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How I became radical: From being an ecologist…to a queer decolonial eco-feminist

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Ebène l'Adelphe

Ebène l'Adelphe

Adventurer, ‘weed’-writer*, research-creation activist & poet, interested in tales of intersectional ecological utopias. * ‘écrivain en herbe’ (from French)
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Stories of ecological transition: Ebène l’Adelphe

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1st lesson : when adults tell me everything is fine, I should probably worry

At the beginning of this story, I was an averagely politicised kid (citizen) – meaning that I didn’t ask myself too many questions. Like everyone, I was “for” sustainable development, “for” gender equality, and for the rest, I trusted that my parents were doing the right and fair things for any problems to be solved before I enter the adult’s world. 
 
As time passed, I came to doubt. If the situation was “under control”, that most people were very aware, why did adults felt so compelled to endlessly and gravely talk about domestic violence and global warming in the news, diners and birthday parties ? 
 
I was taught to believe we had powerful technologies, smart engineers and good will politicians promising ambitious policies – how come didn’t they find a solution yet by the time I turned a teen ? Despite us being careful to turn off the lights when leaving the classroom and conserving water while brushing our teeth, it seemed that climate change persisted on wanting to become a bigger and bigger problem. 
 
We understand that blue wasn’t just for boys and pink for girls, but I could still hear more and more stories about gender based violence. Every evening, my family watched the news while eating a desert and small talking. In those moments, I often fell my body-mind dissociate in the too-fast juxtaposition of news: the latest money-laundering and sex abuse scandal of some 50-years old white rich man (background noise of my sister noisily enjoying her ice-cream), to a report on the making of foie gras (my mum complaining about her colleagues), to the Gaza Strip in the midst of bomb attacks (my brother asking whether he coud eat another sweet).
 
Once day, it became unbearable to powerlessly look at forests ablaze, capital cities flooding and climate refugees leaving in disaster their homes while my relatives commenting the great taste of the chocolate cake. Was this mental dissonance “eco-anxiety”? 
My dad does not care about climate change effects : he knows he belongs to the more privileged people in this planet that will not be directly affected by the natural disasters – he thinks that nature just does its job selecting the more able to survive… That is scary, because it is probably what is going to happen if most people believe like him in this Malthusian theory. In the same time, as an engineer, he also believes in the techno-solutionism : carbon capture, SUVs, etc… sadly, I am more than doubtful. I should offer him this interesting book that just came out called “letter to engineers who have doubts” (1).
 
I also asked my parents what they thought on gender equality. My mum built herself as a warrior : she fought to be paid as a man would, treated with the same respect, valued similarly in her job. As a result, she believe strongly on equality : “we are all the same” means for her that there are no differences to be considered. Woman of man, it does not matter. My dad thinks the same. When I asked them if they thought the education they gave my siblings and I was gender emancipating, they said : “you all had access to the same education, clothes, and toys”.
 
I remember though that my brother was always the one “naturally” invited to work in the garden by my dad, while I had to ask permission if I could join. My brother is the one obsessed with computers and who was the one who could benefit from the teaching of my father on IT skills. He likes table football, video games, virtual reality, taking care of his muscles, wearing strong deodorant and eating Nutella and bananas. My sisters were encouraged to draw, play with horses, involve with housework and laundry. Now, my mum’s starting to think she’s old and ugly, so she wears make-up and looks for clothes that don’t look too “old people fashion” so people don’t mistake her age. She is emotionally driven, caring and mindful, self-sacrificing. My dad is a geek, doesn’t give a damn what people think of him, sits at home in his slippers, takes naps at lunchtime, earns more money than my mum, pragmatic and emotionally rubbish. My brother works in construction, likes hanging out with his friends, to mountain bike, and eats steaks. My sister does pastry, likes interior decoration, reading, and painting. But sure, we had an egalitarian education… just not a feminist one. I did not know yet I was queer, and I did not know words like cis* and straight**. I just had a mere intuition that something was scary on how the pattern of their personalities matched the pink and blue marketing despite what they said. 
Translation: Climate Change is like Chernobyl... It will stop at our borders!
Cis(gender) refers to a person’s gender identity corresponding to their sex assigned at birth (vs transgender). It is also a political organisation of society creating “normal people” (= gender conforming)  and “monsters” as supported by the philosopher Paul b. Preciado in their book Testo Junkie. (2)
Image: understandingtheguidelines.ca
** a heterosexual person, someone having a sexual orientation to persons of the opposite sex and according to the French philosopher Monique Wittig, a political ideology, in her book the straight mind, she writes : “heterosexuality is the political regime under which we live, based on the enslavement of women [it] is a cultural construct that justifies the entire system of social domination based on the function of obligatory reproduction for women and the appropriation of this reproduction” (3).

2nd Lesson: just "ecology" is white dude ecology

Some years later, I learned that Gaia – the living planetary system (4), had the ability to absorb a certain amount of “waste” produced by humans. However, what we were producing in the Anthropocene era far exceeded what it could absorb. Anthropocene is the name of a geological epoch highlighting the idea of mankind as a significant force driving climate change and ecosystems’ destruction. As I discovered later, this concept could be criticized because it implies that all humans contributed the same in creating planetary unbalance. However we now know that this responsibility is not shared equally between social, cultural and political groups of people in this planet. This is what I found out by calculated my ecological footprint. I realized that the toothbrush and the light switch had nothing to do with ecological awareness. The real questions were: how many people do I live with in how much space, how to I use energy and what source of energy, how do I get around, and what do I eat ? This is when I embarked (to the despair of my family) on a true eco-transitioning reflexion:
Gaia
Regarding housing, we were not too bad; my family shared a house with 7 people in an old farmhouse renovated with good insulation and underfloor heating from a wood stove. My dad also created a garden where we grew vegetables, we had fruit trees, and a pond for birds to come and drink. We even had a rare species of toads taking refuge in the natural stone wall of our backyard. I convinced my dad to have chickens, but they got eaten by a wild carnivore (cries) – but it had the merit to make my sisters and my mum more sensitive to antispecist issues which I will tell you more about later. The backflip of all those efforts is the 40° heated inflatable pool my dad insisted on installing on the terrace making our family ecological footprint back to 0…
 
I became antispecist some years ago thanks to the whistleblowing work of the association L214 in slaughter houses, and readings of the Australian philosopher Peter Singer and of the French buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard (5). Their concepts of “limited empathy” really struck me : we love and value only those closest to us – beyond this boundary, the fate of other beings is of little importance to us. This circle depends on our affinities: for most humans, it seems that it includes human relatives and friends. For others strange beings like me, it did include horses, trees, and – in spite of myself – arachnids. As frightened as I was by the spiders in my room, I couldn’t help but freeze, my shoe on top of their frail bodies, questioning the divine right of life and death I’d granted myself over them, ethically analyzing the possibility of peaceful cohabitation. There was indeed something on the order of empathy that led me to consider their point of view, even if the mere sight of them made me shudder with fear.
Matthieu Ricard
Peter Singer
Anyway, all that to say that the day I told my family I was vegan was a real coming-out. My family was eating meat every day and was not ready to change that habit. Bringing up anti-speciest questions at the table created divide between us. Being vegan was a betrayal of the French commensality, something that brought us together despite cultural difference. Moreover, my mum was concerned about my health : we indeed learnt at school that a healthy diet implies to eat everyday dairy product and animal proteins. So, I learnt again entirely about nutrition to make sure I had the good input in my body and prouve my mum I wasn’t putting myself in danger. She was right on that on the way to become vegan, I spend some time being vegetarian, and compensating the lack on protein with cheese and eggs. However, this is neither good for the animal cause (producing milk means killing the offsprings for whom it was intended, which is strongly linked to the meat industry), nor for my health or that of Gaia. I also had iron deficiencies because modern French cuisine doesn’t have recipes that are easily adaptable and balanced, especially when you lose 50ml of blood every month… in short, those “mistakes” in the way of understanding vegan philosophy has enabled me to be more attentive to my body and look for ethic and balance in my diet. 
 
My dad was not very concerned about philosophical concerns but with more practical issues : if I cooked for myself, he didn’t see a problem of my change of diet. However, as a decent of prehistoric hunter (as all French males apparently are…) he though that eating meat was the natural order of things and he was not going to change that. Well, you would be surprised that in fact, my father was the one starting to gradually change our family meals (he is the one cooking at home) because he read articles discussing health issues related to meat consumption. Moreover, as I discovered how to enhance the flavors of my plant-based proteins, spices, and leafy greens, my siblings began to want to taste my dishes ! The incredible chef Jack (that you well know) played a significant role in all of this: he was the one who rekindled my joy of eating by transmitting his (buddhist) philosophy of colors and cooking methods. Thanks to him, I understood that food was the first care I provided for my body. Finally, I enjoyed on the way to learn about French and global traditional cuisines are often vegan (before the industrial revolution, meat was an occasional meal), healthier (because less processed), and more ecological (more local). So, go vegan now 😉
   
The last challenging topic in my family was my choice to boycott the holidays in plane : my decision was perceived as an abandonment. I kind of felt sad too and it made me wonder whether “saving the planet” deserved that I broke my family relations. Definitively, no. So I wondered why my family had this urge more than others to travel internationally. Indeed, my “French origins” friend didn’t “need” to travel so much abroad : tourism VS family – the stakes were not the same. This made me thoughtful on  the carbon footprint of the western imperialism and the slave trade history that leads today my family to be so far apart. That is what the French thinker Malcom Ferdinand calls the Plantationocene (6) : to believe the ecological responsibility of having destroyed the ecosystems is equally shared between nations is an illusion perpetuated by the word “Anthropocene”. This hinders our understanding that the real problem lies in our colonial and extractivist system which benefits still today’s descents of the slave traders. Thus, they (we?*) have the biggest carbon footprint (linked to their ancestors) and so the most power to make a change in the system. 
  
Malcolm Ferdinand
* I also have colonial ancestors and consider myself beneficiary of the slave system as I have French white papers and citizenship.  
 

Well, about transportation, I am now in a dead end : I did my research about alternatives to the plane but it was not very successful. If you know reasonable options, please, let me know ! Reasonable means for my family : a travel mean over the summer vacations (1 month) and within 6000€ (ticket plane back and forth). 

. By sail-boat : first, you need a boat and to know how to navigate. Otherwise, you need to rent the boat with a skipper – budget is at least 3000€ just for the skipper and 6000€ for an average boat for one month. The length of the trip is not very predictable (depends on the forecast) and it takes for sure more than one month to go to Mauritius or Korea by the sea… 
. By cargo ship : once, it was accessible for free, but now, business made it a luxury experience accessible only to few, it’s pretty long and you can’t chose your route. 
. By hot-air balloon : 40% of accidents, 20% of mortality rate. 
Now, I would like to bet on slow travel, but it implies a radical life change that my family is not ready to make. If you have any other ideas, please contact me haha !
 
 
On my path of radicalization (etymologically, trying to get back to the root of issues), I have sometimes felt a bit alone. So I went to meet groups of young people facing the same problems in the French Young Ecologists. After some month of activism, I felt something wrong. The main concerns about my peers were nuclear power and the Common Agricultural Policy (which were very interesting) but nothing seemed to disturb them about their parents having a SUV-car, an apartment in Paris, a second home in Brittany, and their lifestyle of going in vacations in Balearic Islands every winter, studying engineering or political science to work in Brussels. For me, ecological activism was fundamentally starting by questioning myself and my relation to other beings. It was indeed important to talk about COP and global energy policies, but how come we did not have any answers about why people were fighting in shops for pots of Nutella, migrants freezing in our streets, elderlies dying of isolation in our retirement homes ?! Had I become a socialist without realizing it ? To me those questions were deeply linked to ecology. 
 
As for gender issues… when I began to understand what mental load was and I discussed it with my mum, she outrightly denied it; it was as if I was questioning her entire life. Before admitting later that indeed, she would like my father to be more involved in handling everyday life small and necessary caring tasks. I suppose that my mother’s burnout is somehow also linked to this load, whereas my father admits to be quite emotional illiterate himself. Sometimes, it saddens me to feel a lack of empathy on his behalf towards other beings suffering from climate change effects (“it is your generation’s problem, I don’t care” he told me – thanks dad). Or maybe is it just a protective denial strategy ? Although he has more practical sense than my mother, this seems a bit heartless sometimes – noticing that, I feel like reinforcing another stereotype. 
 
But how come my parents, claiming to have raised boys and girls equally could reproduce so much gender rules ? This makes me realize that, contrary to cis-straight people, I do not believe anymore that it is possible to achieve equality while keeping strict gender boxes. For exemple, my mum claimed she did not experience femmephobia (7) until she finally admit that she was often taken for a sex-worker in the street. When I discovered the extent of violence against women, with #MeToo, I began to feel deeply wounded. I hold a grudge against my mother for erasing her own memories of violence and choosing to submit to patriarchal/rape culture by urging me not to go out in a dress at night, repeatedly asking where I was going (unlike my brother), and constantly judging my weight and outfit. And the more I was outraged by the state of the world seen through my feminist lens, the more my parents seemed to detach themselves from my conclusions with an air of “but it has always been like that.” As if violence was normal. Indeed, I slowly understood that in my genealogy, like many others women’s herstory (8)… traumas were ordinary. 
 
One day, I did my mourning and accepted the truth : even if they believed in equality, my parents had contributed on reproducing patriarchy – they were never feminist.
 

There you go. I had become a feminist and a radical socialist and ecologist. Those 3 fights were all important to me, and despite my belief that ecology embraced them all, I did not see the expected convergence in ecologist groups. Moreover, when I asked my activist peers what was ecology for them, many didn’t quite know, there was no consensus. I was quite disappointed about those people (I am not gonna lie, there were mostly white rich cis dudes) fighting for something they could not quite define. For me, ecology was about links between living beings, so if inter-human solidarity was dead, how could we claim to take care of our connection with the rest of the living?

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3rd Lesson: Intersectional queer ecology, alias ecofeminism

If you’ve made it this far, you have probably asked yourself the same questions as I have. I hope this final part will bring you as much pleasure as it did for me: every time I discovered the thinking of the following authors, I felt an electric current running through my entire body ! Well, have a nice electrifying experience while reading !
 
As I wrote before, I did not understand how come we could claim to “save the planet” while not even being able to take care of our neighbors. In French society, Muslims are spat on, the poor are called lazy, the disabled are locked away; how are we going to take care of others with that if we can’t even respect each other ? That were my thoughts when Sandrine Rousseau appeared in the public arena : she was the first female politician to claim to be an eco-feminist. A good introduction to this train of thoughts was written by the author Jeanne Burgart Goutal (9). At a time, I had almost given up on ecology, but she reignited the flame: raped by a man, she quitted politics before to come back to say that she would not let herself be defeated by the silence. In her discourses, she supports the idea that women, like the Earth, are used, exploited, raped by men ; that patriarchy boiled down to BBQs and gold mines, a predatory regime on the rest of the living. Wow. Explosion, revelation. That was maybe the reason I felt personally offended by images showing destruction of Gaïa, that was the reason why my first fight was against islamophobia directed toward sexualized muslim women, that was the reason why I feel so deeply affected when I see an non-human animal suffering. That is how I found a name for what I felt inside : I can not be an ecologist, I am an ecofeminist. 
 
Belonging to a movement is useful in that it gives a story to be attached to, thinkers to be inspired by. So as I dug into this school of thought, I came accros the philosopher Donna Haraway (10) who talks about this quality of friendship we could develop to other species. I like to think that this awareness is also linked to a neurodivergent queer approach to the world… the following thinkers are related to those. The first one is Paul B. Preciado that I already previously mentioned writes in Dysphoria Mundi (11) that dysphoria is not just a matter for transgender individuals, but rather a global concern. Rather than trying to “treated” the planetary dysphoria (which he criticizes psychiatry for), transitioning could be the opportunity to build something different. Indeed, in that moment of chaos where everything is questioned, anything becomes possible. While this situation is certainly not easy, it provides hope to get out of a thanatopolitical world (a concept from Foucault). Preciado (and Judith Butler) highlights that most humans (outside the western world) developed much skills and knowledge on vulnerability, meaning on how to survive in a harsh context. In short, those 3 thinkers were my introduction to a queer ecological thought, even though they do not particularly claim to align with this movement.
Judith Butler
Michel Foucault
Paul B. Preciado
Although I aligned more with queer ecology, there was a spiritual aspect my linkage to the living that I could not let aside to give anchoring and meaning to my activism : my ancestors. Connecting to them reminds me how my privileges everyday are bonded to a responsibility : I owe them the power I have. I can not forget that the wealth I am surrounded by is the result of the biggest historical continental plunder. Malcolm Ferdinand’s decolonial ecology (that I previously mentioned) reminds me of it : the Anthropocene is a lie. Today, most people in poverty are women of color (and most often disabled/migrants/sex workers). They are the first victims of climate change though they are the ones who must maintain households and ensure the survival of the human species. 
 
That is why I liked eco-feminism : its plurality allows all voices to be heard, from center to margin (1). Dynamic processes of poetic-political self-reflexive knowledges circulate between eclectic spaces creating convergences between western writers, african philosophers, latinos’ witches and asian activists. Thus I came across the inspiring Indian activist Vandana Shiva who created a movement for tree protection. I liked to listen to the sparkling and vivid thinking of the philosopher Myriam Bahaffou in podcast interviews (12) : she tells that where women live, nature is better off. She does not essentialize femininity (supposedly having a stronger connection with nature) but she explains that  it is a cultural reality that today women are responsible for subsistence in agricultural economies and so have every interest in environmental stability. Thus, they ensure resilience, abundance, and protection. Another insping figure is the Kenyan biologist Wangari Muta Maathai who created and promoted a project called the Green Belt to stop the progress of the desert. She created women collectives to fight the masculine logic (also perpetrated by some women) to exploit all resources. That led villagers to cut down all the trees to use them for fuel. As a result, the desert sand was no longer stopped in its progression and began to dry up the soil making it uncultivable. Wangari passed on to the women of her community the desire to plant trees and turn villages into orchards to provide shade, moisture, and cultivability to the soil in the long term. 
 
Something else I learn with Myriam Bahaffou was the danger of eco-macho rhetoric of “rewilding” spaces. Often, this was used as an excuse to drive local tribes out of their homes. Bahaffou argues that what is needed is a caring policy: women in communities know how to find a third way between over-exploitation and abandonment of the land. They have practices allowing the regeneration of the land and perpetuation of economic dynamics. They are better planners on the long term because they are responsible for raising children, whereas men are in a short-term “off-the-ground” exploitation logic. In one the the many previously cited podcast, Myriam Bahaffou (find her book reference in footnote 12) also describes the way women have been exploited like non-human animals throughtout history. For exemple, the first doctors were following Descartes’ theory of the mechanic animal as an excuse to vivisected living beings. Some centuries later, the first gynecologists experimented the same on black women and slaves… today, those people are “coincidentally” animalized as “gazelles”, “leopards”, or “deer”. Another exemple from Myriam Bahaffou : nowadays, makeup tests are often carried out on non-human animals and as vaccine tests are on precarious Latinos or Africans. If one has to classify living beings, it seems that the division lies more between the rich white Men and the rest of the inhabitants of the Earth than an inter-species separation. Eco-feminism is not an essentialization, but an invitation to think about the articulation of our biological reality with what we want to make of our culture and society. Eco-feminism recognizes that strategically, women and the rest of the living have suffered common mistreatment from similar oppressors. They may so have more interests in considering themselves as a community united against the ideology of the dominant – this is well explained by bell hooks’ (13) concept of margin VS center (western-valid-rational-white-cis-heteropatriarchal-capitalist-masculinity, etc.)
Myriam Bahaffou
Wangari Muta Maathai
Vandana Shiva
With these new references, I felt more legitimate to openly stand for an intersectional activism : it seemed obvious to me that all oppressions had common roots but I did not have words to think it. Theories but also tools like the Fresque des Résistances proposed by the Laboratoire des Résistances (14) helped me to articulate it with friends and (activist) relatives. Do you know the gender-race-class triptych? It is a sociological lens useful to apply on any (ecological) issues to think it in a situated way. For exemple, it helped me to carbon footprint is directly correlated with one’s positionality (15) or social gear (concept developed by the previously mentioned Laboratoire des Résistances). I understand that our privileges are directly correlated with our responsibility in the environmental crisis. Paradoxically, this social stand is also linked to the level of ignorance and inaction since more privileged we have, the less affected by climate change we are. That problem sometimes bring self-guilt, which is an issue that Jack kindly helps us overcome with his special eco-coaching 😋 so if you feel that way, contact him ! Personally, I think the loooong philosophical-political-spiritual-esthetic-epistemological-ecological discussions we had at night about the state of the world did nurture my sense of purpose. 
 
It is almost the end, so thanks for sticking with me until there. Let’s conclude : I won’t lie, it was smoother to believe that my father’s technology could absorb all the CO2 to release it into space, that poverty exists but that is ok because I am rich, and that gender equity is just a matter of wage. I think I have become a bit doubtful, and to tell you the truth, that is not a relaxing emotion to carry on with. When I am tired of it, I reminds myself of our best philosophers (16) : owning my own responsibility and freedom can be tough, but it is also something desirable. 
 
Becoming ecofeminism led me to Reclaim (17) the knowledge of the female body that was erased by the Inquisition and the doctors’ witch hunt in the XVIIIe century. Witches were the people’ scientists and healers. They were the precarious, divorced, old, or childless women who lived on the margins of villages and who passed down the knowledge of plants, dreams’ interpretation, and intuition. Becoming eco-feminist allowed me to find beauty in my ability to relate to other beings, sharing suffering but also joy. Becoming aware of violence and death opens up my understanding of the preciousness of each ephemeral moment of living sweetness. Being more vulnerable, I am more intensely alive, and everywhere, there could be magic in the air. Becoming ecofeminist is learning to pay attention to the breathing of trees, to the ways water flows from the clouds through us to the sea (18), is to listen to the whispered memories of our garden’s pebbles. Becoming ecofeminism gives me a new sense of belonging in my relation to Gaïa, to the invisible, to the many unknown people who are trying to inhabit the earth differently, transform our relationships to prioritize mutual aid over competition, responsibility over denial, care over contempt, contemplating celebration of the circular time over the unsatisfied agitation provoked by the linear calendar. I met peers in queer, intersectional, ecofeminist places in France : “the transition campus”, “the cat farm”, “the blue windmill”, the “weaving of dreams” … are existing proofs that give me enthusiasm and faith : I know there are so many ways to live outside of oppressive structures and I want to continue to search to grow my list so big that it would include infinite possibilities of radically ecological lives ! If you are a searcher too, I will be happy to hear about your findings !

