Friends of Earth International (FoEI) published a report revealing the greenwashing of net zero emissions of the fossil fuel industries. In this piece, Kim Hill writes about the problems with the concept of economic growth that the report does not acknowledge.
A recent report from Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) unpacks the greenwashing of fossil fuels in the term ‘net zero emissions’. Net zero is a scheme for expanding the oil and gas industry, that does nothing to address the causes of climate change, and indeed exacerbates ecological collapse.
This is how FoEI describes net zero targets: “‘Greenwashing’ hardly suffices as a term to describe these efforts to obscure continued growth in fossil emissions — ‘ecocide’ and ‘genocide’ more accurately capture the impacts the world will face.”
FoEI joins the many environmental activists and groups campaigning against net-zero, in defence of the ecosystems, indigenous peoples, peasants and third-world communities that are being harmed by fossil fuel expansion and offset trading.
The climate movement has adopted net zero emissions as its core demand, and continues to mobilise many thousands of people around the world to join protests in support of this goal. By endorsing the fossil fuel companies’ campaigns for net-zero pledges and targets, rather than taking the side of environmental groups organising against it, the climate movement and Extinction Rebellion are complicit in genocide and ecocide. While individual climate activists may have other motives, the movement as a whole is controlled by corporate interests, and has been co-opted into marketing the goals of its funders.
While climate activists have been inspired by the celebrity status of Greta Thunberg in coalescing around the net zero target, Greta herself has said in recent months “we must forget about net zero” and calls these schemes “empty words, loopholes and greenwash.”
Just a few of the many headlines to be found via a web search of the term net zero emissions.
Two recent articles in The Guardian also expose the net zero spin. One titled Global oil companies have committed to net zero emissions. It’s a sham. says “many companies and countries are using “net zero” to justify expanding the production of fossil fuels…All that the major oil companies have done (with tacit support from many governments) is shift their public narrative about the climate crisis from denial to delusion. They’re no longer insisting there’s no problem, because they lost that argument. “net zero” is their attempt to continue business as usual without addressing what they’re doing to people and the planet.”
A second article, The climate crisis can’t be solved by carbon accounting tricks, states “Net zero increasingly involves highly questionable carbon accounting. As a result, the new politics swirling around net zero targets is rapidly becoming a confusing and dangerous mix of pragmatism, self-delusion and weapons-grade greenwash.”
The FoEI report, titled Chasing Carbon Unicorns, opens with: “Powerful actors, particularly those most responsible for emissions, such as the fossil fuel industry and agribusiness, continue to obscure the need for the phase-out of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions with the distractions and seductions of the carbon market. “net zero” pledges are a new addition to the strategy basket of these actors who are fighting hard to maintain the status quo. And the status quo will certainly worsen the climate catastrophe.”
A few more excerpts:
“These deliberate corporate strategies distract attention from the undeniable and urgent need to eliminate fossil fuel emissions…”
“‘Net zero’ is a smokescreen, a conveniently invented concept that is both dangerous and problematic…” (p4)
“engineered “negative emissions” technologies, such as bioenergy carbon capture and storage(BECCS) or direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), are untested.” (p8)
“There are no saviour ecosystems around the planet, nor fairy godmother technologies, that will suck up continued fossil fuel emissions.” (p8)
“at best there are no overall emission reductions from an offset” (p11, emphasis in original)
“financial interests are not giving up on the profit-making opportunities they see in markets for carbon and for financial assets, such as securities and derivatives, based on carbon.” (p13)
“There are no surprises among the members of the TSCVM [Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets]. BP, Shell, and Total represent the oil majors; Bunge, Nestlé, and Unilever are there for agribusiness; Boeing, easyJet, and Etihad, the aviation sector. Bank and finance industry members include Bank of America, BlackRock, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, Itaú Unibanco, and Standard Chartered…Major big green conservation organisations are also engaged in the effort to rehabilitate offsetting and help to dramatically increase the supply of “nature-based” offset credits. Four organisations sit on the consultative group of the TSVCM: Conservation International (CI), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). All four are prominent advocates for “nature-based” solutions / offsets. All four have active projects in the developing world that are set to generate carbon-offset credits, sometimes including direct alliances with fossil fuel majors.” (p15)
“Government “net zero” targets also obscure fossil emissions and the responsibility for reducing those emissions, as do the “net zero” pledges of the private sector.” (p16)
The report ends with no realistic plan of action, but instead lists vague demands comprising meaningless buzzwords, and calls for “real zero”, a target cooked up in an equally murky shade of greenwash. At no point does FoE acknowledge the reality that infinite economic growth will rapidly destroy all life on Earth, regardless of how the economic system is powered. It takes no account of the physical impossibility of powering a globalised growth economy without continued extraction of fossil fuels, nor the enormous expansion of mining and land-grabbing required to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels at scale. The necessity of scaling back and localising economic activity, and prioritising the needs of people and nature over corporate profits, is never mentioned. Despite sincere efforts to expose the distractions marketed by corporate actors, FoE reveals its own reliance on corporate funding as a serious limit on what it can achieve.
