Women and Nature: Towards an Ecosocialist Feminism

 

Written by Jess Spear and first published at Rupture

It was hot outside that day. In the remote area of KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa a young man watched as five men approached him on the porch. “Could we have a drink?” one of them asked. As they finished the water they asked if they could go inside and thank the woman that lived there. The young man led them in the front door. Moments later shots rang out as the men gunned down the young man’s grandmother and environmental organiser, Fikile Ntshangase, and raced out.

The death of Ntshangase removed a thorn in the side of the Tendele Coal mining company. They had been pressing for over a decade to get the small number of remaining families to vacate their land so their mining operation could expand. Like Berta Cárceres before her, the resistance of Ntshangase and her community is part of a long history of people defending nature as part of defending themselves, their history, their culture, and their future. The role of women like Ntshangase and countless others in defense of nature and with it, life, illustrates the connection between the exploitation of women and the exploitation of nature.  

The rise of ecofeminism

Wherever the forces of destruction attempt to cut down trees, pollute our air and water, and rip away the earth for minerals, women have been leading the resistance. In the cities and communities, women have fought for clean water, air, and land for their families to flourish. From the very first “tree huggers” in the Chipko Movement in India and the Comitato dei danneggiati (Injured Persons’ Committee) protesting pollution in Fascist Italy [1] to the peasants in La Via Campesina, the people of Appalachia fighting mountaintop removal and indigenous defenders of the Amazon, women have been and are today leading communities in struggle against capitalist destruction of our environment.

The rise of second-wave feminism alongside environmental movements in the 1970s led to the emergence of ‘ecofeminist’ politics which saw “a connection between the exploitation and degradation of the natural world and the subordination and oppression of women”. [2] The term ‘ecofeminism’ was coined by the French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or Death) published in 1974. One of the first ecofeminist movements is the Green Belt Movement - aimed at preventing desertification by planting trees - in Kenya started by Wangari Maathai in 1977. 

Of course, many men are also fierce campaigners against capitalist destruction, organising mass movements to defend the forests and land, like Chico Mendes in the Amazon and Ken Saro-Wiwa in the Niger Delta, who were both tragically murdered for their activism. However, the most well-known environmental activists today are undoubtedly women: Vanessa Nakate and Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Naomi Klein, and Vandana Shiva. Even here in Ireland, Maura Harrington helped to lead the Shell to Sea campaign and today the most well known radical environmental activist is arguably Saoirse McHugh. 

That both women and nature are dominated and exploited is undeniably true. The question for ecofeminists and ecosocialists is why and what can be done about it?  

Ecofeminism, patriarchy & capitalism

For some ecofeminists, women’s affinity to nature comes from ‘their physiological functions (birthing, menstrual cycles) or some deep element of their personalities (life-oriented, nourishing/caring values)’. [3] In this way they “understand” nature, whereas men do not and cannot. Women have a spiritual connection to “Mother” earth. These ecofeminists locate the exploitation and oppression of women and nature in patriarchy, where men control, plunder, rape, and destroy both. Climate change is literally a ‘man-made problem that requires a feminist solution’. The feminist solution, in this case, is more women’s voices, more women in positions of power, and more women at the table discussing their experiences and their ideas on what to do about environmental problems. 

Undeniably society is patriarchal (see below). We know it from the statistics and we women know it from the million and one experiences we’ve had that reinforce the idea that men are better, stronger, smarter, and overall more capable.  

Capitalism & Patriarchy

Capitalism emerged from a patriarchal feudal society in which male private property inheritance demanded women’s bodies and lives were subordinated to the needs of the family. All kinds of sexist ideas supported women’s supposed inferiority to men, though the forms of oppression women experienced was of course uneven across class and racial lines. Peasant women certainly weren’t forced to learn multiple languages and the basics of etiquette to attract a husband. 

They worked in the fields and in the home. But they were nonetheless affected by the ideas and culture that emanated from the top of society because as Marx explains, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas...The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas…”

Patriarchal norms and behaviors, and crucially the laws that enshrined men’s right to own property (including the women of their family), meant that men would become the first capitalists, not women. While rich women were confined to stuffy drawing rooms, crocheting and waiting for the day they would marry and ensure property inheritance continued along the male line, working class women and peasant women, who had no property, laboured as mothers, carers, and domestic servants, regardless of how much they had to work outside the home to survive. 

Today this continuation of social reproductive labour by women means that even though in many countries they’ve gained political and civil rights - through persistent struggle by countless women as well as LGBTQ+ people and men - the ability of working class and poor women to exercise these rights continues to be restricted. It is hampered by both capitalism’s dependence on the free labour they perform in the home, the undervalued care work and often precarious, part-time work they do in the formal economy, and the sexist ideas that persist and ensure the gendered division of labour is reproduced year after year, generation after generation.

Patriarchal ideas, norms, and behaviours have devastating impacts today on women. Not only from the discrimination, abuse, and violence they face from men as well as the state and state-supported institutions. The highly gendered division of labour in society means women are not only working outside the home to ensure their families have all they need to live, they are also putting in on average three times more hours than men at home. In Ireland, women labour in the home an extra 11 hours a week compared to men. This impacts the kinds of jobs they can take, which affects salary and wages, working conditions, and whether they are free to fully develop their interest and talents.

Women are also at the frontlines of environmental destruction, toxic pollution, as well as climate and ecological breakdown. In Flint, Michigan it was the women in the community who raised their voices when the effects of lead poisoning became clear, and who today, six years on, are still fighting for clean water. As subsistence farmers, producing half the food globally, and in the global South, planting and harvesting as much as 80% of the food, women are forced to reckon with desertification, lack of nutritious food, access to clean water, and destruction of nature in general more than men. In a natural disaster, women are also 14 times more likely to die. 

The experiences of these women, who make up the majority of the poorest people on the planet, who have and will be more impacted by the pandemic and its aftermath, should be brought to the centre of discussions about solving climate change and ecological breakdown. Not only because they are most affected, but also because they have unique knowledge and skills that will be key to planning how we can establish a more harmonious interaction between society and nature. Vandana Shiva explains that, 

“In most cultures women have been the custodians of biodiversity. They produce, reproduce, consume and conserve biodiversity in agriculture. However, in common with all other aspects of women’s work and knowledge, their role in the development and conservation of biodiversity has been rendered as non-work and non-knowledge.”[4]

The involvement of women in farmer and peasant organisations expanded the struggle for food sovereignty to include combating gender-based violence and equality for women. The women within La Via Campesina for example ‘defend their rights as women within organisations and society in general...and struggle as peasant women together with their colleagues against the neoliberal model of agriculture’. They help organisations understand the many obstacles preventing women from joining and contributing to movements, in particular ‘the division of labor by gender [which] means that rural women have less access to the most precious resource, time...’  