Bibliography

(1) Lefebvre, Olivier, Letter to Doubting Engineers, l’échappée, 2023.
(2) Preciado, b. Paul, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics, Points Feministe, Paris, 2021.
(3) Wittig, Monique, The Straight Mind, Boston, Beacon Press, 1992.
(4) Lovelock, James, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford University Press, 2000.
(5) Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (1975), Melbourne, Ecco Press, 2001.
Ricard, Matthieu, Advocacy for Animals, Allary edition, Paris, 2014.
(6) Ferdinand, Malcom, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, Polity, Paris, 2022.
(7) Hoskin, R.A. Femmephobia: The Role of Anti-Femininity and Gender Policing in LGBTQ+ People’s Experiences of Discrimination. Sex Roles 81, 686–703, 2019.
(8) Herstory: oncept created/diffused first by the feminist journalist Morgan Robin
(9) Burgart Goutal, Jeanne, Being Ecofeminist – Theories and Practices, L’échappée, collection versus, 2020.
(10) Haraway, Donna, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
(11) Preciado, b. Paul, Dysphoria Mundi, Grasset, Paris, 2023. 
(12) La Poudre with Lauren Bastide Episode 126: Myriam Bahaffou
Conversations écoféministes, Karina Kochan, Léa Chancelier, Jasmine Marty, Capucine
Néotravail #20: Des Paillettes sur le Compost de Myriam Bahaffou – Les coups de ❤️ d’Hélène & Laetiti
Avis de Tempête S2 E5 – Pratiquer les éco-féminismes depuis les marges
Book : Bahaffou, Myriam, Des paillettes sur le compost : Ecoféminismes au quotidien [Glitter on the Compost: Everyday Ecofeminisms], Le passager clandestin, 2022.
(13) Hooks, Bell, Feminist theory : from margin to center,  Cambridge, MA : South End Press, 1952.
(14) Website of the association https://www.labodesresistances.fr/
(15) Bayeck, R. Y, Positionality: The Interplay of Space, Context and Identity. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2022.
(16) Sartre and the Existentialism, Camus and The Rebel… yes, yes, I know their are cis-white-het men, but don’t you think I need to add a bit of traditional Frenchness to this article to make it readable ?
(17) Hache, Emilie, RECLAIM, Anthologie de textes écoféministes, Editions Cambourakis, 2016
(18) Neimanis, AstridA, Hydrofeminism : becoming a water body,  https://philo.esaaix.fr/content/hydrofeminisme/hydrofeminisme.pdf

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The rich and climate change: their real impact

The ultra-wealthy funding climate change projects

to support independent and ad-free ecological thinking

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Jacques Lawinski

Jacques Lawinski

PhD candidate in philosophy and ecology at Université Paris VIII, visiting researcher in Lesvos, Greece. A writer, an activist, and an avid walker, I explore the planet and what it means to relate to nature, finding new, ecological ways of being.
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Much of the international debate on sustainability focuses on individual behaviours. This criticism is the same, whether you are a farmer from Canterbury or Jeff Bezos in the United States. However, the influence of the mega-rich and their entourage, through their investments and their control of the framing of the climate debate, is much more important than how many flights they take in their private jets.

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Image: Billionaires Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Mike Bloomberg, with other wealthy individuals who fund climate projects. Francois Mori/AP.

In an interview with Sophia Money-Coutts on Tatler in 2018, Johan Eliasch said something which reveals the attitude of many rich people towards climate change. She reports him saying in their interview:

‘I can do anything I want because I’ve got my rainforest,’ he says, smiling. ‘I’m probably the most carbon-negative individual in the world.’ 

Eliasch is part of a special class of people: the global elite of the mega-rich. He is worth an estimated 3.6 billion GBP, or $7.5 billion NZD. As well as being Chairman of the sportswear company HEAD, Eliasch has held various positions in the British Conservative Party relating to the environment, and runs an organisation called Cool Earth dedicated to protecting the tropical rainforest. He bought 1,600 km2 of Amazonian rainforest in 2005, and closed down all logging operations on the land, which he is now ‘protecting’ for the good of everyone.

In 2008, he wrote a report for HM’s Government in the UK about the possible benefits of using financial mechanisms to preserve forests and prevent deforestation. This report then went on to become influential in guiding policy decisions for the development of REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), a global initiative which is part of the International Climate Change Convention. This initiative means that he can earn money on the land in Brazil that he is protecting from deforestation.

The same story is told countless times over, for countless other mega-rich people, in the study by Edouard Morena, Fin du monde et petits fours: Les ultra-riches face à la crise climatique (End of the world and petit fours: the mega-rich face the climate crisis). According to an Oxfam report, in 2019, the richest 1% of people worldwide were responsible for 16% of global carbon emissions: the same as the emissions of the poorest 66% of humanity (5 billion people). Despite their obvious personal implications in causing this crisis, these wealthy individuals saw an opportunity to increase their power, their fortune, and their wealth. They decided to take action on the back of the crisis.

Morena shows in his book how these wealthy individuals are intentionally directing the climate debate towards a certain version of ‘green capitalism.’ This system ultimately benefits businesses and the wealthy, at the expense of the poor and the environment which the system is supposed to be protecting.

We will explore how the mega-rich, along with a group of relatively well-off academic and professional elites prevent the advent of a just and adequate ecological transition. You, the reader, could be part of a bright and connected future that is both ecologically sober and greatly fulfilling, and create this future in a way which doesn’t increase the wealth and power of a small number of people at the expense of everyone else. If there’s one thing that you take away from this article, it is that there is another way.

Private jet
Private jet. Image: Yuri G. on Unsplash.

The Climate Glitterati and their interests

Kevin Anderson, a British climatologist, calls some of these wealthy elites the “climate glitterati.” Who are they, and what are they doing?

Each year, the World Economic Forum is held in Davos, Switzerland, where countless members of the climate glitterati come together to discuss what must be done to save the world. Thought leaders, prime ministers, wealthy billionaires, and more, are in attendance. They sit in opulence and talk about key issues such as climate change and inequality. In 2020, Morena reports, Al Gore and Jane Goodall talk about the climate crisis. Goodall blames overpopulation for the problems we have now, saying that “we wouldn’t have these problems if the population was the same as it was 500 years ago.” She repeats the same neo-Malthusian arguments that many wealthy people use to shift the responsibility of climate change onto the shoulders of someone else. It’s not us that are the problem: it’s them. Morena quips that they will be “invited again” to Davos, because they have managed to softly reassure the champagne drinkers that their actions are completely rational and safe.

These wealthy individuals and powerful people seek one thing, according to Morena: to save themselves. The champagne and small bites of food on platters continue to be served whilst discussions about the future of humanity unfold. The contrast could not be greater, yet these people seek comfort and reassurance in the face of the crisis.

They go about it in two different ways:

    • One group prefers to distance themselves from everyone else, and live in a secure bubble on their own estate. They’ve bought land in New Zealand or Patagonia, where they can travel by private jet if everything turns to chaos. They can be called the survivalists.
    • The other group are what we referred to before as the “climate glitterati.” They want to save themselves too, but instead of hunkering down, they prefer to travel the world telling other people how to solve the problem. They’ve realised that they have more to gain (or perhaps less to lose) by directing the global climate debate and ensuring that their interests are protected.

“Their climate emergency is not the same as our climate emergency”

Everyone is exposed to the risks of climate change. The fact is, however, we are not facing the same outcomes. The wealthy fear that their golf courses, enormous mansions by the sea, and their investments in fossil fuels will be hit by the effects of climate change. The value of their portfolios might decline, which makes them, like everyone else, anxious and fearful. They might lose power, status, or credibility. The more fiscally sober among us might fear increased prices, an unpredictable storm that wipes out an apple orchard, or an unbearably warm summer which results in the deaths of countless elderly. This is most certainly not what the ultra-wealthy are worried about.

Instead of owning up to their responsibility for the climate crisis, these billionaires want to paint themselves as heroes. We are supposed to see them as the only people who have the wealth, the ideas, the power, and the guts to save humanity from this mess (the mess that they bear a greater responsibility for, remember). They are the new shining lights of our society, and we should desire to be like them.

Just like Johan Eliasch, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and one of the richest people on the planet, has begun to paint himself as a climate hero and invest in climate-related organisations and schemes. After an emissions-intensive trip into space a few years ago, Bezos is said to have realised the fragility of life on Earth. Following this, he set up the Bezos Earth Fund, worth 10 billion USD, and another Amazon Climate Fund worth 2 billion USD. With this money, he has begun investing in organisations and companies which support his vision for the future. He’s also been speaking at conferences about the climate and the need to act (with technology and market-based solutions, as we will see).

Bezos is doing this to save himself and protect his assets. In order to justify being at the head of a company with an immense emissions report, and a track record of injustice and human rights issues, he must donate some of his money to support the climate effort. In doing so, he turns the attention away from the inequality that his company is responsible for, and towards the bright, shiny, technological future he is creating (for us).

As Morena writes, “It’s an indirect way of promoting yourself, legitimising yourself and putting the figure of the innovative entrepreneur at the heart of the climate debate and society in general.”

He donates so that he can continue polluting. He donates so that he can take flights around the world, and continue a high-emissions lifestyle. He donates to justify the fact that his company is responsible for huge emissions. He donates to protect his investments and his assets. He donates so that we ignore his anti-climatic actions.

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man trading on stock markets
Image: Adam Nowakowski on Unsplash.

Their goal: more markets, more capitalism, more technology

In a nice house in London, George Polk hosts dinner parties to educate the rich and the leaders of Western society on how to solve key social and economic problems. He’s the founder of The Catalyst Group, “a London-based organisation which works to educate international business leaders on major issues of public policy.”

Morena reports that people come to these dinners to learn about climate change, and in turn, be informed on the ways in which public policy should act to solve it. Of course, Polk is out to educate them about the possibility that business and investments can be protected through a beautiful thing called “green capitalism.” It’s possible to have your cake and eat it too.

The key aspects of Polk’s strategy to fight climate change are the same as the ideas put forward by the consulting company McKinsey, Al Gore, and a host of other elites seeking to manipulate the climate debate in a certain direction. There are two pillars to their approach towards green capitalism:

    • The marketisation of nature,
    • The reliance on technology and innovation

The first of these, the marketisation of nature, is referring to several schemes set up to pay people who own land and who don’t cut down the trees on that land (or who plant more trees). The idea is that wealthy people and businesses can continue to pollute, because somewhere there are trees that are sucking up all this pollution and storing it in the ground. The person who owns those trees is providing a service to the rest of society, so should be paid for that service.

This marketisation of nature takes many forms in global agreements, being referred to as a carbon credits scheme, an emissions trading scheme, the global programme REDD… This scheme benefits landowners, who extract massive profits from these schemes from companies who have no intention of changing their business plan in order to reduce their ecological impact. What’s more, in places such as Brazil, locals are being forced off land that they have occupied for generations, because this land is now owned by wealthy billionaires or companies engaged in carbon credit trading. Consequently, they are no longer able to use this land for sustenance: most of the time in ways that are sustainable and respectful to the forests themselves. Others, who are employed in the logging industry, are similarly losing their jobs, which previously was one of the only ways to make money in some of these regions. You can read the Guardian article about these communities being forced off their lands here. A similar study based in Asia on Mongabay about the communities who are responsible for taking care of forests is available here.

The Guardian also studied the effectiveness of these projects at stopping deforestation, and the real impact that they have on offsetting carbon emissions. The title of the main article says it all: “More than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows.” That’s almost ALL of their projects that have almost no ecological impact, yet they are behind an industry worth more than $3 billion NZD. The Guardian undertook nine months of research into these schemes to uncover several cases of human rights abuse, very little action to stop deforestation, and gross overestimates of the amount of carbon being stored. This article in Science concludes that “most REDD projects are less beneficial than is often claimed.”

Graph showing effectiveness of carbon forest schemes
Source: The Guardian

The marketisation of nature is completed by the economic viewpoint that nature is something that renders services to human beings, each of which can be calculated and valued in monetary terms. The value of a particular forest might be $200,000; the value of a small lithium mine $2 million, and so on. Economists are therefore able to make calculations according to this about whether it is worthwhile destroying the natural environment, because now we know what it is ‘worth’. These calculations take no account of the real ecological impact of disturbing the land, and forget the fact that once we have sawed the branch we are sitting on (completely disturbed the biosphere), no amount of money will be able to get these environmental conditions back.

By valuing nature like this, economists believe that we can then act to protect the most ‘valuable’ parts of the natural environment. This will be society’s conservation project, to protect and restore ecosystems. To complement this, we need to do something about the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions which are causing global warming. For this, we need technology, the elites will say, and for that technology, we need money in the form of investments.

Investments and partnerships are another financial tool used by the elite to facilitate business despite the ecological crisis. You might have heard of green investments, or investing in green-tech or clean-tech, referring to low-carbon technological projects. These private investments are often guaranteed by the state through various banking mechanisms that mean that the state will bail out investors if their investments don’t end up creating value. Morena writes, “Their aim was in particular to transfer the risks associated with their investments in the low-carbon transition to the states – and therefore to society as a whole – and thus to participate in the advent of a “derisory green state”, to use the terminology developed by the economist Daniela Gabor.” These investors campaign for ‘green finance’ including tax credits, guaranteed loans, and public-private partnerships, to shift the risk for their investments in the future they want to create over to the society, rather than bearing this risk themselves.

The figure of the entrepreneur is a key promotional tool in order to communicate about the technological future these elites envision. Morena writes, “by emphasising freedom, innovation and the individual as vectors of social and environmental progress, this discourse contributes a little more to positioning the figure of the innovative entrepreneur, both careerist and heroic, at the heart of our social and economic imagination. [… This is part of] a broader effort to construct and present enlightened and enterprising economic elites as climate savers and leaders of the low-carbon transition.”

Those who know how to run a business, how to build a brand, how to make good investment decisions, and how to seize the opportunities of the market are, according to this story, those who are most capable of ‘saving’ societies from the risks of climate collapse. I fail to see the connection here. Understanding the functioning of ecosystems, mechanisms of life on Earth, and the ways in which humans extract and produce resources seem to me to be the most important qualities for someone who might be able to propose a solution for a collective. However, those exact skills which have led to the development of extractive and dominating business practices seem very unlikely to be the skillset to also present the solution.

Their promise hits at the heart of what many people today in the West consider as freedom, and therefore as something they are unwilling to give up: the freedom to choose what to buy, what we want to consume. To be free, for many, is an economic freedom, rather than an inner freedom or a freedom from punishment for example. We can continue to be free individuals under this scheme, because the basics of capitalist production will remain the same. The goal of becoming a wealthy and powerful individual remains, and the figure of the ‘greened’ entrepreneur, rags to riches story can remain in place. The mega-rich and their supporters are content, because we don’t have to change the story we tell ourselves about success – all we need are a series of market mechanisms and more science and technology to respond to the ecological crisis.

The method: Curves and Communications

The ultra-rich, in the beginning, were not part of international climate debate. However, through a series of coordinated actions, they have become central players through their ideas about the future, in the frameworks established at climate conventions across the planet.

Morena writes, “This state of affairs is the product of an epistemic community of researchers, experts, government representatives, NGOs and think-tanks, entrepreneurs and consultants who, through their coordinated efforts, have made it possible for the ultra-rich to join the international climate debate centred on the UN negotiations.” It is not only the ultra-rich themselves, but a collection of wealthy, educated individuals who all believe in the same mechanisms, who are supporting the story of the ultra-wealthy as climate heroes and implementing their policies in government accords.

A key player on this scene is the consulting company McKinsey & Company. Acting as a kind of glue between the ultra-wealthy and the political elites in many countries around the world, McKinsey is responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of consulting services to governments. What do they do? “McKinsey has an unrivalled ability to identify the latest ideas and trends, synthesise them, reappropriate them, amend them, repackage them and sell them back to its clients in the form of PowerPoint presentations.”

Frédérique Six, a junior consultant inside McKinsey, developed the Marginal Abatement Cost (MAC) curve to demonstrate how to decarbonise a company. These charts, or curves, tell a company which actions will most effectively decarbonise their economic activities, and the relative monetary cost of each option. In one chart, we can see the actions which cost the least and lead to the greatest carbon dioxide emissions reductions, and therefore these actions are the ones to be selected in the environmental blueprint for the company. These curves were made for all sorts of companies and states.

The MAC curve has many critics, however. In the beginning, Morena reports, McKinsey were criticised for failing to take into account certain important data in their calculations, for underestimating or omitting certain costs like non-financial costs, for making extravagant and/or unverifiable projections, and for failing to reveal just how they went about calculating the information displayed in these curves. Fabian Kesicki and Paul Ekins discuss some of these flaws in their journal article here.

MAC curve
Example of a Marginal Abatement Cost curve for Toronto City. From Ibrahim, Nadine and Christopher A. Kennedy. “A Methodology for Constructing Marginal Abatement Cost Curves for Climate Action in Cities.” Energies 9 (2016): 1-17.

Conference of the Parties, COPs around the world

Where is this message of green capitalism communicated? Now that these economic and political elites have created a ‘climate calendar’ of yearly meetings and discussion papers about the response to climate change, it is very difficult to exist as an activist outside of this calendar, and still have impact. It is at these meetings that decisions are made, even if they are made with the underlying blueprint developed in accordance with the interests of the mega-rich.

Greta Thunberg now attends the World Economic Forum in Davos, which is one of the places where climate policy is discussed among politicians worldwide. Thunberg must attend this conference, because it is there that decisions are made. However, the other participants are unlikely to listen to her real views. Not attending would be akin to having no voice, and she would lose the little impact she might have. It’s an impossible situation. Morena writes, “Thunberg’s presence in Davos is symptomatic of a wider difficulty in existing outside the arenas – UNFCCC, IPCC, One Planet Summit-type climate gatherings – which, taken together, make up what is commonly referred to as the “climate governance regime”. […] The climate movement has become structurally dependent on these elites and their political agenda.”

It’s no longer possible to have an impact as a climate activist and at the same time not attend the very meetings where countries agree on climate response mechanisms. At the COP21 in Paris in 2015, according to interviews conducted by Morena with climatologists who attended the meetings, those who could possibly have spoken out against the propositions in the Paris Agreement were silenced by a group of communication experts. They received the message: if this agreement does not pass, “you cannot exonerate yourselves from the possible consequences of your negative statements.” In other words, if an agreement is not reached, it is your fault for not supporting it – whether it represents a true and meaningful emissions reductions plan or not.

In order for the Paris Agreement and the technological and market-based mechanisms to become popular, many foundations, think tanks and experts sponsored by the ultra-rich began communications campaigns to incorporate their vision into the climate movements. They had to spread their message and their vision far and wide, so that their agreements were seen as the only possible logical and acceptable solution for all countries around the world to decarbonise their economies.

David Fenton is an expert in public communications who runs a business in the US called Fenton Communications. He specialises in public relations campaigns on environmental, public health and human rights issues. Morena uses Fenton’s analysis to detail the mechanisms through which these communications experts spread the message of the ultra-rich.

Common psychology will tell us, according to Fenton, that the brain is capable of thinking only about messages that are either true or false. Thus, we need to be either FOR or AGAINST climate action. By simplifying the message, we can create two groups of people: those who are for doing something about climate change, and those who are against it. In this way, those activists who support other means of climate justice and emissions reductions can be neutralised by reminding audiences that everyone is on the same page: we all want emissions reductions, and it just so happens that market mechanisms and technology is the way that we, the elite, have agreed to go about it.

It became possible, and is still possible, for companies to paint the picture that they are active and engaged in the fight against climate change, yet continue business as usual. When the ability to distinguish between different ‘shades’ of green is removed, everything that is painted green becomes of equal value – whether this is true or not.

The urgency of the situation is another mechanism that is used to push forward a singular agenda for fighting climate change. Because we ‘don’t have time to think of other solutions’, we need to use the ones that we currently have, i.e. markets and technology, so that we can confront the crisis. This of course ignores the many hundreds of other, well-elaborated solutions that are more democratic and more effective at responding to the ecological crisis.

Conferences are where ideas are put in place. Image: Mikael Kristenson

How do the rich prevent change?

Hervé Kempf, a French journalist, wrote a book in 2007 called “Comment les riches détruisent la planète (How the Rich Destroy the Planet).” More than 15 years ago, the same issues were at play, and it became clear how the ideas that certain people were pushing onto the society were preventing the collective from making the decisions that were, and still are, necessary, to respond to the ecological crisis.

According to Kempf, there are four ideas that block us from changing:

    • The belief in growth (especially economic growth)
    • The idea that technological progress will resolve ecological problems
    • The idea of the fatality of unemployment
    • The common destiny of the US and Europe (and we could add, other allies).

These ideas represent a certain view of the world that is completely opposed to any kind of ecological measures. Continued economic growth, and growth in consumption, is not possible in a world with finite resources. Technological progress cannot attempt to understand, replicate, and modify natural systems that took thousands of years to evolve. All current trials of technologies don’t show much promise in a time frame that we would need them, and require immense resources to run and deploy. That’s not to mention the risks involved in their deployment. Unemployment is a way for the capitalist system to ensure low wages to keep the costs of production down. However, the green transition involves the creation of many, many jobs across the world. Finally, the US and Europe are not on the same path: Europe follows most of its climate pledges, the US does not (or does not even engage in making pledges). Similarly, New Zealand following these Western powers prevents any kind of original and local solutions from emerging. 