A movement that can genuinely bring down the fossil fuel industry and stop the destruction of nature needs to extract itself from corporate funding, and be completely independent of business interests. It needs to abandon the tactic of making nebulous demands that can be twisted around by governments and corporations to promote ecocidal economic growth. Merely marching in the streets, and expecting governments and corporations to represent the interests of the people, is a failed tactic. Activists will need to be strategic, and take personal responsibility for organising the direct dismantling of fossil fuel infrastructure. The movement must take an eco-centric rather than business-centric view, and unite around the goal of permanently shutting down all extractive and destructive industries, and regenerating damaged landscapes and communities.
Bright green is a phrase that means that they believe that this culture can be made to be sustainable with some technological fixes. One of the ways we see this would be they believe that wind and solar will save the planet from global warming. Wind and solar can run the economy and not harm the planet. The lies are, well, that.
The fundamental lie is that we can have this level of consumption and a planet too. That you can eat the planet and still have a livable planet. More specifically the lies would be that wind and solar and geothermal, etc. don’t harm the planet. That they can run an industrial economy, neither of which is true. Even in their own terms, they’re not being accurate.
The fundamental problem with all of this is they’re solving for the wrong variable. What do all the so called solutions to global warming, that you here in the mainstream media, have in common? What they have in common is that they take industrial civilization is being given. The natural world as having to adapt to industrial capitalism, to conform to industrial capitalism.
I remember a line in some paper or another where they said that the rule of nature is adapt or die. They were talking about some species being driven extinct by this culture. That’s saying that everybody has to adapt to this way of living or die.
That’s literally insane in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. Because the landbase has to be primary. The health of the planet has to be primary. Without the planet, you cannot have a social system whatsoever. Every social system that has ever existed is based on the health of the land. And if you have a way of life that is based on destroying the health of the land, that is, not a planet with a future.
The fundamental lie is that we can continue this way of living with just a change in what fuels the destructive activities. I don’t think it really matters. It doesn’t matter to the fish being caught in the drift net, whether the ships are fueled by bunker fuel or solar, apart from the fact that solar wouldn’t do it anyways.
The book tackles the greenwashing surrounding so much so-called “green” technology and other false solutions. The authors read excerpts from the book, discuss it’s themes, and answer audience questions.
You can order the book into your local bookstore (or for delivery) here.
Music: Trick or Treat (instrumental) by RYYZN Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0.
The native oyster beds are gone. The vast saltmarshes that soaked up carbon and buffered the coast from stormy seas have been reclaimed for farms and towns. The species-rich maerl and horse mussel beds have vanished and now, in new research, we’ve uncovered the decline of another jewel in the UK’s marine environment: seagrass meadows.