Central to ecofeminism is a rejection of human domination and control over nature in favour of a recognition of ‘...the centrality of human embeddedness in the natural world’.[5] As John Bellamy Foster[6] and other metabolic rift theorists have contended, this is also a central point in Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marx wrote that “[human beings] live from nature...nature is [our] body, we must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if we are not to die. 

To say that [our] physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for [we] are a part of nature.” Unless we struggle for a complete transformation of our society-nature interaction, where production is organised in an ecologically balanced way, the rift between nature and humanity will worsen with devastating consequences for human health, environmental destruction, climate disruption, and irretrievable biodiversity loss. 

Ecosocialist feminism

While ecofeminists rightly point out the subordination and domination of women and nature as having a common cause, Marxist ecofeminists (or what I would call ecosocialist feminists) disagree that women’s connection to nature is rooted in their reproductive biology. The essentialism of some strands of ecofeminism leads us down a path of biological determinism that so much of second-wave feminism was fighting to destroy, and we are still struggling against.[7] We also need to reckon with the revolution in the gender/sex binary demanded by trans, intersex, and gender non-conforming people who do not and will not fit into the simple male/female categories and all the cultural baggage that goes with it. 

While we recognise the unique knowledge women have in care work, for families and for nature, we don’t accept that it’s inherently female or feminine, as some ecofeminism suggests. Cleaning the house, cooking meals, raising children, farming to feed your family, or gathering the daily water is not “women’s work”, but rather the needs of society forced onto their backs. “Saving the planet” is not inherently women’s work or responsibility either. We want to end the gender division in and outside the home and we demand this work is organised amongst the wider community, for example through free public childcare,  community laundromats and canteens. 

This would have the effect of freeing women from this work now, but would also opens the door to a society in which the community is responsible for organising social reproductive work and sexist ideas about “women’s” vs. “men’s work” can begin to wither away. Women will then be free to choose what work they want to engage in, including the farming, environmental/ecological work so many already perform, enriching all of society by their contributions. 

In contrast to “essentialist” ecofeminism, ecosocialist feminism sees women’s “connection” to nature and our environment as socially constructed and reinforced for material reasons. “[W]omen are not ‘one’ with nature...[we’ve] been ‘thrown into an alliance” with it.[8] 

Capitalism treats nature and women’s social reproductive labour as ‘free gifts’, completely outside the formal economy (and therefore without value) and yet absolutely central to its ability to generate profits. For example, the value of an old-growth forest is not accounted for when the trees are felled and the wood used to make furniture. Under capitalism, the value of a commodity (whether it’s a shirt or a house) is based on the average amount of labour power used to make it, including the work that went into acquiring the materials, but not the “value” of the raw materials in themselves.  

It’s the same for domestic labour. Labour in the home - the cooking, cleaning, and shopping - ensures workers are fit and able to labour in the workplace day after day;and the labour required in birthing and caring for children ensures a new generation of workers is prepared to enter the workplace and create wealth for the capitalists. This is all done primarily by women and for free as far as capitalism is concerned. These ‘free gifts’ - from nature and women - are ‘expropriated’ by capitalism. They are taken and consumed in the process of capital accumulation without compensation, cheapening the cost of production and externalising the real costs onto the rest of society.[9]  

For Marxist ecofeminists, the domination of men over women in society and nature at large is therefore not a result of patriarchal ideas alone. Their continuation and utilisation by capitalism maintains divisions between women and men (alongside black/white, straight/LGBTQ, cis/non-binary) workers and poor people to ensure profits continue and their rotten class system endures. 

Most importantly, ecosocialist feminists underscore the crucial difference between working class or peasant women and women who make it to the top echelons of power. Ecofeminism can sometimes “over-romanticiz[e] women and women’s history...” and “[assert] a ‘totalizing’ image of a universalized ‘woman’,... ignoring women’s differences”.[10] While all women experience sexism, the needs and demands of “women”, even working-class and peasant women, are not uniform. 

Not all working-class women were forced into the role of housewife. As black revolutionary socialist Claudia Jones explained in her essay ‘An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!’, capitalism’s structural racism meant that black women in the 1940s were often the main breadwinner in the family and had to work long hours, usually cleaning or childminding for white families, before they came home to labour for their own.[11] 

We also need to keep in mind that the call for more women’s voices is all too easily met within capitalism with the Josepha Madigans, Angela Merkels and Ursula Von Der Leyens of the world. The new Biden administration in the U.S. is the most recent case in point with the first black and Asian vice president and the first indigenous woman to lead the Department of Interior. 

The rise of the new women’s movement alongside a growing climate justice movement gives impetus to ecofeminist ideas, which is overall positive (despite the essentialist arguments, which must be strongly countered). Yet, as long as private property rights are upheld for corporations to do basically whatever they want to the forests, land, and water with impunity and as long as states act in their interests against ours, whether it’s by the hands of men or women, nature will continue to be destroyed, the climate disrupted, and women will disproportionately suffer (with poor, black and brown and marginalised women suffering the worst). 

We must go much further and demand an ecofeminism that is unflinchingly anti-capitalist and socialist and move towards an ecosocialist feminism that sees our labour as the beginning of the way out. Under patriarchal and racial[12] capitalism, working women and peasants labour in and outside the home. This dual role gives them an insight into the unsustainability and destructive character of capitalism. It’s why so many movements for radical change are led by women, despite the extra barriers in our way. But it is in our labour in the workplaces and where we produce for capital that we have the most power to fight and win. 

Like fuel to the engine, profit is what powers capitalism, and all profit comes from our labour in the workplace. Whether we’re cleaning the floors, staffing the till, or operating machinery in a production line, our labour is what keeps the capitalist system going. If we decide to take collective action, to slow down our work or even go on strike, for an hour, a day or indefinitely, it would bring businesses, cities, and even whole countries to a grinding halt. This means workers, which comprise the exploited and oppressed majority, actually have tremendous potential power when we are organised. 

Women workers alongside the men in their workplaces have used their power to fight back against the sexism they experience - as McDonald’s workers did - and to go after big oil - as teachers in West Virginia did. When the INMO went on strike in 2019 they made clear that their demands for pay and retention directly impacted the inadequate healthcare we all receive, and while they didn’t win everything they demanded, they won more than the government was originally offering. 

We need to build on these examples and countless others from history, strengthen our ties in workplaces as well as the community and get organised to challenge patriarchal capitalism wherever it attacks life, in society and our environment. 

Notes 

1. Ledda, Rachel, 2018. Women’s presence in contemporary Italy’s environmental movements, with a case study on the Mamme No Inceneritore committee, Genre et environnement. 

2. Mellor, M. (1996) ‘The Politics of Women and Nature: Affinity, Contingency or Material Relation?’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 2. 

3. Ibid 

4. Mies, M. and Shiva, V., 2014, Women’s Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation” from Ecofeminism, Zed Books, New York. 