If these ideas are the ones that are dominant, and are stopping us from changing, it seems evident that we need new ideas. We have them. However, they are not taken up. Why? Kempf provides several reasons:

    • The elites (our politicians, CEOs, investors, and many academics) are trained in economics, politics, and engineering. Not in ecology. It’s a natural human bias to tend to minimise the impact of the things we don’t understand.
    • We favour an economic representation of everything in society and in nature.
    • People continue to give responses like, it’s not a big problem, we have technology and science to save us
    • The way of life of rich people is cut off from the reality of climate change and social inequality. They don’t see the problem, so cannot imagine what the impact is.
    • The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant that capitalism had a chance to sink its roots deeper into societies the world over, and any other forms of social organisation were ignored for some time.

We can see these ideas playing out on an everyday basis. When it comes to constructing a new road, Governments prefer to look at a cost-benefit analysis, rather than an ecological impact report. They think it’s possible to weigh up the cost of a project against the damage that might be caused to the environment, when in fact these are two completely different things. We also see that very, very few politicians and CEOs have any training on climate change and the ecological crisis. If they don’t understand something, of course it will not be seen as particularly important. And finally, a belief in the new ‘God’ of science and technology coming to save us continues a narrative of non-action, rather than taking necessary steps today to solve the problems we face.

The problem of ‘truth’ in the climate debate

After having read this article, you might be thinking: well, how do I know what is true anymore? How do I know who to believe?

That is a very difficult question to answer. Almost everything in our current economic and social system is sponsored or supported by a certain agenda or viewpoint on the world. It’s very, very difficult to know what to believe.

I find it useful to think about the following questions when I come across a climate policy or suggestion:

    • Who is behind the idea? What is their experience – are they an ecologist, an economist, a physician, a politician, a doctor…? Does this experience relate to the proposition they are making?
    • Who finances this person, or this organisation? Are they sponsored by big business, wealthy entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos/Bill Gates…?
    • Where was this research or policy produced?
    • What happens when I perform an internet search on this idea? Or on ‘criticisms of x…”? Are there strong counter-arguments to it?

The other thing to keep in mind is that there is no ‘true’ solution to climate change. There isn’t even a ‘solution’ to it, because the problem is so complex and so widespread throughout societies across the world that no one mechanism or set of policies will enable us to respond adequately.

Conclusion

What have we learned about the ultra-rich? That their class interests (money and power) and their climate anxiety (about losing these things) have encouraged them to act in a coordinated manner to impose a certain narrative of climate change and climate solutions.

Morena concludes his book: “They may talk to us, feigning emotion, about apocalypses, collapses, a burning planet and the point of no return, but their climate emergency is not our emergency, and even less so that of the vulnerable populations already hit by the effects of global warming. It is the rich who are destroying the planet.”

It’s important to highlight this point: “their climate emergency is not our climate emergency.” Their reasons for fear, the things they will lose, and the things they want to protect are not the same as the majority of people on this planet. And when we understand this, we understand why they believe that market mechanisms and technological inventions will save us from climate collapse. The market mechanisms are in place so that they can continue to generate wealth from their investments, and the technological approach enables them to build a future where they retain their power.

Morena writes, “The climate policies implemented for their benefit – based on tax breaks, tax credits, guaranteed loans, public/private partnerships, voluntary commitments and market mechanisms – come at a high price for society. As well as being ineffective, they unfairly place the financial risk and cost of transition policies on the community.” Instead of helping address the climate crisis, these policies put the cost of a society-wide ecological transition on the community, rather than on those who are most responsible for the destruction of living ecosystems, the loss of biodiversity, and the changing climate.

You could be part of an ecological transition where you will become happier, wealthier, and more connected to other people and to the planet. These carbon credits and technological solutions will in no way benefit you in the long term. They are mechanisms designed by those who have power and money, so that they may continue to have power and money as the climate changes and their investments and assets are threatened.

I agree with Morena’s conclusion: End of the world. End of the month. End of the ultra-rich.

They are the same battle. Climate change, poverty, and inequality are three sides of the same problem. They certainly won’t be solved by more of the same thinking that created them.

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Eco-emotions: eco-anxiety, solastalgia, eco-depression…

to support independent and ad-free ecological thinking

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Jacques Lawinski

Jacques Lawinski

PhD candidate in philosophy and ecology at Université Paris VIII, visiting researcher in Lesvos, Greece. A writer, an activist, and an avid walker, I explore the planet and what it means to relate to nature, finding new, ecological ways of being.
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The way we feel when we think about climate change and environmental doom is different for each person. Some of us feel hope, others feel powerless and even depressed. What are these eco-emotions, how prevalent are they, and what can we do about them?

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In this article...

    • Anxiety is an extreme fear of a perceived future threat. Eco-anxiety is the fear that comes from environmental doom and an uncertain future for human societies.
    • Around 59% of young people aged 16-25 are very or extremely worried about climate change around the world. This is a widespread phenomenon.
    • Eco-anxiety seems to be both an emotional and a behavioural condition. It affects our mood and our ability to function in everyday life.
    • Critics of eco-anxiety say that this only occurs when we don’t know the cause of our anxiety and how to act. We know what causes climate change and we know how to reduce our emissions, so we should be furious, not anxious.
    • Some of the best ways to cope with eco-anxiety are taking action at a local level, and talking amongst like-minded people about how we feel.

In 2019, the term eco-anxiety became a buzzword in media across the world, with dramatic increases in the use of the term and reporting on the issue. Some years on, the term seems to have dropped from our everyday usage, but the evidence suggests that the phenomena is still widespread, and particularly affects young people.

Eco-emotions refers to the range of emotions that we can feel in response to environmental disasters that occur in our home cities, as well as responses to climate change, the future threat of climate change, and the possible extinction of species or even humanity in the future. Eco-emotions commonly include anxiety, grief, depression, anger, hopelessness, helplessness, powerlessness, sadness, and guilt.

The ecological crisis is a real threat to humanity, and it is one that has been caused by human beings themselves. It is important to state from the beginning that these emotions are normal responses to perceived threats in our everyday life. Real environmental disasters like cyclone Gabrielle in early 2023 are traumatic events for those who are involved, and it is entirely appropriate to feel a range of emotions after these events. Likewise with the threats that climate change pose to our livelihoods: worry and anxiety about the future are quite normal responses to a lack of certainty around how the future will play out.

Eco-emotions word cloud
Image: Coffey et al., 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100047

When looking at ecological emotions, there are a range of commonly used terms which describe particular states related to our responses to climate change. These include, according to Coffey et al.:

      • Eco-anxiety: the feeling that arises as a response to worsening environmental conditions, or a chronic fear of environmental collapse.
      • Ecological grief: the emotion related to the losses of species and specific environmental or social conditions
      • Solastalgia: the distress produced by environmental change within the local or home environment
      • Eco-angst: despair at the fragile condition of the planet
      • Environmental distress: the lived experience of doom and the desolation of their local or home environment

Eco-anxiety

Solastalgia and eco-anxiety are perhaps two of the most commonly used terms. Eco-anxiety is a form of anxiety, which means that it is an emotion arising out of a fear of something anticipated or something in the future. The American Psychological Association defines it as a chronic fear of environmental doom. Lise van Susteren talks about eco-anxiety as a form of pre-traumatic stress, rather than post-traumatic stress (PTSD). It is a kind of stress that arises now, in the present, but relates to a trauma which is yet to happen, something that exists in the future: climate breakdown, environmental doom, the extinction of species… She says, “We are on the tracks, the train is coming, we can hear it, we can see it, and we’re wondering if we’re going to do what’s necessary to save ourselves in time.” For van Susteren, eco-anxiety is a condition, and not a disorder. The real disorder, for her, is to not have eco-anxiety: this means that someone is not concerned about the future of the planet.

On the other hand, solastalgia is an emotion relating to the present and past environmental disasters that occur close to home. In 2003, the Australian Glenn Albrecht coined the term, and talked about seeing his country disappearing without him actually leaving it. Solastalgia is the suffering that we have in the face of climate destruction: it is watching the rivers dry up, hearing fewer and fewer birds, seeing the trees get diseases… all the small experiences in everyday life that demonstrate a changing climate and environment.

There have been a few articles about eco-anxiety in the New Zealand press, as well as some studies involving eco-emotions amongst university students in Wellington. This Stuff article laments the fact that older generations think that those who experience eco-anxiety are hysterics, and should just calm down. RNZ published a story on eco-anxiety in young people in particular, noting the experiences of some parents regarding their young children, who are experiencing distress because their favourite animals are at risk of extinction. Slightly older children are also distressed because they have realised that their future almost certainly will not be as rosy as it could have been.

Just how prevalent is eco-anxiety, then? In 2021, a study was published in The Lancet that collated the experiences of 10,000 young people from 10 countries across the globe: “Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey” by Caroline Hickman et al.). Children aged 16-25 were surveyed from Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the UK, and the USA). They found that 59% of respondents were very or extremely worried about the impacts of climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried. More than 50% reported feeling sad, anxious, powerless, angry, helpless, or guilty.

Image: Caroline Hickman et al., 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00278-3

The researchers wrote: “These factors are likely to increase the risk of developing mental health problems, particularly in more vulnerable individuals such as children and young people, who often face multiple life stressors without having the power to reduce, prevent, or avoid such stressors.” Young people know the risks that are present and they know that their future may not be so bright, but they are quite powerless to do something about it.

There are many ways that we can respond as a result of experiencing eco-anxiety. The researchers write, “Defence mechanisms against the anxiety provoked by climate change have been well documented, including dismissing, ignoring, disavowing, rationalising, and negating the experiences of others. These behaviours, when exhibited by adults and governments, could be seen as leading to a culture of uncare.” As a result of these adult behaviours, more respondents felt betrayed by their governments than reassured by their actions.

Image: Caroline Hickman et al., 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00278-3

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“The destruction of life forms every day makes me anxious. It’s also the difference between the political announcements and the actions taken to change things. This creates cognitive dissonance and a feeling of a lack of power. I can sometimes let myself be submerged by emotions. When these emotions are really present it’s difficult to have a logical discussion. We end up feeling like we don’t get across the urgency of the problem. I also put a lot of responsibility on myself to act in the right way and make a lot of effort to do certain things which makes life difficult.

I think we must welcome and accept eco-anxiety. It’s a process of mourning for a world and a way of life that is no longer possible, and mourning many, many species that are losing their lives. Action is the best way to leave the state of depression. Taking action, finding friends, and making statements about what you believe in.

I don’t want to cure my eco-anxiety, because I find it healthy.”

Interview with Lucie Lucas, in Vert.eco (translated from the French)

Does eco-anxiety stop people from living normal lives?

For Lucie Lucas, her eco-anxiety was something that motivated her to act. According to much of the research, eco-emotions are often motivating emotions, meaning that they lead to us taking more actions to prevent climate destruction. We can harness these emotions and use them to guide our actions, making positive decisions for our future and the future of our planet.

However, some research suggests that eco-anxiety can also be an emotion that has behavioural consequences: we can no longer function normally in the world as a result. This is one of the reasons why understanding eco-anxiety and its prevalence among young people is particularly important, and could be a potential problem for our societies. Certain studies claim no connection between eco-anxiety and behavioural changes; other studies such as one conducted at Victoria University in Wellington and Canberra University in Australia, claim a clear connection between eco-anxiety and some kind of cognitive impairment.

This study, published in 2021, by Hogg et al., noted that 54% of respondents experience eco-anxiety at least some of the time. Some of the common physical or behavioural responses included changes in mood (20%), unable to sleep or unable to eat (11.38%), trouble concentrating or constant rumination about how one’s actions affect the environment (6%) and an impacted ability to work or study (4.49%).

The aim of the study was to determine a scale or set of behaviours and emotions upon which we could measure eco-anxiety. The Hogg scale, as they called it, measures eco-anxiety with some reliability, and includes both emotional experiences, and behavioural changes, indicating that eco-anxiety is both an emotional and a physical condition.

In 2021, Stanley et. al looked at the impact that eco-emotions might have on our willingness to take action to stop climate change. They looked at three emotions: eco-anxiety, eco-anger, and eco-depression. They found that eco-anger was a good predictor of personal action taken to stop climate change. All three emotions were good predictors of actions taken at a collective level, with eco-depression and eco-anger being most likely to predict collective action. The researchers note that eco-anger might not be the cause of personal action, rather there might just be some relationship between those who experience eco-anger, and those who take personal actions.

Image: Aaron Thomas on Unsplash.

Critiques of eco-anxiety

Does eco-anxiety really exist? Is it something we should be talking about, or is it just another way for us to label and categorise an experience, instead of focusing on the actions needed to respond to the ecological crisis?

The German philosopher Gunter Anders said that fear is a necessary stage we must pass through, in order to take meaningful social action. We must feel the fear for a future we do not want, before we are to really commit to living in a different way and fighting for a different future. Anxiety, on the other hand, is a kind of fear when we don’t know what the cause is and we don’t know how to respond to that cause.

This point of view is supported by Frédéric Lordon, a French philosopher and economist. In a contentious and provocative article in Le Monde Diplomatique (in French), he argues that in the large majority of cases, people are not experiencing an anxiety, but a form of fear. Anxiety is a condition which leaves us unable to act, because we are anticipating a problem which has not yet happened. He writes, “Eco-anxiety is to see the climate disaster, but to not have any idea from where this disaster comes or how to address it, to defend oneself.” Climate change, however, is a known problem, and we know what we need to do to respond to this problem: reduce CO2 emissions, reduce our consumption of natural resources, stop industrial farming practices, reduce pollution in waterways, in the ground, and in the air… There are many known actions that need to be taken. It is clear what to do to respond.

The media is presenting eco-anxiety as a new trend, and this, according to Lordon, is a neoliberal tendency to psychologise things – to make normal emotional responses to everyday life into particular psychological conditions that require ‘treatment’. This depoliticises these emotions, meaning that instead of looking at the social and political causes of eco-anxiety, we see that the individual person is at fault for experiencing these emotions and try to ‘cure’ them of their condition or disorder. It becomes ‘your fault’ for worrying about your future, rather than the fault of power imbalances and the actions of a certain few, wealthy and powerful individuals.

This in turn means that we can continue doing very little to confront the ecological crisis, because the media have neutralised the emotions that could lead to positive climate action. Instead of mobilising these emotions, they are referred to as the latest condition to plague young people and make their lives miserable, rendering them incapable of participating normally in society. These particular people need psychological interventions, to help them participate in society – the very society which is causing climate change and ecological disaster. Lordon would say that it is the society that is sick, not the individual.

“The only way to break the deadlock is to repeat the same thing over and over: there is ecocide, it is capitalist, there is no solution capitalist, therefore…

We have to put clear and distinct ideas in the heads of people about what is destroying them. That way, we can’t say we have no idea what to fight against, we can’t say we’re eco-anxious, because we know the cause, and we know what to fight.”

Frédéric Lordon

Lordon prefers to refer to himself and others as eco-furious. He is reacting to the ecological crisis, and also to the fact that very little is being done by governments and those in power to stop this crisis. Instead of being anxious because we don’t know what to do, we should be furious because we know what we need to do, but it is not being done.

A second critique of eco-anxiety asks the question, “who profits from eco-anxiety?” In an article on Vert.eco (in French), Vincent Bresson looks at eco-anxiety as a new way for certain people to make money and capitalise on the emotions of everyday people in a world which works against their interests. He notes that streaming services such as Netflix produce and buy content related to the environmental crisis. They play on the fear of the world disappearing, humans being overtaken by robots, or some calamity wiping out life on earth, to produce content that people pay to watch.

Similarly, there are many conferences and YouTube videos and talks which discuss “transform your climate anxiety into positive action” or “overcoming climate anxiety,” which are sponsored by large groups and corporates. These “gurus”, as Bresson calls them, come onto the stage and talk about how people can turn their climate anxiety into actions such as recycling, living without plastic, driving the car less, giving climate talks in local schools… They do this, instead of drawing attention to the current social and economic systems which lead to climate anxiety, and produce the ecological crisis. Instead of helping people to see that the causes of these problems are also much larger than the individual actions they are responsible for. As a result, many solutions are proposed by budding entrepreneurs looking to turn problems into solutions, such as charging $200 to spend a day in nature hugging trees, visiting a specialist eco-psychologist who will somehow make this uncertain future okay…

These two critiques draw attention to the social and political causes of eco-anxiety, and remind us that an individual is not necessarily responsible for being in a state where they fear their future. However, these critiques miss the mark when it comes to very young people. Children cannot take actions to stop climate change, yet they are coming to understand the implication of the world that they live in. This creates a very real anxiety, which cannot and should not be ignored. The child who is afraid of the elephants becoming extinct probably does not understand enough about why this is the case, and can do almost nothing about this problem. The stress and anxiety this child feels is a condition we should be concerned about, as we introduce more and more climate-related education into our schools.

Image: Antenna on Unsplash.

What to do about eco-anxiety

If you are experiencing eco-anxiety, or any of the other eco-emotions, it can sometimes be difficult to see how to overcome this debilitating worry about the future. This is especially the case when the actions taken by governments and businesses are nowhere near the level necessary to confront the ecological crisis.

There are two things that are particularly effective as strategies to cope with eco-emotions. The first of these is to take action at the local level. This can be in whatever way you like, with whoever you like, and focused on whichever cause you feel most strongly about. For some people, this might be volunteering with a conservation group once a week to plant trees and restore a local habitat. For others it might be joining a climate organisation as the treasurer and helping with their accounting. For others still, it might be starting a climate focus-group in their business or workplace to look at how the business might be rethought, resources might be re-used, and circular principles implemented.

Taking action means that we no longer feel quite so helpless and powerless, and we begin to see that the things we are personally doing can have an impact on the lives of other people and the state of the planet. Every tree we plant, and every discussion we have with colleagues will change the state of the web of connections which forms our cultural fabric. Just as one tree helps an ecosystem to recover, one conversation, one policy adopted in your workplace will help us get closer to the systemic changes which are really needed. By acting, we leave the realm of thoughts and rumination in our heads, and take practical actions to change the world around us. And it feels great!

The second thing we can do is learn to let go of the feeling of personal responsibility for climate change. Yes, some of our actions are responsible global temperatures increasing and biodiversity loss. But unless you are Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos (or a member of this kind of wealthy elite), your real contribution to climate change is infinitesimal. Many of the decisions we make in everyday life are often forced decisions: unless we really go out of our way to live a zero-waste life, the things we buy will be packaged in single-use plastic, and there isn’t much we can do about this, unless a large proportion of consumers take action against the companies that are responsible for these choices. It’s not your fault, and your fault alone, and you cannot bare the burden of the responsibility for climate change. A series of decisions made over centuries of human action have led us to this point – and a large majority of those decisions were made when you were not alive. Climate change isn’t your fault.

Dr. Jackie Feather, a New Zealand psychologist, suggests that opening up and coming back to the present moment are also important strategies to confront eco-anxiety. Instead of imagining a terrible future situation, we can confront the present moment with honesty and look at who we are and what we are doing, and take actions to change the present. The future hasn’t happened yet, and you are not the only person responsible for how this future will play out. But the present moment – that is yours alone to create!

Matthew Adams, a psychology lecturer at the University of Brighton in the UK, emphasises that eco-anxiety cannot be fixed. It is a “normal response to a crisis or threatening situation.” His tips to cope with eco-anxiety include learning to acknowledge and accept difficult emotions, and realising that you are not alone with these emotions. Many young people around the world are feeling similarly powerless and fearful for their future.  

Eco-psychologist Mary-Jane Rust talks about the loss of a connection with nature that is prevalent in many Western societies. She says, “There’s a sense of dullness in our comfortable world. We’ve lost a sense of our wild selves. You see many humans go in search of that. We create the adventure that we’ve lost.” By seeking out a connection with the world around us, and creating opportunities for adventure and exploration, we learn to love the wild – the natural environment. This in turn helps us to feel more embodied and to gain wisdom, experiential knowledge, rather than just theoretical knowledge and facts.

The website Carbon Conversations, which has recently become Living with the Climate Crisis, has a set of free resources to help people facilitate sessions where participants explore their eco-emotions and learn strategies to cope with these emotions. This is based on over 15 years of eco-psychology sessions in Oxford, England, started by Rosemary Randall and Andy Brown.

Where to get help

If you are experiencing anxiety or depression that you feel you cannot manage, it’s a good idea to get help from someone who knows and understands these feelings. Contacting a psychologist or psychotherapist near you is a good place to start. It takes courage to recognise that we might not be able to overcome these emotions by ourselves, and it takes time to accept them, but once they become a motivating force, they can lead us towards positive actions, deep friendships, and more meaningful connections with human beings and the natural world.

If you need to talk to someone, there are people ready to help you. In New Zealand, you can call these numbers 24/7:

Lifeline – 0800 543 354 (0800 LIFELINE) or free text 4357 (HELP)

Youthline – 0800 376 633, free text 234

Anxiety NZ – 0800 269 4389 (0800 ANXIETY)

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All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.

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Why plurality.eco?

Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.

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Is recycling really that great?

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author
Jacques Lawinski

Jacques Lawinski

PhD candidate in philosophy and ecology at Université Paris VIII, visiting researcher in Lesvos, Greece. A writer, an activist, and an avid walker, I explore the planet and what it means to relate to nature, finding new, ecological ways of being.
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Recycling is often heralded by business and government as an effective way to combat climate change and pollution problems. Does that claim stack up? You’ll discover that in fact, reusable glass bottles are the best packaging option over short distances, and not recycling. It will also become clear that recycling is a way for companies to shift responsibility for their waste to consumers, rather than addressing the problem themselves.

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Plastic brick company Lego announced recently that they are abandoning their project to make Lego pieces from recycled plastic bottles. Lego is trying to reduce its impact on the environment through changing the materials it uses to produce the bricks. They currently use acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), which needs about 2kg of petrol to make 1kg of plastic. The test involved recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from plastic bottles, but the conclusion was, according to the company, that recycled bricks would result in higher carbon dioxide emissions and a larger environmental impact than the current process.

