Globalism and Localization

Emergent Solutions to Ecological and Social Crises

Jeanine Canty, Jeanine M. Canty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000007145
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Considering the context of the present ecological and social crisis, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore the relationship between globalism and localization. Globalism may be viewed as a positive emergent property of globalization. The latter depicts a worldwide economic and political system, and arguably a worldview, that has directly increased planetary levels of injustice, poverty, militarism, violence, and ecological destruction. In contrast, globalism represents interconnected systems of exchange and resourcefulness through increased communications across innumerable global diversities. In an economic, cultural, and political framework, localization centers on small-scale communities placed within the immediate bioregion, providing intimacy between the means of production and consumption, as well as long-term security and resilience. There is an increasing movement towards localization in order to counteract the destruction wreaked by globalization, yet our world is deeply and integrally immersed within a globalized reality.

Within this collection, contributors expound upon the connection between local and global phenomenon within their respective fields including social ecology, climate justice, ecopsychology, big history, peace ecology, social justice, community resilience, indigenous rights, permaculture, food justice, liberatory politics, and both transformative and transpersonal studies.

1
CLIMATE JUSTICE AND THE CHALLENGE OF LOCAL SOLUTIONS¹

BRIAN TOKAR

Social movements often experience recurring cycles of hope and despair—moments of energizing progress and others when meaningful steps forward seem all but impossible. For scientists, as well as activists, focused on the emerging global climate crisis, this pattern is more striking than usual. Partly this is because so much is at stake now, as we experience the demise of the relatively stable patterns of weather and climate that have helped sustain life on Earth for millennia. It is also a function of the depth of societal changes that are necessary to prevent the direst predictions from coming to pass. With fossil-fueled myths of economic and technological progress on the rise again, a U.S. administration committed to climate denial, economic nationalism, and the deregulation of economic activity, the current challenge often appears impossibly daunting.

The stakes for people around the world are higher than ever. Devastating patterns of floods, droughts, wildfires, and other catastrophic weather events are disrupting life on every continent. They disproportionately impact those who are most vulnerable and who also contribute least to the excessive emissions of greenhouse gases that lie at the heart of the problem. This is the core, underlying message of climate justice, a theme to which we will soon return.

Accelerating weather catastrophes have long affected the Earth’s more remote regions, but in recent years they have begun to impact people and ecosystems nearly everywhere, including the unprecedented wave of powerful hurricanes, wildfires, and landslides that swept the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean islands, and the U.S. West Coast in 2017. While extreme weather in North America typically dominates our own headlines, these events only begin to echo what many people in the global South have experienced for a decade or more. Years of persistent drought have brought acute hunger to more than eight million people in the Horn of Africa² and many more in parts of southern Africa and the war-torn Middle East. Major population centers across South Asia have flooded during the past decade, and two of the severest typhoons to ever reach landfall have devastated communities in the Philippines and Fiji Islands.³

While scientists continue to debate the climate contributions of specific weather events, we know that the turbulent weather we are now experiencing is precisely what climate scientists have predicted for several decades. Climatologist James Hansen and his colleagues⁴ described the continuing shift away from the relatively stable climate state that prevailed for much of human history as analogous to playing a game with loaded dice. Nearly thirty-five years have passed since the world has experienced a single month that averaged below normal in temperature by twentieth-century standards,⁵ and the science of determining the actual climate component of particular weather events is progressing rapidly. The first such study, published in early 2011, took many years and required a mobilization of computing power on a massive scale.⁶ A 2014 study of successive heat waves in Australia, Europe, and East Asia was quicker to confirm an unambiguous climate link, demonstrating that these extreme events would have been virtually impossible in the absence of climate change.⁷ In the case of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated homes and released toxins from industrial facilities across the Texas Gulf coast in 2017, scientists began to sort out the specific contributions of ocean warming, sea level rise, increased atmospheric water vapor, and other climate-related factors in just a few months.⁸ Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology undertook to merge climate and hurricane prediction models, demonstrating the vastly increased likelihood of extreme rainfall episodes under the present climate regime.⁹

The global climate crisis is also a challenge to the future of democratic governance. From the earliest mainstream writings about global warming, people have suggested that a failure of adequate preventive actions will raise the likelihood of an authoritarian response to climate instability. In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, soon-to-be U.S. vice president Al Gore recounted the history of societal responses to past weather catastrophes, which in his view paralleled the rise of “the bureaucratic, administrative tendencies of the modern state.”¹⁰ If societies are unable to anticipate and prevent climate-related disasters, we could see, in Gore’s words, “a new worldwide bureaucracy to manage the unimaginable problems caused by massive social and political upheavals.”¹¹ Gore’s suggestion was to instead launch a Global Marshall Plan for renewable energy development, driven by a largely imaginary U.S. technological and organizational superiority.

