The Solutions are Already Here

Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below

Peter Gelderloos

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780745345130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Umwelt- & Energiepolitik

Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues that international governmental responses to the climate emergency are structurally incapable of solving the crisis. But there is hope.

Across the world, grassroots networks of local communities are working to realise their visions of an alternative revolutionary response to planetary destruction, often pitted against the new megaprojects promoted by greenwashed alternative energy infrastructures and the neocolonialist, technocratic policies that are the forerunners of the Green New Deal.

Gelderloos interviews food sovereignty activists in Venezuela, Indigenous communities reforesting their lands in Brazil and anarchists fighting biofuel plantations in Indonesia, looking at the battles that have cancelled airports, stopped pipelines, and helped the most marginalised to fight borders and environmental racism, to transform their cities, to win a dignified survival.

1
A Wide-Angle View

THE BARE BONES: THE SITUATION NOW AND OUR LIKELY FUTURES

Our planet is suffering a crisis that is both catastrophic and unprecedented.

The catastrophe is present all around us. We can measure it, and we can experience it. Even if we begin with a limited focus on global warming, the aspect of the crisis that has received the most attention, we can find plenty of strands that draw our attention to a whole host of other problems that implicate not only how we produce our energy, but also how we feed ourselves, how we are governed, and how we create and share wealth. Following these strands, even in the condensed summary I am about to provide, means dealing with plenty of ugly, depressing facts. Nonetheless, taking in the scope of the problem is necessary for looking at the solutions, and ultimately, that is what this book is about.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased from 250 to 418 parts per million since the nineteenth century, the average surface temperature has gone up by almost 1°C and it is still rising. In a complex system, such a huge change does not mean a smooth, gradual warming, but a major outbreak in turbulence as shock waves ripple all throughout the interconnected systems of the planet. These shock waves include more violent storms,¹ heavier rainfall, more deadly flooding and catastrophic landslides; and on the other hand more intense droughts and widespread wildfires. The west coast of North America, after experiencing its most intense drought in 1,200 years, went up in flames in the summer of 2020, with fire intensity in California and Oregon many times higher than in any year of the preceding two decades.² Even the Amazon rainforest is burning.

Increasing temperatures and drought contribute to widespread desertification. When water supplies are disrupted through mining or commercial irrigation and soil is destroyed by deforestation, overgrazing, or commercial monocrop farming, deserts expand. The Gobi Desert is swallowing up over 3,000 km² of land every year, and a half a million km² of arable land have disappeared in the Sahel in the last fifty years. About 40 percent of the continental US is experiencing desertification, while in Mexico, Paraguay, and Argentina more than half the territory is threatened.³

Still other shocks come in the form of deadly heat waves. In temperate and even arctic regions, temperatures have exceeded 40°C for extended periods of time, while new records have been set in Death Valley (54.4°C in 2020) and the Sahara (51.3°C in 2018). Heat waves have increased in frequency by 80 percent due to anthropogenic climate change.⁴

The oceans are acidifying and losing oxygen, threatening nearly all marine species with decline or extinction. Growing swathes of the Arctic are becoming ice free every summer, leading to a loss of habitat and also creating a feedback loop: with less of the planet’s surface covered in highly reflective ice, more solar radiation is absorbed, causing even more warming.

The interlinked problems of severe warming, pollution, noxious infrastructures, and extractive industries are causing mass die-offs. One million species are at risk of extinction and animal populations across the board have declined by 68 percent since 1970.⁵ Extinctions are currently happening 1,000 times faster than the normal or background rate.

Given that a habitat is a web of mutually beneficial relationships between living species and a host of geological entities such as bodies of water, soil, and air, it is no surprise that entire habitats are disappearing. On a geological timeline, habitats are always changing. Throughout the history of our planet, habitat loss from the perspective of one species is usually habitat gain from the perspective of another species. And though we are right to associate water with life, even the spread of deserts has often been a shift from one kind of biodiversity to another kind.