In New Zealand, only 29% of plastic bottles are recycled, yet the world average for plastic bottles is 50%. Consumer Magazine conducted some research in 2021 into the extent to which plastic packaging was recyclable. In New Zealand, 52% of plastic packaging was found to be, in practice not recyclable, despite some claims made by manufacturers. This result was the second worst (behind Brazil at 92%) among the countries tested. In Australia, only 14% of plastic packaging is not recyclable.

Image: Consumer Magazine Research

Despite this, New Zealanders still believe that recycling is one of the most effective actions to combat climate change. In some research into environmental attitudes by IPSOS in 2022, 62% of respondents are already recycling, and a further 33% are likely to start recycling in the next year, totalling 95% of the population who are now likely to be recycling. However, 50% of New Zealanders believe that recycling is one of the top three actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In actual fact, recycling comes in at 60th place, behind numerous other actions that are more effective.

Image: IPSOS research 2022 New Zealanders' Attitudes and Behaviours Towards Climate Change

As Lego have found out, recycling plastic isn’t exactly a carbon-friendly process. It involves the emissions of carbon dioxide in processes that transform the plastic from bottles into plastic that is strong to make Lego bricks. Recycling is a process which involves the addition of energy in order to transform one thing, into something else. As we will see, reusable packaging is more environmentally-friendly than recycling.

Plastic Recycling

In 2019, plastics generated 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – 3.4% of global emissions. 90% of these emissions came from the production of plastic, because plastic is made through using fossil fuels like petrol. The OECD believe that by 2060, the impact of plastics is set to more than double, from 1.8 to 4.3 billion tonnes of GHG emissions.

In 2019, researchers from the University of California looked into the relative emissions of different ways of treating plastics. They concluded that it wasn’t recycling that had the largest impact; rather, using 100% renewable energy in the production process was the most effective way to reduce plastic emissions, by 51%.

The researchers analysed four different strategies:

  1. Replacing fossil-fuel plastics with bio-plastics, in this case made from sugarcane.
  2. Using renewable energy in the production process (using wind power and biogas).
  3. Recycling plastics
  4. Reducing growth in demand from 4% per year to 2% per year.

They report, “Our study demonstrates the need for integrating energy, materials, recycling and demand-management strategies to curb growing life-cycle GHG emissions from plastics.” In an interview with the University of California to release the article, the authors explained what they meant. “We thought that any one of these strategies should have curbed the greenhouse gas emissions of plastics significantly,” author Sangwon Suh said. But they didn’t. “We tried one and it didn’t really make much impact. We combined two, still the emissions were there. And then we combined all of them. Only then could we see a reduction in future greenhouse gas emissions from the current level.”

What this study shows is that recycling by itself has very little impact on the emissions generated by plastic. It is only when combined with other changes, including reducing the growth rate of our consumption of plastic, that we see an overall impact.

Plastic is a good material, economically speaking, because it is strong, lightweight, cheap to produce, and easy to make. That is why many companies use plastic, for construction, packaging, everyday items, and more. However, plastic is incredibly damaging to the environment, and in many cases today requires fossil fuels like petrol to produce. We should also be asking whether plastic is the material to be using in an ecological future. Is transitioning to a ‘circular economy’ of plastic recycling even a good idea?

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Is plastic recycling part of an environmentally-friendly future?

Chelsea M. Rochman, Mark Anthony Browne, and other scientists make the case for classifying plastics as hazardous waste materials, and not solid waste, as they are currently. This is for multiple reasons. Firstly, plastics break down slowly in the environment, where they gradually make their way into food webs of small animals such as fish, invertebrates, and microorganisms, which ingest small bits of plastics called microplastics. When microplastics enter an organism’s tissue, they cause harm, such as tissue degradation and cellular dysfunction. It is estimated that human beings ingest up to 5 grams of microplastics per week.

Further, the ingredients in plastics, such as monomers, polystyrene, polyurethane and polycarbonate can be carcinogenic – they can cause cancer. Polyethylene, however, which is used to make plastic bags, is often thought to be safer. However, even these plastics can become dangerous when they pick up traces of pesticides, and end up disrupting key physiological processes in the body. Plastics also contain endocrine disruptors – molecules that stop some of the functions of the endocrine system, leading to cancer, thyroid disruption, and other non-communicable diseases.

The authors note that the same approach was used to clean up the atmosphere of Chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) some years ago: they were classed as hazardous materials, and began to stop being used, and when they are used, they are treated with extreme caution. Rochman and Browne therefore call for the most harmful plastics to be replaced by safer materials, and then for a closed-loop recycling of these safer materials.

Currently, 430 million tonnes of plastic are produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, which is more than the weight of all human beings on the planet (390 million tonnes). Globally, 95% of all plastic used in packaging is disposed of after one use, and one third of this is not collected – it therefore enters the environment unmanaged, and causes pollution.

The best solution to waste management problems such as this is to not produce the waste in the first place – especially as a huge proportion of plastic packaging is used once and then disposed of. There are alternatives to this packaging that exist, for example, selling items in bulk, or in reusable containers, which have much lower emissions, and do not produce waste. The pollution problem with recycling schemes is the leaks in the system: every time plastic is not thrown away into a bin, it enters the environment and is then incredibly difficult to clean up, as it begins to affect other animals and plants.

Image: Lacey Williams on Unsplash.

What about glass and aluminium cans?

In 2020, Zero Waste Europe conducted a study to measure the difference in emissions between different types of packaging. They found out that in most cases, reusable glass bottles are the best option.

Recycled glass bottles require 75% of the energy used in the production of new glass bottles. However, glass bottles can also be washed and re-used. Reused glass bottles produce 85% lower emissions than single-use glass bottles, 75% lower emissions than plastic (PET) and 57% lower than aluminium cans. However, emissions for glass per unit of packaging are consistently 3-4 times greater than for plastics and aluminium.

When comparing reusable glass bottles to single-use PET plastic bottles, the glass bottles are preferable. Despite having much higher initial emissions, gradually the emissions balance out when the glass bottles are reused. However, this is only the case with smaller bottles. 2-litre plastic bottles and re-used glass bottles have approximately the same emissions.

Looking at aluminium cans, reused glass bottles seem to win again. After only three uses, glass bottles have lower emissions than single-use cans.

Transport distance also plays a role in the emissions involved in a particular type of packaging. With distances of more than 100km, reusable glass bottles have higher emissions than cartons or bags in a box, because of the transport of the bottles to be cleaned, refilled, and sent back to the distribution point.

In sum, the authors conclude that 76% of studies they looked at showed that reusable packaging is the most environmentally friendly option. Recycling is more energy intensive than reusing packaging, and recycling involves a new input of energy each time, whereas the effects of reusing packaging are balanced out over multiple uses. The more something is reused, the lower the total emissions for this type of packaging.

Image: Globelet Reusable on Unsplash.

Is recycling a worthwhile behaviour, then?

Recycling is a behaviour done, in most cases, by the consumers themselves. When you buy a bottle of Coca-Cola, or a can of peaches, it is up to you to make the choice whether to recycle or not. This of course depends upon the recycling facilities in the area where you are using these items: if you are in a park with no recycling bins, the bottle of Coca-Cola probably won’t end up being recycled; when you’re at home, the tin of peaches probably will be recycled.

This is a good and easy solution for companies. They do not have to take any responsibility for their products, and the impacts of the packaging that they use. If something is not recycled, or is found in the environment somewhere, it is because a careless consumer put it there – not because the producer made a product in a plastic bottle. The possibility that their products can be recycled is both a selling point and a way to shirk responsibility. In the mid to late 1970’s, Coca-Cola switched from reusable glass bottles to plastic bottles, which were more light-weight and cheaper to produce. Coca-Cola and Pepsi were among the founding members of Keep America Beautiful, an organisation aimed at reducing the amount of waste thrown into the environment. The result? Cheaper costs of production for Coca-Cola, and advertising campaigns placing the responsibility on those who drink these beverages, rather than the company that produces them.

As we have seen, reusable glass bottles are one of the most carbon-friendly packaging options. Recycling is a process that involves adding a lot of energy to transform the old item into a new one. Reusing packaging means that we must simply clean it, and then use it again.

How do I decide which packaging is best?

For most of us, the most effective action when it comes to packaging is to follow these simple rules, in order:

    • Does this item I am purchasing need packaging? If not, don’t use it or don’t buy a version of it with packaging. For example, buy loose apples rather than plastic-wrapped ones. Avoid packaging wherever possible.
    • If the item needs packaging, can I use a glass bottle or jar to buy the item? Most pantry goods, as well as cleaning liquids, can be bought in bulk in this way. You can get flour, oats, soy sauce, olive oil, laundry detergent, and more, and use reusable glass jars.
    • If the item cannot be bought like this, is there an option which doesn’t involve plastic? For example, buying soap wrapped in paper rather than plastic, jam in a glass jar rather than plastic pot, etc.
    • Finally comes the choice of recyclable packaging. Which among the options involves recyclable packaging? This is sure to be better than single-use throw-away plastic.

As we have seen, there are many alternatives to recycling, and purchasing items in recyclable packaging is a good action, but by no means the most effective way to reduce emissions.

To have the most impact, the companies producing goods must change the packaging and distribution of the goods they are selling. Consumers are not the ones responsible for this packaging, nor are they able to start buying in reusable jars if the producers do not sell their products in this way. By pointing out the inefficiency of recycling to your favourite brands on social media, and choosing to shop at places where reusable containers are welcome, we can force companies to change their packaging.

Sharing knowledge is also a great gift.
Let others know about this article

It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.

All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.

If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.

Why plurality.eco?

Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.

Our network

On social media

We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.

Copyright © Plurality.eco 2023

4 ways to think about the economy

to support independent and ad-free ecological thinking

Big questions: Economics

What actually happens in the economy? And how do our representations of the economy influence the way we try to solve the problems that we have identified? Are there alternatives to this dominant neoliberal paradigm, which isn’t working? These key questions will be answered here.

New Zealanders have just elected a new Government for the next three years, led by the National Party. As Toby Boraman remarked on The Conversation and RNZ, “Labour out, National in – either way, neoliberalism wins again.” The orthodox and dominant economic thinking in New Zealand has for some time been neoliberalism. In 2021, Branko Marcetic wrote an article for the Jacobin entitled, “The New Zealand “Socialists” Who Govern Like Neoliberals” with exactly the same message: New Zealand’s political parties, and the economists that support them, might claim to wear different colours, but underneath they’re exactly the same.

This isn’t the case everywhere in the world, although dominant economic, scientific, and technical thinking is becoming more prevalent in many countries. Markets, competition, free trade, and cut backs vs spending are not the only way to look at the economy. Nor are they the only instruments a government has at its disposal to respond in times of need.

Market exchange
Image: Grab on Unsplash

Liberal economists and financial markets

In 21st century western societies, economists are constantly making predictions and analysing the forces of the market, in order to determine what our lives will be like. You would be justified in thinking that these market forces, in particular the financial markets, are the direct determinants of the wellbeing of our citizens.

This is only partially the case. Whilst financial markets have become some sort of ruling deity for governments and businesses, where every decision is calculated so as to not displease these markets, they are not the only way to look at the relations between people in a society. I’m sure you’ve heard yourself referred to as a consumer, and those companies who make the things you buy as producers. You exchange money and goods with them inside a market, and this forms the basis of the relationships you have, besides those with your family members, as an adult in society. There are, however, other relationships going on, and other exchanges being made, which are also economic in nature, but which are not best carried out in this model of a free market.

New Zealand suffers from a hegemony of orthodox liberal market economists. All Finance Ministers believe almost the same things about the economy: as demonstrated by the two articles linked above. What differs is the extent to which they want to intervene through social subsidies and Government spending (and therefore in taxation, too). Left leaning parties tax to redistribute some of the wealth; right-leaning parties reduce taxes to let the market decide. But, the major players of the economy, the belief in the market, the possibility that the market will make corrections, and GDP as the holy-grail are common amongst all of these economists.

man trading on stock markets
Image: Adam Nowakowski on Unsplash

For many, many years, the Government has talked about poverty, illiteracy, a housing crisis… and none of these issues have been resolved. Looking at the child poverty statistics released by StatsNZ, many of the indicators have barely changed since 2007. This shows the limitations both of the economic instruments being used, and the representation that politicians and economists are using to understand the problem. As we will see, there is more than one way to look at the economy, and the exchange relations that are going on between people each and every day.

The ecological crisis is yet another crisis that will almost certainly bring our current economic system to its knees. Based on our collective ability to act in the face of current problems, which seems very limited, it is rational to be worried that we won’t be able to confront this crisis either. If we’ve been largely unsuccessful at responding to the social crises of the early 21st century, the ones coming up will be even worse, as it becomes harder to produce fruit and vegetables, more and more property is destroyed by climate disasters, and social relations and mental health decline further.

Image: The Daily Blog

The four representations

Gilles Raveaud, in his book Les Disputes des Economistes (the Disputes of Economists, 2013), refers to four main representations of the economy. These are:

  1. The market, for liberal economists
  2. The circuit of money flows, for Keynesian economists
  3. The place of power struggles, for Marxist economists
  4. A part of nature, subject to its limits, for ecological economists.

Each approach points towards a different way of looking at the economy. There are problems with each theory, there are benefits to each theory. But they are just that: theories that attempt to explain the world. The world in which we live constantly changes, so we cannot believe that one model will always be the true representation of reality. Raveaud’s analysis is particularly useful to see the differences between economic theories. The economic representations below synthesise his book.

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Discover the economic representations below.

Liberal Economics

Liberal Economics

For liberal economists, all economic mechanisms such as labour, health, education, and welfare, are viewed as markets. The goal for these liberal economists is to increase competition within these markets, which will drive down prices and increase the quality of the goods and services provided. Government plays a small role, because the markets know how to regulate themselves.

 

Adam Smith, Scottish economist in the 18th century and author of “The Wealth of Nations,” believed that wealth was created through exchange. As individuals, we must sell our labour, in order to be able to buy the things that we need. We do so in a market for labour, just as there are markets for fruit and vegetables, meat, technological devices, and construction services. The market, for Smith, is a place of freedom, creativity, and autonomy for each person, and the market is like the social cement between individuals. Our social agreements are not based on emotions or tribal organisations, but rather on the free exchange of goods, services, and labour.

Sweet potato for sale. Image: Juno Jo on Unsplash

Markets are regulated, according to the liberal economists, by something called the price mechanism. The price of a particular good, for example one kilo of kumara, is determined through negotiations between buyers and sellers. If the price of kumara is set at $1 per kilo, everyone will want to buy some, and the supermarket will sell out by 11am. All the people in the afternoon will not be able to buy kumara. On the other hand, if kumara is $10 per kilo, there will still be some left at the end of the day, because only a few people wanted to buy it at that price. The seller sets the price, and the consumer responds, and in a movement like this, they find the best price where the greatest number of people can buy kumara at the highest price for the seller.

 

Is this price, established through ‘feedback’ between shoppers and the supermarkets, fair? Liberal economists would say yes. If the market determines that the price should be $7 per kilo, some people will miss out. These people are happy, according to liberal economists, because they preferred not to buy kumara – they made the choice not to. Everyone is content, because everyone made the choice of what they would buy, based on how much money they had to spend. But, this price is only fair if all the shoppers are there to negotiate with the kumara growers, which is never the case. Likewise, the shoppers must know about all the other supermarkets selling kumara, too, before making a fair choice. They might be selling it cheaper elsewhere, but we rarely shop around all the stores before deciding what to buy.

 

In good times, this price regulation seems alright: we get lower prices and better quality due to competition; people are all choosing what they want from an open and fair market. However, as we are feeling now with the 2023 cost of living crisis, and have felt for some time, in periods of crisis, people are not happy about the choices they are forced to make. Likewise, good and bad choices become polarised, especially in the case of markets for education and hospitals – some hospitals are labelled ‘good’, and others, ‘bad’ or ‘dangerous.’ In times of crisis, it is impossible to find the ideal point where shoppers and suppliers are happy, at the right price.

Keynesian Economics

Keynesian Economics

John Maynard Keynes realised that in times of crisis, the market could not work by itself to sort things out. During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, Keynes challenged the viewpoint which said that people selling their labour (workers) and people buying that labour (entrepreneurs) would end up balancing out such that all those people who wanted a job would have one. Instead, unsold goods and unemployed people are not the exception, but the norm of market economics. Left to its own devices, the market will self-destruct. Therefore, we need certain powers of direction for the market, so that it goes in the right direction.

 

Instead of looking at the economy in terms of markets, Keynes thinks it’s better to look at it like a circuit. In this circuit, money flows between people all the time. Money has no value of itself, but because we all believe in its value, money holds importance and meaning. When banks lend people money, despite the fact that they might only have $100 in their vault, they can lend around 10 times that much – $1000 – to someone wanting a loan. At no moment in this transaction is money actually used – the loan involves moving numbers from one ledger (that of the bank), to another (that of the borrower). This system works if there aren’t too many loans, and if not everyone wants their money at the same time.

Circular flow diagram. Image: United States Government on Wikicommons.

Entrepreneurs are rational people for Keynes, and it is their movement of money which constitutes the greatest activity in the economy. When entrepreneurs reduce their prices, they are able to sell more. But in order to keep lowering their prices, they either have to reduce their wages, or their profit margins. This leads to unemployment, and very easily, a negative spiral can start, where prices reduce, wages reduce, unemployment increases, and the market cannot find a solution.

 

Another actor is needed in order to correct this problem, according to Keynes. These actors take the form of institutions: either the government, or the central bank (the Reserve Bank in New Zealand). The central bank can change the interest rate, which will either increase or decrease spending. When money becomes more expensive, people spend less of it, and vice-versa. But, with this option, we can very easily end up with inflation: when the price of everything increases.

 

On the other hand, the Government can also act by spending money in the economy, in the form of construction projects, welfare payments, health and education, subsidies, and more. This money will then flow through the economy, and enable wages to increase again. However, there are leaks to this circuit of money that Keynes has imagined. Companies can choose to save the money they are given by the Government, instead of spending it. Some consumers will spend this money on goods from other countries, so the money leaves the country and is not seen again. This strategy also increases public debt, the amount of money that the Government has borrowed.

 

During the COVID crisis, these two strategies were used by the Government and the Reserve Bank to manipulate the economy, because the market by itself was not able to regulate itself. The Government spent a lot of money during the crisis, giving it mostly to businesses, so they could stay alive despite not trading. But, this spending led to inflation, as all the prices increased. As a result, the Reserve Bank increased the price of money, the interest rate, which meant that it became more expensive to borrow money, and spending will therefore decrease again. This decrease in spending, otherwise called inflationary pressure, is felt most severely by the lower and middle classes of the economy. It becomes noticeably more expensive to just buy basic goods, especially when wages are not increasing.

 

The problem with Keynesian policies is that they increase public debt, and they very often don’t work well unless there is a coordinated approach or strategy at a higher level, because of the leaks in the circuit. What we have seen, however, is that there are power imbalances in the economy which are not able to be addressed by the market, or by Keynesian institutions.

Marxist Economics

Marxist Economics

When the buyers and sellers have decided on a price for kumara, some people will miss out because the price is too high. Liberal economists justify this, saying that these people, on low incomes, are happy with not having any kumara, because they decided not to buy any. Karl Marx, a major thinker in 19th century political economy, and analyst of capitalism, argued that liberal economists are just justifying the impoverishment of low-income earners. Marx was a key thinker in the development of socialism, and what we know today as worker’s parties such as the Labour Party.

 

According the Marx, the economy is the place where power struggles play out. In the capitalist economy, a limited number of people own the means of production, which are the factories, office blocks, machines, agricultural land, etc. The rest of the population are workers who are forced to sell their labour to these few, in order to live their lives. Because there are always unemployed people on the labour market, wages very often do not increase: if a worker wants to be paid more, the company can fire them, and instead hire another person who is willing to be paid less. Wages are therefore fixed by the market, and not in terms of the value produced by a particular employee in their work.

Union protester
Image: Manny Becerra on Unsplash

The capitalist, the one who owns the means of production, buys the right to use the labour of a worker for a whole day, by paying them a wage. This work therefore belongs to the capitalist, and not to the person who did the work. For example, someone working as a data analyst does not own any of the data analysis that they do. This person spends their entire day producing things that will not belong to them. In this way, workers are exploited, because they are not able to obtain the value created by the work that they do. Instead, the company sells the data analysis and pockets the profits, for example.

 

Marx disagrees with Adam Smith, who we read about before. Smith believed that wealth was created through exchange, but Marx believed that it is violence that creates wealth. The domination of one person or resource by another is what leads to this person becoming rich. For example, it was through stealing land, slavery, and the expropriation of villagers that the British Empire was able to amass power and wealth in the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

The global economy is, according to this analysis, not to everyone’s advantage. What ends up happening is that some people control a lot of the machines, land and buildings necessary to produce goods and services, and these people are concentrated in wealthy countries like the United States. Multi-national companies like Apple, Toyota, Nestle, etc. capture most of the value added, and the workers, often in Asia, of these companies, see almost nothing of what the company rakes in when they sell their goods. The market is, for Marx, hierarchical and a place of domination, and not a place of freedom and expression as Smith believed.

 

For liberal economists, freedom is about being able to possess, to exchange, and to sell things. Democracy is therefore about being free to do these things in the market, without much intervention by a government or external actor. However, in a capitalist regime motivated by profits, socialists argue that there will be too many cars, robots, televisions and soft drinks, and not enough social housing, schools and hospitals. These public goods, such as health and education, need to be provided by the Government, so that all citizens are assured a quality education and healthcare regime, no matter their position or actions within the market.

 

In the early 21st century, many previously state-owned services were sold off to private buyers, with the idea that increased competition would improve the quality of services provided. However, this was often to the detriment to the employees of these companies, as well as services often being cut, reduced, or unreliable, such as what happened with the rail network in the United Kingdom. Sometimes, the private market suppliers collude – they make an agreement to keep prices high – and this is in their interests, rather than in the interests of the people consuming the service. This has been shown to be the case with electricity markets in Europe, with petrol markets, and more.

