indigenous Environmental Network, Global Justice Ecology Project and Rising Tide North America, launched the Mobilization for Climate Justice (MCJ, see actforclimatejustice.org). The Mobilization was founded to link the climate struggle in the US to the growing international climate justice movement, with an eye toward building for actions around the Copenhagen climate summit and beyond.  Its objective was to provide a justice-based framework for organizing around climate change that opened space for leadership by representatives of communities in the US that are most impacted by climate change and the fossil fuel industry.

The MCJ issued a broadly focused open letter to potential allies, calling for “a radical change in direction to put climate justice, ecological integrity and people’s rights at the center of international climate negotiations,” and is working toward a nationwide day of action on November 30, a week before the Copenhagen talks begin—and coincidentally the tenth anniversary of the mass demonstrations that successfully confronted the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999. Activists confronting the toxic legacy of Chevron’s refinery complex in San Francisco Bay city of Richmond, California are already developing action plans for that day, and gatherings in Chicago and Pittsburgh this fall will focus on developing plans for other regions of the country. In Pittsburgh, a climate action camp, modeled on similar camps in the UK and across Europe, will begin during the Pittsburgh Coal Conference (September 21-23), and continue through the September 24-25th meeting of the G-20 heads of state, also in Pittsburgh. The climate camp and subsequent protests against the coal conference and the G-20 will bring together climate justice advocates from throughout the eastern US to build pressure on the Obama administration and others to commit to real and just action on climate change in Copenhagen. Other groups are focusing their efforts on dates throughout the fall, including the annual commemorations of Indigenous People’s Day on October 12th (see ienearth.org), and an international day of climate actions on United Nations Day, October 24th, initiated by prominent environmentalists including Bill McKibben and David Suzuki (see 350.org).

The increasing urgency of the climate crisis has clearly hit a nerve among people of many walks of life, all around the world. While the outcome of this fall’s events remains highly uncertain, it is clear that such a flowering of creative and determined popular responses is precisely what is needed to reverse decades of willful inaction by the world’s elites and reach beyond the limits of politics-as-usual.

Brian Tokar is the Director of the Vermont-based Institute for Social Ecology (social-ecology.org). His books include Earth for Sale , Redesigning Life? and the forthcoming collection (co-edited with Fred Magdoff), Crisis in Food and Agriculture: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal (Monthly Review Press). Thanks to Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle for helpful suggestions.

The previous panelists have offered thoughtful perspectives on how US agricultural policies profoundly alter the lives of people around the world and how people in tropical Central America are beginning to reclaim sovereignty over their food supply. I’d like to bring the discussion home by addressing the problem of increasing corporate control over our own food, and exploring some ways we can begin to bring our food economy back home. This discussion is in many ways an outgrowth of my research on the science and politics of genetic engineering in agriculture. For a variety of international perspectives on the relationship between genetic engineering and global trade policies, please see my 2004 book, Gene Traders, published by Toward Freedom in Burlington, Vermont.1

Once upon a time, my home region-the hills and valleys of north-central Vermont-was considered to be the breadbasket of New England. The Champlain Valley was an important wheat-growing region, and modest hill farms scattered among the foothills of the Green Mountains grew much of New England’s oats, barley and rye.

Today, Vermont, and northern New England as a whole, is overwhelmingly a net importer of food. Bill McKibben reported a year ago in the Vermont Commons newspaper that Vermont’s food imports are worth half again as much as what we export, and two-thirds of these exports are dairy products.2 Even foods we can grow in Vermont are largely imported. A Rodale Institute study of food self-sufficiency across the US, published in 1982, showed that Vermont even imports 70-80 percent of its carrots and apples.3 A recent University of Vermont study projected that only 10-15 percent of our food budgets are spent on locally grown products, but offered a hopeful assessment of the potential to significantly increase this percentage.4  David Timmons, a recent Masters degree recipient from the University’s Program in Community Development and Applied Economics, calculated that Vermont presently has the capacity to grow 38 percent of its food, based on current levels of agricultural production in nine major categories, including foods we mainly grow for export. New Hampshire, unfortunately, comes in at a disappointing 6 percent.

How did it come to this? And, even more importantly, in an era of rising fuel prices and wars for oil, how do we begin to change the situation?

Many factors contributed to the loss of Vermont’s traditional agricultural base. From the westward migrations of the mid-19th century, to the coming of the railroads and the creation of a national grain market, the huge surpluses generated by Western farms drove prices down and rendered New England growers economically marginal. Expanding commodity-based agriculture increasingly trumped the ethic of self-reliance that our region was said to be built upon.

In the 1950s, when Americans spent more than 30 percent of their household income on food, policymakers decided that food had become too expensive for the emerging consumer lifestyle, and that too many people were trying to make their living in agriculture. Subsidies were structured so as to create new export markets for agricultural commodities, and to encourage people to sell their farms and migrate to the cities to find work.

This policy has reverberated many times over the past half century, with repeated “farm crises” through much of the country, and prices declining to the point where we now spend only 15 percent of our income on food. A vanishing share of our food dollars actually goes to farmers, and we are often reminded that food items travel an average of at least 1500 miles from farm to table, a figure dating back to the late 1960s. Vermont lost nearly 90 percent of its farms in the past half century, and many agricultural areas of the central United States faced significant depopulation. Transnational chemical companies, food processors and grain traders, rather than farmers, came to decide how our food would be grown, shipped and processed. Today, the United States has more people in prison than are earning their livelihood growing food.

Today, a shrinking number of transnational corporations control the world’s supply of seeds and other agricultural inputs, as well as food processing, distribution and marketing. This process of corporate consolidation began with the rapidly increasing use of agricultural pesticides in the decades immediately following World War II. US pesticide sales increased ten-fold between the 1940s and 1970s, and another ten-fold since then.5 Pesticide manufacturers such as Monsanto, Dow, and their European counterparts gained unprecedented control over how our food is grown during this period. In the 1990s, they attempted to heighten and consolidate that control through the development of genetically engineered seed varieties, 80 percent of which are engineered to withstand large doses of those companies’ proprietary weed killers.6 To assure market acceptance of genetically engineered crop varieties, Monsanto and other agrochemical giants spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring the world’s leading seed companies.

In 2005, Monsanto became the world’s largest seed company with its takeover of Seminis Seeds, a Mexican company that had grown to become the largest supplier of vegetable seeds in the Western Hemisphere. A generation ago, seed production was as dispersed as milk production, if not more so; the idea of companies having global market share in seeds was virtually unfathomable. Today, ten companies control half of a global seed market estimated at $20 billion annually (see Figure 1).7 Four of those companies, Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont, are also among the world’s largest pesticide producers, and are responsible (along with Dow Chemical) for essentially all of the genetically engineered (GE) seed varieties being aggressively marketed around the world today (Figure 2).

Genetic engineering is a technology that has significantly helped drive corporate consolidation in agriculture. Monsanto alone controls the germplasm, or genetic makeup, of 88 percent of the world’s GE crop acreage.8 Bayer, best known for aspirin and other common pharmaceuticals, is the world’s largest insecticide producer. After the Starlink corn scandal of 2000-’01 cost the food industry $1 billion-and forced the recall of hundreds of name brand corn products due to contamination with a GE variety never approved for human consumption-Bayer bought the former “CropScience” division of the pharmaceutical giant Aventis. Syngenta is essentially a synthetic company, formed from successive waves of mergers, divestments and re-mergers of chemical companies from Switzerland, Britain and Sweden; they are number two in pesticides overall and the largest producer of herbicides. Monsanto is number two in herbicides; thus it is no coincidence that herbicide tolerance is by far the leading genetically engineered trait in commercial agricultural production today.

Corporate giants like Wal-Mart-now the world’s single largest corporation, having overtaken all of the big automotive and oil companies-have come to control a third of the world’s retail sales of food (Figure 3).9 Other companies in the global retail top 10 that are active in New England include the Dutch conglomerate Royal Ahold (owner of Stop & Shop), Albertson’s (owner of Shaw’s), and Costco. The unprecedented market power of Wal-Mart and other huge corporations has also driven consolidation among food processors, with increasing numbers of medium-sized companies-including many of the best known natural food processors-being purchased by the likes of Heinz, General Mills and Mars Candy.10 Added to these is the massive market power of the grain processing giants, especially Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, which together control two thirds of all the world’s shipping, distribution and export of bulk grains, and thoroughly dominate the crushing, milling and processing of soybeans and corn, the two most widespread genetically engineered crops.11

These facts and figures may appear insurmountable, but all around the world, people are saying no to corporate food, reclaiming the ability-and the right-to make basic choices about how our food is grown and how we obtain it. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have become a leading symbol of this resistance, with farmers’ organizations around the world often leading the opposition. In much of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, GMOs are at the center of highly visible and persistent public controversies, and more than 30 countries have adopted labeling rules and import restrictions, resisting pressure from the US and the World Trade Organization (WTO) to step back and simply accept this disruptive and dangerous technology.12

It is no accident that Vermont has been a leader in resisting genetic engineering in the US. Vermonters are very concerned about the quality of our food, and share a concern and identification with those who grow our food that has been all but obliterated in much of the US. Indeed Europe’s distinct food cultures have largely driven the resistance there to GMOs and agribusiness control. In this respect, by moving toward a more conscious cultural identification with the sources and character of our food, Vermont may have more in common with Europe than almost any other place in the US. Eighty five Vermont towns are on record supporting GMO labeling and in most cases, a moratorium on growing these crops, a distinction we share with more than 25 towns elsewhere in New England, as well as three northern California counties, where comprehensive bans on raising GE crops and livestock have been voted into law.

In the countries of the global South-the so-called “developing world”-agriculture remains far more central to people’s everyday experience, livelihood, and traditions. From India and Korea to Brazil and parts of Africa, militant farmers’ organizations have emerged in recent years, and joined with farmer activists from Europe and North America to create a global “peasant movement” known as La Via Campesina. Via Campesina has intervened in numerous international fora over the past decade, and has pioneered the concept of food sovereignty as a centerpiece of their demands toward various international agencies.

Food sovereignty is defined by Via Campesina as people’s fundamental right to define their own agricultural and food policies.13 This includes prioritizing agricultural production to feed people, rather than for export; protecting farmers’ right to land, water, seeds and credit; and granting countries the power to protect local agricultures from the common practice of food dumping. Since the 1950s, agribusiness companies, mostly from the US, have been unloading, or dumping, surplus commodities on international markets, thereby undercutting the value of local food in the recipient countries. Food sovereignty advocates support fair trade and have been in the forefront of resisting the myths of “free trade” advanced by the US government and the WTO.

Just as the sum of many small, local efforts have helped restrain the unchecked spread of genetic engineering and other excesses of corporate globalism, a similar convergence of local efforts can help us grow toward a healthier, more sustainable future at home. A year after Mendocino County in California became the first county in the US to completely ban the raising of GMOs, people in the town of Willits and neighboring communities launched a regional “Economic Localization Project,” inspired by awareness of the looming peak in world oil production.14 For many people across the US, “peak oil” represents the end of the unchecked expansion of the petroleum-based economy and an urgent imperative to create a way of life that can withstand what arms industry analyst Michael Klare has termed the “permanent energy crisis.”15

The WELL (Willits Economic Localization) meets biweekly, and has encouraged the creation of over a dozen projects to further the aim of energy and food self reliance in central Mendocino County. They are developing community gardens, a barter market, a school gardens project, and an effort to green their new community hospital. Other towns in the region have formed a biodiesel co-op, organized bulk purchase of fruit (and olive!) trees, and even started a yak cooperative. They’ve brought renewable energy technologies to area schools and organized local food tastings, along with a wide array of other educational and celebratory events. In 2005, Jason Bradford, one of the founders of WELL, produced a detailed study of his town’s food needs and how they can be met locally.16

Of course, food self-reliance is a more easily achievable goal in northern California than in Vermont or New Hampshire, but we are also beginning to see some heartening steps in that direction. A year ago, one group of 20 Upper Connecticut Valley residents pledged to only eat foods grown within a 100 mile radius for the entire month of January. They relied on a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, Luna Bleu, that provides stored produce all winter, on Butterworks Farm’s dried beans, wheat, corn and sunflower oil, and on diverse local sources of dairy products, bread, maple syrup, honey, and meats. It helped, of course, that they had planned ahead and put by an ample supply of produce from the past year’s gardens. They also relied on the active support of the Upper Valley Food Co-op in White River Junction, whose manager, Kye Cochran, is renowned as a dedicated local food and GE-free advocate. This “Localvore” movement has spread like wildfire throughout Vermont over the past year.

Another effort, the Addison County Relocalization Network (known as ACORN), has undertaken a detailed mapping of their county’s energy and food needs. They are working toward online partnering of growers and buyers, innovative ways for food producers to share needs, and an effort to strengthen agricultural zoning.17 One aim is to make it more difficult for prime agricultural land to be converted to other uses, a problem that has become epidemic in recent decades through much of the Champlain Valley.

Vermont has a vital network of farmers markets and CSA farms. Many growers plant a little extra every year to supply local food shelves. Burlington’s Intervale features some of the most vital and collaborative urban farms in the entire country. NOFA (Northeast Organic Farming Association) and the Vermont Grass Growers are helping struggling dairy farms transition to more sustainable methods. Thanks to FoodWorks in Montpelier, many Vermont schools have active food gardens and horticulture programs. But much more is needed. Even a couple of decades ago, there were many more local canneries for local produce, and freezer lockers and slaughterhouses to serve those who raise animals for meat. Today we have more artisanal cheesemakers than ever before, but Vermont’s single largest cheesemaker, Cabot, has been steadily moving its production out of state since it was purchased by the regional giant AgriMark in 1993.

Two policy initiatives debated in Montpelier during the 2006 legislative session aimed to help further the goal of increasing food self-reliance. One bill was passed (H. 456), providing small grants to schools to develop working relationships with local farmers and food processors; the original bill also included training and processing assistance for school food service personnel to bring more local products into their kitchens. Another bill (H. 654) addressed the link between food self reliance and emergency management, and would have brought together emergency planners, municipal officials and regional planning commissions in a coordinated effort to strengthen and expand local food and energy supplies in preparation for potential future shortages.18

Another crucial policy area is helping farmers through the costly transition to organic and sustainable production methods. Vermont’s recently retired Secretary of Agriculture, Steven Kerr, paid significant lip service to the idea of state aid to farmers who wish to transition to organic production. This idea languished over his four years in office, but needs to be a central element in any meaningful plan to help sustain our farms and farmers. In Europe, public support for organic transitions has been widely available, and has hugely benefited the land, farmers and consumers. In Austria, 10 percent of the farms are organic (50 percent in the alpine Salzburg province), with a ten-fold increase during the 1990s after state support became available for organic conversions.19 Vermont and New England should be able to do this as well.

Can these efforts toward increased food self reliance in our region meet the dual challenge of responding to future crises and sustaining a high quality of life for everyone? Can local alternatives challenge the influence of agribusiness giants like Monsanto over all of our lives, and also meaningfully serve those who are unable to pay more for high quality local food? One of the strengths of the GE-Free Vermont movement over the years has been its insistence that we will not encourage the creation of a niche market for safe, healthy food while those who are less fortunate among us are limited to increasingly hazardous corporate-processed food. A sustainable future-a future of genuine food sovereignty-is only possible if healthy, local food is available to everyone, regardless of their economic status, family history, or access to land. In the best New England tradition, we can work collaboratively with our neighbors to create a greener future for us all.

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Brian Tokar is the author of four books on environmental politics and issues, including Earth for Sale (South End Press) and Gene Traders (Toward Freedom). He directs the Biotechnology Project at the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, and extends his gratitude to Steve Chase and Christine Arminger for the opportunity to participate in this symposium.

Notes:

1 Brian Tokar, ed., Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade and the Globalization of Hunger, Burlington, VT: Toward Freedom, 2004.

2 Bill McKibben, “Can Vermont Feed Itself?” Vermont Commons, October 2005.

3 Cornucopia Project, “The State of Your Food: A Manual for State Food System Analysis,” Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1982

4 David S. Timmons, personal communication, February 2006; David Timmons and Qingbin Wang, “Measuring Local Food,” draft manuscript, University of Vermont, March 2006. See also David S. Timmons, Measuring and Understanding Local Foods: The Case of Vermont, MS Thesis, University of Vermont Program in Community Development and Applied Economics, May 2006.

5 Thomas R. Dunlap, DDT: Scientists, Citizens and Public Policy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981; John H. Perkins, Insects, Experts and the Insecticide Crisis, New York: Plenum Press, 1982; Paolo Palladino, Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture: The Making of Scientific Careers in North America, 1885-1985, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996.

6 See, for example, Brian Tokar, “Monsanto: A Profile of Corporate Arrogance,” in Edward Goldsmith and Jerry Mander, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy, London: Earthscan Publications, 2001. An earlier version of the article appeared in The Ecologist, Vol. 28 No. 5 (September/October 1998).

7 ETC Group Communiqué No. 91, Oligopoly, Inc. 2005: Concentration in Corporate Power, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: ETC Group, November 2005; ETC Group Communiqué No. 90, Global Seed Industry Concentration-2005, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: ETC Group, September 2005.

8 ETC Group, November 2005, ibid.

9 ETC Group, November 2005, ibid.

10 Phillip H. Howard, “Organic Industry Structure: Top 25 Food Processors in North America,” Michigan State University, November 2006, at http://www.msu.edu/~howardp/.

11 Corporate Watch, Cargill:  Arrogance Incorporated, Oxford, UK: Corporate Watch, 1999; Brewster Kneen, Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies, London: Pluto Press, 2002.

12 Center for Food Safety, Genetically Modified Crops and Foods: Worldwide Regulation, Prohibition and Production, Washington, DC: Center for Food Safety, 2005; see also Brian Tokar, “WTO vs. Europe:  Less-and Also More-Than it Seems,” at www.counterpunch.org/tokar02182006.html.

