Ecosocialism and Climate Justice

An Ecological Neo-Gramscian Analysis

Eve Croeser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367894535
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000198942
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book investigates the broader climate movement to contextualise the role played by its climate justice wing, focusing specifically on the theoretical and practical contributions of ecosocialists.

Ecosocialism and Climate Justice provides an account of the shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene in the context of the global spread of capitalist relations of production. Croeser begins by critically analysing the root causes of anthropogenic climate change and identifies the origins and development of the current climate movement within civil society. She then focuses on the climate justice movement, analysing the ways in which anthropogenic global warming may be challenged in a way that is socially just. Overall, this book provides further insight into the effectiveness of ecosocialist theory and activism in the context of existing global, national and local power relationships.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate justice, climate politics, critical global political economy studies and environmental activism.

1 The organic crisis of global capitalism in the Anthropocene

Introduction

The world currently confronts an interlinked ecological, economic, social and political crisis crystallised in the issue of climate change. Despite increasingly urgent warnings from the scientific community that we need to drastically reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within the next decade if we aim to limit the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels (IPCC, 2018a), emissions continue to rise and there is no sign that they will be ‘peaking in the next few years’ (UNEP, 2019). This is despite the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR15), which warns that the damage to ecosystems and socio-economic systems of allowing global temperatures to rise to 2 °C above pre-industrial levels is likely to be much more severe than if the temperature rise is limited to 1.5 °C (IPCC, 2018a).¹ The scenario we face is even worse than this, however; even if governments meet their formal commitments to reducing GHG emissions by the amount they have nominated in the current international climate agreement (the Paris Agreement), SR15 warns that this is likely to ‘result in a global warming of about 3 °C by 2100, with warming continuing afterwards’ (IPCC, 2018a, p. 4).

What life will be like on a planet that is 3 °C warmer is difficult to imagine; even at the current level of warming, which has raised the global temperature by approximately 1 °C (‘with a likely range of between 0.8 °C and 1.2 °C’) above the pre-industrial average (IPCC, 2018a, p. 4), the damaging effects of ‘extreme weather’ events such as the Australian 2019/2020 ‘megafires’ are unprecedented.² The ecological and socio-economic crises that such events precipitate demonstrate that, as SR15 explains, while a 1.5 °C temperature rise will be more manageable than a 2 °C increase, it will still pose great dangers to ecosystems and the people who live in them (IPCC, 2018a). From a climate justice perspective, the risks that climate change poses to the least advantaged people compound the challenges they already face as they contend with insecure livelihoods in an increasingly conflict-ridden, unstable and unequal world.

While disappointing, the lack of urgency in policymakers’ responses to the IPCC SR15 recommendations is not surprising given that more than two decades of international climate change negotiations have yielded very little in terms of real action. As discussed in Chapter 5, the continuing failure of governments acting alone and through international institutions to effectively address the climate crisis has led to the growth of a distinct climate movement within civil society whose broad aim is to bring about the changes required to mitigate anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Like many other social movements, the climate movement is heterogeneous, and its members have different ideas about how best to address the climate crisis. While some activists call for ‘climate action’ (which involves doing the technical things necessary to mitigate anthropogenic climate change, such as ‘leaving fossil fuels in the ground’), others insist on ‘climate justice’ and call for ‘system change’. The ecosocialists who are the main subjects of the study in this book, and whose theoretical and practical contributions to the climate movement are discussed in Chapters 3 and 6, fall into the latter category. As well as analysing the role of ecosocialists within the climate movement, several other interlinked aims informed the writing of this book.