5. Mellor, M. (1996) ‘The Politics of Women and Nature: Affinity, Contingency or Material Relation?’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 2. 

6. See Marx’s Ecology (2000) by John Bellamy Foster and Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism (2018) by Kohei Saito. 

20. Marx, Karl, 1845-6, The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook B. The Illusion of the Epoch. 

7. That is, reproductive ability should determine (and in many cases, limit) your role in the home and in the workplace to those deemed “women’s” work - childminding, cooking, cleaning, teaching, nursing, and so on. 

8. Mellor, M. (1996) ‘The Politics of Women and Nature: Affinity, Contingency or Material Relation?’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 2. 

9. See monthlyreview.org/2018/01/01/women-nature-and-capital-in-the-industrial-revolution/ 

10. Mellor, M. (1996) ‘The Politics of Women and Nature: Affinity, Contingency or Material Relation?’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 2. 

11. See Spear, Jess, ‘Lesser-spotted comrades: Claudia Jones’, Rupture, Autumn 2020. 

12. ‘Racial’ capitalism denotes the history of capitalism’s development was a history of brutal chattel slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and immense destruction of the natural world. “Capital” Marx wrote in Capital Volume 1, “[came] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.

The Natural World and Covid-19

Written by Allan Todd

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1975), p.7

In the midst of this global Covid-19 pandemic, Wednesday 22 April marked the 50th. Anniversary of Earth Day. Fifty years ago, on 22 April 1970, 20m people in the US (around10% of the total population) took to the streets and university campuses to protest against environmental degradation: such as oil spills, smog and rivers that, quite literally, caught fire. The protesters demanded a new way forward for Planet Earth - and, initially, in the early 1970s, some important environmental gains were made: such as the setting up of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the establishment of the principle that "the polluter pays".

But the fifty years since 1970 has shown that the past is indeed “a foreign country” - certainly as regards the environment. From the late 1970s, rampant neoliberal capitalism has not only wiped out most of those gains - it has even made things much worse. In particular, its rapid and on-going destruction of the natural world has resulted in an ever-worsening Climate Crisis - and in dangerous zoonotic pathogens and viruses increasingly crossing from the dwindling number of wild animal species to humans.

As well as the Covid-19 coronavirus, this century has also experienced three other coronavirus epidemics: SARS, in 2002 and 2004; and MERS in 2012. Most recently, from 2013-16, there was the Ebola epidemic, caused by a filovirus. The combined evidence of dangerous global warming and ecological crisis shows that the world is experiencing nothing short of capitalist ecocide.

As Michael Löwy, (Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe) one of the leading ecosocialist thinkers, has said, “…preserving the ecological equilibrium of the planet and therefore an environment favourable to living species, including ours, is incompatible with the expansive and destructive logic of the capitalist system.”

In the 21st. C., the planet - and all life on it - is now facing an unprecedented combination of threats, all as a result of the expansion of the global capitalist system: catastrophic climate breakdown as a result of global warming; a huge loss of ecosystems and biodiversity via a Sixth Mass Extinction; and, as a result of both these dangers, an increase in the frequency of dangerous pathogens crossing from wild animal species to humans.

Twenty-first century ecosocialists are not alone in having recognised the negative impacts of capitalism on the natural world. As well as William Blake - whose poem Jerusalem was one of the earliest literary attacks on the “dark Satanic Mills” of early industrial capitalism - William Wordsworth also pointed out, in a critical way, both the growing encroachments of industrial capitalism on nature (at what has since come to be seen as the start of the Anthropocene), and emerging consumerism:

“The world is too much with us: late and soon, 

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; 

Little we see in Nature that is ours; 

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

...For this, for everything, we are out of tune; ”

William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much With Us in William Wordsworth, S. Gill (ed.), (Oxford, OUP, 1990), p.270

Much more recently, in 1979, James Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, summarised the main points of the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’, that he had developed earlier with Lynn Margulis. In fact, it was the novelist William Golding who suggested the name ‘Gaia’ - as Gaia was the Ancient Greek goddess of Earth. 

And that theory - as briefly summarised by Bryan Appleyard - is that: “Life and the Earth are an interacting whole and the planet can be seen as a single organism:…”  Since then, we have become increasingly aware of just how dangerous it can be to radically alter/interfere with the complex ways in which this organism functions.

However, one of the clearest summaries of the negative impacts of capitalism was drawn up by Michael Löwy in 2005:

“The reigning capitalist system is bringing the planet’s inhabitants a long list of irreparable calamities….All the warning signs are red: it is clear that the insatiable quest for profits, the productivist and mercantile logic of capitalist/industrial civilization is leading us into an ecological disaster of incalculable proportions. This is not to give in to ‘catastrophism’ but to verify that the dynamic of infinite ‘growth’ brought about by capitalist expansion is threatening the natural foundations of human life on the planet.”

If nothing else, this pandemic crisis is making it painfully clear that ‘system change’ is now needed, as quickly as possible, in order to create an economic system that allows for a habitable and sustainable planet. The past 50 years has shown that the ‘System’s’ – i.e. capitalism’s - imperative to push for ever-continued and - increased productivity and consumption, in order to expand short-term profitability, is increasingly exposing the planet’s ecosystems, natural habitats and species to serious threats that are already significantly undermining the planet’s ecological balance.

Furthermore, the unsuccessful global attempts to significantly reduce the emission of greenhouse gases - primarily, but not solely, CO2 - show that the ‘System’ cannot even regulate its destructive actions, let alone overcome the planetary and ecological crises it has already triggered. Faced with the choice of ‘Grow - or die!’, it is clear that, as regards the natural world, neoliberal capitalism continues to favour the latter.

Thus, if capitalism remains - at the very least - unchecked, it will have increasingly devastating impacts on human, animal and plant life. It is now abundantly clear that one of those impacts - especially, but not exclusively, on the poorest and most vulnerable members of all societies - will be ”Epidemics of malaria, cholera, and even deadlier diseases…”

Zoonotic pathogens

As the global impact of the Covid-19 pandemic continues to disrupt lives - and ‘business as usual’ - many are looking for explanations. In part, this is because this is the fourth time this century that humans have been hit by a zoonotic pandemic or epidemic: in 2002, and again in 2004, there was SARS; in 2012, there was MERS; and, from 2013-16, there was the Ebola epidemic.

One aspect that all four infections have in common is that they were all viruses - zoonotic pathogens - that crossed over from wildlife species to humans. The first two - SARS and MERS - like Covid-19, were both coronaviruses; Ebola was a filovirus.