13 La Via Campesina, “What is Food Sovereignty?” January 2003, at www.viacampesina.org.

14 Willits Economic Localization Project Overview, at www.willitseconomiclocalization.org/MoreAbout.htm.

15 Michael T. Klare, “The Permanent Energy Crisis,” TomDispatch.com, February 2006, at www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=58126.

16 Jason Bradford, “Food Security Report for Willits, November 2003,” available from www.willitseconomiclocalization.org.

17 The efforts of ACORN and kindred groups across Vermont are profiled online at vtpeakoil.net.

18 Full texts of bills debated by the Vermont legislature are available at www.leg.state.vt.us.

19 Christian R. Vogl and Ika Darnhofer, “Organic agriculture in Austria,” The Organic Standard (Höje, Sweden), No. 34, February 2004.

(This interview was originally posted at http://www.ecoclub.com/news/101/interview.html)

ECOCLUB.com: What is Social Ecology and in what key ways does it differ from the mainstream environmentalism of the big US & International NGOS?

Brian Tokar: Social ecology offers a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and environmental problems, as well as a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society. We view environmental problems as fundamentally social and political, and seek systemic, long-term solutions, in contrast to the incremental policy adjustments generally advocated by the large NGOs. We advocate fundamental changes in political, economic and social systems, envisioning an outlook that reharmonizes human communities with the natural world, while celebrating diversity, creativity and freedom within human communities.

ECOCLUB.com: What criteria should Tourism meet, assumed that it can, so that it could be genuinely ecological and compatible with social ecology?  In other words, could there ever be a Social Ecological Tourism?

Brian Tokar: Several of our students over the years have sought to address the problems of tourism and eco-tourism from a social ecology perspective. The fundamental problem with tourism today is that it transforms communities and important natural areas toward serving the desires and perceived needs of more affluent people who come to visit from other parts of the world.
A more genuinely ecological tourism would necessarily begin with the genuine needs and lived realities of the host community. Visitors would participate in ongoing community activities and voluntary forms of service to their hosts. Facilities would necessarily be owned and managed by local people and genuinely reflect the community’s lifeways, rather than some idealized or repackaged version of those. The problem, of course, is that in a competitive, capitalist context, and in a world burdened by vast discrepancies in wealth and privilege, communities that offer visitors their lived reality as it is may have a difficult time competing with locales that offer visitors a more idealized fantasy of their existence.

ECOCLUB.com: What is your view of tools such as carbon offsetting of travel emissions, voluntourism and traveller’s philanthropy, do they advance the social ecological agenda, or are they just ‘humane’ forms of green capitalism in travel?

Brian Tokar: We are especially skeptical of carbon offsetting for travel. Offsets may help absolve individuals’ personal guilt for their excess carbon emissions, but the actual benefits to the climate are often difficult to measure. For countries that aim to meaningfully cap their emissions, offsetting emissions through investments in projects elsewhere in the world represents a “hole in the cap” with results that are difficult to monitor and verify. Authors such as Larry Lohmann from the UK have demonstrated that many carbon offset projects ultimately do more harm than good. I am new to the concept of ‘voluntourism;’ as I’ve outlined above, it all depends on how it is carried out, and how genuinely it meets the needs of the host community.

ECOCLUB.com: How optimistic are you about the Obama administration delivering on its promises for peace and the environment?

Brian Tokar: After 30 years of virtually uninterrupted right wing hegemony in the US, most progressive-minded people are hopeful about the ‘change’ that Obama represents. However his policies have a long way to go in living up to his promises for change. The escalation of US military activity in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the very slow withdrawal from Iraq reflect more continuity with past policies than meaningful change. In environmental policy, Obama’s top appointees are consistent in acknowledging the need for effective science-based responses to problems such as the potentially catastrophic global climate disruptions that we are facing. On the other hand, they appear quite wedded to status-quo false “solutions” to global warming, including the potential expansion of nuclear power, trading of carbon dioxide emissions permits, and the myths of “clean coal” and “advanced” biofuels. We may be seeing as much change as is possible within the constraints of the current structures of political power in the US, but this is clearly not enough in the face of mounting ecological and economic disruptions.

ECOCLUB.com: Should the Green movement search for short-term solutions to the current economic crisis (of capitalism) or should they just let the system collapse and develop a really alternative one, not based on money & profit, that it can replace it?

Brian Tokar: Short term solutions are inherently limited, but necessary. Crises, both economic and ecological, disproportionately affect the most vulnerable people, while the most affluent are best able to shield themselves from the most serious consequences. It is the responsibility of any society that believes in justice to compensate for these short-term effects and allow everyone to participate in the recreation of a social order that fully meets the needs of the people and the planet. Short term solutions should not become ends in themselves, nor allow us to become complacent, but rather help set the stage for the much bigger changes that are necessary.

Note: This article is from a presentation for Changer le Monde, Un Quartier à la Fois! (Changing the World, One Neighborhood at a Time) conference, Montreal, 5/1/08

Over the past year, we’ve seen an unprecedented rise in awareness of the consequences of potentially catastrophic global climate changes, and the need for a more ecologically sound way of life. We know that profound changes in our energy systems, our modes of transportation, and our entire way of life, are absolutely essential if we are to avoid a cascade of climate disruptions that will threaten every aspect of life on earth.

We also know that people living in the global South, especially in subsistence cultures that contribute the least to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, are already facing the most severe consequences of an increasingly chaotic climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report not only certified that the evidence for accelerating, humanly-generated climate changes is, in their word, “unequivocal,” but they compiled a massive array of evidence that the consequences of global warming for crop productivity, drinking water supplies, floods, droughts, wildfires and the spread of disease are already upon us.

Here in North America, we have been inundated over the past two years with a plethora of seductive, but ultimately false solutions to this predicament. We face a well-orchestrated political push, from the highest levels of the US government, for a revival of nuclear power. Not only do we still, after 50 years, have no clue what to do with monstrous quantities of highly radioactive nuclear waste, but if our societies do commit the massive capital resources needed to build a new generation of nuclear power plants, there will be literally nothing left to fund truly green, solar-based alternatives. And if this were to happen, in a few years we will run out of the relatively accessible uranium ore that now minimizes greenhouse gas emissions from the nuclear fuel cycle, and the energy needed to mine and purify more uranium would quickly become yet another large contributor to catastrophic global warming.

Another false solution to global warming that we read a great deal about are so-called ‘biofuels.’ Running our cars on ethanol fermented from corn and diesel fuel made from soybeans and other food crops is already contributing to a worldwide food shortage that has caused starvation and social upheavals in Mexico, Egypt, Thailand, Haiti, and all around the world. The amount of corn needed to produce the ethanol for one SUV tank is enough to feed a hungry person for a year. And the idea that we can someday run our cars on fuel extracted from grasses and trees is another dangerous myth that is mainly underwriting a new wave of subsidies to the US biotechnology industry.

Third, we are told that if the world is to make significant reductions in our emissions of greenhouse gases, the only way to carry out these reductions is through the wonders of the so-called “free market.” The European Union has been experimenting with market-based trading of carbon emissions between companies and countries for a few years now, and has clearly demonstrated that trading of carbon emissions represents a new subsidy to highly polluting corporations, without any demonstrable reduction in their contributions to destabilizing the climate. Buying carbon offsets from projects in other parts of the world is even farther from presenting a real solution. Carbon offsets are encouraging the conversion of native forests into monoculture tree plantations, lengthening the lifespan of polluting landfills and industrial facilities in Asia and Africa, in exchange for incremental changes in their operations, and ultimately perpetuating the very inequalities that we need to eliminate in order to create a more just and sustainable world.

It is becoming common wisdom today that the real solutions to global warming, as well as to reducing social inequality and furthering the dual goals of justice and sustainability, are fundamentally local. Not that we don’t require global-scale changes in political structures, economic institutions, and the very foundations of society. But it is at the local level, in our cities, towns and neighborhoods, that we can create lasting models of the kind of world we wish to see, and begin to shatter the myth that meaningful changes are impossible. It is here at the local level that we create living examples of a more ecologically sound way of life, and also build the political movement that takes power back from powerful institutions and demands the broader political and economic changes that are necessary.

The last time a popular movement compelled widespread changes in our environmental and energy policies on a global scale was during the late 1970s and early eighties, when people in Europe, the US and across the world mobilized to end the huge wave of nuclear power development that swept the world in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. In the mid-1970s, we had lines around the block all across the US to purchase gasoline, and analysts predicted that the demand for electricity would soon outrun supplies.

This led to a plan to build hundreds of new nuclear power plants all across the US and Europe. European activists, particularly in Germany, had begun direct action occupations of proposed nuclear power plant sites in the early seventies, often collaborating with local residents to create long-term encampments that challenged the authorities for months at a time. In the US, inspired by these European actions, we built a large, nationwide antinuclear movement that not only ended the push for nuclear power, but embodied a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between technological and social changes. Local and regional antinuclear alliances all across the US contrasted the prevailing image of a highly militarized nuclear state with a long-range vision of an entirely new social order. In this alternative future, decentralized, solar-powered communities would be empowered to decide their energy future and also their political future. Many of us in that movement looked to the emerging philosophy of social ecology as a firm theoretical grounding for a new socially transformative ecological politics.

One further outgrowth of that inspiring anti-nuclear movement was the emergence of a new phenomenon in urban design: the then-revolutionary idea of creating Green Cities. Radical architects, planners, and urban activists began devising visionary plans for redesigning cities along the lines of the emerging new ecological consciousness. For perhaps the first time since the rise of the industrial city in the 19th century, urban planners were discussing native plants, solar-friendly architecture, and rooftop gardens, as well as ways to minimize waste, reclaim once-free flowing rivers, and even return wildlife into the urban setting. Neighborhoods would be redesigned so as to bring living and working places closer together and minimize the scourge of commuting. A resurgence of neighborhood shops would reverse the trend toward ever larger and more remote shopping malls. Some even proposed tearing up streets so as to make neighborhoods friendlier to people and their gardens, and less burdened by automobile traffic. We saw a resurgence of urban gardens, motivated by the knowledge that 19th century cities including Paris grew a large amount of their food, and cities like Kyoto, Japan do so to this day. Further, in keeping with the democratic spirit of the time, innovations in urban design were closely tied to the spread of neighborhood-based democracy. Decentralization of city government was a popular call, with neighborhood planning boards, school boards, and other such bodies proliferating across North America.

Today, in response to the urgency of global warming, we are seeing the rise of a new Green City movement, but today’s movement is largely lacking the visionary focus of 30 years ago. In the US, at least, the emphasis is entirely on demonstrating new technologies and new building materials. Demonstration projects are viewed as ends in themselves, without much thought about bringing energy saving technologies into far wider use, nor integrating them into a new vision of the city. New “Green-certified” buildings use the latest high-tech materials, usually heavily reliant on fossil fuels for their production, and are generally out of reach to anyone but the wealthiest corporate-friendly developers. This approach to greening cities owes more to the rise of “green” products and fashionable “green” consumerism than to any popular movement for fundamental social change.

For example, Popular Science magazine did a survey this past February, aiming to identify the “50 Greenest Cities” in the US. They rated all US cities of over 100,000 in population on a somewhat arbitrary 30 point scale, focusing on electricity sources, transportation (particularly use of public transit), “green living (mainly the number of “green”-certified buildings), recycling and so-called “green perspective.” Electricity and transportation accounted for 20 out of the 30 points, and the remaining categories encompassed the other ten. They also highlighted half a dozen particularly noteworthy projects in the leading cities.

It is no surprise that Portland, Oregon, which may have been the first city in the world to institutionalize environmentally conscious planning in the 1980s, came up first with 23 out of 30 points. The first very large city on the list is Chicago at number 9, cited mainly for its famous lakefront parks, energy-efficient cogeneration of heat and electricity, and four city projects certified by the Green Building Council. New York is number 20, with more than 50% of residents taking public transportation to work, and a new effort to produce electricity from the tides. But only a dozen cities got more than 20 points, and only 31 rated higher than 15. The last 20 so-called “Green cities” received ratings of only 10-15 out of 30. Oakland, California is featured for having added just three hydrogen-powered buses to its fleet, San Francisco for putting solar panels on the roof of its mammoth convention center, and Salt Lake City for one geothermal-powered commercial building. These are all important innovations, but overall, the expectations raised by surveys like this are astoundingly low. There is nothing about reducing overall emissions of greenhouse gases, nothing about fewer people commuting to work, certainly nothing about redesigning neighborhoods, or bringing a greater sense of democracy into people’s lives.

With half of the world’s population now living in urban areas, we cannot overemphasize the need to dramatically change how our cities work. Back in the 1960s, at the dawn of today’s environmental movement, most environmentalists were dismissive of cities. They were seen by many as hopeless cesspools of smog, industrial waste, over-congestion, and human despair. The suburbs, a product of the post-World War 2 economic boom in the United States, were still expanding rapidly, and people were encouraged to flee the cities to embrace the new suburban lifestyle. Today we know that suburbs are akin to ecological deserts, with monocultures of chemically treated lawns, people terminally confined to their cars, and unconscionably wasteful patterns of land use. But 40 years ago, cities were widely perceived to be the problem.

One of the few dissenting voices in those years was Murray Bookchin, the founding philosopher of social ecology and one of the most visionary social thinkers of the late 20th century. Bookchin authored more than 20 books during his lifetime and sought to offer a coherent theoretical underpinning to the work of a generation of ecological and anti-authoritarian activists. Numerous concepts that became common wisdom among ecological activists in the sixties and beyond were first articulated clearly in Bookchin’s writings, including the socially reconstructive dimension of ecological science, the potential links between sustainable technologies and political decentralization, and the evolution beyond class consciousness on the left toward a more encompassing critique of all forms of social hierarchy.

In pioneering works such as The Crisis in Our Cities, The Limits of the City, The Ecology of Freedom, and Urbanization Without Cities, Bookchin delved deeply into the early history of cities, as well as their present condition. He came to understand that cities historically were the first ‘free spaces,’ where people embraced a new-found sense of personal freedom, beyond the provincialism of more traditional, kinship-centered communities. Cities in ancient times were the locus of a potential ethical union of people, the places where community was consciously created, and where humanity began to elaborate a “second nature,” in the terminology of Aristotle and Cicero:  a cultural evolution consciously distinct from non-human “first nature.” Furthermore, cities for Bookchin were a locus of ethical political engagement. Bookchin was fascinated with the structures of the Athenian polis that flourished during the 7th century BCE. Clearly, the classical Greek polis had severe shortcomings in terms of gender relations and a despicable reliance on slave labor—qualities it shared with virtually all other highly organized societies of the period. But, to this day, the polis remains unique in human history as a setting where decisions affecting the future of the city were made by all of its citizens in open assembly, creating a unique, ethically crafted model of democracy that the world has yet to equal in its scope.

Social ecology’s outlook on contemporary politics seeks to bring this model into the present. Drawing on examples from the Parisian sections during the French Revolution, as well as the Paris Commune of 1871, Bookchin came to view the neighborhood as “the authentic unit of political life.” He proposed a political strategy that he called “libertarian municipalism,” seeking to draw out what he viewed as a fundamental conflict between our communities and the state. Libertarian municipalism proposes that citizen assemblies become the center of public life in towns and neighborhoods and function as counterinstitutions to official decision-making bodies, eventually assuming control over essential political and economic decisions. Representatives in city councils and regional assemblies would come to function as mandated delegates, deputized by their local assemblies and empowered only to carry out the wishes of the people.

Bookchin also realized that towns and neighborhoods could not truly move forward as islands unto themselves, and thus libertarian municipalism is also a politics of confederation. In Bookchin’s words, “Confederalism is… a way of perpetuating interdependence among communities and regions—indeed it is a way of democratizing that interdependence without surrendering the principle of local control. Through confederation, a community can retain its identity and roundedness while participating in a sharing way with the larger whole that makes up a balanced ecological society.”

Third, libertarian municipalism is an approach to democratizing the economy under direct community control. An ecological economy is a moral economy, not constrained by the competitive ways of the capitalist market. In such a society, economic as well as political relationships are guided by an ethics of mutualism and reciprocity. Again, quoting Bookchin, “In such a municipal economy – confederal, interdependent, and rational by ecological, not simply technological standards – we would expect that the special interests that divide people today into workers, professionals, managers, and the like would be melded into a general interest in which people see themselves as citizens, guided … by the needs of their community and region rather than by personal proclivities and vocational concerns.”

In a world where the commercial marketplace has thoroughly colonized every sphere of life, virtually dissolving our collective memory of the diversity of lifeways that existed prior to capitalism, a decentralized, moral economy also serves as a kind of school. It is a school for a new kind of citizen, active in public life and public service, and empowered to guide the decisions that affect the life of the community. In a world where right wing ideology would relegate everything to the realm of the private, social ecology emphasizes the reinvigoration of the public sphere, the place where community life happens, and where the economy is guided toward the genuine satisfaction of everyone’s needs.

As Murray Bookchin first articulated in the mid-1960s, the technological means are already available to create a satisfying life for everyone, within the limits of natural constraints, but relieved of the artificial burdens that have shaped human existence throughout the industrial era. Today, more than ever, the obstacles are entirely social and political. Today we have the most inequitable distribution of wealth since the period just before the Great Depression of the 1930s. The occupation of Iraq has cost the US and its allies over $3 trillion over the past five years, according to Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Public funds are squandered on projects and tax measures that benefit the few at the expense of the many, while corporations today will not even invest in measures to save energy and make their operations more efficient unless they can demonstrate a two year payback—a constraint that is not imposed on any other type of investment. Once again, it is here in our neighborhoods that we can both demonstrate a better way and organize to bring these changes to the wider world.

***

Personal bio:  Brian Tokar has been an activist, author and a leading critical voice for ecological activism since the 1970s, and is currently the Director of the Institute for Social Ecology, based in Vermont.  He is the author of The Green Alternative and Earth for Sale, and edited Redesigning Life?, an international collection on the politics and implications of biotechnology, as well as Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade and the Globalization of Hunger. Brian has lectured throughout the U.S., as well as internationally, and is acclaimed as a passionate advocate of grassroots action for ecological sanity and global justice.  His articles on environmental issues, emerging ecological movements, and resistance to genetic engineering appear in Z Magazine, Earth Island Journal, Toward Freedom, and on websites such as Counterpunch, ZNet, Truthout, and WW4Report.  Brian holds concurrent degrees from MIT in biology and physics, and a Masters degree in biophysics from Harvard University.