 

Today however, the market for goods and services is not the largest or most dominant economic market. That would be the financial market. In the 1970’s, the financial markets were opened, and currency exchanges were no longer made at fixed rates. Buying, selling, and lending on the financial markets increased dramatically. Whereas previously, paying people a salary meant that you were guaranteeing that they could buy your goods, now, this is no longer the case. Wages are a cost, rather than a guarantee of consumption, and therefore, they must be reduced as much as possible. The money that is used to buy things and to invest, in large part comes from these financial markets, and not from the sale of goods and services.

 

In the end, according to Marx, the exploitation of workers is what will cause the demise of capitalism. This is because the only way to make profits is through taking the added value of the work that employees perform. Value is created through labour, and exploiting this labour for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. At a certain point, however, these workers can no longer buy the goods and services that they are busy producing, because they no longer have enough money for them: most of it is concentrated at the top. Capitalists can do nothing about this: they are forced, by competition, to keep making a profit, by reducing the prices and selling more, or by reducing the costs of production (the price of labour, the wages). This leads to overproduction, and so food and other goods are wasted and destroyed because they are not sold. People go hungry and starve, yet companies are overproducing the things they need to survive.

 

This situation, to Marx, is completely absurd. He believed, therefore, that capitalism is a very inefficient economic system, and should be replaced by something else, or strongly domesticated. If Smith believed in no intervention in the economy, and Keynes believed in some intervention, Marx believed in a lot of intervention, or just removing the whole system. Smith’s economy based on free association between people is criticised by Marx, instead believing that the economy is based on relationships of domination between people. Both economists believed that economic growth is a good thing, however.

Environmental Economics

Environmental Economics

However, as industrial economies began to produce more and more waste, and it became evident that human beings were having a strongly negative impact on their environment, the dogma of economic growth began to be brought into question. Karl Polyani was an environmental economist, and author of “The Great Transformation.” He saw the economy as a system of work embedded within nature and our environment. Polyani was against the idea that the economy should be organised or thought of in terms of markets and exchange relations. The idea that a market could regulate itself, and that prices would be established fairly by the market, was ludicrous.

 

The result of this market thinking is that all spheres of human life have been absorbed by market economics, replacing relationships of care and solidarity by the exchange of money for services offered. The exchange relation is the most risky and unstable, according to Polyani, because there is no underlying principle guiding behaviour. Each person is therefore pushed to fight for their own self, and becomes egotistical and self-interested.

Image: Shane Rounce on Unsplash

For Polyani, labour, land, and money are not goods that can be commodified and bought and sold in a market. Labour is just the work of human beings, land is that upon which human societies exist, and money is a creation of the central bank. None of these things were created to be sold in a market: they are the very fabric of the economy itself. Whereas Marx believed that the power struggle between the capitalists and the workers was the source of the problem and its solution, Polyani believes that it will be the recognition of the needs of the society and its relationships that will bring an end to the domination by exchange relations.

 

Exchange relations are not the only way of organising a society, according to Polyani. We also have relations based on reciprocity, and on redistribution. Reciprocity considers the other as equal to oneself, and therefore seeks to give in equal terms for what is taken. Redistribution requires a central authority which will take the resources from some people, and give them to others, so that each person is considered equal. Market-based relations treat human beings as instruments, as a means to obtain what one wants, rather than having a value in themselves. The solution, therefore, is to restrict or reduce the exchange relations that we have in our lives.

 

The dogma of economic growth is another aspect of economic thinking which Polyani strongly criticises. Whilst strong economic growth led to huge gains in the standard of living for many Western countries, this growth also created major social and environmental problems. These include pollution, reduction in working conditions, people becoming more individualised and an increase in violence, the production of useless and quickly obsolete goods, advertising everywhere, without limits, and more. Economic growth is measured in terms of the increase in GDP, the gross domestic product, which is the sum of the value of all the goods and services produced in a country within a certain time period. However, this measure doesn’t take into account the social and volunteer work that produces value, nor does it account for the environmental impacts of economic activity. GDP also isn’t able to measure inequalities in a society, yet takes into account ‘bad’ activities – GDP increases when more people are buying paracetamol, whether they really need this or not. It is therefore severely limited in what it can measure. Using a very limited measure of value as the single most important determinant of the ‘health’ of the economy, is, therefore, quite restrictive.

 

Despite this, most economists today, liberal economists, are searching for continuous economic growth, believing that this will lead to better lives for all people. In fact, GDP increases produce greater satisfaction up to a point, at which happiness no longer increases in the same way, despite increasing GDP. The United Nation’s World Happiness Report demonstrates this. You can read more about how happiness is challenging GDP as a measure of health in this article on The Conversation.

 

Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen, a 20th century economist and mathematician, believed that economic value was not created through markets or exchange, or even through labour, but through the natural resources which are taken and transformed. The current economic system takes natural resources with value, and spits out waste, with no value. Using the laws of thermodynamics, Georgescu-Rogen explains how humanity, and the economy as the transformation of natural resources, cannot continue to grow infinitely. Endless economic growth is not possible, with the materials and resources we have on earth. He points out that it is as if human beings decided to have a brief but exciting existence on planet Earth: each car we produce means fewer human lives will be possible in the future.

 

There is another type of economy which environmental economists propose. One part of this involves ‘de-growth,’ which is the idea that we must shrink the economic action occurring in the economy, or at least, no longer care about the idea of growth. Tim Jackson is a British economist who promotes this idea. Another pillar is a kind of “Green New Deal” which proposes government investment in renovating and insulating housing, converting fossil fuel electricity to renewables, developing public transport, sustainable agriculture, and more.

 

Finally, growing the social economy, or social enterprise, is another part of the solutions these economists propose. This means more people will have jobs that are meaningful, in which the value that they produce goes directly to people who need it, and each person in the value creation chain is valued equally. This social economy is not founded on the principle of competition, rather it is based on cooperation between self-organised individuals.

Explaining crisis

To review these theories, let’s think briefly about what they say about how crises come about.

According to liberal economists, intervention in the market is what causes problems. This is what ACT and National have been telling us for some time: the Government itself is the problem, it’s intervening where it should not which is causing problems.

The Keynesians and Marxists would say that this is not the case. In fact, the market economy is essentially unstable. Marxists want to control, regulate, or abolish financial markets, to solve these problems. Keynesians point towards making investments in the society to correct this instability.  

The environmental economists point to the instability and unsustainability of the current model of extraction and economic growth. It is this that causes crises: increases in the price of necessities such as petrol, food and housing make it more difficult for people to live. These increases are written into the code of the current economic order, and are therefore inevitable. Like the Marxists, we must change our economic system if we are to solve the problem.

Image: Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

To conclude...

Environmental economics is a field of study which is not widely accepted yet. Concepts like degrowth and a Green New Deal are not mainstream ideas, but remain with a few thinkers and economists, mostly in Europe and the United States.

New Zealand economists consist almost entirely of liberal economists, who believe that markets can and should run themselves. Neoliberal thinking is that which accepts some role of the state in providing certain services, and in arranging conditions of competition such that the market can operate. With this lack of economic diversity, it is easy to fall into the trap of these economists, and believe that the only solutions are the ones that they propose. Economics is not a science, but the use of human-generated representations in order to explain economic activity in societies.

As we have seen, there are other alternatives. There is also an enormous possibility to develop an environmental economics which rests upon principles from Tikanga Māori. The so-called “Māori economy” currently refers to economic activity carried out by Māori organisations, but if more Māori decided to become economists, and to develop their own representation of the flow of money and resources in the country, they could very easily develop their own economic theory.

Economic perspectives overview

 

Liberal Economics

Keynesian Economics

Marxist Economics

Environmental Economics

Main theorist

Adam Smith

John Maynard Keynes

Karl Marx

Karl Polyani, Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen

What is the economy?

The markets for goods and services

A circuit where money flows

The place of power struggles

Human activity embedded in nature

What produces value?

Exchanges of goods and services in the market

The flow of money through the circuit

Violence – domination/ exploitation of workers

Natural resources – land, plants, animals

Key problem to solve

Interventions which stop the market from self-regulating

The flows of money are not well distributed

Workers are dominated by capitalists and do not earn the value they produce

Market relations have commodified everything, and infinite growth is not possible

Solution

Make sure markets function by increasing competition and removing barriers

Intervene in the market with economic instruments – interest rate and govt spending

Abolish capitalism and allow workers to own means of production and receive value of their work

Develop the social economy, reinstate redistributive and reciprocal relations, degrowth, fix environmental problems and waste

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Geo-engineering

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IN-DEPTH SPECIAL

Shooting chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays back into space, and adding them to clouds to make them brighter, are no longer part of our science-fiction imaginary. Geo-engineering, in its many forms, is gaining ground as a necessary and inevitable way to protect the earth and its inhabitants from the worst effects of climate change.

Geo-engineering is, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “A broad set of methods and technologies that aim to deliberately alter the climate system in order to alleviate the impacts of climate change..” Therefore, all the studies and research into ways that we can change the climate ourselves, to be protected from climate change, are projects of geo-engineering. This ranges from adding chemicals into clouds above the ocean to save the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, adding silver iodide into clouds on the Tibetan plain by the Chinese Government to modify rainfall patterns, carbon capture and storage systems in Iceland, and those researched in the UK and US (among many other countries), and at its most basic level, New Zealand’s planting of monoculture forests to capture carbon dioxide from the air.

cartoon people planning construction
Image: Vectorjuice on Freepik

Two forms of geo-engineering

There are two main ways of going about modifying the climate. Let’s call them the pump, and the thermostat.

water pump
Image: pch.vector on Freepik

The pump

The pump method refers to the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, in various ways. We try to pump the emissions that we have already created back into the ground, to store them there instead. This could be through ‘natural’ means like planting trees, or through technologies like Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). We do this to reduce the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, which is one of the leading causes of climate change and the wider ecological crisis.

dial icon

The thermostat

The thermostat method tries to control the average temperature of the biosphere. Human activity is causing increasing temperatures in the atmosphere, which world governments have pledged to keep below an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius. In order to reduce those temperatures, we can either make the earth’s surface shinier, so that the sun’s rays are reflected back into space, and are not absorbed by the ground here, or we can modify the atmosphere itself, so that it lets through less light from the sun, and therefore less heat energy.

The pros

There are many reasons why we might consider geo-engineering methods. If the world cannot reduce its carbon emissions before the worst effects are felt, which seems to be the case, it will need to find ways to protect life from the effects of these emissions. Geo-engineering is one way to buy us time to decarbonise, and achieve the net-zero targets that have been set. Another reason is that it is relatively cheap and easy to deploy some of these solutions, which, according to certain sectors in the economy, would be easier than decarbonising their industries. Geo-engineering also has support from a moral or ethical standpoint, with some people claiming we must do everything we can to stop the disastrous consequences of climate change. Major proponents of geo-engineering include Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Bill Gates (Microsoft), and Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter). Almost all researchers and funders of geo-engineering in the United States are white, middle-aged, and male.

The cons

Those who disagree with geo-engineering projects currently seem to outnumber those who are in favour of it, however there does appear to be some silent support among scientific, technical and economic communities. Arguments against geo-engineering point first and foremost to the risks involved in these projects. The ‘thermostat’ methods of geo-engineering could disrupt rainfall, including the Indian monsoon season, putting the lives of billions of people at risk. Furthermore, once you start injecting clouds or modifying the atmosphere, you cannot stop. Some models predict up to 800 years of continuous climate intervention to avoid a termination shock where world temperatures increase by around 4 degrees in 10 years, rather than 100 years. These projects require enormous amounts of energy, water, and in some cases mineral resources to run, which would have to be sustained through government changes, war, pandemic, and more. There is also no current way to regulate or govern the countries (and wealthy private individuals) who may start geo-engineering projects: anyone can, at present, add sulphur to the atmosphere, and this decision will impact not just one country, but the whole planet. Likewise, once one country begins, we may enter a war of the sky, where countries vie to control the modification of the atmosphere. Geo-engineering is also another reason for climate delay and inaction, allowing us to continue to emit and pollute. Solar geo-engineering would turn the sky white, having potential impacts on mental health worldwide. Finally, we don’t actually know what effect geo-engineering will have on a large scale: all we have are experiments and models. The side effects of any project, including carbon storage, could be much, much worse. Major detractors of geo-engineering include Andreas Malm (The Future is the Termination Shock), Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything), and Elizabeth Kolbert (Under a White Sky).

Image: Plurality.eco translation from Socialter Special Issue on Geoengineering, Iss. 56, Feb-March 23

Who is geo-engineering?

Mark Zuckerberg supports a company attempting to genetically modify plants, such as rice, corn and wheat, so that they absorb more carbon dioxide (The Innovative Genomics Institute in San Francisco). Bill Gates supports the start-up Carbon Engineering, aiming to increase the amount of petrol extracted from wells through carbon capture and storage technology. Elon Musk’s foundation, XPrize, has allocated $100 million USD to the development of carbon capture technologies. The United States government in 2021 allocated $3.5 billion USD to create four hubs for carbon capture and storage. The Chinese government is involved in a project called the Celestial River, aiming to artificially increase the rainfall over the Tibetan plain. Governments in Australia, the UK, Thailand, France, India, United Arab Emirates, and Germany are also involved in geo-engineering projects and/or research at some level.

And New Zealand...

New Zealand is not currently involved in any technical geo-engineering projects, however natural geo-engineering is very much part of the country’s strategy. Using seaweed to sequester carbon is being researched and carried out. Likewise, planting trees (unfortunately usually monoculture forests) is a key part of the Government’s zero-carbon strategy for 2050, with the One Billion Trees Programme. The debate on geo-engineering in New Zealand seems to be almost dead, with the Government associating any mention of the word with conspiracy theory and false suggestions that storms such as Cyclone Gabrielle were man-made.

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That's just the overview. Click on the topics below to learn more about geo-engineering.

Solar Radiation and Protection

Solar Radiation and Protection

Sweden’s Space Agency, along with backers and technicians from Harvard University in the United States, were preparing to launch the pilot project SCoPEx in the summer of 2021. This project would be one of the first experimental trials of solar radiation geo-engineering in the world. Until this point, researchers had only been able to use computer models to predict what might happen, and to design potential balloons to disperse aerosols into the stratosphere.

But, after protests from indigenous groups and climate activists, Sweden’s Space Agency called off the test, citing concerns over safety, and potential risks and hazards for the Earth’s atmosphere. Blocking the sun to fight climate change would have to remain a project within the computer models for some time to come.

SCoPEx project balloon
Image: https://www.keutschgroup.com/scopex/

How does it work?

Solar radiation geo-engineering aims to inject aerosols into the upper part of the Earth’s atmosphere, the stratosphere, in order to block sunlight from reaching the Earth. Normally, a small amount of these compounds are found in the atmosphere, such as ozone, which protects the Earth’s inhabitants from excessive sunlight. By increasing the amount of these gases such as sulphur in the atmosphere, engineers hope to be able to stop the Earth from warming. This is because the radiation from the sun will be reflected back into space by the aerosols that we inject. The process is like a human-engineered, continuous volcanic eruption: when volcanoes erupt, they spew out large quantities of sulphur gases into the atmosphere. In 1991, Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted, and 20 million tons of sulphur reduced global temperatures by 0.5 degrees Celsius for one year.

This is necessary because of the largely unsuccessful Kyoto Protocol, in which 147 parties, (governments), pledged to decrease emissions by individually agreed targets. We are already at 1.2 degrees of warming, and the Earth is projected to reach 1.5 degrees of warming by 2050, if not before.

The arguments

In 2006, Paul Crutzen, a scientist in Germany and the United States, published an article on stratospheric injections which broke the taboo on the topic amongst researchers. He argued that we needed to develop this technology, because it is a hugely effective way of reducing global temperatures almost immediately at relatively little cost. We needed solar radiation geo-engineering in our back pockets, if things go disastrously wrong, or if we are unable to decarbonise our economies in time. Geo-engineering is therefore the deus ex machina waiting in the wings, ready to save the planet when the time is right. It buys us time to decarbonise, and reinforces the fact that human beings are still the masters of their own destiny: innovation and technology will be able to save the day.

This position follows a technical and engineering logic: we have the technology available, we have the means, and it doesn’t cost too much, so why not develop it? Proponents believe that all technological means to fight climate change are good, if they are rationally used and controlled by world governments. Taking out 1-2% of sunlight would be enough to undo 2 centuries of fossil fuel combustion. The whole problem of climate change could go away, if we are able to design and operate this technical solution in a rational manner. And, according to David Keith in 2000, this whole process would be cheaper than climate mitigation and the reduction of emissions. $30 million USD would compensate one years’ global emissions. Proponents of solar geo-engineering now say that both emissions reductions and geo-engineering are necessary.

Andreas Malm, a Swedish researcher in climate and ecological politics, and a climate activist, wrote an article series in 2022 decrying the risks of solar radiation geo-engineering. The biggest risk with solar geo-engineering is what he terms “termination shock.” Once anyone in society – a business, a government, a wealthy private individual – starts putting aerosols into the atmosphere with the aim of reducing solar radiation on earth, the process must be continued or, theoretically, scaled down very slowly, otherwise the Earth’s temperatures will rebound incredibly quickly. To illustrate this, think about what happens when you try to fix a leak in a pipe under your kitchen sink. To stop water from going down into the pipe, you put the plug into the sink. Water builds up in the sink, but doesn’t flow down into the pipe, so you can fix it. It looks like there’s no leak any more, because you have stopped the flow of water. But, if for whatever reason, the plug is removed, dislodged, or faulty, lots of water will flow out into the pipes, making the leak worse. The same thing happens with the aerosols in the atmosphere. We can pretend that there is no longer any global warming, all the while increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When we stop injecting aerosols, all of a sudden, the sun’s radiation would heat up the Earth by about 4 degrees in 10 years, rather than 100 years.

What reasons might cause us to stop or pause solar geo-engineering, once it was started? Another pandemic like COVID-19 might be cause to force people to stay home for months, meaning the operators and engineers of this technology couldn’t go to work, fix problems, and operate the planes or balloons that inject the aerosols. The workers could go on strike over low pay and high-risk conditions, or they could object to the risks or potential damage their job was doing to the world. China and the United States could begin a war to control the skies, each wishing to be the one determining how much of the aerosols were pumped out, and therefore how many tonnes of CO2 they could continue to emit. A rogue state could decide they wanted more, and start their own programme, meaning that the official programme of geo-engineering would need to immediately be scaled back, otherwise we could completely block out all sun light, and all living beings would die. There are numerous possible scenarios which would mean that this geo-engineering project would stop, and the effects of the termination shock would make themselves felt.

As a result of the termination shock, Malm says it would be like opening the door to a furnace on Earth. No species would be able to adapt itself to radical temperature increases in such as short space of time. Smith compares solar geo-engineering to morphine – it’s incredibly addictive, and once begun, it’s hard to stop.

Further, the modelling shows that solar geo-engineering would disrupt current climate systems, meaning the possible end to the Indian monsoon season, affecting the possibility of life for more than 2 billion people. The Earth’s overall climate would become more even – the tropics would overcool, and the poles would over-heat, according to the models. Some researchers, such as Holly Jean Buck, argue that this is a tool for equality and peace – if we all have the same climate conditions, how can we complain? I’m not entirely sure we would find anyone in the tropics who thought that their inequality with the West could be fixed by making the weather patterns of their region more like the United States and Europe…

Those who argue for solar geo-engineering make a big assumption, which Malm points out. They assume that the technology will be rolled out and managed in a rational, controlled, and pre-determined manner, and that it will remain this way for the up to 800 years of solar radiation blocking necessary to cool the Earth. But, if the world was rationally run, we would not need geo-engineering in the first place. The threats of global ecosystem collapse from the 1970’s would have been heeded, our economies decarbonised, and crisis avoided, well before getting to the point of needed to engineer the climate. Someone, somewhere, must steer the planet from harm just at the right time, with the right amount of action.

Would the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) be able to do that? Or perhaps the United Nations? Or the United States Government? Let’s ask another question: do states currently listen to and follow the directives of the IPCC? No, because again, if they did, emissions would be radically declining and we would not have crossed six of the nine planetary boundaries. We cannot expect such things to happen if we start geo-engineering, either.

Other risks include the fact that the sky will turn a milky-white colour, for the duration of the programme; disrupted climate systems across the globe; potential crop losses as a result of reduced sunlight for plants to grow; collapse of the rain systems across the globe; solar power plants producing less electricity; ozone depletion; air pollution and therefore human health consequences; more acid rain; the coagulation of sulphates in the atmosphere, and more. What’s more, climbing temperatures is one of the major reasons currently to decarbonise, and by masking this problem, we could lull ourselves into thinking that further carbon emissions are acceptable.

These effects sound just as bad, if not worse, than the effects of the climate change and global warming that solar radiation geoengineering is attempting to solve. It would seem the only rational question is, “why not just reduce our emissions?” It is a safe and effective way of responding to climate change. If done well, it will reduce inequalities, improve mental health, reduce waste, reduce habitat and species loss, and more.

Carbon Capture and Storage

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)

The United Kingdom company Drax is promising to be part of a sustainable energy revolution in the UK. Instead of burning coal, Drax has reconverted its factories to burn biomass instead. Biomass is a fancy word for wood chips. Through a legal loophole, by burning wood instead of coal the company avoids its emissions being counted as part of the national emissions total. The UK, through Drax’s power, can reduce its emissions without actually reducing them.