A second feature of these recent infections is that they can all be linked to the climate and ecological crises which have all got worse since the start of this century. Jem Bendell is one researcher and writer who has made the point that climate change has made humans more vulnerable to such viruses. For instance, he explains how declining food sources force wild species - such as bats - to range into new areas:

https://jembendell.com/2020/03/23/the-climate-for-corona-our-warming-world-is-more-vulnerable-to-pandemic/

In addition, lack of sufficient food sources renders such species weaker and therefore more susceptible to infections.

Another factor he highlights is how climate change is increasing our risk of catching diseases like Covid19 by its impact in destroying and degrading natural habitats, and by the resultant biodiversity loss. As he explains:

“The reduction of the total number of wild animals like birds and bats has implications for our exposure to disease. Why?  Because these are ‘reservoir host populations’ for pathogens, and the fewer birds and bats there are, then pathogen concentration and mixing tends to be higher (for reasons of lowered genetic diversity and easier spread). This increases ‘spillover risk’ for zoonotic infections to humans.”

Another to have warned recently about the likelihood of this increased risk of new infections and pandemics because of the growing convergence of ecological crises is Ian Angus:

“Global warming…Species extinction…Deforestation…New diseases and plagues. The list goes on. We face a planetary emergency,…”

However, it is not just global warming and climate change that is causing the loss of natural habitats and biodiversity. As has been seen, one of the biggest drivers of the destruction of natural habitats - and of the resulting ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ of species - is the global capitalist agricultural system. 

This is especially true of the industrialised meat and dairy industries, which, firstly, destroy ever-larger sections of the natural world; and, secondly, also create unhealthy conditions for factory-farmed animals, which make it much easier for animal viruses to cross-over to humans. In addition, there is the use and abuse of wild animals - such as the capturing, breeding and eating of various species.

Even during this pandemic, Brazilian president Bolsonaro has stepped up the destruction of the tropical rainforest in Brazil - from August 2019 to March 2020, satellite photographs show that an area the size of Germany has been cleared. 

Yet scientists and researchers have known for some time that disturbance and destruction of such natural habitats is one of the principal drivers of the transfer of animal-borne infectious diseases from wild animals to humans. Kate Jones, Chair of Ecology and Biodiversity at University College London, has said that such developments are resulting in an “increasing and very significant threat to global health, security and economies.”

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/04/rapid-deforestation-of-brazilian-amazon-could-bring-next-pandemic-experts/

In 2008, she was part of a research team that determined that at least 60% of the 335 new diseases that emerged between 1960 and 2004 originated with non-human animals.

To deal with the wider ecological dimensions of this pandemic, as Alan Thornett explains in a very timely article:

https://socialistresistance.org/covid-19-the-ecological-dimension/19641

will involve “…a revolution in the infrastructure, [in] how we live; the size of cities, how we travel, and what we eat. The task is gigantic but there is no alternative if we are to forge a sustainable future for the planet which resolves the contradiction between ourselves as modern humans and [the] myriad of other non-human species we live alongside.” 

In a way, pathogens like Covid-19 could be seen as Nature’s equivalent of Walt Kowalski in the film Gran Torino (2008), taking its revenge on humans for the damage we are doing to it:

“Ever noticed how you come across somebody once in a while that you shouldn’t have f**ked with? That’s me.”

Half-Earth

One very radical way to overcome these problems is proposed by world-renowned biologist Edward Wilson, who has argued for what has been described as “a visionary blueprint for saving the planet”. This blueprint calls for half of the surface of the Earth to be dedicated to nature. He sees such a scheme as essential if we are to stave off the mass extinction of species - including of humans. Essentially, he sees the current situation as too large to be solved by piecemeal measures, because:

“For the first time in history, a conviction has developed among those who can actually think more than a decade ahead that we are facing a global endgame. Humanity’s grasp on the planet is not strong. It is growing weaker.”

He goes on to argue that anything less than half would not be enough to deal with the threats currently being faced by the natural world:

“Unless humanity learns a great deal more about global diversity and moves quickly to protect it, we will soon lose most of the species composing life on Earth. The Half-Earth proposal offers a first, emergency solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: I am convinced that only by setting aside half the planet in reserve, or more, can we save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival.”

As has already been seen, one aspect of human activity which has already destroyed large amounts of natural habitats and biodiversity is the ever-expanding meat and dairy components of capitalist agriculture. This ‘conventional’ agricultural system needs to be changed in order to save what remains of biodiversity - and one of the quickest ways to do so would be, at very least, to drastically reduce meat and dairy consumption.

This would allow some already-existing agricultural land to be used, instead, to provide humans with plant-based sources of proteins and other nutrients. In addition, other areas of land could be returned to the natural world. Such a move would also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions - and thus contribute to the slowing of global warming which is another factor destroying so much of the natural habitat required by so many species. 

In addition, a shift to a more plant-based diet for humans would play a big part in reducing humanity’s overall ecological footprint, which is necessary to allow the development of a genuinely-sustainable economic system. This doesn’t mean less food for humans - on the contrary, it actually means more food; and food which is not full of the antibiotics and hormones that are often present in meat and dairy products. Such a shift would also form an essential element in creating a world where wealth would be based on quality of life rather than on the quantity of material goods. 

This is a view expressed by the UK’s Royal Society, in their 2012 Report, People and the Planet - which was subsequently endorsed by a global network of scientists and ecologists. In particular, it referred to the need for “systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact” and pointed out the urgent need to reduce “…deforestation, and land use…” Instead, the Report saw greater valuing of “natural capital” as the way to improve human welfare so that people can flourish rather than just survive;

https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/people-planet/report/   

Currently, it can be argued that the destruction of so many ecosystems - and the Sixth Mass Extinction of species such destruction is causing - is a threat as big as that posed by the worsening Climate Crisis. As Covid-19 is currently showing, both of these linked and deadly Anthropocene developments are linked to the increased frequency of pandemics.

The Half-Earth proposal also makes sense as an insurance policy: because, in addition to global warming and the destruction of so much of the natural world, there will always be natural disasters to contend with. Our Anthropocene epoch has seen many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that have impacted on human life - and earlier epochs have also experienced significant climate damage as a result of asteroid strikes. By ensuring sufficient biodiversity remains on Earth, the chances of coping with such additional natural crises are significantly increased.

An important point to grasp as regards the destruction of the natural world is that it’s not, per se, a problem of ‘excessive consumption’ by humans, all of which thus needs to be limited. Rather, it is a problem of the types of consumption - of many products, including food - associated with capitalism. In a more rational society, as Ernest Mandel commented, instead of:

“The continual accumulation of more and more goods (with declining ‘marginal utility’)…” other priorities, such as “…the protection of health and life” would “become major motivations once basic material needs have been satisfied.”

Allan Todd is a member of Left Unity, an environmental and anti-fascist activist, and author of Revolutions 1789-1917. 

After the Coronavirus Pandemic – What will our politics look like?