Complaining about the weather is about as American as apple pie, sitcoms and rock and roll. But while the rest of the world has been noticing for years that our increasingly unstable weather is an initial sign of potentially devastating global climate changes, our nation’s collective heads have mostly remained in the sand. Finally, over the past year or so, things have begun to shift a little.

It helps, of course, that weather changes over the past year or two have become so severe that it’s virtually impossible not to notice. The upper Midwestern plains have lived through 2 years of unprecedented drought; last year in much of the Southeast, it was even more severe, with parts of Alabama and Tennessee experiencing their driest weather in over a century. In Arizona-and also in parts of Greece and Turkey-summer temperatures have reached well above 115 degrees. We saw wildfires sweep through large, populated areas of southern California last fall and the hurricanes that devastated New Orleans and surroundings in 2005 were likely intensified by anomalously high sea temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and across the South Atlantic.

But the particulars of the weather, and even natural disasters, are of merely fleeting interest to most people. In New Orleans, activists tended, quite reasonably, to focus more on the substandard condition of the dikes and how they were undermined by over-development of the surrounding wetlands. Most people perceived relatively little direct relationship between the devastating human consequences of Hurricane Katrina and the emerging global climate chaos.

This is partly the fault of those who are most engaged in communicating to the public about global warming. Most often, global warming is framed as a scientific or technical matter. The hazards are severe, but generally uncertain and long-range in nature. The proposed solutions vary from relatively trivial suggestions like changing light bulbs to disastrous technical fixes like reviving nuclear power or processing the world’s grain supplies into so-called “biofuels.” In sharp contrast to, say, the radical antinuclear activists of 30 years ago, almost no one is talking about the underlying roots of the problem, much less the need for a sweeping ecological transformation of society.

Who is affected by global warming?

Since the first Earth Day, way back in 1970, there has been a serious divide between those who view environmental issues as fundamentally social and political, and those who choose to focus entirely on the technical aspects of individual problems and their narrow, status-quo solutions. In 1970, Earth Day was explicitly cast as an alternative to a continuing focus on the human and ecological ravages of the war in Vietnam, and today it’s no longer surprising to anyone that the day is sponsored by some of the very worst corporate polluters.

As social ecologists have argued since the mid-sixties, however, ecological problems both have serious human consequences, and are thoroughly social and political in origin.1 With respect to global warming, this contrast is becoming central to understanding where we are and where we may be headed. An understanding of the science and politics of global warming is becoming increasingly central to how we understand issues of social justice, or war and peace, and to how such concerns will play out in the coming decades. A brief look at the science may help illuminate this.

Last year, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued their fourth comprehensive review of climate science, saying for the first time that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” and that rises in global temperature can only be explained with reference to human-induced increases in carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases.” (Methane, nitrous oxide, and the banned but persistent CFCs used in air conditioners and refrigerators, are the other main culprits.) For the first time, the statistical confidence level of many of their calculations came in at better than 95 percent.2

The IPCC documented an unprecedented convergence of findings from hundreds of studies and tens of thousands of distinct data sets in numerous independent fields of inquiry. This feat of scientific data gathering and assessment may have been worthy of a Nobel science prize if the panel hadn’t already been awarded the coveted prize for peace, along with Al Gore. Never before have studies in so many fields converged on one disturbing conclusion: not only that the evidence for the role of human activity in altering the earth’s climate is “unequivocal,” but that the ecological and human consequences of those alterations are already being felt in literally thousands of different ways.

The IPCC’s report was actually three separate volumes published by distinct international working groups, plus a concluding “synthesis report,” all released over the course of 2007. Most media coverage, however, focused only on the first volume, where the assembled scientists described and evaluated a wide range of future greenhouse gas emission scenarios, their resulting concentration (in parts per million) of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and how many degrees of global warming would likely result from each possible scenario. Scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen – perhaps the most widely censored senior scientist of our time – have convincingly argued that the IPCC greatly underestimated likely sea level rises, along with several other factors that negatively affect human populations. His analyses over the past year have suggested some very alarming conclusions: that a sensible extrapolation from past climate data would suggest a sea level rise of as much as 80 feet if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels, and that we’ve already surpassed the minimum carbon dioxide level below which the Antarctic glaciers first began to form, some 35 million years ago.3 For Hansen, and many others, the question is literally whether or not our earth will continue to resemble the world in which human civilizations have developed; the only way to accomplish this is to leave most of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground. Meanwhile, policy analysts drone on about “acceptable” or “realistic” greenhouse gas levels that are another 30 – 50 percent higher, and even beyond.

What gets lost in all these long-term projections, however, are the ways that chaotic global warming is already affecting people around the world today. The IPCC wrote about this too, in their second report, specifically addressing the environmental and human consequences of climate change. But scientists and advocates alike would much rather debate parts per million of carbon dioxide than try to address the ways that people’s survival is already imperiled by the over-consumption of the affluent minority.

Most of the world’s poor people live in the tropics and subtropics. They are already living in a world of increasingly uncertain rainfall, persistent droughts, coastal flooding, loss of wetlands and fisheries, and increasingly scarce fresh water supplies. The IPCC predicts that severely increased flooding will most immediately affect residents of the major river deltas of Asia and Africa. On the other hand, the one sixth of the world’s population that depends on water from glacial runoff may see a brief increase in the size and volume of their freshwater lakes as glaciers melt, but eventually the loss of the glaciers will become a life-threatening reality for those people as well.4

The data points strongly toward a worldwide decrease in crop productivity if global temperatures rise more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit, although crop yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by half as soon as 2020. In Africa alone, between 75 million and 250 million people will be exposed to “increased water stress,” according to the IPCC. Agricultural lands in Latin America will be subject to desertification and increasing salt content.

Probably the grimmest tale is contained in the report’s chapter on health consequences of climate changes: “[I]ncreases in malnutrition and consequent disorders…; increased deaths, disease and injury due to heatwaves, floods, storms, fires and droughts; the increased burden of diarrheal disease; the increased frequency of cardio-respiratory diseases due to higher concentrations of ground-level ozone…; and, the altered spatial distribution of some infectious disease vectors,” including malaria. There is little doubt that those populations with “high exposure, high sensitivity and/or low adaptive capacity” will bear the greatest burdens; those who contribute the least to the problem of global warming will continue to face the severest consequences.5

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, released in 2005, offered a particularly graphic representation of where we are and where we are headed.6 One page of that report (p. 119 of the Synthesis Report on Ecosystems and Human Well Being) offers a pair of world maps, each with a bar graph superimposed on every continent. The upper map chronicles the number of major floods reported in each decade from 1950 to 2000; the lower map displays the number of major wildfires. Everywhere but in Oceania-which is now facing such a severe drought that some major grain growing regions of Australia are no longer able to grow crops-the graphs rise steeply as the decades advance. Over this period, global temperatures only rose about one degree Fahrenheit; only the most optimistic of the IPCC’s projected future scenarios limits further warming during this century to less than three additional degrees.

The biannual UN Human Development Report, issued in November of 2007, reported that one out of every 19 people in the so-called developing world was affected by a climate-related disaster between 2000 and 2004.7 The figure for people in the wealthiest (OECD) countries was one out of every 1500. Yet the funds available thus far to various UN efforts to help the poorest countries adapt to climate changes ($26 million) is less than one week’s worth of flood defense spending in the UK, and about what the city of Venice spends on its flood gates every 2 – 3 weeks. The report estimates that an additional $86 billion will be needed to sustain existing UN development assistance and poverty reduction programs in the face of all the various threats attributable to climate change.

From Bangladesh to Darfur, we are already seeing the ways in which increased climate instability is exacerbating conflict and even bloodshed among people. Droughts in East Africa have caused wells to dry up and livestock to perish, fueling interethnic conflicts among the region’s pastoral communities.8 And this is just the beginning. A report last November by the UK-based relief organization International Alert compared maps of the world’s most politically unstable regions with those most susceptible to serious or extreme effects of climate change, and concluded that 46 countries, with a total population of 2.7 billion people, are firmly in both categories. The report, titled “A Climate of Conflict,” states:

“Hardest hit by climate change will be people living in poverty, in under-developed and unstable states, 
    under poor governance. The effect of the physical consequences – such as more frequent extreme 
    weather, melting glaciers, and shorter growing seasons – will add to the pressures under which those 
    societies already live. The background of poverty and bad governance means many of these 
    communities both have a low capacity to adapt to climate change and face a high risk of violent 
    conflict.”9

International Alert’s report profiles eight case studies of places in Africa and Asia where climate changes have already put great stress on people’s livelihoods and often exacerbated internal conflicts. The outlook is significantly improved, however, in places where political institutions are relatively stable and accountable to the population. This contrast allows for a somewhat hopeful conclusion, with the authors extolling “the synergies between climate adaptation policies and peacebuilding activities in achieving the shared goal of sustainable development and peace.” One specific recommendation is to prioritize efforts to help people adapt to a changing climate, especially where subsistence-based economies already contribute very little to global warming but are highly vulnerable to the consequences. Various international NGOs have already intervened, particularly in Africa, to document and disseminate adjustments in farming practices that have proven most useful in facilitating adaptation to a changing climate.

Another study, published in the journal Political Geography by Rafael Reuveny of Indiana University, examined 38 cases over the past 70 years where populations were forced to migrate due to a combination of environmental (droughts, floods, storms, land degradation, pollution) and other factors.10 Half of these cases led to varying degrees of violent conflict between the migrating population and people in the receiving areas. It is clear, states Reuveny, that those who depend the most on the environment to sustain their livelihood, especially in regions where arable land and fresh water are scarce, are most likely to be forced to migrate when conditions are subjected to rapid and unplanned-for change.

Since the Persian Gulf war of the early 1990s, activists have become increasingly aware of the devastating environmental consequences of warfare, and also of “peacetime” military activities. Oil consumption by the US military, for example, approaches 14 million gallons a day, according to Michael Klare, more than all of Sweden or Switzerland.11 (A quarter of this consumption is in the Persian Gulf region.) The US military is responsible for thousands of toxic waste dumps, spread throughout the world. But today, we are in an escalating spiral of warfare and environmental devastation that threatens to spin entirely out of control if we are unable to achieve a different way of organizing the world’s affairs. The world’s militaries and elites are preparing themselves for the worst; those of us who seek peace and global justice need to come together as never before if those worst case scenarios are to be averted.

It is clear today that the past two centuries of capitalist development-and especially the unprecedented pace of resource consumption during the past 60 years-have created conditions that threaten everyone’s future. “There could be no clearer demonstration than climate,” says the UN’s Human Development Report, “that economic wealth creation is not the same as human progress.”12 Those who have benefited the least from the unsustainable pace of economic growth and expansion over the past five or six decades are facing a future of suffering and dislocation unlike the world has ever seen, unless we can rapidly reverse the patterns of exploitation that many in the global North have simply come to take for granted.

False solutions

Over the past year or two, we have been inundated with a plethora of seductive, but ultimately false solutions to the threat of catastrophic climate changes. First, we face a well-orchestrated political push, from the highest levels of the US government, for a revival of nuclear power. Not only do we still, after 50 years, have no clue what to do with monstrous quantities of highly radioactive nuclear waste, but if our societies do commit the massive capital resources needed to build a new generation of nuclear power plants-at least tripling the present number according to many estimates-there will be literally no funds left to develop truly green, solar-based alternatives, even in the long run.

Further, a significant expansion of nuclear power would expose countless more communities to the legacy of cancer that critical scientists such as Ernest Sternglass have documented, and additional indigenous communities to the even more severe consequences of uranium mining and milling. Indeed, we would soon run out of the relatively accessible uranium ore that now minimizes greenhouse gas emissions from the nuclear fuel production chain, and the energy needed to mine and purify more uranium would quickly become yet another large contributor to catastrophic global warming.13 For the first time since the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in central Pennsylvania, US utilities are considering the construction of new nuclear power plants, thanks to a new round of subsidies orchestrated by the Bush administration, and appended to the latest round of energy and climate bills considered by Congress. This expanded nuclear initiative clearly needs to be stopped.

Another false solution to global warming that we read a great deal about are so-called “biofuels.” (Activists in the global South use the more appropriate term, “agrofuels,” as these are first and foremost products of global agribusiness.14)  Running our cars on ethanol fermented from corn and diesel fuel made from soybeans and other food crops is already contributing to a worldwide food shortage that has caused starvation and food riots in Mexico, Egypt, Thailand, Haiti, and all around the world.15 The amount of corn needed to produce the ethanol for one SUV tank is enough to feed a hungry person for a year.16

Even if the entire US corn crop were to be used for fuel, it would only displace about 12 percent of current gasoline use, according to University of Minnesota researchers.17 The current push for agrofuels has consumed a growing share of US corn-at least 20 percent last year, and rising-and encouraged growers of crops such as wheat and soybeans to transfer acreage to growing corn. Land in the Amazon and other fragile regions is now being plowed under to grow soybeans for export, while Brazil’s uniquely biodiverse coastal grasslands are appropriated to grow sugarcane-a much more efficient source of ethanol.18 Further, two studies released earlier this year show that deforestation and other changes in land use that go along with agrofuel development clearly make these fuels net contributors to global warming.19

The increasingly fashionable “biodiesel” alternative can be equally problematic. In contrast to the waste oil from restaurants that is favored by hobbyists, commercial supplies of biodiesel usually come from GMO soybean or canola fields in the US Midwest, Canada, or the Amazon, or worse, from the vast monoculture oil palm plantations that have displaced more than 80 percent of the native rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia. As the global food crisis has escalated, agrofuel proponents have asserted that using food crops for fuel is only a temporary solution, and that soon we will run all of our cars on fuel extracted from grasses and trees; this dangerous myth is mainly underwriting a new wave of subsidies to the US biotechnology industry.

Third, and perhaps most insidiously, we are told that if the world is to make significant reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases, the only acceptable way to carry out these reductions is through the wonders of the so-called “free market.” When Al Gore (as Vice President) went to Kyoto in 1997, he offered that the US would sign on to what soon became the Kyoto Protocol under two conditions: that mandated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions be made far less ambitious, and that any such reductions be implemented through market-based trading of “rights to pollute” among companies and among countries. If one company, for example, failed to meet its quota for emission reductions, it could purchase the difference from another permit holder that reduced its emissions faster, theoretically inducing companies to implement the most cost-effective changes as soon as possible.

Of course, the US never adopted the Kyoto Protocol, but the rest of the world has had to live with the consequences of Gore’s proposals, creating what the British columnist George Monbiot has aptly termed “an exuberant market in fake emissions cuts.”20 The European Union has supported trading of carbon emissions permits for a few years now, and their “cap-and-trade” scheme has represented a huge new subsidy to highly polluting corporations, without any demonstrable reduction in their contributions to destabilizing the climate. Meanwhile, European governments are actively supplementing carbon trading with active public support for energy conservation and alternative energy technologies; only here in the US do such technologies (in marked contrast to nuclear power and agrofuels) first have to prove their viability in the so-called “free market.”

Carbon offsets are the other popular “market-based” solution. Frequently compared to the ways sinners used to buy indulgences from the Catholic church during the Middle Ages, the purchase of carbon offsets from projects in other parts of the world is even farther from a real solution. Larry Lohmann of the UK’s CornerHouse research group has demonstrated in detail how carbon offsets are encouraging the conversion of native forests into monoculture tree plantations, lengthening the lifespan of polluting industrial facilities and toxic landfills in Asia and Africa in exchange for incremental changes in their operations, and ultimately perpetuating the very inequalities that we need to eliminate in order to create a more just and sustainable world.21 Even if they can occasionally help support beneficial projects, offsets represent a gaping “hole” in any mandated “cap” in carbon dioxide emissions-a way for polluting industries to continue business as usual at home while contributing nominally to emission reductions elsewhere. This system will simply not bring us any closer to the zero-emissions future that many analysts have suggested is both necessary and achievable.

What kind of movement?

The last time a popular movement compelled significant changes in US environmental and energy policies was during the late 1970s. In the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo, imposed during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the nuclear and utility industries adopted a plan to construct more than 300 nuclear power plants in the United States by the year 2000. Utility and state officials identified rural communities across the US as potential sites for  new nuclear facilities, and the popular response was swift and unanticipated. A militant grassroots antinuclear movement united back-to-the-landers and traditional rural dwellers with seasoned urban activists and a new generation of environmentalists who only partially experienced the ferment of the 1960s.

In April of 1977, over 1400 people were arrested trying to nonviolently occupy a nuclear construction site in the coastal town of Seabrook, New Hampshire.22 This event helped inspire the emergence of decentralized, grassroots antinuclear alliances all across the country, committed to nonviolent direct action, bottom-up forms of internal organization, and a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between technological and social changes. Not only did these groups adopt an uncompromising call for “No Nukes,” but many promoted a vision of an entirely new social order, rooted in decentralized, solar-powered communities empowered to decide their energy future and also their political future. If the nuclear state almost inevitably leads to a police state-due to the massive security apparatus necessary to protect hundreds of nuclear plants and radioactive waste dumps all over the country-a solar-based energy system could be the underpinning for a radically decentralized and directly democratic model for society.

This movement was so successful in raising the hazards of nuclear power as a matter of urgent public concern that nuclear construction projects all over the US began to be cancelled. When the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania partially melted down in March of 1979, it spelled the end of the nuclear expansion. While the Bush administration today is doing everything possible to underwrite a revival of nuclear power, it is still the case that no new nuclear plants have been licensed or built in the United States since Three Mile Island. The antinuclear movement of the late 1970s also spawned the first wave of significant development of solar and wind technologies, aided by substantial federal tax benefits for solar installations, and helped launch a visionary “green cities” movement that captured the imaginations of architects, planners and ordinary citizens.