Drax claims that their wood chips are sustainably sourced from offcuts and sawdust in wood factories. This, however, as the New York Times has investigated, is not the case. Drax cuts down forests in the United States and Canada, some of which are primary growth forests (those that have never before been cut down for human use), and ships the trees to the United Kingdom to be burned at their plants. Drax are also researching Biomass Energy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), so that the carbon dioxide released from burning the wood chips is captured and stored in the earth, rather than released into the atmosphere. They hope to build two power stations by 2030, each capable of removing 8 million tonnes of CO2 per year. That’s equal to 1.6% of the UK’s national yearly emissions. As yet, however, despite calling their enterprise sustainable, they continue to cut down trees and burn them, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

This is just one example of how carbon capture and storage is being used in conjunction with other supposedly sustainable methods of energy generation to “reduce” carbon emissions in the world’s largest economies. The largest project of carbon storage is the Orca factory in Iceland, run by the Swiss company Climeworks. The factory currently occupies 1,700m2 of land, filled with fans to capture the carbon dioxide in the air. The gas is liquefied then stored one kilometre underground in basalt rock. The cost of this project sits at $15 million USD, and the factory currently sucks out 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. That’s equivalent to three seconds of global emissions. Climeworks want to capture 1% of world emissions by 2025. Based on current progress, the dreams of millions of tonnes of CO2 being sequestered every year seem very, very far off.

Carbon turbines plant
Image: carbonengineering.com

How does it work?

There are two main methods of removing carbon: collecting carbon dioxide directly from chimneys (Carbon Capture and Storage, CCS), or sucking the gas out of the air (Direct Air Capture, DAC).

Capturing carbon directly from chimneys involves attaching a capturing device to the infrastructure already present, such as the wood burning factories of Drax in the UK. Then, the carbon dioxide is compressed, and needs to be stored somewhere deep in the earth where it is not going to be released.

Capturing carbon from the air involved hundreds of huge turbines, sucking in air and capturing the carbon dioxide as the air passes through. These turbines are constructed in an industrial cooling tower, which pumps water around to stop them from overheating. The carbon dioxide in the air is converted into potassium carbonate, through a reaction with potassium hydroxide sitting on thin plastic sheets within the turbines. These pellets of chemical salt undergo further chemical reactions to produce pure carbon dioxide.

Carbon Capture Plant diagram

Today, this technology is primarily used by petroleum companies. They extract carbon dioxide from the air, in order to pump it back into the oil wells and force the oil to the surface. They use the emissions of burning fossil fuels in order to extract more fossil fuels…

In a trial in Iceland with the first carbon being injected into the ground, the researchers on the CarbFix project realised that micro-organisms in the rocks were feeding on the carbon dioxide being injected, meaning that injection possibilities were considerably reduced. Now, instead of injecting the CO2 at 100 degrees Celsius, it’s injected at 250 degrees Celsius, killing off all microbes, and potential microorganisms in the rocks. It’s estimated that 60% of species living 1km into the earth’s surface are still unknown to humans, but this has not been factored into the plans or risks involved, as noted by those who are using the technology.

Another, more ‘natural’ method of carbon sequestration, is through using trees and other plants. New Zealand, like some other countries, has committed to planting 1 billion trees by 2028. When plants grow, they use the carbon dioxide in the air to make the organic molecules they need. These molecules of glucose are stored in the plant. The water that the plant absorbs is also taken up and converted into oxygen, which the plant releases. This process is called photosynthesis, which is part of the Earth’s carbon cycle. Therefore, trees such as the radiata pine tree are often used to capture and store carbon, because they require carbon dioxide to grow, therefore taking it out of the atmosphere. Often, the trees planted are not native trees to the area, and are planted with the idea that they will be cut down eventually. This means that we are not creating biodiverse native forests with habitats for other species; rather, we are engineering a human ‘forest’ for the sole purpose of sucking out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

All other plants do this too – corn, wheat, and soy for example. Mark Zuckerberg supports research by the Innovative Genomics Institute, exploring how to genetically modify these crops, so that they absorb more carbon dioxide from the air: they want to make the process of photosynthesis go faster, and occur in greater quantities in the same plant. This gene-editing technology is called CRISPR, developed by Nobel prize winner Jennifer Doudna.

Using trees to suck up carbon

Image: United States Department of Agriculture

Using seaweed and the ocean

Kelp carbon cycle
Image: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/how-kelp-naturally-combats-global-climate-change/

The ocean is another large storehouse of carbon on the planet. So much so that the IPCC has written a paper in their 6th cycle of reporting on Ocean Carbon Storage. According to them, over the past 200 years the oceans have taken up 500Gt of CO2, whilst humanity has emitted 1,300Gt of emissions in the same period. Not all carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere, therefore: quite a large proportion of it ends up in the ocean. Carbon dioxide can be injected into the ocean, or we can use plants such as kelp (seaweed) to the same effect. New Zealand firm Blue Carbon is researching this method, and hopes to more effective at sequestering carbon than its land-based alternative. A trial in South Korea showed that for one hectare of algae, 10 tonnes of CO2 were captured, per year. That’s an almost insignificant amount, less than the average emissions of one New Zealander in a year.

By adding fertilisers such as iron and nitrates into the ocean, we can encourage seaweed to grow faster, taking up more carbon dioxide. There are, once again, several risks with this method, including the destruction of all marine life through the de-oxygenation of areas of the ocean. Ocean acidification, warmer oceans, and disrupted current flows are also possible consequences. It is, however, possible for this process to occur somewhat naturally – that would involve returning sea life to pre-industrial levels (sustainable fisheries, elimination of ocean pollution, reduction of ocean acidification, and more).

The arguments

The arguments for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), Direct Air Capture (DAC), and carbon sequestration through land or sea are very similar to the arguments in the case of solar radiation. We need more time to be able to decarbonise our economies; we have the technology available, so we should pour money into researching ways to make it commercially viable; and the fact that we should be fighting climate change “by any means necessary.” Geo-engineering projects allow Western societies to keep the status-quo lifestyle intact, and not make major changes to their dominant way of life and values. By allowing us to overshoot the target of 1.5 degrees, it permits emissions to continue for longer than they would otherwise be able. This current generation in power will not have to deal with the reality of climate change.

Capturing carbon from the air and from chimneys is seen as a much less risky way of geo-engineering than solar radiation and protection. It doesn’t involve disturbing ecosystems and climate patterns in quite the same way as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere. There is no risk of termination shock – any and all carbon captured and stored is a net benefit to the planet and humanity, and any that remains will be the cause of global warming – which we are currently facing. No added consequences will be felt.

The problem with all these technologies is that they require large amounts of energy, materials such as rare earth metals, and water, to be able to run. Each CCS plant requires around 6km2 of land space, and 30km of air-sucking machinery. To remove 1 trillion tonnes of CO2 (we have emitted 1.3 trillion tonnes since industrial times) would require land twice the size of India, or the whole of the land mass of Australia. That means large amounts of land would need to be reconverted to carbon capture plants, throughout the world. Land that could be reforested, used for farming, or housing, would have large turbines installed to capture and collect the carbon. In terms of water use, to capture and store just the yearly emissions of the United States, 130 billion tonnes of water would be necessary, each year. Estimates for the costs of such endeavours could be up to $570 trillion USD this century.

The technology for carbon capture and storage is currently being used in large part by oil companies to increase the yields of their oil wells, by injecting carbon dioxide that they have captured from the air. CCS is a way to increase profitability from oil deposits where the oil is difficult to extract. It’s hard to see carbon capture and storage as something other than a profit-seeking initiative by the companies who engage in it. As will be discussed in more detail in the Carbon Markets section, the first company who can capture and store 1 tonne of carbon dioxide for less money than the price of one tonne of carbon on the carbon market, has themselves a way of making immense profits. Perhaps that is why it is often not governments investing in this technology, but private individuals such as Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

In the case of biofuels, and Biomass Energy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), growing large plantations of monoculture forests requires a very large amount of land. Were this to be taken up large-scale, land would be required both for agriculture and food, and energy. A fire, storm or flood that wipes out food crops and monoculture biomass forests would deprive a community of both electricity and food. Plants and animals that previously lived in areas devoted to monoculture forests would lose their habitat, and would be threatened with extinction. Even “marginal land” is not completely devoid of life. Further, if biofuel becomes more profitable to grow than food, there is nothing to protect people from farmers who convert their agricultural farms into forests to earn more, resulting in potential food shortages.

For the methods that use living organisms to sequester carbon, such as radiata pine trees on land and kelp in the oceans, these methods are not without their risks. All trees require time to sequester carbon from the air into the soil: this is not a process that happens immediately. Further, native biodiverse long-growth forests are much better in the long run at sequestering carbon than monoculture pine forests. They also support other living beings in diverse ecosystems, in a permanent way. If the land where these trees are grown is subsequently tilled or ploughed, much of the sequestered carbon will be released back into the atmosphere. The other oceanic option, growing kelp, risks massive de-oxygenation of areas of the sea, where it becomes impossible for any other marine life to live.

Money, Carbon Markets, and Investors

Money, Carbon Markets, and Investors

Why are world governments not funding geo-engineering projects at the same scale as private wealthy individuals? Who are the proponents of geo-engineering, and why are they advocating for it? Where is the money flowing, and who stands to benefit from geo-engineering projects? An important part of ecological analysis is to consider flows of capital, both material capital and money. Let’s dig into these questions.

More power, more money

Bill Gates has put $8 million USD into solar radiation management and direct carbon capture technologies. Elon Musk has allocated $100 million USD to carbon capture technologies. The Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation has given $11 million USD to genetically modify plants to increase their photosynthesis capabilities. Meanwhile, the United States Government in 2019 authorised only $4 million to be spent in geo-engineering research. In 2021, a 300-page report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in the United States, “Reflecting Sunlight,” for the first time recommended a coordinated national research programme to explore geo-engineering possibilities. Governments and think tanks around the world seem to be showing little interest in geo-engineering. New Zealand’s Government seems scared of the very use of the word, associating anyone who talks about it with conspiracy theory. A look through the Official Information Act requests demonstrates this.

To think that people such as Gates and Musk are simply benevolent and compassionate human beings looking after the welfare of the rest of the planet would be quite naïve. Surely they cannot have realised the colossal destructive impact that their empires have had on this planet, and are now repenting by paying us back with the invention of technologies to save the world. If they really did recognise the threat, they certainly would not be taking private jets around the planet, and would probably have wound up their businesses with interests in fossil fuels (most of them).

More likely, therefore, is that they are proposing geo-engineering because it is a way for them to keep the capital – in the form of wealth and power – that they have accumulated through a capitalist economic structure. They have a direct interest in keeping this fossil-fuel dominated way of life alive: it brings them more money and means they are powerful people.

These elites will retain their power because geo-engineering enables them to mask the true effects of increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Without solar radiation reflecting light back, world temperatures will increase by more than 1.5 degrees in at most 20 years. With it, however, world temperatures can be kept at an acceptable level. “Climate change” can be averted, never mind the other consequences. Their dream of a techno-rational empire, where science and technology are able to solve all of the problems of humanity, is one step closer to proving itself as the only way forward. Such an empire, of course, will not be controlled by world governments or organisations, like the United Nations; rather, it will be owned and run by private enterprise: the enterprises of Musk and Gates.

Image: Financial Times UK

How will these wealthy individuals make money through geo-engineering the planet? The answer lies in the global carbon markets. In New Zealand, we have set up an emissions trading scheme (ETS) which puts a price on each tonne of carbon emitted. Companies can purchase the right to emit carbon into the atmosphere, and land owners or carbon extraction companies can sell credits to these companies, because they are storing carbon in the ground.

The first company or person who can store carbon for less money than it costs to emit one tonne of carbon enters into a very beneficial position: they can make others pay, through the carbon market, for them to store carbon in the ground, and make a profit.

For example, if it costs a company $100 to store 1 tonne of carbon in the ground, and the price of carbon on the carbon market is $200, for every tonne of carbon they store using their technology, they make 100%, or $100. A company with one plant that stores 8 million tonnes a year would, in this model, make $800 million a year.

The whole idea behind the carbon market is that the price of carbon will increase, so that net emissions will decrease. There is no future projection, in the long run, in which the price of carbon decreases, because that would mean more carbon emitted into the atmosphere, which is what the scheme is trying to regulate. It’s like investing in something with guaranteed returns.

Example: Make Sunsets

Make Sunsets, a start-up in the United States, is selling “cooling credits” at $17 USD each. These aren’t just for companies, but also individuals who want to invest in geo-engineering. Apparently, one cooling credit equals 1 gram of sulphur dioxide released, which will offset the warming effect of 1 ton of carbon dioxide for one year. This incredibly easy maths seems too easy to be true, and may in fact just be clever marketing more than accurate science. What’s more, individuals like you and me could offset our 15 tonne-per-year average emissions by paying $255 a year. Set and forget, monthly subscriptions are possible: the site looks just like any other online site where you could buy a coffee machine or a pair of shoes. We could just pay the money and wash all our sins away, and forget about any responsibility we have towards ecological destruction.

Their website’s FAQ has the following question: “I would like you to stop doing this.”

Their (quite arrogant) response is: “And we would like an equitable future with breathable air and no wet bulb events for generations to come. Convince us there’s a more feasible way to buy us the time to get there and we’ll stop. We’ll happily debate anyone on this, just confirm an audience of at least 200 people and we’ll find the time to try and convince you. 😉” As of May 2023, they have completed 20 flights for 96 customers. If they had $50 billion USD a year, they could offset the effects of all man-made emissions. They want more time for other people to do the work of decarbonisation, and because their actions are not regulated, they can deploy sulphur into the air, and make money from doing so. When the cooling credits were launched, they were $10 each in 2022. As time goes on, their cooling credits increase in price (now at $17), whilst the cost for deployment decreases as more people buy credits. Costs decrease, price increases, and the company makes a lot of money.

What they do not do, however, is take any responsibility for the consequences of their projects. They do not plan to donate any money to people affected by the deployment of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. Such a thing is too hard to prove, and no research could be conducted (and likely wouldn’t be financed in the first place): was it global warming’s fault or Make Sunset’s fault? All responsibility lies outside the company, and externalities are recognised but financially and legally ignored.

Make Sunsets is just one part of a host of companies and individuals financing carbon removal and solar radiation projects. A similar bet is being placed by Drax in the UK: burning wood chips is carbon neutral. If they can store the carbon actually released from burning the chips, then they have a net carbon-negative business. As well as selling energy, they make money through selling carbon offsets on the carbon market. The more trees they burn, the more they can sell on the carbon market.

Make Sunsets logo
Make Sunsets website screen capture
Image: Make Sunsets website

The perpetrators of the problem are the ones that stand to benefit the most from geo-engineering projects. These companies are using investment money and promising returns on investment just like any other investment in Apple or Microsoft or SpaceX. The global carbon capture and storage market could reach $4 trillion USD by 2050, according to estimations by Exxon Mobil, a petroleum company.

In the end, investing in carbon capture technology is an investment in one’s own wealth, not in the future of the planet. Such an beneficial outcome for the planet is not even guaranteed, and comes with incredible risks: none of which will be paid for or recognised by the investors, who will have made their financial returns, and moved on to financing space villages, after destroying the climate system on planet Earth.

Further Reading
  • Kolbert, Elizabeth. (2022) Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. Crown Publishing.
    Kolbert looks at the ways that human civilisation manages the environment, and the future of this management through geo-engineering.
  • Morton, Oliver. (2017) The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World. Princeton University Press.
    An account of the reasons for geoengineering to take place, and the necessity to continue researching this. The book explores the history, politics, and science of geoengineering.
  • Malm, Andreas. (2022) The Future Is the Termination Shock: On the Antinomies and Psychopathologies of Geoengineering. Part One and Part Two. In Historical Materialism 30.4, 3–53.
    Malm discusses the rational-optimist viewpoint towards the world in this article series. He strongly criticises geoengineering movements from all sides.
  • Science for the People. (2018). Summer Special Issue: Geoengineering.
    https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/geoengineering-special-issue/
    Science for the People break down all the viewpoints on geo-engineering in the United States context, with a variety of articles by different contributors on the topic.
  • New Zealand Productivity Commission. (2018) Low Emissions Economy.
    The Productivity Commission discuss the ways in which New Zealand can transition to a low emissions economy. Discussed here are natural means of geo-engineering, namely, reforestation and carbon capture through tree planting and carbon credits (ETS).
  • Official Information Act requests on geoengineering in New Zealand, on FYI.org (here, question by Chris McCashin), shows the extent to which the Government deny any knowledge of or involvement with geoengineering. Also, in the comments on this page, you can see how a reasonable request is taken up by those supporting conspiracy and misinformation, who demand the Government be held to account for inaccurate responses.  

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The corporate strategies to avoid change: an activist’s guide

Climate protesters

to support independent and ad-free ecological thinking

author
Jacques Lawinski

Jacques Lawinski

PhD candidate in philosophy and ecology at Université Paris VIII, visiting researcher in Lesvos, Greece. A writer, an activist, and an avid walker, I explore the planet and what it means to relate to nature, finding new, ecological ways of being.
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How do businesses and government deal with protests and demands for change? What is their strategy, and how do they go about maintaining their power and their position, throughout and despite the protests? And what about dialogue: how does that work, do meetings between activists and perpetrators often lead to change?

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There are examples where activism has led to meaningful, systemic and long-lasting change. These examples, however, are few and far between. Western societies have known about the climate crisis at a societal level for at least 50 years, and in some cases longer. Environmental damage and conservation movements have existed for many hundreds of years. Yet, the same companies continue to destroy the environment, and governments around the world have proven themselves to be inadequate and insufficient for confronting the systemic problems leading to global ecosystem collapse. Dialogues at 27 yearly Conference of the Parties (COPs) so far, have led to zero reductions in net global carbon dioxide emissions.

So, how do companies deal with activists to keep doing the same thing? How do they neutralise the threats posed to their interests: making profit, assuring production of goods and services, and maintaining their power within the current economic and social system? This article explores the strategies and classifications used by companies, and increasingly by Governments worldwide to reduce threats posed by activists with valid claims for social and environmental justice.

The types of activists and how to deal with them

Ronald Duchin was a founding member of MBD, a company hired by the agriculture industry, the tobacco industry, the chemical industry, and many other non-declared clients, due to the secretive nature of the company. “Get Government Off Our Back” and “Regulatory Revolt Month” are some of the major campaigns brought about by the group in the US, always in favour of free and unbridled enterprise, and with the aim of shutting down all social and environmental activist movements.

In 1991, he gave a speech to the National Cattleman’s Association in the United States, entitled, Take An Activist Apart and What Do You Have?”. In this speech, he described four groups of activists, and the characteristics of each group. This was the basis for the strategic work that MBD did with large companies to neutralise the threats posed by activist groups “who want to change the way your industry does business – either for good or bad reasons.” These four groups are the radicals, the opportunists, the idealists and the realists.

1. The Radicals

Those who “want to change the system,” and “can be extremist or violent.” These people are involved in specific causes because of underlying socio-economic or political motives, hate business and enterprise, and seek larger systemic transformation than the particular struggle they are fighting. With them, there is nothing to be done, according to Duchin. They must be isolated from the rest of the group so they lose their credibility.

2. The Opportunists

Those who are looking for “visibility, power, followers, and perhaps even employment.” They move from cause to cause, and are quick to change position or move to the forefront of a potential change in the following. If the society changes its opinion, they will change their stance to return to the front of the pack. They seek personal gain, and look for issues with the greatest potential for themselves. With these people, you must give them the impression of a partial gain or win. They are not interested in reality, but in their following, so if “the opportunist is provided the chance to be a participant in that final determination of policy, he/she has his/her victory, and he/she is satisfied.”

3. The Idealists

These are the moral and principled people, attracted to causes because they care about the outcomes for people and the planet. They are “usually altruistic, emotionally involved, naïve, and generally unaware of the unforeseen consequences.” They “want a perfect world and find it easy to brand any product or practice which can be shown to mar that perfection as evil.” They are credible and believed in the media and by politicians, because of their altruism and values. However, this makes them hard to deal with. “Idealists must be cultivated and one should respect their decision. […] They must be educated.” For Duchin, this means showing them that their opposition to a cause will cause harm to others and is not ethically sustainable in the long term. Once an idealist has realised the consequences of their position, they will be converted to a realist.

4. The Realists

The group of people to which companies should interact with the highest priority. They are “pragmatic, not interested in radical change, can live with trade-offs, and understand the consequences.” To respond to their demands, business must “meet with them, listen to their concerns, and be open that the industry’s agreed-upon solution may not be the best.” The solution agreed upon by the realists is often the one that is adopted by all members, if business is part of the decision-making process. If industry is not part of this process, then the radicals and idealists can gain more strength.

Activist comic showing plastic in fish
Image: Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

The main strategy is to listen to the realists, educate the idealists to convert them to realists, and ignore the radicals and opportunists at the beginning. These groups can be converted to believe in the position of enterprise and industry, with small adjustments to suit the demands of the realists. The radicals only have power when they are supported by the other groups: when they are alone, they lose their public credibility, so they must be isolated. The opportunists can be invited to join in the final policy resolution, as long as they have a moment to be in the spotlight. The issue will be resolved with the least fuss and the least change for the industry involved.

We see this strategy deployed all the time in relation to concerns regarding the environment and social justice. Protests occur, and the organisation in question will call for the protests to stop (isolate the radicals), put out their own statement with strong ethical language (educate the idealists), and then invite the realists of the group to a meeting to discuss their concerns (convert the realists). At the end, the opportunists get a photo with the high officials involved (swallow the opportunists), and the issue goes away, with very little change.

This was the strategy with the Save Passenger Rail protesters in New Zealand recently, too, in regard to the Government’s lack of climate action. Their actions were quickly denounced in the media as being a public nuisance, dangerous, and examples were found of people in their cars who missed appointments or were otherwise inconvenienced by the movements. The radicals were isolated from public opinion, so they lost their credibility for their cause. Showing that hard-working kiwis “just trying to get to work to feed their kids” were disrupted by the action played on the empathetic nature of the idealists. Meetings were had with the realists; the opportunists had a photo…

But, think of the disruption climate change will cause. Cyclone Gabrielle was disruptive. People on the streets for a few hours is nothing compared with the disruption climate change is causing, and will continue to cause, without serious measures taken by Governments and businesses worldwide. The counter-strategy was so effective that the protesters never really got to express their views to the public and explain the situation. Neutralised and the conflict brought indoors, to private meetings, the whole issue went away very quickly. The second time the protesters tried their action, the Government refused to meet with them again: “you’ve been unfaithful,” they said. “You’re disrupting our lives and our cities.” Instant de-legitimising and loss of credibility for the protesters. The realists were portrayed as no longer being realistic, but being radicals: isolating them all from the larger society once again neutralised the threat.