Main themes and aims

The primary aim of this book is to contribute to efforts to find socially just solutions to the climate crisis that is currently unfolding. The ecosocialists who are the focus of this book have themselves published many excellent books and papers analysing the causes of the anthropogenic climate crisis and proposing socially just solutions to it. This book is not intended to compete with the extensive body of ecosocialist writings; it is, rather, an overview and meta-analysis of some key aspects of ecosocialist thought and practice with the aim of introducing these ideas to readers who may not be aware of them. Another aim of this book is to identify ecosocialist strengths as well as the challenges they face in the hope that this will provoke further thought and debate about these issues both amongst ecosocialists and amongst other readers who are concerned about the social justice issues arising from the interlinked crises we currently face. Ecosocialists contribute many valuable ideas on the issue of climate change that merit a wide audience; for example, their definition of the concept of ‘climate justice’ is much broader and deeper than liberal definitions of this concept and can fruitfully contribute to the urgent debate we need to engage in regarding how to respond to the human suffering that results from the interlinked ecological, economic, political and social crises we currently face.

While ecosocialist thought and practice is one of the book’s main themes, the theoretical lens through which this theme is explored was developed in response to Clive Hamilton’s (2017) argument that the advent of the Anthropocene requires new approaches to the way we do research, as well as to what and how we teach. Hamilton’s views of the implications of the Anthropocene for the social sciences are discussed in more detail later in this chapter; it suffices to say at this point that his observations motivated the incorporation of a new category, the ‘Biosphere’, into the standard neo-Gramscian theoretical perspective first developed by Robert Cox (1981, 1983) and later modified by his colleague Timothy Sinclair (2016), so that it is more explicitly ecological. The incorporation of the global political economy as a category within the Earth’s biosphere is the modest novel theoretical contribution that this book makes to the existing academic literature on the issues of climate change and climate justice.

The original neo-Gramscian perspective and its modifications are described in Chapter 2. The ecological neo-Gramscian perspective is then used as an heuristic device throughout the rest of the book to achieve the book’s final goal: to conduct an extensive case study that demonstrates how this theoretical lens can facilitate a critical ecological political economy account of the interconnected crises we face. It is hoped that other analysts will find the ecological neo-Gramscian perspective interesting and, perhaps, even useful in their own work. More generally, the material discussed in this book is intended to stimulate further reflection on, and exchanges of ideas regarding, the pressing issue of how to shift from ‘Holocene’ to ‘Anthropocene’ modes of thinking, analysis, research and teaching. This is a challenging endeavour because, as Hamilton (2017) points out, the changes that are required are so radical that they constitute what philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn refers to as a ‘paradigm shift’.

Thomas Kuhn’s ‘paradigm shifts’: a brief overview

In his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn defines ‘paradigms’ as ‘universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners’ who are trained to engage in what Kuhn refers to as ‘normal science’ (Kuhn, 1996, p. x). Kuhn argues that in the course of doing this work, researchers sometimes encounter anomalies that cannot be explained by the existing paradigm and lead to crises that necessitate radical shifts, which he refers to as ‘paradigm changes’. While Kuhn’s work relates to enquiry in the natural sciences, Hamilton (2017) argues that the existing paradigms that social scientists work with cannot accommodate the anomaly that is represented by the advent of the Anthropocene, and that a paradigm shift is required in these discipline areas to deal with it. This shift in the social sciences is well overdue; the emergence of a new field of study, Earth System science, heralded such a paradigm shift in the natural sciences more than three decades ago.

Earth System science: a paradigm shift in the natural sciences

As ecosocialist Ian Angus explains, the study of the Earth as an integrated system originated in the 1980s when scientists realised that ‘nuclear weapons, ozone-destroying chemicals, and greenhouse gases could radically remake the world: human activity was causing not just change but global change, with potentially disastrous consequences’ (Angus, 2016, p. 30). The resultant scientific research in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Earth System science aimed to develop an understanding of how different components constituting the dynamic and complex natural world, including humans, interact (National Academy of Sciences, 1986). Over the years, Earth System scientists have systematically found evidence of widespread anthropogenic changes to the natural environment, including the disruption of major biogeochemical cycles such as the carbon, hydrological, nitrogen and phosphorous cycles that constitute the complex, dynamic biosphere of the planet (National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017). Describing the dynamism of the Earth System, Galloway et al. (2014, p. 351) explain that Earth System components interact through several ‘biogeochemical cycles’ that function to conserve matter in the Earth System by shifting ‘chemical elements among different parts of the Earth: from living to non-living, from atmosphere to land to sea, and from soils to plants’. Referring to the example of how reactive nitrogen has more than doubled in the biosphere since pre-industrial times, they furthermore draw attention to how ‘[g]lobal-scale alterations of biogeochemical cycles are occurring, from human activities both in the U.S. and elsewhere, with impacts and implications now and into the future’ (ibid.).