The 1970s and early ’80s (before the “Reagan revolution” fully took hold) were relatively hopeful times, and utopian thinking was far more widespread than it is today. Some antinuclear activists looked to the emerging outlook of social ecology-developed by Murray Bookchin and others-as a new theoretical grounding for a revolutionary ecological politics and philosophy. Social ecology challenges prevailing views about the evolution of social and cultural relationships to non-human nature, and explores the roots of domination in the earliest emergence of human social hierarchies.23 For the activists of the period, Bookchin’s insistence that environmental problems are mainly social and political problems encouraged radical responses to ecological concerns, as well as reconstructive visions of a fundamentally transformed society. Similarly, social ecology’s emphasis on popular power and direct democracy helped inspire many antiglobalization activists during the late 1990s.

Radically reconstructive social visions are relatively scarce in today’s political climate, dominated as it is by endless war and rapidly rising inequality. But dissatisfaction with the status quo reaches both widely and deeply among many sectors of the US population. While elite discourse and the corporate media continue to push political debates rightward and politicians of both major parties glibly comply, poll after poll suggests the potential for a new opening, reaching far beyond the confines of what has become politically acceptable. The more people consume, and the deeper into debt they fall, the less satisfied most people seem to be with the world of business-as-usual.

Toward a movement for Climate Justice

As with so many other pressing issues of our time, the impetus for a movement that can reach beyond the status quo and meaningfully confront the full consequences of global climate chaos is coming to us mainly from other parts of the world. A global Climate Justice movement is taking shape, uniting indigenous opponents of biofuel plantations, international carbon trading skeptics, long-time antinuclear and global justice activists, and many others. One of the first signs of this movement’s emergence as a new global reality occurred in an unlikely place: Bali, Indonesia during last winter’s official Conference of the Parties to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change.

With the US government continuing to stonewall in international climate negotiations, and most other rich countries now seeking to perpetuate market-centered approaches that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, the atmosphere at this latest meeting was more polarized than ever. Questions of justice and equity, ignored in these meetings at least since the Kyoto Protocol was finalized a decade ago, were raised both inside and outside the official proceedings, and those who are chronically excluded struggled to make their voices heard. They opposed the appropriation of native forests in the global South to further the North’s carbon offset schemes, and spoke out against the World Bank’s expanding influence over how international funds for climate mitigation and adaptation are to be allocated.

Anne Petermann, of the Global Justice Ecology Project, who was on the scene in Bali, described “a very vocal and militant demonstration during the World Bank’s launch of the Forest Carbon Partnership [sic] Facility. Demonstrators staged a die-in with individuals representing different peoples, ecosystems and island nations that are threatened with extinction due to the official focus on market-based false solutions to climate change. The chants of hundreds of protestors included ‘World Bank: Hands Off,’ and could easily be heard inside the official proceedings… Thousands marked through the streets in a highly diverse assemblage of activists and movements united in the call for immediate and effective action on climate change.”24

An indigenous people’s declaration, issued early on in the proceedings, not only called for “full and meaningful participation” of indigenous representatives, but demanded that those assembled “recognize and take action to curb the adverse impacts of climate change on indigenous peoples; and to refrain from adaptation and mitigation schemes and projects promoted as solutions to climate change that devastate Indigenous People’s lands and territories and cause more human rights violations, like market based mechanisms, carbon trading, agrofuels and avoided deforestation.”25 The latter term is UN-speak for the persistent effort to use carbon offsets as the primary means to combat deforestation, while leaving forest dwelling peoples largely out of the picture.

In January and February, several representatives of the international Durban Group on Climate Justice26-formed in 2004 to resist the rising hegemony of carbon trading and offset schemes-toured the US and inspired a new convergence of global justice activists, opponents of coal industry expansion, long time antinuclear and environmental justice advocates and others. Strategy meetings on both coasts began to explore how a homegrown Climate Justice movement might begin to take shape. A declaration initiated by California environmental justice advocates, and signed by more than 25 in-state groups and others across the country and around the world, affirmed their opposition to carbon trading as a false solution to global warming, highlighted the ways in which Asian, African American, Latino and Native American communities bear the heaviest impacts of the fossil fuel economy, and further pledged that the California Environmental Justice Movement will support conservation, regulatory, and other
    measures to address greenhouse gases only if they directly and significantly reduce emissions, require 
    the shift away from use of fossil fuels and nuclear power, and do not cause or exacerbate the pollution 
    burden of poor communities of color in the United States and developing nations around the world…27

This past April, the decentralized activist collective Rising Tide North America organized a day of demonstrations and direct actions focused on the ever-expanding fossil fuel industry, and they are busily organizing a series of week-long climate convergences across the US this summer.28

A new movement is emerging, but clearly has a way to go before it can meaningfully counter the dual obstacles of global warming denial on one hand, and nominally well-meaning but counterproductive policy measures on the other. Several elements clearly need to come together in order for a genuine popular movement for Climate Justice to take shape. Such an agenda would likely have at least four central elements:

1.  Highlight the social justice implications of global climate disruptions. Global warming is not just a scientific issue, and it’s not mainly about measuring parts per million of carbon dioxide or saving polar bears. As the UN’s Human Development Report described so eloquently, global warming is a social justice issue, and people in the global South are already facing severe consequences from increased droughts, wildfires and major floods. Bringing home these implications can go a long way toward humanizing the problem and raise the urgency of global action.

2.  Dramatize the links between US climate and energy policies and US military adventures, particularly the war in Iraq, which is without question the most grotesquely energy-wasting activity on the planet today. Last October, people gathered under the banner of “No War, No Warming” blocked the entrances to a Congressional office building in Washington, demanding an end to the war and real steps to prevent more catastrophic climate changes. Similar actions across the country could go a long way toward raising the pressure on politicians who say the right things about global warming and blithely vote for business as usual.

3.  Expose the numerous false solutions to global warming promoted by the world’s elites, particularly the subsidized expansion of nuclear power and agrofuels. Carbon trading and offsets are promoted in Washington as the only politically expedient way to reduce emissions, but we know they are structurally incapable of doing so. We need mandated emissions reductions, a tax on industrial scale carbon dioxide production, requirements to reorient utility and transportation policies, public funds for solar and wind energy, and large reductions in energy consumption, especially in the industrialized world. Buying more “green” products won’t do; we need to consume less!

4.  Envision a new, lower-consumption world of decentralized, clean energy and politically empowered communities. Like the antinuclear activists of 30 years ago, who halted the first wave of nuclear power in the US, while articulating an inspiring vision of directly democratic, solar-powered communities, we again need to dramatize the positive, even utopian, possibilities for a post-petroleum, post-mega-mall world. The technologies already exist for a locally-controlled, solar-based alternative, at the same time that dissatisfaction with today’s high consumption, high debt “American way of life” appears to be at an all time high. Small experiments in living more locally, while improving the quality of life, are thriving everywhere. So are experiments in community-controlled renewable energy production.

There is no shortage of feasible technological solutions to excessive energy consumption and the need to rapidly curtail the use of fossil fuels. Thirty years ago, energy analyst Amory Lovins began to demonstrate the feasibility of dramatically increased energy efficiency. His work over the past three decades has demonstrated in exhaustive detail how we can reduce energy consumption by 60 – 80 percent, and that many of the necessary measures would result in an unambiguous economic gain.29 New, innovative technologies for saving energy and replacing fossil fuels are announced almost daily.

Today, more than ever, the obstacles are entirely social and political. Corporations generally will not invest in measures to save energy and make their operations more efficient unless they can demonstrate a two year payback-a constraint that is not imposed on any other type of investment.30 Further, we now have the most inequitable distribution of wealth since the period just before the Great Depression of the 1930s; the occupation of Iraq has cost the US and its allies over $3 trillion over the past five years, according to Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Public funds are squandered on projects and tax measures that benefit the few at the expense of the many, while our society’s contribution to climate catastrophe continues to mount.

Global warming can represent a future of deprivation and scarcity for all but the world’s wealthiest, or this global emergency can compel us to imagine a radically transformed society-both in the North and the South-where communities of people are newly empowered to remake their own future. The crisis can drive us to break free from a predatory global economy that fabulously enriches the top tenth of one percent, while leaving the rest of us scrambling after the crumbs. The reality is too urgent, and the outlook far too bleak, to settle for status-quo false solutions that only appear to be addressing the urgency of global climate disruption.

We can embrace the reconstructive potential of a radically ecological social and political vision, prevent catastrophe, and begin to make our way toward a fundamentally different kind of future. In practical terms, real solutions to global warming, as Van Jones of San Francisco’s Ella Baker Center, points out, are far more likely to benefit our inner cities and put millions of people to work installing decentralized, energy-saving technologies. In the longer term, Al Gore is correct when he emphasizes that political will is the main obstacle to addressing global warming, but we also need to be able to look beyond the status-quo and be willing to struggle for a radically different kind of world.

Brian Tokar is a long-time activist and author, and the current Director of the Institute for Social Ecology, based in Plainfield, Vermont.  He is the author of The Green Alternative and Earth for Sale, edited two books on the politics of biotechnology, Redesigning Life? and Gene Traders,  and lectures widely on a variety of environmental and political topics.

Notes:

1 The emerging conflict between technocratic environmentalism and social ecology was first explored by social ecologist Murray Bookchin in the 1970s; several of his essays from that period are compiled in his Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980, now available from AK Press).

2 The various IPCC reports, and condensed summaries aimed toward policymakers, can be downloaded from http://www.ipcc.ch.

3 Reported in James Hansen, et al., “Climate change and trace gases,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Part A, Vol. 365, pp. 1925-1954 (2007), and James Hansen, et al., “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” (unpublished manuscript), available from http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf.

4 The IPCC’s conclusions in this and subsequent paragraphs are from their Working Group II Report, titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” and available from http://www.ipcc.ch.

5 IPCC Working Group II Report, p. 393.

6 World Resources Institute, Synthesis: Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, A Report of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005.

7 Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World, United Nations Development Program, 2007, p. 16.

8 See, for example, Ernest Waititu “Drought Spurs Resource Wars,” Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, reprinted in The Indypendent (NYC), No. 119, April 25, 2008.

9 Dan Smith and Janani Vivekananda, A Climate of Conflict: The links between climate change, peace and war, London: International Alert, November 2007, p. 3.

10 Rafael Reuveny, “Climate change-induced migration and violent conflict, Political Geography Vol. 26, pp. 656-673, 2007.

11 Michael T. Klare,  “The Pentagon vs. Peak Oil: How Wars of the Future May Be Fought Just to Run the Machines That Fight Them,” at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174810.

12 Human Development Report, op. cit., p. 27.

13 See, for example, Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, Nuclear Power: The Energy Balance, available from http://www.stormsmith.nl.

14 See, for example, the Agrofuels Special Issue of Seedling, published in Barcelona by the international research group GRAIN, July 2007, available from grain.org.

15 It is estimated that up to 30% of current food price increases are attributable to the diversion of food grains toward agrofuel production. See, for example, Eric Holt-Giménez and Isabella Kenfield, “When Renewable Isn’t Sustainable: Agrofuels and the Inconvenient Truths Behind the 2007 U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act,” Oakland, CA: Food First, 2008.

16 Lester R. Brown, “Supermarkets and Service Stations  Now Competing for Grain,” Earth Policy Institute Update, July  13, 2006, at http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update55.htm.

17 Jason Hill, et al., “Environmental, economic, and energetic costs and benefits of biodiesel and ethanol biofuels,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 103  no. 30, pp. 11206 -11210, July 25, 2006.

18 For an early overview, see Biofuels: Renewable Energy or Environmental Disaster in the Making? London: Biofuelwatch, 2006, at www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/biofuel_paper.pdf.

19 In some instances, especially under tropical conditions, it can take centuries of agrofuel production to compensate for the carbon dioxide emissions that result from converting forests and grasslands to agrofuel production. See Joseph Fargione, et al., “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt,” Science Vol. 319, pp. 1235-1238 February 29, 2008, and Timothy Searchinger, et al., “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change,” Science Vol. 319, pp. 1238-1240, February 29, 2008, both available online from www.scienceexpress.org.

20 In George Monbiot’s column, “We’ve been suckered again by the US. So far the Bali deal is worse than Kyoto,” The Guardian, December 17, 2007.

21 Larry Lohmann, Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatization and Power, Uppsala, Sweden: Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, 2006, available from http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=544225.

22 For analysis of the landmark 1977 Seabrook demonstration, written mainly by participants, see The Clamshell Alliance at 20, a special issue of Peacework (No. 265, July/August 1996), published in Cambridge, MA by the American Friends Service Committee, and available from http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/pwork/clam1996/default2.htm.

23 For an overview of social ecology see Brian Tokar, “On Bookchin’s Social Ecology and its Contributions to Social Movements,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Volume 19, No. 2, March 2008. Perhaps the most comprehensive statement of the outlook of social ecology is Murray Bookchin’s classic The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), currently available from AK Press in San Francisco.

24 Anne Petermann, “Climate Change Negotiations,” Z Magazine, February 2008, p. 35.

25 “Opening Statement – The International Forum of Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change,” from From Alter-ECO #1, December 4, 2007 at http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?act_id=17652.

26 The 2004 Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading is available at http://www.carbontradewatch.org/durban/durbandec.html.

27 The full statement, with a list of signers, is available at http://www.ejmatters.org/declaration.html.

28 See www.risingtidenorthamerica.org.

29 See, for example, Amory Lovins, et al., Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and Security, Snowmass, CO: Rocky Mountain Institute, 2005, available from www.oilendgame.com. Lovins’ pitch is unapologetically aimed at those whose primary concern is market profitability; the absence of a broader political outlook has led to a conspicuous myopia about why his proposals are not more widely adopted.

30 Matthew L. Wald, “Efficiency, Not Just Alternatives, Is Promoted as an Energy Saver,” New York Times, May 29, 2007

Murray Bookchin was a leading theoretical progenitor of the many currents of left ecological thought and action that emerged from the 1960s, and his voluminous and many-faceted work has continued to influence theorists and activists to this day. Marcel van der Linden of the International Institute of Social History, based in the Netherlands, has described Bookchin’s collection of sixties-era essays, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, as “definitely… one of the most influential works on the international generation of 1968.”1 His magnum opus, The Ecology of Freedom, was placed by the Village Voice “at the pinnacle of the genre of utopian social criticism.”2 Numerous concepts that became common wisdom among ecological and left libertarian activists in the sixties and beyond were first articulated clearly in Bookchin’s writings, including the socially reconstructive dimension of ecological science, the potential links between sustainable technologies and political decentralization, and the evolution of class consciousness toward a broader critique of social hierarchy.

Bookchin authored more than 20 books and countless articles and pamphlets, seeking to offer a coherent theoretical underpinning to the work of a generation of ecological and anti-authoritarian activists.3 Bookchin also revived and updated the tradition of social anarchism, which had fallen rather dormant by the early 1960s, but later renounced his tie to anarchism and sought to articulate a new libertarian socialist synthesis, which he termed “communalism.”4 Nonetheless, his sweeping condemnations of Marxism from the late sixties through the eighties drew the antipathy of many traditional leftists. As independent Marxists grew toward a more environmentally sensitive outlook in the 1970s and eighties, prominent figures often overlooked Bookchin’s contributions, even as they appropriated many of his ideas and elements of his language.

This paper represents the contribution of someone who met Murray Bookchin in the mid-1970s, came to Vermont to work and study with him in 1980, and participated in many of the movements and projects that were influenced by social ecology. I have been involved in the many activities of the Institute for Social Ecology since the 1980s and have been a core faculty member since the early nineties. Through periods of close collaboration, and also when we vehemently disagreed, Bookchin’s ideas profoundly influenced my own writing and political praxis. This work is offered in a spirit of heartfelt appreciation and lasting gratitude.

Social Ecology

Murray Bookchin was raised in a leftist family in New York City during the 1920s and thirties, and often told of his expulsion from the Young Communist League at age eighteen for openly criticizing Stalin. He briefly identified with Trotskyism while working and organizing in the auto foundries around Mahwah, New Jersey in the 1940s, and was associated with a group of like-minded former Trotskyists around the journal Contemporary Issues from the late forties through most of the fifties. The Contemporary Issues group was critical of the increasing political accommodation and corruption of organized labor, and moved toward a politics centered in the substantive democratic renewal of communities.5 Bookchin’s first published article, “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” appeared in Contemporary Issues in 1952. During this same period, Bookchin also encountered a group of anarchist veterans of an earlier generation of labor struggles, affiliated with the Workmen’s Circle and Libertarian Book Club in New York. His subsequent identification with the social anarchist tradition was sustained until the final decade of his life.

Bookchin’s theory of social ecology emerged from a time in the mid-1960s when ecological thought, and even ecological science, were widely viewed as “subversive.” Even relatively conventional environmental scientists were contemplating the broad political implications of an ecological world view, confronting academic censorship, and raising challenging questions about the widely accepted capitalist dogma of perpetual economic growth. In a landmark 1964 issue of the journal Bioscience, the ecologist Paul Sears challenged the “pathological” nature of economic growth and inquired whether ecology, “if taken seriously as an instrument for the long run welfare of mankind [sic], would . . . endanger the assumptions and practices accepted by modern societies . . .”6

Bookchin carried the discussion considerably further, proposing that ecological thought is not merely “subversive,” but fundamentally revolutionary and reconstructive. With the world wars and Great Depression of the 20th century appearing to have only strengthened global capitalism, Bookchin saw the emerging ecological crisis as one challenge that would fundamentally undermine the system’s inherent logic. His first book, Our Synthetic Environment, was issued (under the pseudonym, Lewis Herber) by a major New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and cited by authorities such as the microbiologist Réne Dubos as comparable in its influence to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.7 Our Synthetic Environment offered a detailed and accessible analysis of the origins of pollution, urban concentration, and chemical agriculture.