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Dialogue as a means to inaction

At the beginning of the 1980’s in the United States, the calls from campaigners and social and environmental activists to regulate business action and for companies to adopt responsible business practice became louder and louder. To counteract these calls, industries in the US needed a new way of dealing with this, to protect their interests, guard against offensive government regulation, and neutralise the criticisms coming from various corners of the society.

As a result, companies joined in on the “ethical communication” bandwagon that was beginning to take hold at the time. Instead of fighting against ethical communication and openly promoting their profit-based interests, large companies realised they could be the champions of ethical communication. They could see their critics not as adversaries, but as partners, who needed to be brought to the table to bring about resolution to the problems they pointed out. Instead of fighting opposition, they could just swallow them up.

What this actually meant was that dialogues needed to be had, so that the companies could convince the critics that the position of business and industry was just, fair, socially motivated, and had everyone’s best interests at heart. They knew that they had to identify the realists amongst the critics, and talk with them to bring about solutions. Jean-Claude Buffle writes, in Dossier N… Comme Nestlé, “for them (the business), dialogue was not a way to open oneself up to the other, it was a strategy, another method to wage their war.” The goal of these discussions was not to exchange or negotiate, but to “convince people of their (business) point of view and motivate them to act for the company’s interests.”

In his book detailing the genealogy of authoritarian liberalism, Grégoire Chamayou notes six different virtues of dialogue as a strategy to maintain and guard power (p. 129-130). These are:

  1. Intelligence-gathering: having a dialogue with opposants means that companies can figure out potential problems before they reach the public arena and cause harm to the company’s image in the public eye. Companies can understand how the campaigners think, what’s on their minds, and what their future projects might be.

  2. Pre-emptive blocking: in the 1980’s, Nestlé released, without being asked to, a series of pamphlets detailing the rules of conduct for activists. These included always contacting the company directly before any other action. This approach meant that government, media, and the general public would not get a chance to hear the complaints, and everything could be resolved in private. Activists are therefore restrained of their primary force: public opinion and support.

  3. Diversion: Instead of discussing what opposants don’t like about a company and their current practice, companies can set up meetings with critics to discuss what the future might look like: that way, the company retains their power and can point activists towards positive actions they can take to create the future they want. The problem at hand, in the present, is diverted from their attention, and in its place is a blue-sky future planning which may or may not even happen.

  4. Absorption: According to Bart Mongoven, another founding member of the MBD consulting company we discussed earlier, in a document released by Wikileaks, enterprises should look for the most realist of organisations opposing their action, and then invite them to the table, and offer them, in exchange for the resolution of the problem, power, glory and money. To do this, the company needs to treat the adversary with respect, as one should do with realists, and even offer them falsely sensitive information: gain their trust. Once the organisation accepts, they will convince the public that the problem is solved. One simple deal means that the adversary is brought over to the company’s side, and integrated into their fold. For example, organisations could offer “ecological certifications” to companies in exchange for power and money for their causes.

  5. Disqualification: Dialogues with companies or governments and their opponents are always selective. By reinforcing their commitment to consensus, enterprises can label and therefore disqualify groups who they deem threats as being confrontational, unwilling to compromise, indignant, and anti-democratic. The opposants are therefore discredited, and presented as irrational, unreasonable, and ultimately, too radical.

  6. Legitimation: by having a dialogue with a large NGO or other organisation respected by the general public, companies hope to improve the image of their brand. NGOs have little capital resource, but large reputations; companies can often have a bad reputation, but lots of capital (money, infrastructure, property, land, etc.). By forming a partnership, the reputation and money can flow in ways controlled by the corporation, benefitting the company at a relatively low cost in the form of a donation to the NGO.

When I first read these, I could think of so many examples where this has happened. It was obvious upon reflection, but without this list I could not have identified what was going on.  These are the strategies used by business and government to avoid confronting real problems pointed out by activists, and to continue, in many cases, perpetuating social issues and destroying the environment.

Image: Antenna on Unsplash.

Activist strategies for countering the counter-attacks

Based on the theories above, here are some ideas for ways that activists and campaign organisers can counter or disarm the strategies of their adversaries:

  • Strength comes with people. If you have a large following, or have the opinion of the general public behind you, you’re much more likely to be able to push for lasting and meaningful change. Try to never be seen as ‘radicals’ – you don’t want to be isolated from the group and therefore ineffective at bringing people onto your side.
  • Work out where you and your group sit, regarding the four activist personalities. Make sure you have a way to work together, rather than separately, to cover the weaknesses of the other people. For example, radicals and realists need to work together, each pushing the other in the right direction. Idealists and opportunists can also work together, making sure the movement has the right balance of image and leadership, and values and principles.
  • Avoid dialogue unless it comes with real opportunities to change. If you’re invited to a meeting where someone will “listen to your arguments”, tell your story to the media instead. Explain that listening is a codeword for ignoring. Tell people about the strategies of companies to avoid confronting the problem. Paint the company as uncooperative and unwilling, before they do the same to you after your meeting.
  • Be wary of legitimation. Many companies want to associate themselves with organisations who stand for values, whilst continuing damaging business practices. They might think that giving some money to a not-for-profit group or community organisation will absolve them of the responsibility for their actions, but this is not the case. Point it out.
  • Always keep things in public. Don’t do things in private: private meeting and cordial email conversations mean you lose your power and effectiveness.
  • And, as always, be informed and knowledgeable about your issue. You won’t win anyone over if you don’t know enough about the topic and cannot put forward convincing arguments for change.

 

 

Do you have a story of activism, or another method for effective activism? Let us know in the comments below, or send us a message at submissions@plurality.eco if you’d like to tell your story.

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What is deep ecology?

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Jacques Lawinski

Jacques Lawinski

PhD candidate in philosophy and ecology at Université Paris VIII, visiting researcher in Lesvos, Greece. A writer, an activist, and an avid walker, I explore the planet and what it means to relate to nature, finding new, ecological ways of being.
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Perspectives in political ecology series

The aim of this series of articles is to delve into the different perspectives in political ecology. It is absolutely not the case that there is only one way to address climate change. There are, in fact, many! More technology, carbon removal, and business as usual is but one way of confronting the crisis, and this approach misses the mark in so many ways. Read on to discover what deep ecology is, who its founders were, and whether we see many deep ecology movements amongst climate activists today.

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The basic definition

The term deep ecology was coined by Arne Naess in 1973, with his article, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A summary.” Naess sought to point out the difference between certain ecological movements which viewed problems in silos, and believed that each could be treated with technical fixes and economic policies; and those which sought deeper systemic or structural change in spiritual and social systems.

Shallow ecology, therefore, is a particular approach to the ecological crisis which identifies particular problems, and proposes technological or instrumental solutions to these problems. For example, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem, and we can solve this through carbon capture technologies which will be developed to take the carbon out. We don’t look at the production systems that cause this carbon dioxide to be in the atmosphere, or the other, related problems. Many of the environmental policies that we see today from governments across the world take a shallow ecology approach to the crisis: we can keep going, and keep growing, we just need small modifications to stop the worst parts of our production and consumption.

Deep ecology, on the other hand, does take all these problems as being interconnected in one large web. For Naess, deep ecology also comes with certain commitments relating to the order and structure of beings in the world, and a certain ethical view, too.

The two main traits of deep ecology are the following:

  • A belief in the fundamental importance of self-realisation. This means that each human should be able to set and achieve their goals and develop themselves as they see fit in any society. Deep ecology extends this to include all living beings, too. Therefore, all bears, birds, fish, snakes, spiders, wasps and more, should be able to flourish on earth, all at the same time as humans are.
  • The belief that human beings are not at the centre of the universe (a rejection of anthropocentrism). Ecocentrism is the position that all forms of life are important because they are alive on this planet, and this gives them the rights to live in ways that allow them to flourish. All life forms, and a diversity of life forms, are valuable in their own right. This means that human beings are no longer the masters of nature, the possessors of nature, nor do they have any divine or supreme right to the use of natural resources. The idea that human beings are at the top of the evolutionary pyramid is arbitrary, and this view poses that there is a web, a net, or a fabric of relations, in which the human being is just one part.

Deep ecology says that the reason that we are going wrong is because we have badly evaluated the place that we as human beings occupy in nature. If we are to confront the challenges we face, we have to re-evaluate this, and change our perspective on who we are as human beings in, and with, nature.

Furthermore, Naess posits that a view of cooperation, rather than competition, should be had towards species in nature. He writes, “live and let live is much better than Either you or me.” He also notes that nature, and ecological systems, are complex, but not complicated. This implies a division of labour, not a fragmentation of labour in the way beings work together. Finally, Naess advocates for decentralisation and localisation, so that structures can be developed that reflect the local landscape and ecology in which the human beings live.

The leading theoreticians of deep ecology

Already mentioned is Arne Naess (1912-2009), who was a Norwegian philosopher and writer on environmental issues. He was the youngest person to be appointed full professor at the University of Oslo in 1939, and was the only philosophy professor in the country at the time. He also was a prolific mountaineer, and engaged in several protest actions throughout his life to prevent the destruction of the environment.

Naess created an 8-point platform upon which a deep ecology movement could be founded, with fellow American environmentalist George Sessions, in 1984. These eight points are:

  1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves…. These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
  2. Richness and diversity…contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
  3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.
  4. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
  5. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
  6. Policies must therefore be changed…[to] affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures.…
  7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality…rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living.…
  8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes.

Warwick Fox (b. 1954), an Australian-British environmentalist and Professor at the University of Lancashire in the UK, is another key thinker in developing the deep ecology movement from the ethical point of view. For a decade beginning in 1984, he worked to primarily on deep ecology, before shifting away from this to consider environmental ethics more globally. “Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism” is his main work on deep ecology, where he writes that deep ecology has three main ideas:

  1. The development of a non-anthropocentric or ecocentric worldview,
  2. The idea that we should ask deep questions about our relationship with the natural world, and what this means, and
  3. The importance of cultivating a wider relationship with different forms of life around us.

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) was another key thinker, or source of inspiration for the deep ecology movement. He is often not cited as a deep ecologist, because of some key differences in his thinking, despite their belonging to deep ecology at first glance. He was one of the ‘fathers’ of the ecological consciousness in the United States, as well as the environmental ethics movements.

Leopold believed that instead of each individual being able to realise his or her own goals in life, the community or group was more important. The community was prioritised over the individual, and should be so in our thinking and policy decisions regarding our relationship to nature.

Leopold also fought for the idea that we do not only have rights to certain resources, but also responsibilities towards nature. He believed that we shouldn’t be giving people money to fulfill their responsibilities towards the natural world; rather, their mere existence on this planet meant that they have the duty to fulfill these obligations.

Central to the thinking of all these people is an idea of egalitarianism amongst all living beings. Human beings cease to be the master species on earth, and instead, all forms of life have equal value and importance on earth. Likewise, they all encourage us to reflect on our relationship with nature, and propose that we should relate more to nature, sometimes in a spiritual way, other times in a metaphorical way.

Earth First, founded by David Foreman (1946-2022) and some of his friends in the southwestern United States, is perhaps the most radical example of a deep ecology movement. Their widely referenced belief was that human beings are parasites on the planet, and should be placed last, rather than first, in the hierarchy of species. This anti-human thinking was too much for many humans who believe in the human race at least to some degree. These radical ecologists refuse to go to commissions or talk to politicians, instead preferring eco-terrorism, protests, blockages, and other radical means to stop environmental destruction. There are now chapters of Earth First in many countries across the globe.

Image: the Earth First! logo.

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Critiques of the deep ecology movement

On a theoretical level, one of the main problems with deep ecology is that we always end up back in an anthropocentric worldview, no matter how hard we try.

Take for example, the belief that all life has value on earth, and all species are intrinsically important. This idea of value requires an evaluator – someone or thing who can decide what has value on Earth and what does not. This evaluator could only be a human being, because value is a human concept. Despite all life being equally important, there is still one species who is deciding this fact and enacting its consequences.

Furthermore, deep ecology is often charged with being anti-humanist, or worse, anti-human. Humanism is the view that the human being is at the centre of thought in the world, and values the development of human qualities, the love of humanity, the fight against oppression, and more. Humanism constructs a vision of the ideal human, and, by definition, this human is not-nature. Humanism implies anthropocentrism, one of the main things that deep ecology seeks to challenge. Therefore, many deep ecologists are do not mind being anti-humanist, because it is this very thinking, they believe, that has caused the problems in the first place.

Deep-ecology is also sometimes referred to as being fascist, which is a mistaken view, but does have some truth to it. Critiques often talk about the fact that the Nazis in Germany liked writing about nature, and fantasised about their relationship with nature, and therefore that the deep ecology movement is somehow related to National Socialism in Germany. This is incorrect. However, what deep ecology could lead to is a form of ecological totalitarianism, whereby the efficiency of the ecosystem, or the rights of all beings, are taken administratively to be the highest goal, with other things such as human needs, or culture, becoming unimportant to a particular politician. This is not inherent to the deep ecology view; rather a possible manifestation of deep ecology that should be avoided. Arne Naess is rather anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian: he asks that each human being search for the meaning of their own life, and that the possibilities be afforded to them to be able to do so.

Deep ecologists also sometimes discuss the problem of population and the overconsumption of resources. Each year, human beings consume more and more resources, at a faster rate, and therefore consume more than one planet’s worth of resources per year to meet their supposed needs. Deep ecologists like Naess as well as other ecologists such as James Lovelock (the Gaia theorist) have supported a reduction of the human population. The optimal human population, according to them, sits somewhere between 100 million and 500 million. The problem with this, however, is that there is no ethical or morally justifiable way of reducing the human population without imposing some kind of rule on who can, and who cannot, have children.

Finally, the deep ecology perspective is often situated in religious or ideological contexts. People such as American Joanna Macey mix Buddhism and deep ecology to advocate for a return to nature and the natural world. There is something spiritual about the deep ecology movement, and the changing relationship that this movement advocates between humans and nature often forces us to think in spiritual or somewhat imaginary ways. For some, this approach works and is necessary; for others more scientistic in nature, this is another criticism of deep ecology.

In summary

The deep ecology perspective, and the movement that accompanies it, seeks to challenge the position of the human being in nature. Instead of being on top of the hierarchy, or standing outside of nature, human beings are embedded in the natural fabric that makes up nature, and are but one species in this fabric. Rights to resources are to be accorded to all living beings, and not just to human beings.

Deep ecology has challenged how we relate with nature, and has promoted an awareness of all other life forms on the planet. It proposes radical political changes, like giving rights to all living beings, which in practice seem, at least at this stage, quite difficult to implement.

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Let others know about this article

It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.

All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.

If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.

Why plurality.eco?

Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.

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IPCC Synthesis Report: what we do now will determine the future impact of climate change

what we do now impacts future generations

to support independent and ad-free ecological thinking

author
Jacques Lawinski

Jacques Lawinski

PhD candidate in philosophy and ecology at Université Paris VIII, visiting researcher in Lesvos, Greece. A writer, an activist, and an avid walker, I explore the planet and what it means to relate to nature, finding new, ecological ways of being.
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have finished their sixth cycle of reporting. They published the conclusions of this research in a report released in March 2023.

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In late March 2023, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the final synthesis report of around a decade of research and investigation into climate change and its impacts and effects. This report is incredibly important, as it shows us an overview of what we currently know at a global level, as well as a regional level, about the impacts climate change might have on our environment. The report contains the best guesses about what could happen, and presents future scenarios with different levels of global warming to show us what these futures might be like. What’s clear is that each tenth of a degree makes a difference to the damage that will be caused by human-induced climate change.

Unfortunately, there was not much fanfare or media reporting in New Zealand when the report was released. A look on the Climate page of Stuff’s website 3 weeks after its release shows nothing regarding the report, and to find the articles they did publish requires searching through their archives. Looking at the articles, no news media site seemed to take the time to explain the whole report, its importance, and what NZ could do off the back of this evidence. 

What is the IPCC and why is this report important?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC for short, is the organisation set up by the United Nations (UN) to coordinate and report on climate change science across the globe. It comprises scientists from member nations of the UN, each a specialist in their field of climate research in their country.

The IPCC is divided into three Working Groups, who focus on different areas of climate change research. The first group works on the physical science of climate change; the second on climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, and the third on mitigation of climate change. There are also Task Groups which focus on research in specific areas such as gender-related impacts as a result of climate change.

The IPCC have reporting cycles, meaning that approximately every seven years they release three large reports, one from each Working Group, and a synthesis report, which summarises the findings over this period. In 2022-23, they released their sixth cycle of reports (AR6), which discuss the changes in climate science since 2014, when the fifth cycle was published. The report published in March 2023 was the final report in the cycle, synthesising the findings and delivering important conclusions and possibilities for action for governments worldwide (link to the report).

It’s important to note that the IPCC do not recommend anything, nor are they in the business of making promises of what will happen. They discuss the information that they have gathered through the scientific method, which comes with varying levels of certainty, depending upon many other factors, such as the availability of data, the extent to which this data has been verified, and the likelihood of certain scenarios. The IPCC reports can tell us the overall impact of certain policies, but they will not tell us what to do or how to do it.

We must therefore be careful when reading articles which quote a conclusion from the IPCC report, attempting to defend the arguments of a particular person. The report does not justify actions, but provides evidence for the possible outcomes of global warming. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is of interest to the scientists; just how we go about that is of interest to politicians.

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The main conclusions of the Synthesis Report of the Sixth Cycle

There are several important conclusions drawn by the report that all citizens should be aware of, if they are to understand climate change and its current and potential future impacts. These are the following:

  • Global warming has already resulted in a temperature increase of 1.1 degrees Celsius in the period 2011-2020, compared with 1850-1900.
  • Time is running out. There is a rapidly closing window of action to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all, and if we do not see a rapid and severe decline in greenhouse gas emissions, we will not keep global warming to 1.5 degrees, and therefore the challenges will become more complex and the impacts and risks more severe. The next 10 years are crucial.
  • Each tenth of a degree counts. Each tenth of a degree of warming results in greater losses and damages, and risks that become much harder to predict and to manage. Current measurements are showing the state of the planet is worse than was predicted in the previous report.
  • Vulnerable populations are the first and hardest hit by climate change. These populations are less developed countries, indigenous peoples, low-income families, and those living in low-lying and coastal regions and small islands. 3.3-3.6 billion people live in highly vulnerable places to the effects of climate change.
  • There is a gap between what we are currently doing, and what we should be doing to both meet our targets and keep global warming within the 1.5-degree threshold. Continuing our current trajectory will result in 3.2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.
  • All models desiring to limit the impacts of climate change at least somewhat involve a necessary “rapid, deep, and in most cases immediate reduction in CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors.”
  • Cross-sector, multidisciplinary and democratic approaches are the best ways to implement and adapt to climate change, as well as mitigate losses. Working with indigenous knowledge, working with diverse approaches, working with vulnerable populations, and involving all stakeholders in decision making leads to better outcomes.
  • It is more likely than not that we will hit at least 1.5 degrees of warming in the early 2030’s, however we do have hope. We can still limit warming to 1.5 degrees. The only way to do this would be through large, severe cuts in emissions across all sectors and all developed nations on the planet.

The estimates: What will happen at different levels of warming?

The image below contains the IPCC’s estimates for all geographic regions at different levels of warming. The first scenario is for 1.5 degrees of warming, the last for 4 degrees of warming. As you can see, the impact gets more and more severe, as the average temperature increases. 

Future scenarios at different levels of warming
Image: IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, figure 2

The report notes that every region is projected to increasingly experience extreme weather events, which happen concurrently. This means that both hottest temperatures will increase, and lowest temperatures will decrease, as well as there being increased precipitation and risk of rain-caused flooding in most regions, increased fire risk, tropical cyclone risk, and drought risk.

For other terrestrial species like insects, mammals, birds, etc., of the tens of thousands of species surveyed, between 3-14% of them face a very high risk of extinction at 1.5 degrees of warming. Coral reefs are projected to decline a further 70-90% at 1.5 degrees – these may very well become something that exist only in our memories.

Alongside these ecosystem changes, we can expect changes to the availability of food, and therefore increases in nutritional deficiencies among those in highly vulnerable regions; increases in pathogens and diseases, heat-related deaths, and more. As the temperature increase rises, so does the complexity of managing the effects of this increase.

Severity of impacts of climate change on populations
Image: IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, figure 3

Current policy action vs necessary policy action: the enormous gap

If the policies and agreements in place in 2020 such as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, were continued along their current trajectory, we would in no case reach net-zero emissions, nor keep warming to 1.5 degrees. There is a large gap between the current policies in place, and what needs to be done in order to respond to the dangers that we just saw above.

Gap between current climate policies and necessary reductions
Grey at the top of the image shows projected outcome from current policies in place. We should be aiming for the blue, purple, and orange lines: dramatic immediate reductions. Image: IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, figure 3.6

In the case of finance, globally we need 3-6 times more investment in climate-related programmes, initiatives, innovations, strategies, and knowledge production, averaged between now and 2030, if we are to limit the effects of global warming. In the Australia, Japan and New Zealand region, this figure is 3 times more at the lower estimate, and 7 times more at the higher estimate. For places like the Middle East, a much, much larger investment is required, with 14-28 times the current investment required to mitigate the effects of climate change. The report notes that “There is sufficient global capital and liquidity to close global investment gaps, given the size of the global financial system.” Factors within and outside the global financial system act as barriers to stop this from happening.

tree showing possible outcomes of acting now
What we do between now and 2030 impacts which path we follow long into the future. Image: IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, figure 4.2

The most important conclusion of the report is that what we do between now and the early 2030s, is what will make the most difference to the impacts of climate change for all future generations. Sea levels will keep rising for millennia, but just how much they rise is determined by how we choose to respond today. As you see in the above image, when we choose early action, we can set a trajectory towards a brighter, more stable, and more liveable future. If we make bad choices now, we put ourselves on the pathway towards greater destruction, pain and suffering in the future.