Seagrass is a flowering plant that forms rippling underwater meadows in shallow coastal seas. Our study is the first to analyse all published data on this habitat in the UK, gathered from newspapers, diaries and other sources throughout history. We found that at least 44% of the UK’s seagrass has been lost since 1936 – most of it since the 1980s. But when we modelled which coastal areas were likely to have been suitable for seagrass, we found that as much as 92% of it might have disappeared.
Thankfully, there are still 8,493 hectares (20,987 acres) of mapped seagrass in UK waters. That’s about the same size as Newcastle upon Tyne. But seagrass may have once covered 82,000 hectares of seabed – an area as large as 115,000 football fields. While we may never know exactly how much of the UK’s seabed was once covered by this habitat – old data sets are often light on detail and contain inaccuracies – we know these underwater meadows were vast. We can only imagine how their loss has transformed the country’s coastal seas.
Widespread loss
Seagrass meadows are one of the world’s most efficient sinks of carbon and support 20% of the world’s biggest fisheries. We estimated that the UK’s meadows once stored 11.5 million tonnes of carbon, equivalent to the annual emissions of 7.7 million cars. With the destruction of the seagrass, much of that carbon has been added to the atmosphere and needs to be returned. These huge meadows could also have sheltered 400 million fish, and annually filtered pollution equivalent to the amount of urine produced by the entire population of Liverpool each year.
The first estimates of seagrass around the UK emerged in the 1930s. Descriptions and anecdotes suggest it was a common sight at the coast. Seagrass abounded in sheltered and protected spots, and there were plentiful populations in the lochs of Ireland and the west of Scotland.
Seagrass was considered so abundant in the 1860s that entrepreneurs writing in the Times of London described it as a potential cash crop that could rival imported cotton. While accurate data on the past size and extent of seagrass meadows is rare, the information we do have paints a picture of widespread loss. And these declines continue. The seagrass that has persisted is in a poor state – beset by pollution, coastal development, and disturbance from boating.
Seagrass losses were widespread from urban coastlines to remote estuaries. While huge areas of the Humber, the Essex and Suffolk estuaries lost seagrass, so did more rural locations on the east coast of Anglesey in Wales, the Cromarty Firth in Scotland, and the inlets and estuaries of Cornwall. Areas once covered by seagrass are now lifeless seabeds in many cases.
These losses have numerous and complex causes, but most involve poor water quality resulting from sewage discharges and nutrients running off farmland. Coastal developments – and mines in the past – have also polluted and disturbed seagrass.
A chance for renewal
Our findings should not inspire blame, though. They should highlight the massive opportunities in restoring these habitats. Reviving the UK’s seagrass meadows could help fight the climate emergency, rebuild wildlife populations and put beleaguered fisheries back on a path to productivity.
The tide is turning for some marine habitats in the UK. Work led by the WWF is replanting seagrass in West Wales, oysters are being laid in the Durnoch Firth and coastlines are being reshaped to encourage saltmarshes in Somerset. But these projects must aspire to a bigger vision of coastal biodiversity, mirroring achievements in the US. In Virginia, thousands of hectares of seagrass have been planted. This is the scale of ambition the UK needs.
The evidence of its decline is stark, but seagrass was once common throughout UK waters and could be again. The opportunity for the restoration of this vital habitat is immense.
This article was originally published in The Conversation who are clear about that “Disinformation is dangerous. We fight it with facts and expertise.” You can read the original article here.
In this article, Erik Molvar outlines the serious nature of climate change. He offers evidence-based clarity on why destroying fragile woodlands, that holds carbon in place, needs to stop.
The dawn breaks each morning on a hundred different mountain ranges in the Great Basin, with few human eyes to see it.
Many of these mountain chains will be unfamiliar to most – the Toquimas, the Wah Wahs, the Goshutes, the Sheeprocks, the Fox Range – but the one thing they all have in common is their juniper woodlands that have been here for thousands of years. On the mesas and tablelands of the Colorado Plateau, guarding the slickrock canyons and mazes of badlands that are American icons, are the fragile woodlands (don’t bust the crust!) of pinyon and juniper that perfume the air with that ineffable scent of wild country. Today, just as the world awakens to the reality that we need as much carbon sequestration as possible, these arid woodlands are under assault from a coordinated campaign to deforest the West, orchestrated by the livestock industry.