In 1964, in an article titled “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” Bookchin stated:

The explosive implications of an ecological approach arise not only because ecology is intrinsically a 
    critical science-critical on a scale that the most radical systems of political economy have failed to 
    attain-but also because it is an integrative and reconstructive science. This integrative, reconstructive 
    aspect of ecology, carried through to all its implications, leads directly into anarchic areas of social 
    thought. For, in the final analysis, it is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature without 
    creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment.8

Over the next four decades, Bookchin’s social ecology emerged as a unique synthesis of utopian social criticism, historical and anthropological investigation, dialectical philosophy, and political strategy. It can be viewed as an unfolding of several distinct layers of understanding and insight, spanning all of these dimensions, and more.

At its most outward level, social ecology confronts the social and political roots of contemporary ecological problems. It critiques the ways of conventional environmental politics and points activists toward radical, community-centered alternatives. Bookchin always insisted that ecological issues be understood primarily as social issues and was impatient with the narrowly instrumental approaches advanced by conventional environmentalists to address particular problems. The holistic outlook of ecological science, he argued, demands a social ecology that examines the systemic roots of our ecological crisis, while challenging the institutions responsible for perpetuating the status quo.

This critical outlook led to many years of research into the evolution of the relationship between human societies and non-human nature. Both liberals and Marxists have generally viewed the “domination of nature” as a fulfillment of human destiny and human nature-or more recently as an unfortunate but necessary corollary to the advancement of civilization. Bookchin sought to turn this view on its head, describing the “domination of nature” as a myth perpetuated by social elites in some of the earliest hierarchical societies. Far from a historical necessity, efforts to dominate the natural world are a destructive byproduct of social hierarchies.

In The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin examined the anthropological literature of the 1970s and 1980s, seeking principles and practices that emerge from our understanding of non-hierarchical “organic” societies. These core principles included interdependence, usufruct, unity-in-diversity, complementarity, and the irreducible minimum: the principle that communities are responsible for meeting their members’ most basic needs.9 Complementarity for Bookchin meant disavowing the oppressive inequality of supposed “equals” within contemporary societies, instead invoking traditional communities’ ability to compensate for differences in ability among members. Technology has never been an end in itself, nor an autonomous principle of human evolution, but rather a reflection of an evolving “social matrix.”10 Bookchin’s historical and anthropological investigations affirmed his belief that any truly liberatory popular movement must challenge hierarchy in general, not just its particular manifestations as oppression by race, gender or class.

His explorations of the persistent role of social hierarchies in shaping social evolution and our relationships with non-human nature led Bookchin further toward a philosophical inquiry into the evolutionary relationship between human consciousness and natural evolution. He sought to renew the legacy of dialectical philosophy, abandoning popular oversimplifications and reinterpreting dialectics from its origins in the works of philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel. Bookchin’s dialectical naturalism emphasizes the potentialities that lie latent within the evolution of natural and social phenomena, and celebrates the uniqueness of human creativity, while emphasizing its emergence from the possibilities inherent in “first nature.” It eschews the common view of nature as merely a realm of necessity, instead viewing nature as striving to actualize its underlying potentiality for consciousness, creativity and freedom.11

For Bookchin, a dialectical outlook on human history compels us to reject what merely is and follow the logic of evolution toward an expanded view (challenging Hume and others) of what could be, and ultimately what ought to be. While the realization of a free, ecological society is far from inevitable-Bookchin was not the teleologist his critics sometimes caricatured him as-it is the most rational outcome of four billion years of natural evolution. This dialectical view of natural and social evolution led to the controversial claim that nature itself can be viewed as an objective ground for a social ethics.

While continuing to develop and clarify his philosophy of nature, Bookchin also developed a distinct approach to political praxis, one aimed at realizing the ecological reconstruction of society. Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism draws on what he viewed as a fundamental underlying conflict between communities and the state as well as on historical examples of emerging direct democracies from the Athenian polis to the New England town meeting. Bookchin sought a redefinition of citizenship and a reinvigoration of the public sphere, with citizen assemblies moving to the center of public life in towns and neighborhoods and taking control of essential political and economic decisions. Representatives in city councils and regional assemblies would become mandated delegates, deputized by their local assemblies and empowered only to carry out the wishes of the people.

Confederation is also a central aspect of libertarian municipalism, with communities joining together to sustain counterinstitutions aimed at undermining the state and advancing a broad liberatory agenda. Unlike many ecologists writing about politics, Bookchin embraced the historical role of cities as potential sites of freedom and universalism and viewed the practice of citizenship in empowered neighborhood assemblies as a means for educating community members into the values of humanism, cooperation, and public service.12 The stifling anonymity of the capitalist market is to be replaced by a moral economy in which economic, as well as political relationships, would be guided by an ethics of mutualism and genuine reciprocity.13

Libertarian municipalism offers both an outline of a political strategy and the structure underlying social ecology’s long-range reconstructive vision: a vision of directly democratic communities challenging state power while evolving in harmony with all of nature. This vision draws on decades of research into political structures, sustainable technologies, revolutionary popular movements, and the best of the utopian tradition in Western thought. Bookchin spent his last decade or so intensively researching the history of revolutionary movements in the West from the Middle Ages to the middle of the 20th century, drawing out the lessons of the diverse, often subterranean, popular currents that formed the basis for revolutionary movements in England, France, the U.S., Russia, Spain, and beyond.14

Social Ecology and Social Movements

The influence of this body of ideas upon popular ecological movements began with the underground distribution of Bookchin’s essays during the 1960s. Ideas he first articulated, such as the need for a fundamentally radical ecology in contrast to technocratic environmentalism, were embraced by the growing ranks of ecologically-informed radicals. Bookchin and his colleagues, including Institute for Social Ecology co-founder Daniel Chodorkoff, also participated in some of the earliest efforts to plan for the “greening” of cities and bring alternative, solar-based technologies into inner city neighborhoods.

By the late 1970s, social ecology was playing a much more visible role in the rapidly growing movement against nuclear power. Utility and state officials were identifying rural communities across the U.S. as potential sites for new nuclear power plants, and the movement that arose to counter this new colonization of the countryside united rural back-to-the-landers, seasoned urban activists, and a new generation of radicals who only partially experienced the ferment of the 1960s. Following the mass arrest of over 1400 people who sought to nonviolently occupy a nuclear construction site in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977, decentralized anti-nuclear alliances began to appear all across the U.S. These alliances were committed to nonviolent direct action, bottom-up forms of internal organization, and a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between technological and social changes. They were captivated by the utopian dimension of the emerging “appropriate technology” movement for which Bookchin and other social ecologists provided an essential theoretical and historical grounding. Over a hundred students came to the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) in Vermont every summer to acquire hands-on experience in organic gardening and alternative technology while studying social ecology, ecofeminism, reconstructive anthropology, and other political and theoretical topics.

New England’s anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance was the first to adopt the model of the affinity group as the basis of a long-range regional organizing effort.15 Murray Bookchin introduced the concept of grupos de afinidad-borrowed from the Spanish FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation)-into the U.S. in an appendix to his influential 1968 pamphlet, “Listen, Marxist!”16 Bookchin initially compared the revolutionary Spanish affinity groups to the countercultural collectives that were appearing in cities across the U.S. during the late 1960s. Quaker activists initially advocated the formation of affinity groups as a structure for personal support and security at large demonstrations at Seabrook. But after the mass arrests and two weeks of incarceration in New Hampshire’s National Guard Armories, participants began to view the affinity groups as the basis for a much more widely participatory, directly democratic form of social movement organization than had ever been realized before.

Bookchin’s original “Note on Affinity Groups” was distributed widely in the lead-up to the planned follow-up action at Seabrook in June of 1978, and activists in Vermont, Boston, and elsewhere in New England worked hard to make the Clamshell Alliance live up to the most profoundly democratic potential of this organizational model. Anti-nuclear alliances across the U.S. followed the Clamshell in taking their names from local species of animals and plants that were endangered by the spread of nuclear power and adopted affinity groups and spokescouncils as their fundamental organizational and decision-making structures.17

The euphoria of affinity group-based internal democracy was to be short-lived in the Clamshell, however. Protracted debates over the appropriateness of various tactics within a framework of organized nonviolence led to a growing polarization within the organization. When most of the original founders of the Clamshell Alliance acceded to a deal with New Hampshire’s Attorney General that led to the cancellation of the 1978 Seabrook occupation in favor of a large legal rally, activists at the ISE, in Boston, and elsewhere helped expose the anti-democratic nature of that decision and pressed for a renewal of affinity group democracy. The Boston area chapter was completely reorganized around affinity groups and neighborhood-based organizing collectives, and a new organization, the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook, picked up where the Clamshell left off. Bookchin’s writing of this period helped sustain the anti-nuclear movement’s powerful utopian impulses and encouraged the grassroots resistance to the betrayals of the movement’s self-appointed “leaders.”18

These events largely bypassed the often retrograde Marxist Left of the 1970s. Marxists of the period had little use for a resolutely anti-authoritarian ecological movement; many remained wedded to the increasingly farcical myth of advanced “socialist” nuclear power in the U.S.S.R. Bookchin redoubled his critique of Marxism, which he had launched with the colorful polemic, “Listen Marxist!,” issued on the eve of the Progressive Labor Party’s 1968 takeover of SDS. In a series of in-depth theoretical articles originally published in the journal Telos, Bookchin advanced the view that Marxism was incompatible with a distinctly ecological approach to politics and social ethics.19

In his late seventies writings, Bookchin characterized Marxism as “the most sophisticated ideology of advanced capitalism,” incapable of addressing the full extent of social domination, and fatally wedded to archaic myths of technological progress and economic determinism. “The entire theory is captive to its own reduction of ethics to law, subjectivity to objectivity, freedom to necessity,” Bookchin wrote.20 Even the Frankfurt School, which Bookchin read exhaustively, did not sufficiently question the roots of domination and the “historical necessity” of capitalist development. Later in his life, however, in response to the rising popularity of New Age mysticism and anti-organizational “lifestyle anarchism,” Bookchin reassessed his theoretical indebtedness to the Marxist tradition and became increasingly impatient with contemporary trends in anarchism.

Green Politics and Beyond

By the early 1980s, Bookchin and other social ecologists began to closely follow the emergence of a new Green political movement in West Germany and other European countries. Social ecologists became excited about this new “anti-party party” that initially functioned more as an alliance of grassroots “citizen initiatives” than a conventional parliamentary vehicle. In the early 1980s, European Greens were running for office as delegates from various social movements, decisions were made primarily at the local level, and those elected to public offices or internal positions of responsibility were obliged to rotate their positions every two years. Greens in Germany and other countries were articulating a sweeping ecological critique in all areas of public policy, from urban design, energy use and transportation, to nuclear disarmament and support for emerging democratic movements in Eastern Europe. Translations of Bookchin’s writings played an influential role in the development of this new Green political agenda.

Staff members of the ISE played a central role in organizing the first gathering (in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1984) aimed at constituting a Green political formation in the U.S. One significant bloc of participants at that meeting were pushing for a national organization through which self-appointed representatives of various issue-oriented constituencies would form a national organization, relate to other NGOs on the national level, and perhaps create a national Green Party within the year. The model that prevailed, however, was that of a more decentralized, grassroots-based movement, rooted in Green locals empowering regional delegates to make confederal decisions following locally debated mandates. Social ecologists in New England had already begun to form a confederation of Green locals on that model, and the idea once again spread across the country. By the first national conference of the U.S. Greens, in Amherst, Massachusetts in July of 1987, there were already over a hundred grassroots Green locals spread across the country. Ideas from social ecology and activists based at the ISE played key roles in the development of the first national Green Program between 1988 and 1990.21

The early 1990s saw a growing tension between Greens committed to grassroots democracy and a municipalist politics, and those advocating for a U.S. Green Party that would field candidates for national office. Bookchin and other social ecologists in New England circulated a call for a Left Green Network in 1988, and similarly-minded activists in the San Francisco Bay Area developed a Radical Green caucus. As Greens across the U.S. collaborated on the development of a national program, policy positions advocated by the Left Greens were adopted by three consecutive national gatherings, much to the chagrin of those promoting a more mainstream agenda.22 Ironically, many Left Greens and other grassroots activists began losing interest in the Greens at this point. Green moderates went on to form a separate national organization, based exclusively on state-certified Green Parties, while the Left Green Network continued holding educational conferences and publishing educational materials largely independent of any other Green entity.

During the same period, a group of recent ISE students formed a youth caucus in the Greens, which eventually became an independent organization known as the Youth Greens. The Youth Greens attracted a significant base of young radicals largely from outside the Greens and joined with the Left Greens to initiate a major direct action to coincide with the April 1990 twentieth anniversary of the original Earth Day. On the day following the official commemorations-a Sunday filled with polite, heavily corporate-sponsored events-several hundred Left Greens, Youth Greens, ecofeminists, environmental justice activists, Earth First!ers and urban squatters converged on Wall Street seeking to obstruct the opening of stock trading on that day. Activists based around the ISE in Vermont had prepared a comprehensive action handbook, featuring a variety of social ecology writings and helped create a broad, empowering coalition effort. The next day, columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote in the New York Daily News,

Certainly, those who sought to co-opt Earth Day into a media and marketing extravaganza, to make the 
    public feel good while obscuring the corporate root of the Earth’s pollution almost succeeded. It took 
    angry Americans from places like Maine and Vermont to come to Wall Street on a workday and point 
    the blame where it belongs.23

Meanwhile, in Burlington, Vermont, Bookchin and other social ecologists formed the Burlington Greens to develop positions on urban issues and run candidates for local office. The Greens opposed the commercial development of the city’s Lake Champlain waterfront and argued that the neighborhood assemblies established by the Progressive city administration for planning and administrative purposes should become the basis for a more empowered model of democratic neighborhood governance. The Burlington Greens gained national headlines in 1989 when the Greens contested several City Council seats and a Green candidate challenged the city’s Progressive mayor in a citywide election.

During the 1980s and nineties, social ecologists also played a central role in the development and elaboration of ecofeminist ideas. Ynestra King’s ecofeminism classes at the ISE during the late 1970s were probably the first to be offered anywhere, and annual ecofeminist colloquia were organized by Chaia Heller and other social ecologists during the early 1990s. Ecofeminist activists played a central role in initiating two Women’s Pentagon Actions and a women’s peace camp alongside the Seneca Army Depot in New York State; however ecofeminism evolved through the 1990s as a predominantly cultural and spiritual movement that social ecologists became increasingly wary and critical of.24 Self-identified ecofeminists with a rather eclectic mix of political outlooks also played a central role in the evolution of Green politics in the U.S.25

In the later 1990s, activists connected to the Institute for Social Ecology played a central role in the rapidly growing movement to promote global justice and challenge the institutions of capitalist globalism. Social ecologists raised discussions around the broad potential for direct democracy as a counter-power to centralized economic and political institutions and helped further the evolution toward a longer-range reconstructive vision within the movement that came of age on the streets of Seattle. A few ISE students were centrally involved in the organizing for the WTO shutdown in Seattle, and several others formed an affinity group to participate in and document the actions. After Seattle, the ISE booklet Bringing Democracy Home highlighted the writings of various social ecologists on potential future directions for the movement. Global justice activists from across the U.S. attended programs at the ISE in Vermont during the early years of this decade to further their political analysis and join Bookchin and other faculty members in wide-ranging discussions of where the movement might be heading.

The rising popularity of anarchist ideas and anti-authoritarian organizational forms in the aftermath of Seattle was not sufficient, however, to assuage Bookchin’s rising concern about the limits of anarchist theory. The popular anarchist press had not taken kindly to Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, especially his advocacy of municipal electoral engagement and revolutionary counterinstitutions. Anarchist writing and youth culture in the 1990s was increasingly centered in New Age spirituality, punk-inspired disdain for organization, and “green anarchist” fantasies of an impending “end of civilization.”26 In response, Bookchin rose in defense of such unpopular notions as reason, civilization, historical continuity, and the philosophical legacy of the European Enlightenment. Facing an increasingly hostile audience in the anarchist-inspired youth scene, Bookchin cast aside his once-ringing defenses of the libertarian communist tradition of Kropotkin and the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists. Encouraged by international colleagues, particularly in the Scandinavian countries, he articulated a new framework, which he called “communalism,” and redoubled his focus on the need for sustained political engagement and revolutionary organization.27

Bookchin in his later years was also more forthcoming about his theoretical debt to Marxism, describing it as “the most comprehensive and coherent effort to produce a systematic form of socialism.”28 Marxism, however, remained imbedded in the world view of early industrial capitalism, much as classical anarchism could be seen as a product of an even earlier “peasant and craft world.” The anarchist tradition, according to the later Bookchin, was fatally rooted “in a strong commitment to personal liberty rather than to social freedom” [emphasis in original], and hence stagnated within an essentially liberal ideological framework. Communalism, he argued, required a “new and comprehensive revolutionary outlook” drawing on the best of Marxism and the libertarian socialist tradition and rooted in an expansive view of a confederal, municipally-centered democracy developing non-statist counterinstitutions capable of contesting political power on a broadly revolutionary scale. Speaking of his new communalist synthesis, Bookchin wrote:

From Marxism, it draws the basic project of formulating a rationally systematic and coherent socialism 
    that integrates philosophy, history, economics, and politics. Avowedly dialectical, it attempts to infuse 
    theory with practice. From anarchism, it draws its commitment to antistatism and confederalism, as well 
    as its recognition that hierarchy is a basic problem that can be overcome only by a libertarian socialist 
    society.29

During the same period, the ISE’s Biotechnology Project pioneered the use of New England’s Town Meetings as a primary organizing vehicle to express opposition to the genetic engineering of food. In March of 2002, residents in 28 Vermont towns voted for labeling genetically engineered (GE) foods and a moratorium on GE crops.30 Eight towns took the further step of declaring a moratorium or otherwise discouraging the planting of GE crops within their town. By 2007, 85 Vermont towns and 120 across New England had passed similar resolutions. At a time when efforts to adequately regulate biotech products at the national level had become hopelessly deadlocked, this campaign invigorated public discussion of genetic engineering in the region and across the U.S., gained international attention, and articulated a broader analysis of the social and ecological implications of genetic engineering and the commodification of life. It also revealed the limits of town meeting organizing absent a broader municipalist consciousness. A majority of those who worked to bring the issue to their towns were content to view their resolutions merely as a means to lobby legislators and other state and federal officials rather than as part of a broader strategy to reclaim municipal political power, a problem that continues to be debated and theorized by social ecologists today.31

Social Ecology and the Future

During the first half of the current decade, the traditional environmental movement in the U.S. was rocked by an internal crisis of confidence, one that came into popular view in 2004 with the wide distribution of an extended essay provocatively titled “The Death of Environmentalism.”32 Responding to the dramatic rollback of environmental regulation under two Bush administrations and the failure of policy advocates in the U.S. to adequately address the impacts of global climate disruption, the essay (authored by two public relations consultants with close ties to the foundation world) echoed radical critiques of environmental praxis, while seeking to unite big business and organized labor in a “New Apollo Project” for the development of renewable energy technologies. In 2005, a group of prominent environmental justice advocates circulated a response titled “The Soul of Environmentalism,” which sought to reclaim the social movement roots of environmentalism in early civil rights struggles and urge more attention to “big issues,” community building, and “deep change.”33 This response effectively critiqued the narrow assumptions of “The Death of Environmentalism” and reaffirmed vital historical and practical links to other social movements but was relatively sparse in its specific proposals for moving forward.

