Posted October 27, 2009
Cândido Grzybowski
Sociologist, director of Ibase
The climate crisis is the most evident, immediate and threatening consequence of the productionist, consumerist industrial model that underpins our economy and the way we live life.
And it is not something specific to any contingent present situation, but marks the exhaustion of a whole system driven by having and accumulating; that is, where the basic tenet of development is to grow and grow more, to grow endlessly with no regard for natural limits – and all in order to concentrate wealth. That is the precondition of development, regardless of the environmental destruction it may cause, or of the fact that this generation of wealth is, at the same time, generation of poverty, social exclusion and inequalities of all kinds. Global warming and the climate crisis are thus expressions of an inevitability intrinsic to this kind of development. From both the environmental and social standpoints, such development cannot be made sustainable. It does not matter what place we occupy on this unique, finite planet, the fact is that we have to change. Today that is an ethical imperative, a question of life and death: what is at stake is life itself – and thus all humankind – in its deep-seated relationship with the environment.
The crisis is on us, as plain as day. It’s no good thinking we can dodge it, that it’s nothing to do with us. The climate is a common good: it has the virtue of being cosmopolitan, for better or for worse. Except that the climate change resulting from our type of economy – especially its energy base – affects, and will continue to affect, particularly the 80% of humankind that have received little or nothing from this model of development. Even more so now in its globalised form, of near-total interdependence. I dare say we are condemning the overwhelming majority to becoming environmental refugees with no place to turn, drifting, as already heralded by the boatloads of clandestine migrants on the Caribbean and the Mediterranean or the appalling expansion of big city slums.
We confront a crisis of civilisation, and that is what we have to acknowledge if we are to react in time. The logic of development that grew out of the industrial revolution became the economic, political and cultural force that has driven the world in recent centuries. No longer is it a clash in the old terms of capitalism versus socialism framed by industrial civilisation and developments from it. The crisis confronting us today is in industrial civilisation itself and its models of economic and political organisation for society – the dominant capitalist model and the subordinate, aspiring socialist model. It is the very fundamentals themselves of that type of civilisation that are exhausted. They have literally gone into meltdown, they have been consumed by their own contradictions. And now they threaten the whole planet.
New civilisation, new paradigm
The need is urgent and radical: here and now, we have to transform our ideas, ways of thinking and the political, economic and technical systems that sustain development. The break has to be total, from top to bottom. Going from a productionist industrial civilisation to a bio-civilisation committed to life on the planet entails a veritable revolution.
And it’s no easy break. Development is embedded in us, it’s a value we hold dear. Development immediately makes us think of progress. And who can be against progress? The problem is that we forget to talk about what quality of life that progress brings. About how much waste, pollution and destruction are bound up with that progress. Just remember the automobile, one of the prototypes of the present model of development. Our towns and cities are designed not for us men and women citizens, but for cars. And nonetheless we can hardly move for monumental traffic jams. Can it be that in order to live well we always need more? To have more ad more goods, always changing them because they deteriorate so quickly (they’re made not to last) or from the compulsion drummed into us as the ideal of always getting the latest model. All that just generates destruction across the whole cycle, from the extraction of raw materials to the rubbish heap where we throw our used goods. Have we ever stopped to think who is gaining in the process?
There is no doubt that there are enormous unmet needs. Many people’s economic, social, cultural and environmental rights are not realised. Whole groups and peoples are condemned to exclusion, misery, hunger, poverty, and privations of all kinds. But who causes this and how? The more the world is developed on this model – as globalisation has made even more evident – the more inequality is produced in the world. A mere 20% of humankind consumes more than 80% of the natural resources and goods and services produced by this system. And what’s worse is that if the level of consumption were extended to everyone, we would run out of planet, of natural resources! Ecologists conceived the ecological footprint precisely to evaluate that misappropriation of nature by the privileged strata of the population and the more developed countries. For everyone to live like an average North American would take around five planet Earths. That is why change is a necessary condition.
A major revolution in mentalities and value systems is indispensable. We have to go beyond the ideology of progress and replace social and environmental justice at the centre, along with the idea of all people living well. And while there is still time, because if we don’t change now… tomorrow will be too late. Let s start by disputing the senses and meanings of the development that is put to us as salvation. There is a dictatorship of economic thinking in the debate and in political decisions, as if nothing could be done without economic growth as a precondition. The dominant economistic view sees environmental and social considerations are costs rather than the bases on which any society rests. The call is to repoliticise everything. The economy and the market, science and technique, development strategies, all have to be subordinated to a philosophy of life that sees humankind as an intrinsic part of the natural environment and in intimate interaction with all living things, in their biodiversity, in their territories.