When Gore’s book came out more than a quarter century ago, it was already clear that this was highly improbable, as the U.S. was well behind Europe and other regions in advancing solar and wind technologies and stood in the forefront of a neoliberal world order that would stifle any ambitious public-sector initiatives. Meanwhile, Gore’s personal role in the evolution of global climate diplomacy would prove quite ambiguous. In Kyoto in 1997, he offered that the U.S. would only sign onto a global agreement mandating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions if it were implemented through the establishment of a global market in tradable emissions credits.¹² Even though the U.S. Congress refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the rest of the world has had to live with the consequences of a cumbersome and inherently inadequate emissions trading regime that has thoroughly failed to bring needed pollution reductions.

While the obstinacy of the current leadership in Washington may be more extreme than most of us have seen in our lifetime, current politics may tend to obscure the virtually uninterrupted history of U.S. obstruction in the world of international climate diplomacy. For example, the Obama administration’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, gave a speech during the lead-up to an annual UN climate conference where he brushed aside the issue of compensation for present-day climate damages, a matter of the highest urgency for delegates from the global South, as merely an “ideological narrative of fault and blame.”¹³ He insisted that no significant public funds for international climate aid would be forthcoming beyond the meager US$2.5 billion that the U.S. had committed annually since 2010. In 2009 at Copenhagen, Hillary Clinton and other U.S. officials had promised to raise US$100 billion a year from Northern countries in order to win acceptance for a wholly voluntary approach to international reductions in greenhouse gases.¹⁴ Furthermore, Stern dismissed the long-standing principle of responsibility for historic carbon dioxide emissions, which was enshrined in the original 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. With unsurpassed arrogance, Stern insisted that “[i]t is unwarranted to assign blame to developed countries for emissions before the point at which people realized that those emissions caused harm to the climate system.”¹⁵ This blatantly overlooks the fact that at least half of all cumulative emissions have occurred since 1980, and more than three-quarters since the very first observations of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the late 1950s.¹⁶

Obama and Clinton’s interventions in Copenhagen launched a concerted effort to shift climate diplomacy from mandatory toward purely voluntary mitigation measures that has shaped all subsequent negotiations, including the eventual text of the Paris climate agreement.¹⁷ While many observers of the most recent global climate conferences have voiced hope that the U.S. would step aside and let others lead the way to further climate progress, it appears that the Trump administration’s disavowal of even modest climate goals may instead be enabling others to weaken their own prior commitments.

In response, people committed to meaningful climate action have redoubled their focus in two clear directions: illuminating the underlying social justice dimensions of the climate crisis and shifting the focus of proposed solutions toward the local level. This is reflected throughout the grassroots of the climate movement and in the shifting strategies of some larger organizations, most notably the global 350.org network. The insights and leadership of those most immediately affected by accelerating climate disruptions have significantly reshaped the priorities of large and small organizations alike.

As stated previously, the principle of climate justice highlights the experiences and urgent needs of people around the world who contribute the least to excessive greenhouse gas emissions but live with the most severe consequences of accelerating climate chaos. As an emerging movement, climate justice unites three distinct elements, each with roots in different parts of the world.¹⁸ Some of the most compelling voices for climate justice are those of indigenous and other land-based peoples, mainly in the global South, who have raised crucial demands at the United Nations and other settings that reflect their communities’ unique vulnerability to climate disruptions. These include rainforest dwellers opposing new mega-dams and palm oil plantations, African and Latin American communities resisting land appropriations for industrial agriculture and agrofuel production, Pacific Islanders facing the loss of their homes due to rising seas, and peasant farmers fighting for food sovereignty and basic land rights, among many others. A statement to the 2009 UN Copenhagen climate conference from the worldwide confederation of peasant movements, La Vía Campesina, stated, in part,

Climate change is already seriously impacting us. It brings floods, droughts and the outbreak of pests that are all causing harvest failures. I must point out that these harvest failures are something that the farmers did not create. Instead, it is the polluters who caused the emissions who destroy the natural cycles…. [W]e will not pay for their mistakes.¹⁹

In North America, organizers for environmental and racial justice contribute the experience of their historical roots in the civil rights movement, a lived understanding of the effects of climate change on marginalized communities, and essential links to justice-based movements around food, health care, transportation, and other basic social needs. Many environmental justice advocates view the climate justice movement as a continuation of the U.S. civil rights legacy, and of their communities’ continuing “quest for fairness, equity and justice,” as described by the environmental justice pioneer Robert Bullard at a landmark 2009 gathering in New York City.²⁰ The Grassroots Global Justice Alliance continues to bring delegations of U.S. environmental justice activists to the annual UN climate conferences around the world and has supported the dev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 1 Climate Justice and the Challenge of Local Solutions
• Chapter 2 The African Burial Ground: Roots of Ecological Destruction and Social Exploitation
• Chapter 3 The Ties That Bind: An Earth-Based Story of Home
• Chapter 4 Food Justice, Permaculture, and Global Urban Strategy
• Chapter 5 The Declaration of Ek Balam: Protecting the Sacred in Corn
• Chapter 6 The Paradox of Digital Technology in Social Movements
• Chapter 7 A Climate Justice Compass for Transforming Self and World
• Chapter 8 The Evolution of the Environmental Justice Movement: Translocal Voices for Systemic Transformations
• Chapter 9 Ethical Path to Ecological and Social Survival
• Chapter 10 Living La Vida Local: Small Steps Toward Global Change
• INDEX