Action to address climate change has been announced as a central policy priority with the Biden administration, putting the significant role of domestic livestock in climate disruption in the spotlight. Methane emissions (both from the four-chambered digestion system that allows ruminants to digest cellulose, and from the breakdown of manure) get the lion’s share of the attention, in keeping with America’s end-of-tailpipe fixation on measuring pollution. But the carbon cycle is circular, and livestock exacerbate climate disruption at many points in the cycle. One key effect is by bankrupting soil carbon reserves by eliminating deep-rooted perennial plants and replacing them with annual weeds, and another is through deforestation to create cattle pasture. While deforestation for livestock is widely-recognized as a major climate problem in the Amazonian rainforests, deforestation of pinyon-juniper woodlands is ramping up across the American West, and similarly contributes to the climate catastrophe.
The real reason that pinyon-juniper woodlands are so aggressively targeted for “control” and “treatment,” even though they are an ecologically important and natural component of western ecosystems, comes down to the almighty dollar. A recent survey of Bureau of Land Management employees by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility contains this clue: “with ranchers, one employee noted that the current excuse to cut pinyon juniper and sagebrush to prevent wildfire, which have been the native species for thousands of years, has no scientific reasoning. Instead, it’s to benefit cattle.”
During the dying days of the Trump administration, an all-out war on juniper woodlands was underway under the guise of fire prevention. The Tri-State Fuel Breaks Project planned almost a thousand miles of strips; scientists criticized the project, predicting it
“will not achieve success and may in fact exacerbate degradation of the native flora and fauna of the region.”
The Idaho portion was approved in May of 2020, authorizing
“manual, mechanical, and chemical treatments, along with targeted grazing and prescribed fire.”
The Great Basin Fuel Breaks Project was even bigger, authorizing 11,000 miles of fuel breaks in April of 2020. The selected alternative authorized wiping out 121,000 acres of woodlands. And for what? A federal review of the science found inconclusive benefits from fuel breaks constructed throughout the West over the past five decades. In effect, these are make-work projects that, while causing significant ecosystem destruction and habitat fragmentation, have little or no benefit in reducing the extent or intensity of fires.
Fuel breaks are but the tip of the deforestation iceberg.
In January 2021, during the twilight of the Trump presidency, a program called “Fuels Reduction and Rangeland Restoration for the Great Basin” was completed. Under this plan, more than 26 million acres would be targeted for a variety of environmentally destructive projects euphemistically labeled “vegetation treatments” as if the native vegetation is somehow sick. “Targeted grazing” is one such treatment authorized, even though a federal court ruled that livestock grazing actually increases the spread of flammable cheatgrass, instead of reducing fire risk, after hearing expert testimony on both sides of the issue.
Pinyon-juniper woodlands would bear the brunt of the projects, facing chainsaws, chaining with bulldozers, and herbicides. Some 3,088,468 acres of pinyon-juniper woodlands are now scheduled for “restoration treatments.” The Administration pre-approved this massive program habitat destruction under a single Environmental Impact Statement, which could allow the agency to approve future projects without analyzing the site-specific impacts, or perhaps even public notification.
The drive to get rid of pinyon and juniper woodlands began several years ago.
Senators Hatch and Heinrich slipped a rider into the 2018 Farm Bill instructing the Bureau of Land Management to create a “Categorical Exclusion” exempting pinyon-juniper logging and chaining projects of up to 4,500 acres from having to go through environmental analysis otherwise required by the National Environmental Policy Act. This legislation was pushed by sportsman groups, spearheaded by the Mule Deer Foundation. Western Watersheds Project and other conservationists warned that pinyon-juniper removal was bad for wildlife – including mule deer – but these warnings were ignored by Congress. Ironically, several months after Hatch-Heinrich passed, a new scientific study was published demonstrating that pinyon-juniper woodlands were an essential habitat component for mule deer, and that juniper removals have a negative effect on the species.