There is much speculation in political circles, especially on the left, about what effect the pandemic will have on our politics, once we get through the current crisis. Certainly, these are unprecedented times that we live it, which business as usual politics was unable to cope with, in any kind of civilised manner. It is at times like these that government comes into its own, laissez-faire, neo-liberal politics has been found wanting, and a collective politics has emerged as a much more suitable vehicle for this crisis, in the UK at least.

The do nothing strategy, if you can call it that, to contain the spread of the virus, has steadily been abandoned over the last fortnight, in favour of a collective appeal to help the NHS, by most people largely self isolating, and the closure of pubs, restaurants and live entertainment of all kinds. Gradually, the instructions from the government have become more draconian, with enforcement by the police of these measures.

The political left (and some on the right) has voiced concerns over this more authoritarian approach, whilst the political right worries over ‘big state’ actions and to some extent carries over its obsession with immigration from the Brexit debate. Ah, Brexit, it hardly gets a mention these days though, after almost four years of it dominating British political discourse. The main concern for the right appears to be the adoption, by a Conservative government, and a pretty right-wing one at that, of socialist policies.

The government has, in effect, nationalised the payroll, with measures to pay 80% of public and private sector wages for those laid off by the crisis and has produced a similar scheme for the self-employed. At the same time, a volunteer pool of people has been established to help the NHS and to take on other duties, like driving food delivery vans and doing shopping for elderly and vulnerable people.

Some of this was already happening in communities anyway, but the government is accelerating this, with a call for collectivism rather than the usual individualism, bugger everyone else, me, me, me, being replaced by a more sharing approach. 

Some businesses will go bankrupt, but many will survive, and some will even do very well out of this emergency, as Naomi Klein has documented in her book about disaster capitalism, ‘The Shock Doctrine’.

What we are witnessing here, is an attempt to save the capitalist system, rather than replace it, but for the neo-liberal Conservative party, this is indeed a big shift to the left, but of a Keynesian nature, rather than a truly socialist one, but even so this is very much out of character for the Tories.

This is an emergency though, so the attempt will be to move back to business as usual as soon as the crisis is under control. The Tories hope this will be greeted with relief by the public, after the lock-down has ended. The government are trying to conflate our freedoms with the normal state of economics and politics, hoping that people will be so relieved that they can go out and enjoy themselves, they will welcome the resumption of the ancient regime.

The government’s favoured analogy is that of fighting a war, when a national effort is needed to defeat the ‘enemy’, all pulling together (collectively) in this time of crisis. Indeed during in World War II, Britain came as close to socialism as it has ever done. And it was successful, but people tired of all the restrictions and particularly the rationing of food, once the war was over, and this is the feeling that the Tories will attempt to exploit.

And yet, Winston Churchill, the great wartime leader tried exactly the same tactic, but was unceremoniously booted out of office, and Labour had a landslide victory. People remembered what life was like before the war, and remembered Churchill’s politics from that time. He set the army against union members in the General Strike of 1926 and was no friend of the working classes.

The people wanted no more of that, and after all the sacrifice of the war years, wanted a decisive break with the pre-war days. I doubt the soldiers would have obeyed Churchill if he had tried to set them against the workers at that time.

The 1945 Labour government although it did great things like create the NHS and largely the welfare state, underestimated the public’s fatigue with wartime measures, and carried on rationing for too long after the war ended, which ultimately led to electoral defeat in 1951, and the return of a Tory government. Although, not of the pre-war type, as they outdid Labour on things like building council houses. The post-war politics remained in place under successive Tory and Labour governments until Margaret Thatcher destroyed it in the 1980s.

For the left, this lesson needs to be learnt, we should big up the achievements of the collective approach, and the improvements in the environment (far less pollution) but without keeping the most unpopular bits, like the draconian approach to people not being able to have fun. Once the coronavirus pandemic has passed, we should ask people if they really want to go back to austerity for most, and extreme wealth for a few? 

Everything will be in play once the crisis is over, there will be a new world to fight for.

What Happens When the Alt-Right Believes in Climate Change?

Editors note: This is relevant for UK readers, as some years ago, Nick Griffin, then leader of the British National Party, spoke about the opportunities climate change would bring in terms of challenging immigration for the far right.

Written by Casey Williams and first published at Jewish Currents

Last September, as record-breaking hurricanes thrashed the Caribbean and south-eastern U.S., the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance (AmRen) asked its readers a question: “What does it mean for whites if climate change is real?”

In its bombastic response, the magazine bucked two decades of conservative dogma to offer an ethno-nationalist take on planetary warming. Conceding that scientists might be right about climate change, it worried that shifting weather patterns could drive more black and brown people to the Global North, where whites will face a choice: stem the migrant tide, or die.

“The population explosion in the global south combined with climate change and liberal attitudes toward migration are the single greatest external threat to Western civilization,” AmRen wrote. “[It’s] more serious than Islamic terrorism or Hispanic illegal immigration.”

The magazine’s editor-in-chief, influential white nationalist Jared Taylor, doubled down on AmRen’s position in an email to Jewish Currents. “If continued global change makes the poor, non-white parts of the world even more unpleasant to live in than they are now, it will certainly drive more non-whites north,” Taylor said. “I make no apology for… urging white nations to muster the will to guard their borders and maintain white majorities.”

From Fringe Views to the White House

These are fringe views. But they’re becoming less so. Hyper-conservative immigration policies have drifted from the populist periphery to the White House in a few short years, and conservatives, from racist reactionaries to Rockefeller Republicans, are starting to talk openly about how planetary warming might affect their agendas. In a world where doubting climate science remains something of an 11th commandment for the American right, this shift is significant. Climate change gets a little harder to deny every day, and it’s only a matter of time before mainstream conservatives are forced, by a growing incongruence between their words and the weather, to abandon hard-core denialism.

Right now, a handful of Congressional Republicans, some libertarian think tanks, and a few on the alt-right are the only ones on the right taking climate change seriously, giving them a head start in shaping conservative climate policy in the coming decades.

Liberal lawmakers, meanwhile, seem ill-prepared to go toe-to-toe with conservatives on climate policy. For two decades, denialism has been climate enemy number one. The Democrats’ strategy has mostly involved trying to convince people that planetary warming is real, pillorying deniers as fools, cynics, and oil company shills. 

Perhaps this made sense in the mid-2000s, when “merchants of doubt” were seeding skepticism about climate science to protect fossil fuel interests and stave off liberal reforms. It probably still makes sense as part of a broader climate agenda on the left. After all, it’s a huge problem when top lawmakers refuse to acknowledge the existence of the potentially civilization-ending catastrophe sweeping across the planet.

But it’s not the only problem, and a singular focus on combating denialism has left Democrats and their liberal backers unprepared to do battle with a conservative movement armed with real and dangerous policy proposals on climate change.