Meanwhile, a flowering of popular movements for land rights, for community survival, and against the privatization of public services has arisen in recent decades throughout the global South. From the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico to “water wars” in Bolivia and India, widespread land seizures by displaced farming communities in Brazil, and the activities of radical farmers in South Korea, among others, these movements have increasingly captured the imagination of global justice advocates, even those who initially seemed to take ecological matters for granted. These movements offer a profound challenge to environmental politics, as it is commonly practiced in the North, and have also helped provoke a broad critique of traditional Northern approaches to land conservation as practiced by transnational NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund. While some authors have appropriately cautioned against the automatic labeling of indigenous, land-based movements as ecological,34 the resurgence of interest in these movements has furthered the evolution of global justice activists’ outlook on ecological matters. It has also encouraged thoughtful urban youth to broadly identify with the world views of those whose livelihoods are still derived from the land.

Today, with a growing awareness of global warming and the profound social and ecological upheavals that may likely be upon us, environmental politics once again appears ascendant. But most often it is the same narrowly instrumental environmentalism that Bookchin critiqued in the 1960s and seventies. “Green consumerism,” which first emerged as a national phenomenon around the 1990 Earth Day anniversary, has returned with a vengeance, incessantly promoted as the key to reducing our personal impact on the climate. Market-based trading of carbon dioxide emissions, a transparently false solution first proposed in the late 1980s, has been advanced as the most politically acceptable policy option for reducing greenhouse gases.35 Public debates range from fruitless controversies over whether or not human-induced climate change is real, to narrow prescriptions for establishing a market price for carbon dioxide that might induce corporations to reduce their emissions. Even well-known radicals, such as the popular British columnist George Monbiot, often focus on demonstrating the feasibility of a “least painful” lower-energy scenario, rather than posing a fundamental ecological challenge to the further destructive development of global capitalism.36

In this disturbingly constrained political and intellectual environment, what is the future for ecologically-minded radicals? Will capitalism finally come to terms with the environmental crisis? Or does the imperative of responding to the threat of catastrophic climate change still present a fundamental political challenge and a hope for a genuinely transformed future? To address these questions it is useful to consider some of the particular ways that social ecology may continue to inform and enlighten today’s emerging social and environmental movements.

First, social ecology offers an uncompromising ecological outlook that challenges the supremacy of capitalism and the state. A movement that fails to confront the underlying causes of environmental destruction and climate disruption can, at best, only superficially address those problems. At worst, capitalism offers false solutions-such as carbon trading and the worldwide production of so-called biofuels to replace gasoline and diesel fuel-that only aggravate problems in the longer term.37 Ultimately, to fully address the causes of climate change and other compelling environmental problems requires us to raise visionary demands that the dominant economic and political systems will likely prove unable to accommodate.

Second, social ecology’s 40-year evolution also offers a vehicle to better comprehend the origins and the historical emergence of ecological radicalism, from the nascent movements of the late 1950s and early sixties to the eco-saturated present. Over four decades, the writings of Murray Bookchin and his colleagues reflected upon the most important on-the-ground debates within ecological and social movements with passion and polemic, as well as with humor and long-range vision.

Third, social ecology offers the most comprehensive theoretical treatment of the origins of human social domination and its historical relationship to abuses of the earth’s living ecosystems. Social ecology has consistently pointed to the origins of ecological destruction in social relations of domination, in contrast to conventional views that an impulse to dominate non-human nature is a product of mere historical necessity.

Fourth, social ecology presents a framework for comprehending the origins of human consciousness and the emergence of human reason from its natural context. Dialectical naturalism reaches far beyond popular, often solipsistic notions of an “ecological self,” grounding the embeddedness of consciousness in nature in a coherent theoretical framework with roots in classical nature philosophies. It offers a philosophical challenge to overturn popular acceptance of the world as it is, and to persistently inquire as to how things ought to be.

Fifth, social ecology offers activists an historical and strategic grounding for political and organizational debates about the potential for direct democracy. Social ecologists have worked to bring the praxis of direct democracy into social movements since the 1970s, and Bookchin’s work offers a vital historical and theoretical context for this continuing conversation.

Sixth, at a time when the remaining land-based peoples around the world are facing unprecedented assaults on their communities and livelihoods, social ecology reminds us of the roots of Western radicalism in the social milieu of peoples recently displaced from rural, agrarian roots. Bookchin’s four-volume opus, The Third Revolution,38 describes in detail how revolutionary movements in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Spanish Civil War often had cultural roots in pre-industrial social relations, an understanding which can serve to historicize and deromanticize our approach to contemporary land-based struggles. Rather than an exotic other, vaguely reminiscent of a distant and idealized past, current peasant and indigenous movements offer much insight and practical guidance toward reclaiming both our past and our future.

Seventh, social ecology offers a coherent and articulate political alternative to economic reductionism, identity politics, and many other trends that often dominate today’s progressive Left. Bookchin polemicized relentlessly against these and other disturbing tendencies, insisting that our era’s ecological crises compel a focus on the general interest, with humanity itself as the only viable “revolutionary subject.” Social ecology has helped connect contemporary revolutionaries with the legacies of the past and offered a theoretical context for sustaining a coherent, emancipatory revolutionary social vision.

Finally, Bookchin insisted for four decades on the inseparability of oppositional political activity from a reconstructive vision of an ecological future. He viewed most popular leftist writing of our era as only half complete, focusing on critique and analysis to the exclusion of a coherent way forward. At the same time, social ecologists have often spoken out against the increasing accommodation of so-called “alternative” institutions-including numerous once-radical co-ops and collectives-to a stifling capitalist status quo. Opposition without a reconstructive vision leads to exhaustion and burnout. “Alternative” institutions without a link to vital, counter-systemic social movements are cajoled and coerced by “market forces” into the ranks of non-threatening “green” businesses, merely serving an elite clientele with “socially responsible” products. A genuine convergence of the oppositional and reconstructive strands of activity is a first step toward a political movement that can ultimately begin to contest and reclaim political power.

Defenders of the status quo would have us believe that “green” capitalism and the “information economy” will usher in a transition to a more ecological future. But, like all the capitalisms of the past, this latest incarnation relies ultimately on the continued and perpetual expansion of its reach. All of humanity, from urban centers to remote rural villages, is being sold on a way of life that can only continue to devour the earth and its peoples. Today’s high-tech consumer lifestyles, whether played out in New York, Beijing, or the remotest reaches of human civilization, defies all limits, raising global inequality and economic oppression to heretofore unimaginable proportions while thoroughly destabilizing the earth’s ability to sustain complex life.

The corrosive simplification of living ecosystems and the retreat into an increasingly unstable and synthetic world that Murray Bookchin predicted in the 1960s has evolved from a disturbing future projection to a global reality. Our survival now depends on our ability to challenge this system at its core and evolve a broad, counterhegemonic social movement that refuses to compromise its values and settle for partial measures. Hopefully such a movement will embrace and continue to expand and elaborate the revolutionary and reconstructive social and political vision of social ecology.
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NOTES

1 Marcel van der Linden, “The Prehistory of Post-Scarcity Anarchism: Josef Weber and the Movement for a Democracy of Content (1947-1964),” Anarchist Studies, 9, 2001, p. 127.

2 Quoted at http://essentialbooks.com/id50.htm.

3 A partial bibliography is available at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/bookchin/bookchinbiblio.html.

4 Bookchin’s evolution from anarchism to communalism is described in Janet Biehl, “Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism,” Communalism, 12, October 2007, at http://communalism.net/Archive/12/bba.php. Also see note 27 below.

5 van der Linden, op. cit.

6 Paul B. Sears, “Ecology: A Subversive Subject,” BioScience, 14, 7, July 1964.

7 René Dubos, Man Adapting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 196.

8 Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism  (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 58.  Post-Scarcity Anarchism was reprinted by Black Rose Books (Montreal) in 1986 and by AK Press (San Francisco) in 2004.

9 Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), especially Chapters 2 and 3. The Ecology of Freedom has also been reissued by both Black Rose (1991) and AK Press (2005).

10 Ibid., Chapters 9, 10.

11 The fullest elaboration of these ideas appears in Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990 [Revised 1995]).

12 Murray Bookchin, “A New Municipal Agenda,” in Urbanization Without Cities (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992 [republished by Cassell in London, U.K. in 1995]). Also see his earlier Limits of the City, originally published by Harper & Row in 1974 and in an expanded edition by Black Rose Books.

13 Murray Bookchin, “Market Economy or Moral Economy,” in The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986).

14 Murray Bookchin’s The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era was published in four volumes, the first two by Cassell and the latter two by Continuum, and dated 1996, 1998, 2004 and 2006.

15 At least one earlier mass action, aimed at shutting down Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War in the spring of 1971, was organized on the affinity group model, but Clamshell activists were the first in the U.S. to make this the underlying structure of their organization.

16 Reprinted in Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism.

17 A sympathetic, but factually flawed description of the libertarian and feminist roots of this movement, on both the east and west coasts, is available in Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

18 See, for example, “Open Letter to the Ecology Movement,” in Murray Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose, 1980), pp. 73-83.

19 These essays were adapted and updated in Toward an Ecological Society.

20 Ibid., p. 200.

21 For a fuller account of the U.S. Greens and the role of social ecologists, see Brian Tokar, “The Greens as a Social Movement: Values and Conflicts,” in Frank Zelko and Carolin Brinkmann (eds.), Green Parties: Reflections on the First Three Decades (Washington, D.C.: Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, 2006).

22 See, for example, articles by John Rensenbrink and Charlene Spretnak in Zelko and Brinkman, ibid.

23 Juan Gonzalez, “Getting Serious about Ecology,” New York Daily News, April 24, 1990.

24 See Chaia Heller, Ecology of Everyday Life (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999); also Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991).

25 See Greta Gaard, Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

26 The most comprehensive statement of the latter tendency, increasingly popular among self-identified anarchists, is John Zerzan, “Future Primitive,” online at http://www.primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm.

27 See Biehl, 2007, op. cit. Bookchin’s 2002 essay, “The Communalist Project,” appeared in the short-lived social ecology webzine, Harbinger (http://www.social-ecology.org/index.php?topic=harbinger), and is currently available at http://communalism.net/Archive/02/tcp.html, as well as in the newly edited volume, Social Ecology and Communalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2007). The communalism.net webzine was established in 2002 by social ecologists in Norway.

28 Quotes in this paragraph are all from “The Communalist Project,” in Social Ecology and Communalism. On Bookchin’s re-evaluation of Marxism, see also his Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left (Oakland: AK Press, 1999).

29 “The Communalist Project,” op. cit.

30 On the evolution of resistance to genetic engineering in the U.S., see Brian Tokar, “Resisting the Engineering of Life,” in Brian Tokar (ed.), Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (London:  Zed Books, 2001). For a more theoretical treatment, see Brian Tokar, “Biotechnology: Enlarging the Debate,” Z Magazine, June 2001. On the Vermont and New England town meeting campaigns vs. GMOs, see the pamphlet “Vermont Towns vs. Genetic Engineering: A Guide to Reclaiming our Democracy,” available from biotech@social-ecology.org.

31 The most comprehensive paper on this topic is Ben Grosscup, “Town Meeting Advocacy in New England: Potentials and Pitfalls,” presented at the 2007 Social Ecology Colloquium, Marshfield, Vermont.

32 Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World,” online at http://www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf.

33 Michel Gelobter, Michael Dorsey, Leslie Fields, Tom Goldtooth, Anuja Mendiratta, Richard Moore, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Peggy M. Shepard, and Gerald Torres, “The Soul of Environmentalism: Rediscovering Transformational Politics in the 21st Century,” Redefining Progress, Oakland, CA, 2005, available online at http://www.rprogress.org/soul/soul.pdf.

34 Larry Lohmann, “Visitors to the Commons,” in Bron Taylor (ed.), Ecological Resistance Movements (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).

35 For an historical overview, see Brian Tokar, Earth for Sale (Boston: South End Press, 1997), Chapter 2; for a detailed examination of the consequences of present carbon trading policies, see Larry Lohmann, Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatization and Power, Development Dialogue, 48, September 2006 (Uppsala: Dag Hammerskjold Center).

36 George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Boston: South End Press, 2007). For a comprehensive review of more radical solutions to the climate crisis, see the “Less Energy” series in the Green politics journal Synthesis/Regeneration, beginning with the Winter 2007 issue, No. 42, available at http://www.greens.org/s-r.

37 See Brian Tokar, “The Real Scoop on Biofuels,” online at http://www.4report.com/node/2864; also Eric Holt-Gimenez, “The Great Biofuel Hoax,” online at http://www.alternet.org/environment/54218.

38 See note 14 above.

With all the fanfare that usually accompanies such gatherings, delegates to last December’s UN climate talks on the Indonesian island of Bali returned to their home countries declaring victory. Despite the continued obstructionism of the US delegation, the negotiators reached a mild consensus for continued negotiations on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, and at the very last moment were able to cajole and pressure the US to sign on.

But in the end, the so-called “Bali roadmap” added little beside a vague timetable to the plans for renewed global climate talks that came out of a similar meeting two years ago in Montreal (see “Climate talks in Montreal,” Z Magazine, February 2006). With support from Canada, Japan and Russia, and the acquiescence of the new Australian government, the US delegation deleted all references (except in a nonbinding footnote) to the overwhelming consensus that reductions of 25 to 40 percent in annual greenhouse gas emissions are necessary by 2020 to forestall catastrophic and irreversible alterations in the earth’s climate.

In Kyoto in 1997, then Vice President Al Gore was credited with breaking the first such deadlock in climate negotiations: he promised the assembled delegates that the US would support mandatory emissions reductions if the targeted cuts were reduced by more than half, and if their implementation were based on a scheme of market-based trading of emissions. The concept of “marketable rights to pollute” had been in wide circulation in the US for nearly a decade, but this was the first time a so-called “cap-and-trade” scheme was to be implemented on a global scale. The result, a decade later, is the development of what British columnist George Monbiot has aptly termed “an exuberant market in fake emissions cuts.” Of course, the US never signed the Kyoto Protocol, and the rest of the world has had to bear the consequences of managing an increasingly cumbersome and ineffectual carbon trading system.

Given the increasingly narrow focus on carbon trading and offsets as the primary official response to global climate disruptions, it is no surprise that Bali resembled, in the words of one participant, “a giant shopping extravaganza, marketing the earth, the sky and the rights of the poor.” All manner of carbon brokers, technology developers and national governments were out displaying their wares to the thousands of assembled delegates and NGO representatives. Numerous international organizations used the occasion of Bali to release their latest research on various aspects of global warming, including an important new report from the Global Forest Coalition and Global Justice Ecology Project highlighting the consequences for the world’s forests of the current global push to develop so-called “biofuels” from agricultural crops, grasses and trees (revised edition available at globaljusticeecology.org).

Substantive developments from Bali were few and far between. Those that did emerge serve to highlight the ways that nominal progress on global warming is often linked to counterproductive measures that only benefit the world’s elites. First, the World Bank announced the creation of a new “Forest Carbon Partnership Facility,” releasing Bank funds for governments seeking to preserve forests. But this effort is based on perpetuating the fatuous notion that wealthy nations (and individuals) can “offset” their excessive carbon dioxide emissions by paying for nominally carbon-saving projects in poorer countries. Throughout the global South, carbon offsets have already spurred the replacement of vast native forests with timber plantations, more readily assessed for their carbon sequestration potential, and able to be harvested for “energy crops” such as palm oil and highly speculative cellulose-derived ethanol.

NGOs assembled in Bali warned that the Bank’s forest initiative “could trigger further displacement, conflict and violence; as forests themselves increase in value they are declared ‘off limits’ to communities that live in them or depend on them for their livelihoods.” Traditional forest dwelling communities, deemed incapable of managing their own forests, will continue to be displaced by international experts affiliated with the Bank, national governments, and compliant environmental organizations such as Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund. Ultimately, timber companies and plantation managers, in league with the World Bank, will be demanding, in the words of Simone Lovera of the Global Forest Coalition, “compensation for every tree they don’t cut down.”

Second, the Bali meetings led to the creation of a new UN fund to help poor countries adapt to climate changes. This fund will be managed by the Global Environment Facility, a semi-independent partnership of the UN’s environment and development programs and the World Bank, and funded through a two percent levy on carbon offset transactions under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM’s carbon offset schemes, however, have been widely criticized for manipulations, abuses and the funding of highly questionable projects including, once again, large scale commercial timber plantations displacing tropical rainforests. The new adaptation fund binds governments of poor countries even more tightly to the questionable practice of carbon offsets, even as it offers only a miniscule fraction of the estimated $86 billion needed just to sustain current UN poverty reduction programs in the face of the myriad new threats related to climate change.