Then the Trump administration took it a giant leap farther, authorizing that pinyon-juniper removals as large as 10,000 acres could be approved under a Categorical Exclusion.
Cutting down juniper woodlands is often promoted as a method to create or improve habitat for the imperiled sage grouse, which requires undisturbed sagebrush steppe habitats and avoids trees of any kind. While juniper removal might seem to make sense, the reality is that logged-off juniper woodlands seldom result in sage grouse habitat. Mature and old-growth stands of junipers typically have very little understory at all, neither sagebrush nor native grasses. When bulldozers and other heavy equipment move in and the trees are torn down, what you get is disturbed bare ground. It’s the perfect breeding ground for the non-native invasive weed, cheatgrass.
If the goal is fuel reduction, cheatgrass infestations are the worst possible outcome.
When livestock add their impacts into the mix (as they almost always do), suppressing native bunchgrasses and breaking up fragile soil crusts, cheatgrass proliferates. Highly flammable, cheatgrass predictably dies each July (escaping the drought stress of high summer in seed form). Drying out, it creates the perfect tinder for fires to burn, and those fires wipe out sagebrush and other fire-intolerant shrubs creating a monoculture of cheatgrass that fuels a cycle of frequent wildfires in perpetuity.
There is a widespread myth that pinyon pines and juniper are an “invasive species” that are unnaturally expanding their range as a result of human activities like fire suppression or heavy livestock grazing. The reality is that these woodlands have been expanding and contracting for thousands of years in a natural cycle, following changes in precipitation patterns.
In addition to mule deer, there are a number of other native wildlife species that benefit from pinyon-juniper woodlands. Scott’s oriole, juniper titmouse, and Bewick’s wren are a few of the songbird species that are considered juniper obligates. Pinyon jays are pinyon obligates, as their name suggests. Obligate species are animals that require a specific type of habitat to sustain their populations.
As for the climate impacts, when you replace juniper woodlands – or sagebrush-bunchgrass steppes – with cheatgrass, it reverses the enormous carbon sequestration capability of western desert shrublands, hemorrhaging soil carbon into the atmosphere. We typically think of forests as the most important carbon immobilizers, but desert shrublands can pull even more carbon out of the atmosphere and safely lock it away in the soil.
The removal of pinyon-juniper woodlands across the American West draws a direct parallel with rainforest destruction to create livestock pastures in the Amazon Basin. It’s all about the fool’s errand of trying to mow down native ecosystems and replace them with idyllic grassy pastures ideal for adding pounds and profits to beef cattle. Nevermind that cattle are ill-adapted to arid environments, and do so poorly on western public lands that the vast acreage dedicated to beef production on western federal lands amounts to little more than two or three percent of the nation’s beef production. Even if western public lands had no recreational value to the Americans for whose benefit they are supposed to be managed, the carbon sequestration value of juniper woodlands would still eclipse the scanty private profits that are wrung from marginal western livestock operations.
Climate change is a serious problem, not least of all for the arid West now struggling with protracted drought and decreasing water availability. Let’s stop making it worse by cutting down the fragile woodlands that hold the carbon in place.
This article was written by Eric Molvar and published on Counterpunch on March 12, 2021. You can read the original version here!
Erik Molvar is a wildlife biologist and is the Laramie, Wyoming-based Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting and restoring watersheds and wildlife on western public lands.
In this article, Kelli Lundin describes her experience at Thacker Pass and the culmination of her analysis that every landscape deserves sovereignty for its own sake.
By Kelli Lundin
I’ve always found my attempts quite taboo in trying to put my experiences into a container—such as words. How can any arrangement of words, especially mine, fully describe feelings, emotions, visions, colors, dreams—or in particular, Life from the perspective of a specific place? My experience at Thacker Pass holds for me the same dilemma. What can be said of such a place to make a difference in the hearts of others? How can I describe with words something so sacred, something so elemental, something so necessary that it merits protection, honor, and reparations from us all?
