Climate change begins at home
June 2012
With governments subject to corporate capture within a systemic imperative to pursue economic growth, it is plain that the responsibility for transformation lies with the governed themselves. In light of the debacle of the Rio Earth summit, actress Lucy Lawless, Xena the Warrior Princess herself, declares that ‘we’re on our own, and governments are rubbish’. (The Saturday Interview by Susanna Rustin, The Guardian 30 June 2012).
The time has come to reconstitute public life from the ground upwards, addressing individuals as active, informed citizens rather than self-interested voters, and launching an inclusive and ever-expanding civil society movement that is capable of integrating all those serious about taking action to avoid climate catastrophe. Given that it is now obvious that successive climate conferences have failed to deliver policies and actions of sufficient ambition to prevent the worst of climate change, it's crucial that citizens recognise the political, moral and intellectual bankruptcy of official politics, constitute themselves as an active citizen body, reclaim politics for themselves, and refound public life anew. This requires a grassroots organisation and mobilisation that forms the social and democratic content of any ecological politics.
“The Green party has long demanded a firm commitment to year-on-year targets for cuts in emissions, to prevent politicians from making a "Nimto" (Not In My Term of Office) response - setting targets and timetables so far in advance that they avoid having to take serious action now. When I spoke at Climate Camp in London on Saturday, it was clear that the determination of civil society to tackle climate change head-on is stronger then ever. What we need now are the right politicians to ensure that the positive changes we are calling for truly materialise.” (Caroline Lucas MEP Leader, Green party).
Ongoing commitment and engagement within the associational space of civil society serves to strengthen and buttress political will at the parliamentary level, ultimately translating popular pressure into public policy, putting a legislative and institutional framework in place so that the transition to a low carbon economy is made the overwhelming objective of government.
In the politics of ancient Greece, any demands that citizens made of the government were demands that they made upon themselves. There was no separation between government and governed, the polis was the citizen body. Aristotle defines the citizen as one who rules and is ruled in turn. This sense of political demands being demands we make on ourselves as citizens needs to be recovered.
Many campaigners and demonstrators demand that "the government" do something. It is important that the governed come to recognise that they are the government so that individuals go beyond asking for governments to produce solutions to problems they refuse to face themselves. Such as cutting our carbon footprints. Whenever green taxes and environmental regulations are proposed, a populist outcry can be guaranteed. The time will come when the same people will ask why, given all that governments knew with respect to solid scientific evidence, politicians failed to act. Public reluctance to face hard truths encourages politicians to look the other way. Not only politicians but voters themselves are guilty of being NIMTO’s. How many individuals vote thinking of long term environmental issues? Most vote as private individuals, their private concerns linked to ‘the economy’ being uppermost. It is a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario, individuals choosing according to self-interest, resulting in the least optimal outcome for all concerned.
Politicians are subject to the electoral cycles and so succeed by an appeal to the familiar and the obvious. As individual voters cling on to the impossible dreams projected by consumer capitalism, politicians are more likely to win votes by feeding illusions and appealing to desires than by proposing solutions to an environmental crisis caused by inflated human demands. We need to recover the ancient Greek sense of politics as creative human self-realisation, as something individuals do together as citizens, as against an external, instrumental mechanism for serving individual wants and wishes. Such a conception requires individuals to see the public consequences of personal choices and take a collective responsibility for what needs to be done. Only then will it be possible to break the political impasse, the refusal of governments and politicians to take effective action for fear of the potential unpopularity of the decisions to be made. Individuals will see themselves what needs to be done and will demand action for their own good.
Individual action alone is limited and quickly settles into culture and lifestyle as a substitute politics. Beyond individual commitments to using less energy, there has to be grassroots mobilisation at civil society level so as to push governments into taking effective action in bringing about real change. Eco-action begins with the individual, but it doesn’t end with the individual. It leaves home, strikes roots elsewhere and makes the world a better place. What Barbara Ward calls the ‘Home of Man’.