Global Warming and the World’s Poor

The limited outcome of the Bali negotiations was especially maddening in light of all the new information released in the past year about the immediate consequences of global climate chaos, especially for the world’s poor. The Nobel Prize-winning scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have documented an unprecedented convergence of findings from hundreds of studies and tens of thousands of distinct data sets in numerous independent fields of inquiry. Never before have studies in so many fields converged on one disturbing conclusion: that the evidence for the role of human activity in altering the earth’s climate is “unequivocal,” and that the disruptive consequences of those alterations are already being felt in literally thousands of different ways.

It has also become clearer than ever before that the effects of chaotic global warming are most felt by those people who are least able to adapt or compensate for these disturbing changes: the roughly half of the world’s population that live on less than two dollars a day. The IPCC made it very clear in the second volume of their 2007 report, addressing the consequences of climate change, that the people least responsible for climate change will likely bear the worst consequences, as they are most vulnerable to the widespread increases in floods, droughts, wildfires and other effects of a rapidly changing climate. The UN’s biannual Human Development Report (http://hdr.undp.org/en), which was released in Bali, shows that at least one out of every 19 people in the so-called developing world was already affected by a climate-related disaster between 2000 and 2004.

Most vulnerable, of course, are the inhabitants of various Pacific island nations, whose very survival is seriously in doubt. With rising sea levels, not only are people less able to live near the shore, but even inland sources of essential drinking water are becoming brackish due to increasing infiltrations of sea water. Migration of Pacific islanders to New Zealand has quadrupled in recent years, according to The Independent, as rising numbers of island communities are becoming uninhabitable. Island nations, according to the IPCC, are collectively responsible for far less than 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

But this is only the beginning. While it appears that the northern- and southernmost portions of the earth’s temperate zones may reap some short term benefits from global heating, including longer growing seasons, the future looks bleak for people throughout the world’s tropical and subtropical regions. These areas, where people are far more likely to rely on the cycles of the earth, water and sky for their immediate subsistence, are in for a future of uncertain rainfall, persistent droughts, coastal flooding, loss of wetlands and fisheries, and increasingly scarce fresh water supplies. Flooding will most immediately affect inhabitants of the major river deltas of Asia and Africa. The one sixth of the world’s population that depends on water from glacial runoff may see a brief increase in the size and volume of their freshwater lakes as glaciers melt, but very soon the overall decrease in glacial area will become a life-threatening reality for many people.

The IPCC predicts a worldwide decrease in crop productivity if global temperatures rise more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit, but crop yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by half as soon as 2020. In Africa alone, between 75 million and 250 million people will be exposed to “increased water stress.” Agricultural lands in Latin America will be subject to desertification and increased salt content.

The health consequences of climate changes are perhaps the most starkly framed: “[I]ncreases in malnutrition and consequent disorders…; increased deaths, disease and injury due to heatwaves, floods, storms, fires and droughts; the increased burden of diarrheal disease; the increased frequency of cardio-respiratory diseases due to higher concentrations of ground-level ozone…; and, the altered spatial distribution of some infectious disease vectors,” including malaria. There is little doubt that those with “high exposure, high sensitivity and/or low adaptive capacity” will bear the greatest burdens.

The UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, released in 2005, offers a particularly graphic representation of where we seem to be headed. One page of this report (p. 119 of the Synthesis Report on Ecosystems and Human Well Being) offers a pair of world maps, each with a bar graph superimposed on every continent. The upper map chronicles the number of major floods reported in each decade from 1950 to 2000; the lower map displays the number of major wildfires. Everywhere but in Oceania (which is facing such a severe drought that large portions of the Australian breadbasket are now virtually unable to grow grain) the graphs rise steeply as the decades advance. Over this period, global temperatures only rose about one degree Fahrenheit; only the most optimistic of the IPCC’s projected future scenarios limits further warming during this century to less than three additional degrees.

As the UN Human Development Report showed that one out of every 19 people in the so-called developing world was affected by a climate-related disaster between 2000 and 2004, it also highlighted the contrasting figure for people in the wealthiest (OECD) countries: one out of every 1500. Yet the funds available thus far to various UN efforts to help the poorest countries adapt to climate changes ($26 million) is less than one week’s worth of flood defense spending in the UK, and about what the city of Venice spends on its flood gates every 2 – 3 weeks. The report estimates that an additional $86 billion will be needed to sustain existing UN development assistance and poverty reduction programs in the face of all the various threats attributable to climate change.

Two additional studies addressed the likelihood for increased violent conflict in the world as a result of climate-related changes. A paper published in the journal Political Geography by Rafael Reuveny of Indiana University examined 38 cases over the past 70 years where populations were forced to migrate due to a combination of environmental (droughts, floods, storms, land degradation, pollution) and other factors. Half of these cases led to varying degrees of violent conflict between the migrating population and people in the receiving areas. It is clear, states Reuveny, that those who depend the most on the environment to sustain their livelihood, especially in regions where arable land and fresh water are scarce, are most likely to be forced to migrate when conditions are subjected to rapid and unplanned-for change.

In November, the UK-based relief organization International Alert reached a similar conclusion. In a report titled “A Climate of Conflict,” they compared maps of the world’s most politically unstable regions with those most susceptible to serious or extreme effects of climate change, and concluded that 46 countries, with a total population of 2.7 billion people, are firmly in both categories. The report states:

“Hardest hit by climate change will be people living in poverty, in under-developed and unstable states, under poor governance. The effect of the physical consequences – such as more frequent extreme weather, melting glaciers, and shorter growing seasons – will add to the pressures under which those societies already live. The background of poverty and bad governance means many of these communities both have a low capacity to adapt to climate change and face a high risk of violent conflict.”

The report profiles 8 case studies of places in Africa and Asia where climate changes have already put great stress on people’s livelihoods and often exacerbated internal conflicts. The outlook is significantly improved, however, in places where political institutions are relatively stable and accountable to the population. This contrast allows for a somewhat hopeful conclusion, with the authors extolling “the synergies between climate adaptation policies and peacebuilding activities in achieving the shared goal of sustainable development and peace.” One specific recommendation is to prioritize efforts to help people adapt to a changing climate, especially where subsistence-based economies already contribute very little to global warming but are highly vulnerable to the consequences. Various international NGOs have already intervened, particularly in Africa, to document and disseminate those adjustments in farming practices that prove most useful in facilitating adaptation to a changing climate.

Worldwide, the potential human toll from severe changes in the climate is even more disturbing than the statistics and “objective” case studies suggest. Two centuries of capitalist development—and especially the unprecedented pace of industrial development and resource consumption that has characterized the past 60 years—have created conditions that threaten everyone’s future. “There could be no clearer demonstration than climate,” says the recent UN Human Development Report, “that economic wealth creation is not the same as human progress.” Those who have benefited the least from the unsustainable pace of economic growth and expansion over the past five or six decades are facing a future of suffering and dislocation unlike the world has ever seen—unless we can rapidly reverse the patterns of exploitation that many in the global North have simply come to take for granted.

A Different Response

The more closely we follow the evolving discussion of global warming and its potential impacts, the more often we seem to find ourselves hovering at the edge of despair. This is especially true once we realize how many of the proposed “solutions” merely worsen the problem and exacerbate inequalities around the world. Powerful interests in the US are seeking massive subsidies for even more destructive false solutions, including the expansion of nuclear power and the liquification of coal. for  But as the recent UN Human Development Report states, “resigned pessimism is a luxury that the world’s poor and future generations cannot afford.” So what are we to do?

The last time a popular movement compelled significant changes in US environmental and energy policies was during the late 1970s. In the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo, imposed during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the nuclear and utility industries adopted a plan to construct more than 300 nuclear power plants in the United States by the year 2000. Utility and state officials identified rural communities across the US as potential sites for  new nuclear facilities, and the popular response was swift and unanticipated. A militant grassroots antinuclear movement united back-to-the-landers and traditional rural dwellers with seasoned urban activists and a new generation of environmentalists who only partially experienced the ferment of the 1960s.

Just over 3 decades ago, in April of 1977, over 1400 people were arrested trying to nonviolently occupy a nuclear construction site in the coastal town of Seabrook, New Hampshire. This event helped inspire the emergence of decentralized, grassroots antinuclear alliances all across the country, committed to nonviolent direct action, bottom-up forms of internal organization, and a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between technological and social changes. Not only did these groups adopt an uncompromising call for “No Nukes,” but many of them promoted a vision of an entirely new social order, rooted in decentralized, solar-powered communities empowered to decide their energy future and also their political future. If the nuclear state almost inevitably leads to a police state—due to the massive security apparatus necessary to protect hundreds of nuclear plants and radioactive waste dumps all over the country—a solar-based energy system could be the underpinning for a radically decentralized and directly democratic model for society.

This movement was so successful in raising the hazards of nuclear power as a matter of urgent public concern that nuclear construction projects all over the US began to be cancelled. When the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania nearly melted down in March of 1979, it spelled the end of the nuclear expansion. While the Bush administration today is doing everything possible to underwrite a revival of nuclear power, it is still the case that no new nuclear plants have been licensed or built in the United States since Three Mile Island. The antinuclear movement of the late 1970s also spawned the first wave of significant development of solar and wind technologies, aided by substantial federal tax benefits for solar installations, and helped launch a visionary “green cities” movement that captured the imaginations of architects, planners and ordinary citizens.

Radically reconstructive social visions are relatively scarce in today’s political climate, dominated by endless war and rapidly rising inequality. But dissatisfaction with the status quo reaches wide and deep among many sectors of the US population. While elite discourse and the corporate media continue to push political debates rightward and politicians of both major parties glibly comply, poll after poll suggests the potential for a new opening, reaching far beyond the confines of what has become politically acceptable. The more people consume, and the deeper into debt they may fall, the less satisfied most people seem to be with the world of business-as-usual.

Over the past year, activists across the US and in other industrial countries have begun to dramatize the reality of potentially catastrophic global warming and pressure their governments to do something about it. Al Gore’s movie and the IPCC report have had positive educational impacts, but most public gatherings up to now, at least in the US, have been rather timid in their outlook, and minimal in their expectations for real changes. The failure of the Bali talks suggests the urgency of a far more pointed and militant approach, a genuine People’s Agenda for Climate Justice. Such an agenda would have at least four central elements:

1.  Highlight the social justice implications of global climate disruptions. Global warming is not just a scientific issue, and it’s certainly not mainly about polar bears. As the UN’s Human Development Report describes so eloquently, global warming is a global justice issue, and the immediate consequences for the world’s poor are truly staggering. Bringing home these implications can go a long way toward humanizing the problem and raise the urgency of global action.

2.  Dramatize the links between US climate and energy policies and US military adventures, particularly the war in Iraq, which is without question the most grotesquely energy-wasting activity on the planet today. Author Michael Klare has documented (see S/R # ?) that troops in the Persian Gulf region consume 3.5 million gallons of oil a day, and that worldwide consumption by the US military—about four times as much—are equal to the total national consumption of Switzerland or Sweden. Last October, people gathered under the banner of “No War, No Warming” blocked the entrances to a Congressional office building in Washington, demanding an end to the war and real steps to prevent more catastrophic climate changes. Similar actions across the country could go a long way toward raising the pressure on politicians who consistently say the right thing and blithely vote the opposite way.

3.  Expose the numerous false solutions to global warming promoted by the world’s elites. Billions of dollars in public and private funds are wasted on such schemes as a revival of nuclear power, mythical “clean coal” technologies (supported by Barack Obama, among many others), and the massive expansion of so-called biofuels (more appropriately termed agrofuels): liquid fuels obtained from food crops, grasses, and trees. Carbon trading and offsets are described as the only politically expedient way to reduce emissions, but they are structurally incapable of doing so. We need mandated emission reductions, a tax on carbon dioxide pollution, requirements to reorient utility and transportation policies, public funds for solar and wind energy, and large reductions in consumption throughout the industrialized world. Buying more “green” products won’t do; we need to buy less!

4.  Envision a new, lower-consumption world of decentralized, clean energy and politically empowered communities. Like the antinuclear activists of 30 years ago, who halted the first wave of nuclear power in the US, while articulating an inspiring vision of directly democratic, solar-powered communities, we again need to dramatize the positive, even utopian, possibilities for a post-petroleum, post-mega-mall world. The reality of global warming is too urgent, and the outlook far too bleak, to settle for status-quo false solutions that only appear to address the problem. The technologies already exist for a locally-controlled, solar-based alternative, at the same time that dissatisfaction with today’s high consumption, high debt “American way of life” appears to be at an all time high. Small experiments in living more locally, while improving the quality of life, are thriving everywhere. So are experiments in community-controlled renewable energy production (see solartopia.org). Al Gore is correct when he says that political will is the main obstacle to addressing global warming, but we also need to be able to look beyond the status-quo and struggle for a different kind of world.

Global warming can represent a future of deprivation and scarcity for all but the world’s wealthiest, or this global emergency can compel us to imagine a radically transformed society—both in the North and the South—where communities of people are newly empowered to remake their own future. The crisis can drive us to break free from a predatory global economy that fabulously enriches elites, while leaving the rest of us scrambling after the crumbs. The reality is too urgent, and the outlook far too bleak, to settle for status-quo false solutions that only appear to be addressing the problem of global climate disruption. Instead, we can embrace the reconstructive potential of a radically ecological social and political vision, prevent catastrophe, and begin to make our way toward a fundamentally different kind of future. As a writer in The Nation recently summed up her assessment of two books on the rise of the right wing politics in the US, “sometimes only a willingness to be radical really brings about change.”

Brian Tokar’s books include Earth for Sale (South End), Redesigning Life? (Zed Books), and Gene Traders (Toward Freedom). He is currently the director of the Institute for Social Ecology, based in Vermont.

If 2006 was the year that the “inconvenient truth” of global climate disruption made its way into the popular consciousness—and sparked a huge new wave of green products and corporate greenwashing—then hopefully the results of 2007’s revelations about the earth’s rapidly changing climate will prove more substantive and long-lasting. Not only did the UN’s Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issue a massively comprehensive report on climate science and its consequences, but the disturbing, and sometimes catastrophic, reality of worldwide climate collapse began to affect almost everyone’s daily life.

Here in the US, where the minds of a media-saturated public seemed to be firmly lodged in the sand around this issue for at least two decades, people finally began to notice the disturbing changes in the weather, and in the once familiar pattern of the seasons. In most regions now, spring comes a couple of weeks or more earlier than it used to, and fall comes later. In much of the country, unseasonably warm weather appeared sporadically throughout the year, and cold spells were sudden, severe, and relatively short-lived. Rain in many areas was sparse, and appeared more often in rapid, concentrated deluges. Major floods seemed more common than ever, the extreme drought in much of the Southeast—the worst in over a century—made national headlines, and nearly everyone saw the news of the unprecedented wildfires that swept across far southern California in October. Midsummer temperatures in much of the US Southwest, as well as in parts of Greece and Turkey, reached 115 degrees or higher.

The professional deniers continue to relegate all this to mere chance and coincidence but, fortunately, many fewer people are paying attention to such dismissals than before. Beside the overwhelming intuitive sense that something is seriously amiss, two central facts make the evidence more compelling than ever. First, the patterns of heating, highly erratic weather, and cycles of floods and drought are felt worldwide, and closely match the projections of climate modelers going back more than a decade. Today’s observations closely follow what the modelers have long been predicting, though much of what we are seeing today was once predicted to occur several decades further into the future.

Second, the scientists of the IPCC have documented an unprecedented convergence of findings from hundreds of studies and tens of thousands of distinct data sets in numerous independent fields of inquiry. This feat of scientific data gathering and assessment may have been worthy of a Nobel science prize if the panel hadn’t already been awarded the coveted prize for peace. Never before have studies in so many fields converged on one disturbing conclusion: that the evidence for the role of human activity in altering the earth’s climate is “unequivocal,” and that the disruptive consequences of those alterations are already being felt in literally thousands of different ways.

Another reality that began to break into the public consciousness in 2007 is that the effects of chaotic global warming are most felt by those people who are least able to adapt or compensate for these disturbing changes: the roughly half of the world’s population that live on less than two dollars a day. Beside the anecdotal evidence, several systematic studies, including the IPCC’s second volume addressing the consequences of climate change, have begun to map out this story in detail. Impoverished people around the world are also bearing the consequences of some of the most prevalent false solutions to global warming, including the push for so-called ‘biofuels,’ and the dual hoax of carbon emissions trading and purchases of offsets. Considerations of justice and equity further highlight the scale of social and economic transformations that are necessary if we are to head off the very worst consequences of an increasingly erratic, overheating climate. While business-as-usual scenarios in terms of energy use and carbon dioxide emissions have now been shown to be untenable, so too is the continuation of business-as-usual in the structure of our political and economic institutions.

Awareness

One of the first articles to bring the global justice consequences of global warming to a wide audience was an exceptionally insightful piece in the New York Times that appeared fast on the heels of the IPCC’s initial 2007 report. As reporter Andrew Revkin stated, “In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed the least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet. Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest.”

The Times dispatched reporters to cover four widely varying instances of people coping with the consequences of a severely altered climate, illustrating some stark contrasts across different parts of the world. In a village in Malawi, officials struggle to maintain the functioning of a simple weather station, chronically lacking basic supplies like light bulbs and chart paper, while in India, rural villagers struggle to cope with the effects of increasing floods and more erratic monsoons on their already fragile life support systems. Meanwhile, Western Australia has built a state-of-the-art water desalinization plant, powered by an array of wind turbines about 100 miles away, and the Dutch have begun building homes attached to huge columns that allow the actual houses to rise and fall by as much as 18 feet with the ebb and flow of tidal waters.