However, at an accelerating pace over the last century, we have witnessed a wholly different kind of change that can be described as an objective loss of habitat for all living beings: the proliferation of wastelands or dead zones. These are places that, in quantitative terms, have low biodiversity and low biomass. In other words, hardly anything lives there, as though an entire area has been removed from the living world.

A prime example are oceanic dead zones, large areas of an ocean or sea that become depleted in oxygen and subsequently devoid of most forms of life. The dead zones proliferating today are caused by chemicals from industrial agricultural saturating a watershed and causing algae blooms that consume all the oxygen. There are currently over 400 such dead zones worldwide, including in the Chesapeake Bay, off the coast of Louisiana, in the northern Adriatic, the Kattegat strait between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, and in the coastal waters of China, Japan, and New Zealand.⁶

Another example of a wasteland, a former habitat that our society has made unsuitable for life, are the toxic sites poisoned by a wide variety of industrial practices. Manufacturing—especially in the chemical and electronics industries—mining, and energy production result in huge quantities of toxic waste that is lethal to humans and other life forms. Much of this pollution stays in the environment a very long time, with examples including the radioactive byproducts of nuclear energy, with a half-life of billions of years, or synthetic chemicals like PFOA, a carcinogen used in Teflon that is so stable it is all but indestructible.

These toxins are concentrated at the point of production or intentionally stored in a waste dump. With a cavalier mentality, such sacrifice zones are justified as the necessary price for people to have air fresheners or new cell phones, though in truth no sacrifice zone is perfectly isolated, with carcinogens and other poisons leaking off into the water, soil, or air for the foreseeable future. In other instances, however, poisonous chemicals are intentionally pumped into the environment as widely as possible, as is the case of the 2.5 million tons of pesticides used for industrial agriculture every year.⁷

In the United States, highly contaminated industrial wastelands are placed within the Superfund system, which lists 40,000 toxic sites spread across the country. Fifty percent of the population of New Jersey live within three miles of a Superfund site.⁸ Clean-up is paid for by consumers and taxpayers; however, most sites are left to slowly leak out with no clean-up whatsoever.

The impact and meaning of a toxic site are impossible to convey quantitatively. In order to understand just what is being done to the planet, perhaps we need to get a little more visual. The most devastated places I have ever seen were an open pit copper mine in the Atacama Desert and Sierra Minera in Cartagena, Spain.

The Atacama Desert is the driest place on earth. Walking across the face of it feels like being on the surface of another planet. Nonetheless, there are quite a few creatures that live in that seemingly inhospitable place, and the longer you spend there, the more you pay attention, the more you realize how alive it really is, even before you discover the lomas, or fog oases that survive by drawing moisture out of the air, and the forests of chañar, trees kept alive by groundwater.

The open pit copper mines, operated by multinationals or by the state-owned company Codelco, are nothing like that. The one I saw was like a gaping wound in the earth, too big and brutal to be believed. It was unsettling the way the mine, clearly excavated without any concern for the harm it entailed, was nonetheless dug out in a semblance of geometric perfection—a terraced abyss of concentric rings—like some deeply unhappy creature’s idea of beauty. The devastation of the habitat, the scars of heavy machinery, countless tons of explosives, and toxic run-off had resulted in a landscape hostile to life itself. And the death it caused went well beyond the gigantic hole in the ground, nearly a kilometer deep and several kilometers across. All the water stolen by the industry has irrevocably depleted the water table that fragile desert ecosystems depend on. Many once lush forests in desert oases are now graveyards of desiccated trees.