So extensive are the geological and ecological impacts of human activities, and so profound their effects on the Earth’s biosphere, that several Earth System scientists (for example, refer to Steffen et al., 2015) support atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen’s (2002) contention that they signal the commencement of a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene, or ‘The Age of Humanity’. In contrast to the Holocene, the geological epoch which was characterised by the unusually stable climatic conditions and rich biodiversity that were conducive to the development and flourishing of human civilizations over the past approximately 11,500 years (Walker et al., 2009), the Anthropocene is characterised by a changing, unstable biosphere and, relatedly, the onset of what has been termed ‘the sixth great extinction event’ in our planet’s history (McCallum, 2015). While the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body whose task it is to formally determine and name geological time spans, is yet to decide on whether or not to formally acknowledge the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, Angus (2016, p. 58) points out that even if it rejects the Anthropocene Working Group’s recommendation to do so, this ‘will not make the Anthropocene go away’.³

Apart from the larger controversy about whether or not humans have indeed become a geological force whose activities herald the Anthropocene, another important debate that has been preoccupying Earth System scientists and stratigraphers involves determining when the Anthropocene started, with suggestions ranging from Neolithic times to the Industrial Revolution and beyond (Oldfield et al., 2014). The starting point of the Anthropocene is very significant, as it can point to the root causes of the global changes, and identifying the cause of a problem is crucial if one is to address it effectively. Steffen et al. (2015) point out that while it is true that human activities affected local ecosystems prior to the 1940s, the changes their activities made to these ecosystems were neither extensive nor profound enough to have environmental effects on a planetary scale. It was only after the ‘phenomenal growth of the global socio-economic system’ in the 1950s, a phenomenon that Earth System scientists refer to as the ‘Great Acceleration’, that planetary-scale changes to natural systems became apparent (Steffen et al., 2015, p. 93). This is evident when one compares graphs depicting global socio-economic trends such as growths in population, real GDP, foreign direct investment, primary energy use, fertilizer consumption, transportation and international tourism (see Figure 1.1) with graphs showing biospheric system trends such as GHG concentrations, ocean acidification, surface warming and tropical forest loss over the period 1750–2010 (see Figure 1.2), which show concomitant sharp increases in all these indicators after 1950.

Figure 1.1 Socio-economic trends.⁴

Source: Steffen, W., et al. The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review 2(1), pp. 81–98. Copyright © 2015 by the Authors. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd.

Figure 1.2 Earth System trends.

Source: Steffen, W., et al. The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review 2(1), pp. 81–98. Copyright © 2015 by the Authors. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd.

On the basis of this evidence, the preferred date that Will Steffen and his co-authors suggest for marking the onset of the Anthropocene is very precise.

On Monday 16 July 1945, about the time that the Great Acceleration began, the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert. Radioactive isotopes from this detonation were emitted to the atmosphere and spread worldwide entering the sedimentary record to provide a unique signal of the start of the Great Acceleration, a signal that is unequivocally attributable to human activities.

(Steffen et al., 2015, p. 93)

1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 The organic crisis of global capitalism in the Anthropocene
• 2 Theoretical perspectives for the Anthropocene: an ecological neo-Gramscian Method of Historical Structures
• 3 Competing ideas: ecosocialist theory
• 4 Institutional responses to a changing biosphere: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
• 5 The social dynamics of ‘climate justice’ versus ‘climate action’ in the climate movement
• 6 Competing ideas: ecosocialist strategy and tactics in the struggle for climate justice
• 7 The biosphere and social forces in a geopolitically unstable world beset by organic crisis
• 8 Prospects for climate justice: a research agenda
• Index