The plight of people in Pacific island nations is also finally attracting some mainstream press attention. With rising sea levels, not only are people less able to live near the shore, but even inland sources of essential drinking water are becoming brackish due to increasing infiltrations of sea water. Migration of Pacific islanders to New Zealand has quadrupled in recent years, according to The Independent, as rising numbers of island communities are becoming uninhabitable. Island nations, according to the IPCC, are collectively responsible for far less than 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Here in the US, Hurricane Katrina brought home the extreme inequity in people’s capacity to cope with climate-related disasters. While affluent homes have been restored, and people again flock to New Orleans’ unique tourist quarters, roughly a third of the population has yet to return and public housing projects remain empty, and continually threatened with demolition, despite a relatively low level of storm-related damage. While the human toll from the more recent San Diego area wildfires was comparatively low, the systemic inequities remained rather harsh. Naomi Klein reported in The Nation in November that residents able to pay several tens of thousands of dollars were whisked away to elite resorts to wait out the fires, while their homes were sprayed with special fire retardants that were tragically unavailable to their neighbors.

It has become common wisdom that people living near the coasts are highly vulnerable to the uncertainties of a changing climate, however the magnitude of that threat remains controversial, even among climate scientists. The IPCC, reflecting the high level of scientific uncertainty around this issue, projected an estimated sea level rise of less than 25 centimeters this century, based on current trends. But scientists agree that the two most vulnerable glacial landmasses, Greenland and the West Antarctic, each hold enough water to raise sea levels by 20 feet.

In a paper published by the British Royal Society last spring, NASA climatologist James Hansen documented a much higher level of ice sheet instability than is accounted for in the IPCC report. Factors such as the decreased reflectivity of Arctic zones due to global warming—the well known “albedo effect”—along with an increasing incidence of glacial fractures and quakes and the lubricating effects of glacial meltwater, all point toward a much faster rate of melting. Hansen stands by the far more disturbing prediction of an 80-foot sea level rise, based on extrapolation from the period 3-4 million years ago when global temperatures were last as warm as they will become by the end of this century, if we fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the industrialized world by 80 – 90 percent.

Studies

Several systematic studies, all released in the past year, affirm the conclusion that the world’s poorest people are by far the most at risk from an increasingly erratic, warming climate. The IPCC itself devoted several chapters of its second volume to the human costs of global warming. By comparing all of the available studies issued since their last report in 2001, and quantifying the confidence levels of various observations and trends, this report establishes a benchmark for virtually all future study.

Their basic message is overwhelming in its consequences. The northern- and southernmost portions of the earth’s temperate zones may reap some short term benefits from global heating, including longer growing seasons. The tropics and subtropics, however, where most of the world’s poor people live, are in for a future of uncertain rainfall, persistent droughts, coastal flooding, loss of wetlands and fisheries, and increasingly scarce fresh water supplies. Flooding will most immediately affect residents of the major river deltas of Asia and Africa. The one sixth of the world’s population that depends on water from glacial runoff may see a brief increase in the size and volume of their freshwater lakes as glaciers melt, but very soon the overall decrease in glacial area will become a life-threatening reality for many people.

The IPCC predicts a worldwide decrease in crop productivity if global temperatures rise more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit, but crop yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by half as soon as 2020. In Africa alone, between 75 million and 250 million people will be exposed to “increased water stress.” Agricultural lands in Latin America will be subject to desertification and increased salt content.

The health consequences of climate changes are perhaps the most starkly framed: “[I]ncreases in malnutrition and consequent disorders…; increased deaths, disease and injury due to heatwaves, floods, storms, fires and droughts; the increased burden of diarrheal disease; the increased frequency of cardio-respiratory diseases due to higher concentrations of ground-level ozone…; and, the altered spatial distribution of some infectious disease vectors,” including malaria. There is little doubt that those with “high exposure, high sensitivity and/or low adaptive capacity” will bear the greatest burdens.

The UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, released in 2005, offers a particularly graphic representation of where we seem to be headed. One page of this report (p. 119 of the Synthesis Report on Ecosystems and Human Well Being) offers a pair of world maps, each with a bar graph superimposed on every continent. The upper map chronicles the number of major floods reported in each decade from 1950 to 2000; the lower map displays the number of major wildfires. Everywhere but in Oceania (which is facing such a severe drought that large portions of Australia are now virtually unable to grow crops) the graphs rise steeply as the decades advance. Over this period, global temperatures only rose about one degree Fahrenheit; only the most optimistic of the IPCC’s projected future scenarios limits further warming during this century to less than three additional degrees.

The biannual UN Human Development Report, issued at the end of November, reported that one out of every 19 people in the so-called developing world was affected by a climate-related disaster between 2000 and 2004. The figure for people in the wealthiest (OECD) countries was one out of every 1500. Yet the funds available thus far to various UN efforts to help the poorest countries adapt to climate changes ($26 million) is less than one week’s worth of flood defense spending in the UK, and about what the city of Venice spends on its flood gates every 2 – 3 weeks. The report estimates that an additional $86 billion will be needed to sustain existing UN development assistance and poverty reduction programs in the face of all the various threats attributable to climate change.

Two additional studies addressed the likelihood for increased violent conflict in the world as a result of climate-related changes. A paper published in the journal Political Geography by Rafael Reuveny of Indiana University examined 38 cases over the past 70 years where populations were forced to migrate due to a combination of environmental (droughts, floods, storms, land degradation, pollution) and other factors. Half of these cases led to varying degrees of violent conflict between the migrating population and people in the receiving areas. It is clear, states Reuveny, that those who depend the most on the environment to sustain their livelihood, especially in regions where arable land and fresh water are scarce, are most likely to be forced to migrate when conditions are subjected to rapid and unplanned-for change.

In November, the UK-based relief organization International Alert reached a similar conclusion. In a report titled “A Climate of Conflict,” they compared maps of the world’s most politically unstable regions with those most susceptible to serious or extreme effects of climate change, and concluded that 46 countries, with a total population of 2.7 billion people, are firmly in both categories. The report states:

“Hardest hit by climate change will be people living in poverty, in under-developed and unstable states, under poor governance. The effect of the physical consequences – such as more frequent extreme weather, melting glaciers, and shorter growing seasons – will add to the pressures under which those societies already live. The background of poverty and bad governance means many of these communities both have a low capacity to adapt to climate change and face a high risk of violent conflict.”

The report profiles 8 case studies of places in Africa and Asia where climate changes have already put great stress on people’s livelihoods and often exacerbated internal conflicts. The outlook is significantly improved, however, in places where political institutions are relatively stable and accountable to the population. This contrast allows for a somewhat hopeful conclusion, with the authors extolling “the synergies between climate adaptation policies and peacebuilding activities in achieving the shared goal of sustainable development and peace.” One specific recommendation is to prioritize efforts to help people adapt to a changing climate, especially where subsistence-based economies already contribute very little to global warming but are highly vulnerable to the consequences. Various international NGOs have already intervened, particularly in Africa, to document and disseminate those adjustments in farming practices that prove most useful in facilitating adaptation to a changing climate.

Worldwide, the potential human toll from severe changes in the climate is even more disturbing than the statistics and “objective” case studies suggest. Two centuries of capitalist development—and especially the unprecedented pace of industrial development and resource consumption that has characterized the past 60 years—have created conditions that threaten everyone’s future. “There could be no clearer demonstration than climate,” says the recent UN Human Development Report, “that economic wealth creation is not the same as human progress.” Those who have benefited the least from the unsustainable pace of economic growth and expansion over the past five or six decades are facing a future of suffering and dislocation unlike the world has ever seen—unless we can rapidly reverse the patterns of exploitation that many in the global North have simply come to take for granted.

Mitigations—Worse than the Disease?

Unfortunately, many of the most widely promoted solutions to the problem of global warming don’t come close to addressing these highly unequal impacts. Indeed, some of the most popular proposals, including the widespread conversion of food crops to so-called “biofuels,” and the payment of fees by Northern consumers to development projects in the South hoping to “offset” personal greenhouse gas emissions, often do significantly more harm than good.

A year ago in these pages (Z January 2007), we cited some early studies demonstrating that the extraction of ethanol from corn and biodiesel fuel from soybeans may not offer much of a solution to the dual problems of climate change and declining fossil fuel resources. Most striking at the time were the land use consequences of US production of agrofuels (this is the preferred term among activists and critics in the global South): for example, researchers at the University of Minnesota demonstrated that the entire current US corn and soybean crops could only displace about 3 percent, respectively, of our gasoline and diesel consumption. In the past year, the pressure on global grain prices from the accelerated push for agrofuels has led to a near crisis in global food supplies.

Analysts such as Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute have been predicting a conflict between food and fuel consumption for some time; Brown calls it an “epic competition between 800 million people with automobiles and the 2 billion poorest people.” But in the past year, the effects began to reverberate worldwide. World corn prices nearly doubled, as more than 20 percent of the US corn crop was diverted to ethanol production. Wheat prices rose to an all time high as Midwestern farmers seeking to profit from the ethanol boom converted acreage from wheat to corn production. (Wheat is also relatively drought tolerant, whereas corn is far more dependent on large inputs of water and chemicals.) The world price of milk increased nearly 60 percent, and people in Mexico rioted as their prices for tortilla flour nearly doubled. China announced a freeze on the diversion of food grains to fuel production, as the effect on their own food prices began to be felt. Even the elite journal Foreign Affairs determined that “[t]he biofuel mania is commandeering grain stocks with a disregard for the obvious consequences.”

The most popular solutions to this dilemma carry equally troubling consequences. Europe is getting less of its biodiesel from soybean or canola oil and more from oil palm plantations, mainly in southeast Asia. Malaysia and Indonesia, in particular, have lost 80 – 90 percent of their tropical rainforests to intensive logging, followed by the planting of monocultures of oil palms. Brazil is plowing under its unique Cerrado grasslands for sugarcane plantations, known to be a more efficient source of ethanol than corn, and is collaborating with the US and global investors to export its exploitative model of sugar production throughout the Caribbean. Meanwhile, soy plantations are spreading deep into the Amazon to satisfy growing demands for biodiesel, as well as for livestock feed. Peasant and indigenous groups throughout the global South have come to see the agrofuel push as an accelerated effort to expand industrial agriculture and drive subsistence farmers from their lands.

Meanwhile, virtually all biofuel/agrofuel advocates are staking the future on the hope of rapidly switching from food crops to cellulose-rich sources—mainly trees, grasses and crop wastes—as the major feedstock for agrofuel production. But these scenarios, too, often rely on the massive replacement of natural biodiversity with monoculture plantations of “energy crops.” Cellulose, as one of the two main structural components of plant cells, is extremely resistant to chemical or biological digestion, and current experimental “cellulosic” agrofuel plants consume far more energy than they produce. Thus, the push for cellulose-based fuels has also turned into a massive subsidy to biotechnology companies that are attempting to re-engineer enzymes and microorganisms—and even synthesize entirely novel bacterial genomes—in the hope of developing an efficient way to turn cellulose into fuel.

Even if these technical problems can be resolved without dire unforeseen consequences, there is simply not enough “excess” biomass to keep all of the privileged world’s cars running. Crop “wastes” are an essential resource for farmers seeking to return some fertility to the soil after harvesting grains, and many of the grasses frequently proposed as fuel sources are noxious weeds in many parts of the world.

One of the most disturbing consequences of the push for cellulose-based fuels is a resurgence of interest in the genetic engineering of trees. A company known as Arborgen, partly owned by International Paper and Mead-Westvaco, received USDA approval last summer to expand its experimental plots of a variety of eucalyptus that is genetically engineered to withstand cold temperatures. This would allow these highly invasive and resource-consuming trees to be planted throughout the southeastern US, as well as in other moderate temperate zones. Backers of this technology continually invoke the idea that such trees are needed to make fuel to replace petroleum, in an attempt to disarm critics and dismiss wider ecological concerns. Throughout the global South, people whose lands have been appropriated by corporations for conversion to commercial tree plantations have joined the worldwide campaign to prevent the commercial growing of genetically engineered trees (see Z March 2006 and stopgetrees.org). Ultimately, there is simply not enough biomass on earth, whether on fields, grasslands, or forests, to replace the millions of years of accumulated biomass that produced the once abundant reservoirs of fossil fuels, consumed at an ever accelerating pace during the past century.

Similarly, the growing practice of purchasing carbon dioxide credits in order to “offset” affluent consumers’ excessive greenhouse gas emissions is increasingly opposed by people on the receiving end. Carbon offsets, whether sold on the internet, or negotiated through the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, also favor the conversion of forests into monoculture plantations, and further the displacement of traditional communities. The intensive monitoring required by the UN may be necessary to prevent profiteering and outright fraud, but also significantly favors homogeneous and biologically deficient plantations owned by transnational timber companies, in contrast to richly biodiverse tropical and subtropical forests inhabited by indigenous communities.

Most of us tend to view planting trees as an inherently benign activity, but as Larry Lohmann has documented in his thoroughgoing study, Carbon Trading: A critical conversation on climate change, privatization and power (available for download from www.thecornerhouse.org.uk), international funding for tree planting (also for various industrial conversions and even for solar electricity) often exacerbates inequalities and semi-feudal economic relations in the recipient regions. Further, the process of global warming has begun to measurably decrease the ability of trees to absorb carbon dioxide, as nighttime respiration begins to emit more carbon than the trees can absorb through photosynthesis during the day. The added damaging effects of hurricanes and other catastrophes can quickly turn even the healthiest forest into a net emitter of carbon dioxide.

A Different Response

The more closely we follow the evolving discussion of global warming and its potential impacts, the more often we seem to find ourselves hovering at the edge of despair. This is especially true once we realize how many of the proposed “solutions” merely worsen the problem and exacerbate inequalities around the world. Powerful interests in the US are seeking massive subsidies for even more destructive false solutions, including the expansion of nuclear power and the liquification of coal. for  But as the recent UN Human Development Report states, “resigned pessimism is a luxury that the world’s poor and future generations cannot afford.” So what are we to do?

Most analysts opt for a cautious approach, trying to piece together enough different strategies to reduce CO2 emissions while maintaining current levels of production and consumption. Such systematic analysis is necessary, and several approaches to building a more renewable energy system will be reviewed in a future article. But it is not sufficient, and current consumption levels in the industrialized world simply cannot be sustained. The technical obstacles to addressing the problem of global warming are often not even the most important ones. If we can find a way beyond the current impasse in our ability to imagine and realize a different kind of society, the problem of reorganizing our energy sources becomes far more tractable.

The last time a popular movement compelled significant changes in US environmental and energy policies was during the late 1970s. In the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo, imposed during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the nuclear and utility industries adopted a plan to construct more than 300 nuclear power plants in the United States by the year 2000. Utility and state officials identified rural communities across the US as potential sites for  new nuclear facilities, and the popular response was swift and unanticipated. A militant grassroots antinuclear movement united back-to-the-landers and traditional rural dwellers with seasoned urban activists and a new generation of environmentalists who only partially experienced the ferment of the 1960s.

Just over 3 decades ago, in April of 1977, over 1400 people were arrested trying to nonviolently occupy a nuclear construction site in the coastal town of Seabrook, New Hampshire. This event helped inspire the emergence of decentralized, grassroots antinuclear alliances all across the country, committed to nonviolent direct action, bottom-up forms of internal organization, and a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between technological and social changes. Not only did these groups adopt an uncompromising call for “No Nukes,” but many of them promoted a vision of an entirely new social order, rooted in decentralized, solar-powered communities empowered to decide their energy future and also their political future. If the nuclear state almost inevitably leads to a police state—due to the massive security apparatus necessary to protect hundreds of nuclear plants and radioactive waste dumps all over the country—a solar-based energy system could be the underpinning for a radically decentralized and directly democratic model for society.

This movement was so successful in raising the hazards of nuclear power as a matter of urgent public concern that nuclear construction projects all over the US began to be cancelled. When the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania nearly melted down in March of 1979, it spelled the end of the nuclear expansion. While the Bush administration today is doing everything possible to underwrite a revival of nuclear power, it is still the case that no new nuclear plants have been licensed or built in the United States since Three Mile Island. The antinuclear movement of the late 1970s also spawned the first wave of significant development of solar and wind technologies, aided by substantial federal tax benefits for solar installations, and helped launch a visionary “green cities” movement that captured the imaginations of architects, planners and ordinary citizens.

The 1970s and early ‘80s (before the “Reagan revolution” fully took hold) were relatively hopeful times, and utopian thinking was far more widespread than it is today. Some antinuclear activists looked to the emerging outlook of social ecology—developed by Murray Bookchin and others—as a new theoretical grounding for a revolutionary ecological politics and philosophy. Social ecology challenges prevailing views about the evolution of social and cultural relationships to non-human nature, and explores the roots of domination in the earliest emergence of human social hierarchies. For the activists of the period, Bookchin’s insistence that environmental problems are mainly social and political problems encouraged radical responses to ecological concerns, as well as reconstructive visions of a fundamentally transformed society.

Radically reconstructive social visions are relatively scarce in today’s political climate, dominated by endless war and rapidly rising inequality. But dissatisfaction with the status quo reaches wide and deep among many sectors of the US population. While elite discourse and the corporate media continue to push political debates rightward and politicians of both major parties glibly comply, poll after poll suggests the potential for a new opening, reaching far beyond the confines of what has become politically acceptable. The more people consume, and the deeper into debt they fall, the less satisfied most people seem to be with the world of business-as-usual.

Global warming can represent a future of deprivation and scarcity for all but the world’s wealthiest, or this global emergency can compel us to imagine a radically transformed society—both in the North and the South—where communities of people are newly empowered to remake their own future. The crisis can drive us to break free from a predatory global economy that fabulously enriches elites, while leaving the rest of us scrambling after the crumbs. The reality is too urgent, and the outlook far too bleak, to settle for status-quo false solutions that only appear to be addressing the problem of global climate disruption. Instead, we can embrace the reconstructive potential of a radically ecological social and political vision, prevent catastrophe, and begin to make our way toward a fundamentally different kind of future. As a writer in The Nation recently summed up her assessment of two books on the rise of the right wing politics in the US, “sometimes only a willingness to be radical really brings about change.”

In February’s Z, Orin Langelle will offer a photo essay on the recent UN climate talks, held in Bali, Indonesia. Brian Tokar’s books include Earth for Sale, Redesigning Life? and Gene Traders; he can be reached via social-ecology.org.