The good thing is that the report highlights the interrelatedness of the Sustainable Development Goals and the work being done to mitigate the effects of climate change and adapt to new realities. In places where we eradicate poverty, ensure clean air and water supplies, and educate all young people, we not only look after the ecosystems and allow communities to reduce their emissions, but also improve the wellbeing and living standards of these people. There may be some trade-offs between climate mitigation and sustainable development, but there are significant mutual benefits, too.

What can we do about climate change?

The Synthesis Report considers many different possibilities for climate action. These possibilities are both at the individual and collective level. Have a look at the image below, and you will see the various estimated impacts of particular solutions, as well as their relative costs to implement. The largest light blue bars represent low-cost high impact solutions, such as solar and wind energy, electricity efficiency, and public and goods transportation including cycling.

Impacts and costs of different climate actions
There are low-cost high impact actions we can take immediately to reduce warming potential. Image: IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, figure 4.4

Things that we can choose to act on ourselves include our diet and lifestyle choices. As we can see, shifting to sustainable healthy diets with more plant-based foods and less animal products such as meat and dairy has a reasonably large potential impact. Likewise with reducing food loss and food waste – only buying what we need and making use of all of it can go a long way to reducing emissions.

Similarly, transportation choices make a big difference. Walking or cycling are the lowest-emission options, closely followed by public transportation. A fuel-efficient vehicle or electric vehicle if you do need to use a car also makes a big difference. Our shopping choices also make a difference, opting for efficient lighting, efficient household appliances, and other electronics which require lower energy supplies helps to reduce emissions.

This individual impact is summarised in the Demand-side impacts section at the bottom of the image. Sobriety, that is, making the choice to live a low-emissions, low-energy, low-consumption lifestyle, has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40-70%. Given that each tenth of a degree counts, these lifestyle and shopping choices makes a real difference. 

Most of the impact does however come from the institutions which make up a society, including government, businesses, and energy production. We can’t make the choice to use solar or wind power unless we have a large investment ready to purchase an autonomous power supply for our own roof, but our energy companies can make the decisions to stop fossil fuel energy production. Solar and wind energy are low cost and high impact solutions. Stopping deforestation and the destruction of natural ecosystems is a reasonably low-cost solution which likewise has a large impact. These kinds of decisions are the policies we need to see our politicians enacting, if they are to demonstrate that they have understood the problems we will face due to climate change.

The report puts specific emphasis on the fact that justice and inclusion are particularly important in the response to climate change.

“4.4 Actions that prioritise equity, climate justice, social justice and inclusion lead to more sustainable outcomes, co-benefits, reduce trade-offs, support transformative change and advance climate resilient development. Adaptation responses are immediately needed to reduce rising climate risks, especially for the most vulnerable. Equity, inclusion and just transitions are key to progress on adaptation and deeper societal ambitions for accelerated mitigation. (high confidence)”

Likewise, solutions that involve multiple stakeholders, and which are arrived at through collaborative means, have far-reaching impacts beyond just the state of the planet:

“4.9 The feasibility, effectiveness and benefits of mitigation and adaptation actions are increased when multi-sectoral solutions are undertaken that cut across systems. When such options are combined with broader sustainable development objectives, they can yield greater benefits for human well- being, social equity and justice, and ecosystem and planetary health.”

Some policy ideas

We need to demand more from our politicians, because as the report clearly states, current trajectories are not sufficient to mitigate the effects of climate change. As a reminder, current efforts put us on track to reach 3.2 degrees of warming by 2100. That means, if you are now 30-40 years old, and we continue as we are, your children or grandchildren will be living in a highly uninhabitable world with large-scale economic and ecological damage.

Here are some things New Zealand and other developed countries could do on the back of the IPCC’s Synthesis Report. These are not part of the report, as the IPCC is not involved in making recommendations or telling us what to do; rather they are my own ideas based on the evidence we find in the report. 

  • Stop all fossil fuel subsidies, spend the money saved on vulnerable populations.
  • Convert 100% of electricity grid to renewable (solar, wind as first choices)
  • Small scale grant programme for community ecology and environment initiatives (max $20,000 per year, per initiative for example)
  • Banning greenwashing with severe punishments, increasing requirements on green advertising, carbon reporting, and introduce mandatory emissions labelling
  • 1 day per week environmental work scheme, paid for by the Government (instead of working at your workplace, you opt to work in local government, or other associations on environmental issues, and your daily salary paid for by Government).
  • New Zealand international cooperation with low-lying Pacific nations on a much larger scale.
  • Free ecological and environmental studies programmes, climate change information sessions for all NZ citizens.
  • Investment priority in public transportation, cycling and pedestrians. Development of road and car projects scaled back significantly. Bike and electric bike rebates (50% off up to $500 per citizen for example).

Moving from science to action

The report is serious and sobering reading. It’s quite tough to think about what the world might look like in 20 years’ time. One of the best ways to confront this is through taking practical action steps in your own life to reduce your ecological impact and your emissions. Here are three ways you can transform your new knowledge into action immediately:

You can calculate your approximate carbon footprint using the NZ-based calculator FutureFit here.

You could think about diet and lifestyle changes that you could implement, focusing on food, transportation and energy use. How can you live better, with less?

You can have a conversation at your workplace about your company’s emissions and ecological impact. Push for more measurements of emissions, and more ambitious emissions reductions targets. Use the information in this article to help you talk about what the dangers of climate change might be, and why we should act now.

Sharing knowledge is also a great gift.
Let others know about this article

It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.

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If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.

Why plurality.eco?

Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.

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A new way to think of entrepreneurship

to support independent and ad-free ecological thinking

author
Jacques Lawinski

Jacques Lawinski

PhD candidate in philosophy and ecology at Université Paris VIII, visiting researcher in Lesvos, Greece. A writer, an activist, and an avid walker, I explore the planet and what it means to relate to nature, finding new, ecological ways of being.
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Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be about making lots of money. It can be ecological, too, and exist in ways that support the ecological transition, rather than continue to degrade the resources of the Earth.

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What is entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship and the role of entrepreneurs in our society has increased significantly in the past decade, with much Government policy and resources being given to drive innovation, encourage people to become entrepreneurs, and therefore to drive the growth and competitiveness of the economy. The European Union has identified entrepreneurship as a key focus point of its growth strategy, yet cites the perception and recognition of entrepreneurs as being one of the barriers to boosting entrepreneurship on the continent. In New Zealand, a similar view of entrepreneurship is held, with then-minister Steven Joyce saying in 2016 that entrepreneurs “lead and grow the businesses that generate employment and deliver considerable export revenues for New Zealand.”

For the larger society, we need entrepreneurs for economic growth, and to make sure that our people are employed. Entrepreneurs create the businesses that enable us to make this happen. For entrepreneurs, their motivations likely lie elsewhere, with growth and revenue sometimes only the by-product of their motivation and skillset to solve a problem or change something.

New Zealand’s leading entrepreneurship education organisation, Young Enterprise, don’t seem to say what entrepreneurship is on their website, but they do claim that their programmes “inspire people to discover their potential in business and in life.” Entrepreneurs would seem to be those people who have discovered or realised their potential in either or both business and life. The Stanford Online site has a page entitled, What is Entrepreneurship? where they note that entrepreneurs are those who, by themselves or with others, “strike out on an original path to create a new business.” Entrepreneurs are people who create businesses, then. Oberlo who come up upon searching the question say the same thing, but add that modern entrepreneurship is also about solving big world problems “like bringing about social change.” Wikipedia say that entrepreneurship is “the creation or extraction of economic value,” “and is generally viewed as change.” They then also add that entrepreneurs create businesses, and like the other sites, note that entrepreneurs bear the most risk and also potentially gain the greatest reward.

Does entrepreneurship really have the impact that these leaders advocate for? In 2008, two Dutch researchers undertook a meta-study (reviewing other studies) of empirical evidence to see what the impact on entrepreneurs is on the society and the economy, compared to non-entrepreneurs. They concluded that entrepreneurs create more employment relative to their size (often small businesses, self-employed, etc.), but in doing so they reduce the stability of the labour market, meaning that job creation is more volatile and less predictable. Entrepreneurs were found to pay lower wages, offer fewer benefits, and create jobs in lower levels of the economy compared with their non-entrepreneur counterparts like large well-established organisations. However, employees seem more satisfied with their jobs as or with entrepreneurs, compared to at other companies.

Entrepreneurs also produce fewer new products and new technologies, and apply for fewer new patents than non-entrepreneurial companies. This means that entrepreneurs are not in fact more innovative, however their innovations are generally of higher quality than others. In terms of productivity, entrepreneurs are not at all very productive. And finally, regarding utility, most entrepreneurs would earn more in a wage job, because average entrepreneurial income data is skewed by some very, very large earners at the top of the scale. Despite all these things, the authors note that entrepreneurs have other, non-tangible benefits to being an entrepreneur, otherwise they would be “irrational, optimistic, or risk-seeking.” These are the classic benefits of being one’s own boss, choosing when to work, doing something which they believe makes a difference, among other reasons.

These understandings of entrepreneurship seem to be very focused on business, and on the economic outcomes of entrepreneurship for the society. Entrepreneurship is intimately tied with business, and one must, if one is an entrepreneur, have a business. Having a business means making money, and extracting value.

Young Enterprise UK teaches enterprise, as well as entrepreneurship, with a more general take on what this looks like: “Enterprise education provides young people with the skills, competencies and mindset to make the most of everyday opportunities and challenges. Being enterprising is something which can be applied to all aspects of life and work – identifying and initiating opportunities as well as adapting your response to situations.” They focus more on the skills involved in being enterprising, and seem to encourage students to apply these to any situation.

The entrepreneurship competencies or skills are well defined in many different areas. The European Union created EntreComp, a framework showing the entrepreneurship toolbox, and they share this transversal definition of entrepreneurship: “value creation in any sphere of life.” There are three competence areas, ideas and opportunities, resources, and into action, and they note that entrepreneurship is one of eight key competences for lifelong learning. They support the definition proposed by the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship & Young Enterprise: “Entrepreneurship is when you act upon opportunities and ideas and transform them into value for others. The value that is created can be financial, cultural, or social.”

entrepreneur sitting on a hill looking into the distance
Entrepreneurs and ecology: do they go together? Image: Tobias Tullius on Unsplash

An ecological critique of entrepreneurship

Economic growth cannot continue to rule our societies, if we are to confront the ecological crisis. We cannot continue to seek profit, we cannot continue to extract as much value from natural resources as we can, and we cannot make decisions purely based on financial and economic return. This has been highlighted by many intergovernmental research bodies, including the IPCC, the IPBES, and more. Entrepreneurship, therefore, in its narrow definition as “starting a business” would seem to be at odds with ecological action.

If we want more entrepreneurs, as Steven Joyce said at the beginning, to create more revenue and keep people employed, then we would be thinking very narrowly, if entrepreneurship is about creating value for others. Just how valuable is economic growth and revenue when we are facing the extinction of thousands of incredibly important species for the maintenance of life on Earth? Currently we are face-to-face with an ecological crisis, and economic growth is at odds with this.

All is not lost for the entrepreneur, however. He or she can and should continue to exist, but the challenge is to find a way to decouple the link between entrepreneurship on the one hand, and business, money, profit, and supposed individual freedom on the other. Having complete control over your life might be great, but at the expense of the planet and the livelihoods of other people, is not so great. If entrepreneurs can demonstrate and use their skills in different ways, with a different mindset, then they could become the key players of the ecological transition that is needed in our societies.

But just what might an ecological entrepreneur look like?

Ecological economics

A group of European and American scientists got together when they realised that their research had interesting conclusions for each other. These were not just a group of biologists, or economists, but actually a mix of the two: the economists saw that the biologists had something to say about the nature of the economy, and of entrepreneurship.

This work is being carried out by people such as Giuseppe Longo, Roger Koppl, Stuart Kauffman, Teppo Felin, and more. Their award-winning paper, Economics for a Creative World, outlines the possibilities for a new way of viewing entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs keep the same skills, but their function and goal in the economy changes.

They propose both a theory of value in the economy, and a theory of entrepreneurship, or a theory of the evolution of the economy through the actions and services of entrepreneurs. In this new way of thinking, the greatest value is created for humanity when we find ways to move ourselves to a new state of society – be it with an invention like writing, the iPhone, or recycling. The entrepreneur is the person who enables this change, by combining resources in new ways. Just as the ant who goes a little further than the other ones might discover a new food source to keep his ant colony alive longer than the neighbouring colony, the entrepreneur makes and shares their solutions or discoveries to make progress as humanity. This is an evolutionary mechanism, and the authors of this idea have looked at how organisms evolve, and realised that as human beings, we in fact evolve in our economy in the same way.

The starting point of this research is the observation that the economic system is not a causal system. This means that there are no dynamic laws of economics. A consumer can always choose to act in irrational and unpredictable ways, and whole groups of consumers can do this, defying the commonly held beliefs in neoclassical economic principles. The ‘rational man’ of neoclassical economics doesn’t exist, and has been proven dead for decades.

Neoclassical economics views the market, and the economy, in the same way that Newtonian physics views the world. Everything is controlled and governed by laws that determine predictable outcomes for each and every action, and this all happens in a closed system. This is a mechanistic viewpoint, which relies on principles of cause and effect for action to happen and be explained. Viewing the economy in this way means that economists create laws and models to predict what will happen, and explain what is happening. These models very rarely explain the complexity of a situation, and, as we see again and again, are often wrong.

For these researchers – both biologists and economists – the economy is not a causal system, algorithms cannot be used, and we cannot predict or pre-state what will happen in a particular case. Instead, economic dynamics are creative, much like evolution. In evolutionary biology, random traits appear, which just so happen to be better at dealing with certain stresses put on a particular organism, and this is what helps these organisms survive over other ones. The economy is a bit similar: creativity, innovation, and random inventions are what shape and define the progress that the economy makes. Before Apple, we did not predict based on “current trends” or “current laws” that there would be a product, the iPhone, that would change the way we interact with each other. But it has.

If we think of the economy in terms of one central square, there are many, many possible ways of putting resources together which lead people to a new square, slightly outside of the current one. There are infinitely many possible combinations of things, ideas, resources, which constitute inventions, which could change the way people do things. This is the evolutionary logic of the economy: we make new things, and therefore evolve. For example, think about the uses of a screwdriver: there are millions of possible uses, many where the screwdriver is useful but ineffective. We could use it to make holes in paper, we could use it to write in the sand, and we could also use it as a radio antenna. In 1800, we had screwdrivers but not radio transmission, so we could have never predicted this use of the screwdriver at that time. However, through more developments and combinations, we arrived at a point where this became a possible use for the screwdriver.

Therefore, we cannot accurately predict or model what happens in the economic space, with enough certainty. We can observe tendencies and behaviours, but these are not accurate predictions nor are they laws, because as we have seen what shapes the evolution of, or changes in the economic space is creativity and novelty – the combination of current things to make new things which lead the economic space in another direction. Past innovations, like screwdrivers, did not cause new inventions, like radio antennae, to be invented. They enabled them, but they did not cause them.

The economic space is therefore changing all the time. People are inventing things, buying things, combining things, and selling things at an incredible rate. Trying to model or predict within this is near impossible.

Statistics and modelling of the economy means that we close off our economic system to this novelty and creativity, because we do not allow for or account for the possibility of an unpredicted and unpredictable change or invention. The more open a system, the greater the wealth of this system, because of greater diversity, and greater possible avenues of evolution, just as a system of insects in the biosphere.

ant colony
The best ants are entrepreneurs too: they help the survival of the colony by finding new food sources or places to live - moving the ant colony from one possible space to another. Image: Prince Patel on Unsplash

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Ecological entrepreneurs

Taking this new vision of the economy into account, the ecological entrepreneur is someone who is able to spot an opportunity to move from one economic state to another: someone who combines resources, or knows of an idea from somewhere else, and who successfully moves from the general frame or way of doing things, into one which conforms with his product, service, or solution. This does not necessarily involve the buying and selling of solutions, nor does it have to respond to a practical problem, which is often taught in entrepreneurship education. Rather, the entrepreneur spots an opportunity for a new way of doing something, and is able to share this way with enough other people to move the group towards the adoption of this new way.

Entrepreneurs can act in and with community groups, organisations, businesses, and society at large. There is nothing which says that entrepreneurs must bring about change on a societal level, or disrupt a whole market and ‘ecosystem’ of businesses. Opportunities are present everywhere, and the skills required to identify these and take action upon them are applicable in various situations.

According to these scientists, the most successful innovations are “non-algorithmic responses to new possibilities.” The entrepreneur is able to identify a possibility, and create a way to get us from where we are now, to a state in which that possibility is the normal. An algorithm could give us a thousand ways to use copper, for example, but the entrepreneur is creative about his use of resources, and develops unpredictable solutions. This is a new way of thinking about innovation.

The entrepreneur is therefore decoupled from business, money, and profit. They are someone who spots an opportunity, invents in a creative way to move towards that possibility, and enables transformation in order to make that a reality. We no longer value entrepreneurs because of their gains in economic value, productivity, and employment, but because they enable societies to innovate, solve problems, and move beyond their current position.

Societies that can innovate and change are more resilient because they are better able to adapt. The entrepreneur becomes a useful force in the ecological transition because they have the key skills needed to develop ideas, spot opportunities, and make necessary transformations to stop the ecological destruction we are now causing. The only competency to add to the EntreComp framework is therefore ecological knowledge: for this new way of ecological entrepreneurs, they must know about the impact of their change on social, environmental, and subjective or psychological levels.

Let’s look at a brief example. A lot of energy is wasted in boiling more water than is needed for a cup of tea, when we fill the kettle and only use some of what we boiled. We could create a cup-measure, we could create a kettle with marks on the side for the number of cups, or, we could create something which sticks in people’s minds, which means they use their tea cup to measure the water first, before boiling the jug. The best solution to this problem involves no extra resources – it is simply a procedural, and behavioural change. The successful ecological entrepreneur therefore figures out a way to encourage this behavioural change, and transforms the society to adopt this behaviour. He or she knows that selling a product to put next to your existing kettle to measure water would generate money, but would also be an incredible waste of water, when a simple behavioural solution would suffice. He or she is able to take a risk on a zero-resource solution, and is effective at getting others to adopt his solution.

The question that arises here is how we value and compensate such entrepreneurs. They won’t necessarily be making huge amounts of money – the entrepreneurs’ dream is, and remains, for many, a dream. As the meta-study at the beginning points out, most entrepreneurs would earn more in wage employment than they are earning as an entrepreneur. But if they are following this new model of entrepreneurship, selling products people don’t need is only one possible way of being an entrepreneur. Those who have a sense of responsibility, or a moral attitude towards our flora and fauna, can dream of being entrepreneurs, just in a different sense. Responsibility for the environment means avoiding the idea that we need to extract more, sell more, and create more value, and trading this for the idea of innovation and creativity to help us move to new spaces and new ways of doing things. We need to find ways to reward the ‘enablers’ who are developing ideas, and connect them with the more practical entrepreneurs who know how to change or transform. These new and ecological entrepreneurs are not necessarily straight out of business school, either. They are to be found in research centres, in practical and community organisations, or the most ‘random’ places – because these people intimately know the systems they are working with or against, and are best poised to creatively help us out of trouble.

The benefits of an ecological entrepreneurship

Western societies are facing incredibly difficult challenges at social, economic, health, environmental, technological, and governmental levels. Promoting the idea that entrepreneurs will help us out of this mess through innovations which they sell on the market is a very narrow way of thinking. More money, more growth, more GDP, more waste, and more consumption will not solve these issues. They are much deeper and structural than could be solved through money alone.

Promoting a vision of ecological entrepreneurship enables people to imagine ways in which they could improve their surroundings and communities, and make that into a life project which we now call ‘work.’ Ecological entrepreneurs won’t work solo on projects – they will often need teams of people with various knowledge bases to help them implement their transformations. This possibility, this vision, of entrepreneurship, is a mobilising and active way of thinking about entrepreneurship, rather than a predetermined and algorithmic method that we normally see. True non-algorithmic solutions can only come about when we let our citizens know that they can viably seek to transform systems, and do this as a means for life. The question of funding does and will continue to exist, but any Government looking for innovation I think has a duty to support truly innovative solutions from ecological entrepreneurs. Venture capitalists will not necessarily get any financial benefit from innovative behavioural changes, but perhaps their focus will shift to more philanthropic causes if ecological entrepreneurship became a ‘Big Thing’. That is, if these funding sources and financial institutions are really concerned about the crises that we are facing, and failing to deal with.

To sum up in four points

  • The current everyday definition of entrepreneurship is one where a person comes up with an idea, develops this idea, takes it to market, and then sells and markets this item for a profit as a business.
  • Instead, we could look at entrepreneurs as having three successive roles: spotting an alternative possibility outside of our current way of life, making that behaviour, way of thinking, or solution a reality, and then maintaining it such the old possibility becomes everyday life.
  • Thinking like this means that entrepreneurs do not need to create and sell products or services in the market. Entrepreneurship becomes a notion uncoupled from capitalistic relations, and we can now undertake entrepreneurial projects in many different, ecological, and democratic ways. Entrepreneurs are the evolutionary enablers of the human economy.
  • This is ecological thinking because we can promote a vision of entrepreneurship which is not destructive towards the environment, nor towards our social relations. We are aware of the impact that the idea has, and word business does not appear in the definition. Profit is completely up to the person.

Sharing knowledge is also a great gift.
Let others know about this article

It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.

All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.

If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.

Why plurality.eco?

Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.

Our network

On social media

We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.

Copyright © Plurality.eco 2023
EN