The Far-Right

The alt-right is a contested category, and groups typically arrayed under its banner – fascists, white nationalists, right-wing populists, etc. – lack a unified position on climate change: its existence, causes, and effects. Some self-described members of the alt-right accept that industrial capitalism is largely responsible for spiking greenhouse gas emissions. Others blame growing populations in the Global South for rising global emissions, even though there’s little evidence to support this view. Others still continue to question the science of climate change, or downplay its significance.

What far-right climate realists seem to agree on is this: rising global temperatures and changing regional weather patterns threaten to release a flood of migrants from increasingly inhospitable parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to the U.S. and Europe, causing what AmRen describes as a “climate-driven demographic catastrophe.”

“If you believe in global warming, the obvious implications are that global migration must be shut down,” one commenter recently posted on a Reddit forum devoted to discussing the alt-right’s position on climate change. “All the quickly growing populations must be quarantined or ‘encouraged’ to stop having children.”

Taylor put it (only a little) more delicately. “If human activity causes undesirable climate change, we should not promote global population growth,” he told Jewish Currents, arguing that lawmakers should “promote intensive family planning in the south, especially in Africa, because an exploding African population will… drive more Africans north in search of a better life.”

Nothing scares ethno-nationalists more than “demographic change” – the probability that, in a few decades, more Americans will be black and brown than white. They hyperbolize this shift as “white genocide” (a term with a bloody history), and lament what they see as the loss of white structural power. It’s not surprising, then, that climate change – which indeed affects the poor, marginalized, and dispossessed more severely than most white Americans – inspires racists to fear white decline, and to seek control over the bodies and movements of non-white people.

Actual Climate Change

Climate change is here, and it’s bad. Fossil fuel emissions hit an all-time high last year, which is unfortunate because countless studies have shown that burning fossil fuels spews heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, causing average global temperatures to rise. Indeed, average temperatures have already jumped about one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and we’re on track to exceed 1.5 degrees of warming by 2040, according to a leaked report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

So far, planetary warming has weakened Antarctica’s ice sheets, worsened flooding in coastal cities like Miami, contributed to deadly heat waves in India, and upped the odds of Sandy-like superstorms smashing major urban centers. Study after study shows such catastrophes worsening and happening faster than previously thought, and they’re mostly hurting people who lack wealth and political power.

Among conservatives, climate realism is still a minority view. Republicans are largely deniers, doubters, or cynical backers of the fossil fuel industry. Only 28 per cent of white Christians, who overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2016, believe in anthropogenic warming, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Trump himself, who once called climate change a “hoax,” not only continues to deny the existence of global warming, but has also pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, opened huge tracts of ocean to oil and gas exploration, and stuffed his administration with climate deniers and champions of the fossil fuel industry.

Doubting climate change remains a constitutive part of right-wing identity, like pandering to the gun lobby or opposing abortion rights. It telegraphs distrust of the “administrative state” – scientists, bureaucrats and “liberal elites” who tell people what cars to drive and how much soda to drink – and preemptively opposes decarbonization policies that would threaten fossil fuel and related industries, which conservative lawmakers often rely on for campaign contributions. 

Indeed, the billionaire donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, known for bankrolling the Trump campaign and sinking millions into Breitbart and other far-right websites, continue to finance climate denial. Maybe this makes business sense: as political theorist and activist Naomi Klein has observed, cutting carbon emissions enough to keep planetary warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius (the more ambitious goal set by the Paris Climate Agreement) would probably require abandoning neoliberal capitalism. This is not something Republicans are likely to do.

But climate change is now, like gravity, indisputable. The most pragmatic conservative institutions, like the Defence Department, have long accepted the reality of climate change, appreciated its seriousness, and begun preparing. 

Capital, too, understands there’s more money to be made planning for climate change than ignoring it. Insurance companies are “adapting in order to profit from climate risk,” according to a 2017 Harvard Business Review analysis, for instance, by charging more to insure houses located in low-lying areas vulnerable to sea-level rise. Tellingly, Exxon Mobil Corp., which conducted some of the earliest studies on the greenhouse effect, has publicly backed the Paris Agreement and called for a carbon tax.

Some Republican lawmakers are starting to flip, too. Congressional Republicans are stacking the House Climate Solutions Caucus (though critics say they’re just “greenwashing” their resumes ahead of the midterms), and The Atlantic reported last year that a group of Republican House members led by Congressman Bob Inglis is promoting free-market responses to greenhouse gas emissions. Republican Congressman Carlos Curbelo, who represents a South Florida district that could see sea levels rise between 10 and 30 feet by the century’s close, unveiled a carbon tax bill in July. 

These members of the “eco-right” argue, contrary to Klein’s hypothesis, that tackling climate change is perfectly compatible with capitalism. They support scrapping emissions regulations in favor of a carbon pricing system – an idea that’s popular with some libertarian groups, like the Niskanen Center.

If denialism is on the way out, can the alt-right influence the nascent conservative climate agenda? It certainly seems possible. Right-wing populists like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, who rub right up against the ethno-nationalist fringes, have had incredible success smuggling nativist immigration policies from the vanishing edges of conservatism to the Oval Office. 

Xenophobic populism has taken even firmer hold in Europe, where populist governments and vigilantes have met growing numbers of migrants from Africa and the Middle East with tightened immigration controls, harassment and death. If their influence persists, it does not require a great imaginative effort to picture far-right views on climate change leaching into the federal climate agenda.

While the Trump administration has been transforming its “America First” immigration platform from white populist pipe dream to federal policy, shameless racists have been winning airtime and influence. Ethno-nationalist influence on the Trump White House is contested, and of course not all Trump supporters are out-and-out white nationalists. But the two groups overlap on immigration, and Trump’s own rhetoric is often a brackish mixture of dog-whistle nativism and more overt forms of racist hate (Trump once retweeted an account called “white genocide,” for example).

It seems plausible, then, that ethno-nationalist climate proposals could go mainstream. While the Congressional “eco-right” is taking on mitigation, pushing for a free-market approach to emissions cuts, alt-right thinkers are some of the only right-wing voices discussing the ways America will adapt to a changing climate. And they’re doing so by framing climate change as an immigration issue, a strategy that’s likely to play well with Trump and his base.

The latter point is crucial. Immigration and climate change were once seen by conservatives as something like conceptual opposites. The idea was that fretting about rising temperatures was either a liberal conspiracy to swell the size of government or pointless hand-wringing by tree-hugging snowflakes, a distraction that obscured truly pressing threats like illegal immigration and Islamic terrorism. 

Summing up conservative priorities in 2015, Mike Huckabee declared that “a beheading is a far greater threat to an American than a sunburn.” But if conservatives start to believe (wrongly, obviously) that sunburns will lead to more beheadings – or more immigrants taking American jobs – it’s not hard to imagine the right not only ditching denialism, but also using the fact of climate change to whip up support for more draconian immigration measures.