What comes to mind is this: every place, whether it be Thacker Pass or any other Landscape, deserves sovereignty for its own sake, or rather, IS sovereign. Land, like any other body, is its own, just like mine and yours, the Songbird’s, the Sage Brush, every body of water, every mountain, woodland, valley, and prairie.
“First, and above all, an explanation must do justice to the thing that is to be explained, must not devalue it, interpret it away, belittle it, or garble it, in order to make it easier to understand…”
Words, I feel, (or again, at least mine) never fully justify, explain, or have the ability to assign value to what is Sacred. And like Thomas Berry said,
“There are no unsacred places; there are only Sacred places and desecrated places.”
Thacker Pass is Sacred.
And, I believe what weaves throughout all sacredness, or literally what defines the Sacred, is Relationship. Here in the high landscapes nestled amongst Mountains and Valleys, relationships abound in abundance. These relationships are so intimate—my voice, my thoughts, my very presence feels intrusive. Being in this place, my eyes wide open, I am in awe. My heart relaxes, my mind empties, and I feel at home in a quiet comfort that is rarely afforded to me.
I wander in solitude, and the wild of this place soothes the ache and loneliness I find in the city, the noise and bustle of everyday goings-on. The sound of Ravens, Chukars, Coyotes, Rain, and the explicit emotions of Wind repair and bring back to Life all my senses. The ever-constant numbness that protects me from the underlying and overwhelming grief of all that I know, slowly fades. I feel again, what it is to be alive.
I trail them—Deer, Coyote, the flight of a Sage Grouse, Bobcat, Mouse, even a Mountain Lion and wonder about their lives—what they know, how they feel, the meanings of their songs. I also wonder, “how do the sounds of my song inspire others?”
I have seen the spectrum of desecration swing from dismissiveness, blatant willful ignorance and callousness, all the way to blasting, shredding and annihilating bodies to dust, leaving death forever more in its wake. Lithium Americas wants to obliterate Thacker Pass. It doesn’t matter that they have a reason. It’s not their body. It’s not their Lithium. It belongs to the land. It’s Hers for her own purpose.
Does it take being raped and knowing that experience to empathize with the raping of Land or any body that is being taken from, used, resourced, controlled, exploited, or any other word describing desecration? I don’t know. What I do know is this: rape equals death. Something dies that is never reborn and no amount of grief will ever bring it back.
When will we all see this with our own eyes?
ALL of Life is depending on us to open our eyes and hearts to see the Sacred, in us and all around us. Death is one thing, but the end of birth is entirely something else.
For me, it all comes down to one word. Love (verb): to give Life, protect Life, honor Life, to see all Life as Sacred. For every Body.
Thank you Will Falk and Max Wilbert for continuing to offer justice, through your words and actions, that speak to the truth of how I feel and what I know. I’m so proud of you both. You are true humans being. Your courage is remarkable and a clear demonstration of how we all can expand our awareness in knowing every Body as Sacred.
Kelli Lundin is an environmental activist, land defender and writer.
This article offers clarity regarding the risks of continuing in an ‘economic growth mindset’. All life on earth needs a stable climate, healthy soil, and protective ozone layers. Without significant, meaningful, global change humans remain on a course that invites climate collapse, this includes pandemics.
By Tom Pegram, Associate Professor in Global Governance and Deputy Director of UCL Global Governance Institute, UCL,
and Julia Kreienkamp,Researcher at the Global Governance Institute, UCL
As governments around the world roll out COVID-19 vaccine programmes and seek to kickstart their economies back to life, recovery seems to be within reach. However, hard questions must not be sidestepped. How did this pandemic happen? And how resilient are we to future global risks, including the possibility of deadlier pandemics?
Importantly, COVID-19 was not a “black swan” event – an event that cannot be reasonably anticipated. As Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s emergencies programme, made clear in an impassioned address in February, COVID-19 is very much a human-made emergency. By continuing to privilege economic growth over environmental and social sustainability, “we are creating the conditions in which epidemics flourish … and taking huge risks with our future”.