The Sierra Minera of Cartagena has been mined for 2,500 years, since the times of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. In the mid-twentieth century, multinational mining companies switched to the more profitable open pit mining system. Now it looks like Mordor, which, incidentally, was based on the artillery blasted trenches Tolkien witnessed in World War I, as well as the slag heaps and smoke-choked landscape of the coal-mining and industrial regions of the English Midlands, a comparison that suggests an affinity between total warfare and industrial mining. Denuded hills carved out in unnatural shapes, a long interplay of excavations, the roads flattened to carry the minerals away, and then erosion as mud and rock gave way to wind and rain, and then baked dry in the sun. And everywhere, pools of blood-red goo giving off noxious smells. Countless children in nearby villages are experiencing severe health problems from leftover toxins, years after the mines have been closed.⁹

Next to the toxic sites produced by mining and industry, one of the most common types of wasteland presents quite the contrast. Though they are defining features of landscapes in the Global North, few people would think to include them as examples of a wasteland. In fact, they actually masquerade as symbols of fertility, prosperity, and lush, green bounty in the bourgeois imaginary. I’m talking about the two bookends of capitalist suburbia: green lawns and parking lots. There are over 160,000 km² of lawn in the US alone, maintained to the tune of billions of dollars of chemical products, water, and gasoline-powered lawnmowers, making it the number one “crop” in the entire country.¹⁰ This huge expanse, twice as large as all of Ireland, is home to a tiny number of grass species, which are cut short before they can feed any pollinators, and serves as a meager habitat for a small number of bugs. It is, in other words, far more desolate than a desert.

Parking lots and asphalted areas more generally are the companion to the artificially green residential subdivisions. To fulfill their dream of consumer bliss, all those isolated houses with parceled lawns require individualized transportation—cars—and abundant places to leave those cars while shopping and working. (Mortgaged) home ownership, consumerism, and car culture form the normative idea of success and happiness at the center of American capitalism, an idea that has globalized considerably over the past decades. Between roads and parking lots, 158,000 km² across the US are covered in pavement. This is almost as much land as is dedicated to wheat farming.¹¹ In the UK, it’s around 8,000 km². Aside from constituting a dead zone hostile to nearly all forms of life, parking lots and roads are a source of water pollution and urban heating.

The destruction of the earth’s living communities has a major impact on human life as well. One study found that in 2018, one in every five deaths around the world was caused by fossil fuels.¹² The World Health Organization estimates that between 2030 and 2050 climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths every year, though this only counts excess deaths (deaths in excess of rates previously considered normal) from more severe heat waves, loss of access to clean water due to climate change, malnutrition caused by drought, and the geographical spread of the malaria zone.¹³ The already alarming figure of 2.5 million people killed every decade by the energy, agriculture, and manufacturing industries does not take into account the complex way that different aspects of the ecological crisis are interrelated, beyond just climate.

Take all the deaths caused by contaminated drinking water. Deforestation causes erosion, which, together with the climate trend towards more violent storms, increases flooding, one of the principal ways drinking water is contaminated. And the shift from localized subsistence agriculture to commercial cash crop production (the “Green Revolution” encouraged by leading governments, corporations, and institutions the world over) multiplies the wasteful use of water, as well as poisonous run-off. Contamination of water is also caused by mining, waste dumps, and urbanization. The result is that 500,000 small children are killed every year.¹⁴ While only a small portion of those deaths are directly attributable to global warming, access to clean water is undeniably an ecological issue, a question of how we treat our environment, and what kind of economic activities we promote to “make a living,” as inappropriate as that phrase often is.

What about food production? How we feed ourselves is one of the ways we most intensively interact with the rest of the living world. Every year, human societies produce a surplus of food, yet 3.1 million people die from malnutrition and under-nutrition. Even in wealthy countries, millions of poor and racialized people are put at risk of diabetes and heart disease because they live in “food deserts,” neighborhoods where it is impossible to obtain healthy, fresh food.

Air pollution, caused largely by cars, energy production, and manufacturing, was already killing 8.8 million people a year in 2015.¹⁵ A study in The Lancet found 1.8 million deaths a year caused by water pollution and 1 million deaths ...