What confronts us is the need for a new ethical, analytical and strategic paradigm in order for us to start changing here and now. We need a mental infrastructure, a cultural revolution – as our Betinho would say – that puts everything back in its place, the place of life, of nature, of ideas, of our enormous collective capacity to create, to invent. Let us put all of that at the service of a re-encounter among ourselves, humans, with the diversity that we are and of what we know how to do and create. But our re-encounter must also be with the environment from which we are sucking the lifeblood and of which we are an integral part.
Let us create a great movement of ideas, a kind of religion, where we believe and act with determination. That can make a difference today and sway politics – the only possible arena for confronting and discharging our collective responsibility in the light of the disaster that is looming – from the local level, there where we live, to the world level. It cannot wait! The Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is nearly on us. Let’s pressure our negotiators to assume the republican civic responsibility we expect of them!
What is fundamental is our conviction that another world is possible. Doubt will only delay effective action. Worse still, it makes us easy prey to a false discourse about the need to damage the environment in order to develop, to solve our glaring social problems. It is one thing to face up to our pressing needs, and quite another to confuse that with supporting major economic and financial conglomerates so that they can deal with the problem. That goes for everything from large hydroelectric projects to agrofuels, from deforestation to cattle ranching, and from green deserts for cellulose to supporting big construction companies because they create jobs. No political action for change can happen if we, men and women citizens, fail to believe that it can happen, must happen and that we want it to happen. As for paradigm change, the ball is in the citizens’ court. The possibility of Brazil’s acting differently lies in our hands: we who hold one of the largest natural patrimonies of all humankind.
Starting blocks
Share the world: that is the simple secret of a new ethical, civic consciousness of planetary proportions. We need to share among ourselves and with future generations what we have been generously given, a gift from nature. We need to share, too, what we produce, respecting life and the environment on the basis of our collective genius – or is anyone in doubt that human knowledge is essentially collective, produced in the interaction and exchange afforded to us by language and intelligence? – and its practical application as science and technology in creating goods and services that are useful to everyone. Sharing means solidarity and responsibility. Sharing means recognising ourselves in other men and women the same rights as we claim for ourselves.
One fundamental challenge for sweeping change is to bring the common goods, which are a precondition for life for each and every one of us, back to the centre of the debate. Here it is worth remembering, firstly, the givens like water, the air we breathe, the climate, biodiversity, the enormous resources that nature has accumulated over time, in short the biosphere as a system that is unique in its diversity. Also fundamental to another style of life are the common goods created over the course of human history: that is, languages, song and music, art and culture in general, including knowledge, science and techniques, and philosophies. Life in society and a healthy, just and sustainable relationship with nature depend on our preserving, strengthening those goods and using them responsibly. One urgent and unavoidable task is to deprivatise and decommodify the common goods – today one of the greatest threats produced by the model of development we follow and thus, one of the decisive factors in global warming.
In our endeavour to identify the bases for a new world, we must not forget those human accomplishments that are clearly strategic and should be leveraged. These include democracy as a method for change and a way of operating a society grounded in social and environmental justice. Democracy is fundamental to broadening the ascendancy of politics over the economy, of things public over things private, and of citizens’ power over the power of money and corporations. Democracy, however, is also essential to repositioning the environmental issue as an issue of social justice, for this and future generations.
When we talk about sustainable societies, rather than sustainable development, we are putting the collective citizens’ right to have enough food, clothing, housing, health, culture and happiness to live a decent life congruent with historical conditions, on a radical principle of equality and valorisation of diversity, before the individual private right to accumulate without limit. Participation – that is, the citizen’s right and duty to define the type of social and environmental justice the society can guarantee to all its members – is central to democracy.
Once again, the problem is in the dominant model, but any possibility of change lies in the hands of the active citizenry. That is to say that, rather than being disillusioned by what our representatives ad policy-makers and managers do or fail to do, we have to exercise our capacity as the constituents of political power and governments. We have to say, loud and clear, what we want and what we think the world needs and expects us to do.
The media may be against us, no doubt, but not in the long run. Always, down though history, it has been mobilisations coming from the heart of society that have brought change. In response to the mighty corporations and their apparently all-dominant structures, we have to invent citizen-based modes of social and public oversight that constrain them, inhibit them and oblige them to change their strategy and practice. After all, no company can withstand a citizens’ boycott. They have to resume their role as organisations for the production of goods and services not for themselves, but for citizens’ happiness.
Pathways to change
In an effort to identify existing movements that can and should be strengthened for their potential for change, let me mention some here. The list is not exhaustive and does not indicate priorities. I prefer to see them as emergent and signs of another possible world.
In the first place, let me highlight the radicality of the proposal to call into question the most commonly-used measure of the value of wealth. What is wealth, after all? Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a degradation, an elegy to environmental and social destruction caused by the commodification of everything, as if that were generation of wealth. It excludes whoever is not in the market and whatever is not made for sale. It does not regard household work, the care and even the reproduction of life, as producing value. The environment is an “externality”, in terms both of its use and of what is discarded into it, and does not enter into the value. This is a measure of what is being earned and not what humankind is losing. Much of the environmental destruction and social injustice we witness is embedded into GDP.