Human civilisation is on a collision course with the laws of ecology.
Experts have long warned of zoonotic diseases jumping the species barrier as a result of growing human encroachment on nature. A 2019 landmark global biodiversity assessment showed that species and ecosystems are declining at rates “unprecedented in human history”.
Biodiversity loss is accelerating, driven by multiple interrelated forces, all of which are ultimately produced or greatly amplified by practices that push economic growth. These include deforestation, agricultural expansion and the intensified consumption of wild animals.
Climate change often steals the headlines, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the prospect of mass biodiversity loss is just as catastrophic. Crucially, these two challenges are deeply interlinked. Global warming is putting massive pressure on many of our most diverse natural ecosystems. In turn, the decline of these vital ecosystems weakens their ability to store carbon and provide protection from extreme weather and other climate-related risks.
These effects cannot be captured in simplified metaphors such as “the war on carbon”, which may be politically expedient but obscure the complexities involved in protecting life-sustaining ecosystems. There is no single measurement that captures the “the variability among living organisms from all sources including … terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part”. In fact, many of the living organisms on Earth are still unknown to humans.
Uncharted territory
Although it has long been argued that there are hard limits to unsustainable economic growth on a finite planet, these arguments have been largely dismissed by western economic powers. But market forces will not abolish natural scarcity or do away with planetary limits.
Belatedly, driven in part by growing public awareness of environmental destruction, economic planners are waking up to our ecological interdependence. As the recent Dasgupta Review, commissioned by the UK Treasury, puts it:
“Our economies, livelihoods and wellbeing all depend on our most precious asset: nature. We are part of nature, not separate from it.”
Buoyed by school climate strikes and the declaration of climate and nature emergencies around the world, UN Secretary General António Guterres has declared 2021 as “the year to reconcile humanity with nature”. However, the lack of progress is sobering. Of the 20 global biodiversity targets agreed in 2010, none have been fully met a decade later.
The international community remains way off track when it comes to implementing the Paris climate agreement. And although the COVID-19 crisis has led major economies to make commitments to build back better and greener, much of the recovery spending is flowing into business-as-usual economies.
A fundamental shift in thinking
How can political reality be brought into alignment with biophysical reality to ensure our societies do not prosper at the expense of the ecological life support systems upon which they ultimately depend?
Economist Kate Raworth’s doughnut-shaped economic model for human development provides one prominent plan of action, placing social and planetary boundaries at the core of governance redesign. In other words making sure that no human being is deprived of life’s essentials (food, shelter, healthcare and so on) while collectively ensuring that we don’t put damaging pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which all humans depend (a stable climate, healthy soil, a protective ozone layer).
But this is just one in a long line of ecological economic blueprints stretching back to at least the 1960s. The question remains: is society ready to relinquish its deep-seated will to power over nature for a different accommodation – one where we live in agreement with nature?
As ecologist Gregory Bateson observed: “The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.” The COVID-19 pandemic is a canary in the coalmine; more are sure to follow. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear that the environmental challenge requires
“rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.
What is perhaps less clear from this statement is that the mindset, models and metaphors which shape society’s goals and aspirations must also change. Where might we look for inspiration? According to the Yale Environmental Performance Index, Botswana and Zambia rank first and second in the world for biodiversity and habitat protection. In fact Botswana is unique in that most of its biodiversity remains intact. Such examples hold lessons for how we can converge towards a reconciliation with nature.
Political scientist William Ophuls argues that political struggle must now urgently focus on making ecology the master science and Gaia the key metaphor of our age. In other words, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow above or outside the natural systems that support us. Humanity’s efforts to embrace the politics of ecology could well prove to be the defining story of this century if we are to avoid indulging the tragedy of homo (in)sapiens.
You can read the original article, published in The Conversation, on the 5th March 2021 here. The authors are:
Tom Pegram Associate Professor in Global Governance and Deputy Director of UCL Global Governance Institute, UCL