The populist right, in the U.S. and elsewhere, seems primed to accept this kind of thinking. The migrant crisis in Europe, sparked by conflicts in the Middle East and Northern Africa (conflicts rooted in histories of European colonialism, extractive capitalism, and Western military intervention), has been met with a vicious and sometimes deadly xenophobic backlash. There have been good faith efforts to link the Syrian war to climate change. But it’s easy to picture this work getting co-opted by nationalists looking for excuses to halt immigration. 

Similarly, North Africa from Morocco to Nigeria has been called an “arc of tension” – a band of earth so battered by drought, famine, desertification, internal conflict, and centuries of colonial and neo-imperialist violence that it’s ready to snap, pushing more people north. I doubt it would take much for climatic shifts in North Africa, a region already seen as dangerously other and tarred by the right as a terrorist “breeding ground,” to serve as pretexts for far-right efforts to close borders and boot migrants seeking shelter from the global storm.

The Left and Climate Realists

The liberal left isn’t prepared for any of this. Emphasizing climate denial has, paradoxically, been a way to depoliticize climate change, framing it as an empirical problem instead of a contest over competing visions of the future. But the odd fantasy, widespread among the #resistance, that getting everyone to acknowledge the existence of climate change would also get them to support the right kinds of climate action has always been just that: fantasy. It reflects a stubborn faith in both the wisdom of technocrats and the tired liberal belief that knowing better leads to doing better.

It rarely does.

The left, from liberals to Leninists, now have an opportunity to look past deniers and skeptics, and study the ideas and actions of climate realists across the conservative spectrum. Some are doing this, of course. Several scholars have flagged “eco-apartheid” as a likely consequence of climate change in a staggeringly unequal world. Naomi Klein, though understandably concerned about climate denial, has argued that capital is agnostic about rhetoric so long as it can turn socio-environmental crises to its advantage. And the climate justice movement, powerfully articulated by activists and intellectuals from Bangladesh to Standing Rock, has emphasized the unevenness of climate impacts and the need to prepare equitable responses to their many horrors.

Progressive cities, states and environmental organizations are basically ignoring conservatives and pushing aggressive mitigation and adaptation measures, while eco-socialist thinkers like Kate Aronoff and John Bellamy Foster are suggesting ways of folding climate action into broader efforts to redistribute wealth and re-democratize the political system. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the only American politicians to back plans to keep warming under 1.5 degrees, wins a Congressional seat in November (which she is almost guaranteed to do), proposals for ambitious and equitable climate policy will head to Congress.

In five short years, right-wing populists have marched hardline immigration policies from the periphery of mainstream U.S. conservatism to the Oval Office. Now they’re talking about climate change. If their influence persists, it is not hard to picture rank xenophobia – in the form of stricter immigration quotas, more militarized borders, and tighter restrictions on women’s fertility – taking over the federal climate agenda. The results would be nightmarish. If the left thinks a just response to climate change is still possible, it should take notice of these nativist believers, and prepare to push back. 

This article first published on the Jewish Currents website.

Casey Williams is a writer based in Durham, North Carolina. His work covers environmental politics and culture, and has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, The Nation, and other national and local outlets.

Capitalism, not human nature, blocking climate action

Written by Naomi Klein – an abridged version first published at The Intercept

The entire August 5 New York Times Magazine was composed of just one article on a single subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time when the science was settled and the politics seemed to align. The novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate crisis has long deserved but almost never received.

Written by Nathaniel Rich, this work of history is filled with insider revelations about roads not taken that, on several occasions, made me swear out loud.

And lest there be any doubt that the implications of these decisions will be etched in geologic time, Rich’s words are punctuated with full-page aerial photographs by George Steinmetz that wrenchingly document the rapid unravelling of planetary systems. These range from the rushing water where Greenland ice used to be to huge algae blooms in China’s third largest-lake.

We have all heard the various excuses for why the small matter of despoiling our only home just doesn’t cut it as an urgent news story: “Climate change is too far off in the future”; “It’s inappropriate to talk about politics when people are losing their lives to hurricanes and fires”; “Journalists follow the news, they don’t make it — and politicians aren’t talking about climate change”; and of course: “Every time we try, it’s a ratings killer.”

None of the excuses can mask the dereliction of duty. It has always been possible for major media outlets to decide that planetary destabilisation is a huge news story, very likely the most consequential of our time. They always had the capacity to harness the skills of their reporters and photographers to connect abstract science to lived extreme weather events.

And if they did so consistently, it would lessen the need for journalists to get ahead of politics because the more informed the public is about both the threat and the tangible solutions, the more they push their elected representatives to take bold action.

Which is why it was so exciting to see the NYT throw the full force of its editorial machine behind Rich’s opus — teasing it with a promotional video, kicking it off with a live event at the Times Centre, and accompanying educational materials.

That’s also why it is so enraging that the piece is spectacularly wrong in its central thesis.

Getting it wrong

According to Rich, between 1979 and 1989, the basic science of climate change was understood and accepted, the partisan divide over the issue had yet to cleave, the fossil fuel companies hadn’t started their misinformation campaign in earnest, and there was a great deal of global political momentum toward a bold and binding international emissions-reduction agreement.

Writing of the key period at the end of the 1980s, Rich says: “The conditions for success could not have been more favourable.”

And yet we blew it — “we” being humans, who apparently are just too short-sighted to safeguard our future. Just in case we missed the point of who and what is to blame for the fact that we are now “losing Earth”, Rich’s answer is presented in a full-page callout: “All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.”

Yep, you and me. Not, according to Rich, the fossil fuel companies who sat in on every major policy meeting described in the piece.

Imagine tobacco executives being repeatedly invited by the US government to come up with policies to ban smoking. When those meetings failed to yield anything substantive, would we conclude that the reason is that humans just want to die? Might we perhaps determine instead that the political system is corrupt and busted?

This misreading has been pointed out by many climate scientists and historians since the online version of the piece dropped on August 1. Others have remarked on the maddening invocations of “human nature” and the use of the royal “we” to describe a screamingly homogenous group of US power players.

Throughout Rich’s accounting, we hear nothing from those political leaders in the Global South who were demanding binding action in this key period and after, somehow able to care about future generations despite being human.

The voices of women, meanwhile, are almost as rare in Rich’s text as sightings of the endangered ivory-billed woodpecker — and when we ladies do appear, it is mainly as long-suffering wives of tragically heroic men.

My focus is the central premise of the piece: that the end of the 1980s presented conditions that “could not have been more favourable” to bold climate action. On the contrary, one could scarcely imagine a more inopportune moment in human evolution for our species to come face to face with the hard truth that the conveniences of modern consumer capitalism were steadily eroding the habitability of the planet.