The hegemony of GDP as a measure of wealth is now being contested. “Living well”, rather than being a measure, points to whole other basis for thinking about wealth. Moves are under way to built indices of human happiness or gross well-being. The Human Development Index (HDI) proposed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) goes to contest the economic and financial preponderance of GDP, but is not yet a break, because per capita GDP continues to be one of its four components. In addition, HDI ignores impact on common goods.
Certain principles have to be borne in mind here in creating any new measure of value able to point towards a more equal and diverse world with social and environmental justice. Such a measure should take account of the interaction among people, the community, neighbours and friends. It should also contemplate direct experience of nature. It is indispensable that it consider feeling good, personal and collective self-realisation, creation and the possibility of participating over and beyond the accumulation of material goods and assets.
A second movement that must be recorded here is what is taken in by the term “solidarity economy”. This encompasses basically modes of social and economic organisation based on cooperation and social responsibility and designed, first and foremost, to serve life and not accumulation. In any area of human activity, setting up a solidarity economy enterprise blends sharing-in and sharing-with into one and the same act. There, a revolutionary principle is applied in practice to building sustainable lives and societies.
The solidarity economy – itself constituting a new economic weave of human, rather than mercantile, exchanges – is made up of initiatives at whose core is an endeavour to restore the balance among the bio-ecological, socio-economic and technical and scientific systems which underpin any goods and service production activity. Also notable here and harmonising with the solidarity economy is a whole new trend towards recycling and conserving goods, rather than producing new ones to be discarded. These are the roots of a new economy, both in relations between people and nature, and in relations among the people producing, sharing and consuming goods and services.
Given the environmental crisis and bearing in mind our ecological footprint, humankind must invent less material-intensive ways of producing wealth. The information and knowledge economy, today with major impacts on our lives, can go in that direction if not fettered to the large capitalist conglomerates. After all, what we most need it to produce more wealth, more happiness, without using up nature destructively. The dematerialisation of production is an imperative now binding on all material goods production activities. Using less energy and less natural resources is no longer a matter of choice for economic organisations, if they are to survive the environmental catastrophe. Their choice is only how to do so.
Another fundamental factor worth highlighting – as an emergent trend that should be strengthened for what it signals – is the re-localisation and re-territorialisation of power and of economies. This is not to ignore or reverse our planetary interdependence, which is now a condition of life. However, this should not be confused with the globalisation driven by the large economic and financial corporations that organise the world according to their strategies for accumulation. The localisation and territorialisation stem from the recognition of a greater common good, the planet, the biosphere, biodiversity, the air, the oceans and the climate. They also recognise the diverse potentials and limits of each corner of the planet, of each human society anchored there. Secondarily, we all depend on each other. However, we must actively do whatever is possible and decide for ourselves according to the possibilities of the place we occupy on the face of the Earth. Non-one has the right to deny us the ability to decide for ourselves or to impose solutions from outside. Neither, of course, do we have the right to reach decisions that ignore the consequences on everyone else.
To localise and territorialise is to re-encounter each other among ourselves and to re-encounter the environment. That is why we need forms of organisation that enable us to internalise all that can be internalised, producing here to consume here, deciding here whatever concerns the men and women citizens of here, given the culture and identity that are proper to us. Everything that has to do with the greater collective good, everything that we need and do not have, everything that we have too much of and others have too little – all that should be organised and decided at a higher level, be it national, regional or world.
Take energy – the villain of the climate crisis – as an example. The different human territories on the planet have diverse and unequal energy resources and needs. Management of such resources can only be local, then to rest, secondarily, on other levels. What cannot happen is what has been the case to date: resource exploitation and use are decided colonially and imposed from outside, either from the world economic centres or from the industrial centres within countries, with no regard for the needs of the local human groups involved.
Over and above conclusions
Of course, this endeavour entails my making the effort to liberate myself – yes, from dogmas, from ideals and values, from structures for thinking and acting. Aware of my responsibility as director-general of Ibase, I want to spur, to motivate, to set off a powerful movement of internal change that will lead us to bold proposals and new practices. Ibase needs to participate actively in the construction of a new agenda, inside and outside Brazil, a citizens’ agenda for a just, diverse world with social and environmental justice. Radically committed to democracy as a strategy for social change, we must rise to the challenge of a new agenda for Brazil and the world and make it the agenda of citizenship itself.
The issue of global warming and climate change – and with it the idea that development is a problem to be solved – calls on us for reflection and practice that can bring out a new vision in society as regards the foundations we need to lay in order to meet our needs and what the planetary citizenry expects of us – however small our contribution. As I always say, we cannot forget that, however small we are, like the flea that bites and worries, we can make a difference to how the political and economic elephant, the State and the economy, goes about things. Let’s start by imagining what and how, and that in itself is an act of liberation.
September 2009.