The late ’80s was the absolute zenith of the neoliberal crusade, a moment of peak ideological ascendency for the economic and social project that deliberately set out to vilify collective action in the name of liberating “free markets” in every aspect of life. Yet Rich makes no mention of this parallel upheaval in economic and political thought.

Real discussion

When I delved into this same climate change history some years ago, I concluded, as Rich does, that the key juncture when world momentum was building toward a tough, science-based global agreement was 1988. That was when James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before Congress that he had “99% confidence” in “a real warming trend” linked to human activity.

Later that same month, hundreds of scientists and policymakers held the historic World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in Toronto, where the first emission reduction targets were discussed. By the end of that year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the premier scientific body advising governments on the climate threat, held its first session.

But climate change wasn’t just a concern for politicians and wonks — it was watercooler stuff, so much so that when the editors of Time magazine announced their 1988 “Man of the Year,” they went for “Planet of the Year: Endangered Earth”. The cover featured an image of the globe held together with twine, the sun setting ominously in the background.

“No single individual, no event, no movement captured imaginations or dominated headlines more,” journalist Thomas Sancton explained, “than the clump of rock and soil and water and air that is our common home.”

When I surveyed the climate news from this period, it really did seem like a profound shift was within grasp. Then, tragically, it all slipped away. The US walked out of international negotiations and the rest of the world settled for non-binding agreements that relied on dodgy “market mechanisms” like carbon trading and offsets.

So it really is worth asking, as Rich does: What the hell happened? What interrupted the urgency and determination that was emanating from all these elite establishments simultaneously by the end of the ’80s?

Rich concludes, while offering no social or scientific evidence, that something called “human nature” kicked in and messed everything up.

“Human beings,” he writes, “whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations.”

Neoliberal revolution

When I looked at the same period, I came to a very different conclusion: that what at first seemed like our best shot at lifesaving climate action had in retrospect suffered from an epic case of historical bad timing.

Because what becomes clear when you look back at this juncture is that just as governments were talking about getting serious about reining in the fossil fuel sector, the global neoliberal revolution went supernova. That project of economic and social reengineering clashed with the imperatives of both climate science and corporate regulation at every turn.

The failure to make even a passing reference to this other global trend that was unfolding in the late ’80s represents an unfathomably large blind spot in Rich’s piece. After all, the primary benefit of returning to a period in the not-too-distant past as a journalist is that you are able to see trends and patterns that were not yet visible to people living through those tumultuous events in real time.

One thing that becomes very clear when you look back on the late ’80s is that, far from offering “conditions for success [that] could not have been more favorable,” 1988-89 was the worst possible moment for humanity to decide that it was going to get serious about putting planetary health ahead of profits.

Recall what else was going on. In 1988, Canada and the US signed their free trade agreement, a prototype for countless pro-corporate deals that would follow. The Berlin Wall was about to fall, an event that would be successfully seized upon by right-wing ideologues in the US as proof of “the end of history” and taken as license to export the Reagan-Thatcher recipe of privatisation, deregulation, and austerity to every corner of the globe.

It was this convergence of historical trends — the emergence of a global architecture that was supposed to tackle climate change and the emergence of a much more powerful global architecture to liberate capital from all constraints — that derailed the momentum Rich rightly identifies.

Because, as he notes repeatedly, meeting the challenge of climate change would have required imposing stiff regulations on polluters while investing in the public sphere to transform how we power our lives, live in cities, and move ourselves around.

All of this was, and is, possible. But it demands a head-on battle with the project of neoliberalism. Meanwhile, the “free trade” deals being signed in this period were busily making many sensible climate initiatives — like subsidising and offering preferential treatment to local green industry and refusing many polluting projects like fracking and oil pipelines — illegal under international trade law.

Capitalism

I wrote a 500-page book about this collision between capitalism and the planet. I’ll quote a short passage here:

“We have not done the things that are needed to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism.

“We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe — and would benefit the vast majority — are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets;

“It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.

‘Indeed, governments and scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in 1988 — the exact year that marked the dawning of what came to be called ‘globalisation’.”

Why does it matter that Rich makes no mention of this clash and instead, claims our fate has been sealed by “human nature”? It matters because if the force that interrupted the momentum toward action is “ourselves”, then the fatalistic headline on the cover of New York Times Magazine – “Losing Earth” — really is merited. If an inability to sacrifice in the short term for a shot at health and safety in the future is baked into our collective DNA, then we have no hope of turning things around in time to avert truly catastrophic warming.

If, on the other hand, we humans really were on the brink of saving ourselves in the ’80s, but were swamped by a tide of elite, free-market fanaticism — one opposed by millions of people around the world — then there is something quite concrete we can do about it.

We can confront that economic order and try to replace it with something that is rooted in both human and planetary security, one that does not place the quest for growth and profit at all costs at its centre.

The good news

And the good news — and, yes, there is some — is that today, unlike in 1989, a young and growing movement of green democratic socialists is advancing in the United States with precisely that vision. And that represents more than just an electoral alternative — it’s our one and only planetary lifeline.

Yet we have to be clear that the lifeline we need is not something that has been tried before, at least not at anything like the scale required. When the NYT tweeted out its teaser for Rich’s article about “humankind’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe,” the eco-justice wing of the Democratic Socialists of America quickly offered this correction: “*CAPITALISM* If they were serious about investigating what’s gone so wrong, this would be about ‘capitalism’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe.’ Beyond capitalism, *humankind* is fully capable of organizing societies to thrive within ecological limits.”

Their point is a good one, if incomplete. There is nothing essential about humans living under capitalism; we humans are capable of organising ourselves into all kinds of different social orders, including societies with much longer time horizons and far more respect for natural life-support systems.

Indeed, humans have lived that way for the vast majority of our history and many Indigenous cultures keep Earth-centred cosmologies alive to this day. Capitalism is a tiny blip in the collective story of our species.

But simply blaming capitalism isn’t enough. It is absolutely true that the drive for endless growth and profits stands squarely opposed to the imperative for a rapid transition from fossil fuels.

It is absolutely true that the global unleashing of the unbound form of capitalism known as neoliberalism in the ’80s and ’90s has been the single greatest contributor to a disastrous global emission spike in recent decades, as well as the single greatest obstacle to science-based climate action ever since governments began meeting to talk (and talk and talk) about lowering emissions. And it remains the biggest obstacle today, even in countries that market themselves as climate leaders, like Canada and France.

But we have to be honest that autocratic industrial socialism has also been a disaster for the environment, as evidenced most dramatically by the fact that carbon emissions briefly plummeted when the economies of the former Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s.

We can conclude that socialism isn’t necessarily ecological, but that a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of all of life, appears to be humanity’s best shot at collective survival.

We aren’t losing Earth — but the Earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us. In the nick of time, a new political path to safety is presenting itself. This is no moment to bemoan our lost decades. It’s the moment to get the hell on that path.