If you're so right, not that I can see what point you're trying to make, then why not try educating us instead of being a sarky git.
I enjoy being a sarky git, but you’re probably right that it isn’t very educational.
It might be best if I take a step back and explain where I’m coming from.
First, I disagree with the thread title. I don’t think focussing on individual responsibility is the correct framing for the debate. The climate crisis is a systemic problem and can’t be fixed by individual behaviour changes alone. There has to be a change by industry.
An example I return to when discussing this is the fact that we’re always being told “*we * use too much plastic”. That households are “producing too much plastic waste”.
That is utter bollocks. Do you manufacture plastic in your kitchen? Do you wrap bananas in plastic, then unwrap them and dispose of the plastic wrapper? You don’t produce plastic waste. Food processing and retailing companies are responsible for the plastic. If there is to be a meaningful change it has to come from them.
Years ago, I went through a phase of taking off unnecessary wrapping at the checkout. I wanted the supermarket to learn that I didn’t want it. They didn’t learn. And not only that, I was making no difference to the world’s plastic waste. I was just changing the location it was binned. My protest was futile.
It’s clear that industry - business - wants us to frame the climate crisis that way. To fret about our individual responsibility. Because that way, they don’t have to change. Oil companies want us to think about our carbon footprints. Because as long as we’re doing that, we aren’t laying the blame at the door of the actual culprits. And we’re going to have very little impact.
Airlines aren’t going to notice the difference between me boycotting them and the fact that I hardly ever use them anyway. The heavy users will keep on heavily using them. Not for annual holidays. But for the daily clockwork of business.
I wrote a short piece (600 words) for the ACG website recently, which puts this case. The idea that individual behaviour changes alone are not enough. It’s here:
Climate Destruction is Systemic – the Response Cannot Be “Individually Blame Ourselves”. - Anarchist Communist Group
So that’s the foundation. The climate crisis requires systemic change. Blaming ourselves individually, or its twin, shaming other individuals, is a deflection that industry will be delighted with. Because it means business as usual for them.
There are two main threads to the systemic change that’s needed. But they are interwoven. One is climate change. That requires decarbonisation of the world’s economies. The other is ecosystem repair. That requires us to rethink the way we use the planet’s resources.
There is no planet B. We cannot spread the way the “global north” consumes to the “global south”. There aren’t the resources. The north is wasteful, inefficient, and profligate. But there
are resources for everyone to have plenty.
It’s been said on other threads that if we raise people in the “global south” out of poverty, they will have fewer children. That will in turn put less strain on the planet. The focus shouldn’t be “to reduce the population”, but in fact by doing something
we should be doing anyway, it will influence those trends in beneficial ways.
These things are all interlinked. We can’t imagine that our economic structures on these islands are cut off from the rest of the world. There are a handful of ports through which all the world’s goods are bottlenecked. The blockage of the Suez Canal was an illustration of that.
I want a world in which I can continue to enjoy coffee and bananas. Things we can’t grow on these islands. But we do have to rethink our food security immensely so that we aren’t relying disproportionately on imports. And that will mean restructuring agriculture.
We currently subsidise farming to keep it in business. But we need to be encouraging it to produce for our needs where we are. We should produce food as if we were self sufficient. That doesn’t mean don’t import tea or oranges. But it does mean rebalance production so that
were we blockaded, we’d still get the right balance of nutrition. Not because we expect blockades, but because that’s a way of rethinking what we do.
In hand with that, we need to repair the biodiversity of our natural environment. We will need to design agricultural around this rewilding, and design rewilding around agriculture. We can’t do either alone. And we need to do it in sympathy with nature. The monoculture of the forestry planting in the 60s and 70s where I grew up (and in which my Dad worked for a while, when it was in an unsustained high man-hour spurt), is an example of exactly what we don’t want to do. It blanketed the land, regardless of suitability, in one species. From loch shore to crags.
Instead we need to plan carefully where we reforest. And we need to plan carefully where we graze. (Which needs to be hugely reduced). And where we grow crops. And how we grow crops.
But the good thing is we don’t have to start inventing all this. We already have this knowledge and technology. We just need to start applying it. Not just for land use, but also for power production. It is there. Not with future technology. But with now technology. But industry has been blocking it. Dragging its feet. Diverting our attention. Deflecting blame. And government has gone along with this. Saying that industry needs to be at the table.
So, when you and others say “you can’t plant crops on mountain tops”, you’re joining in with the misdirection that comes from the industries who got us into this mess. Nobody is saying do that. We’re saying redesign for our needs and in sympathy with our environment.
And like it or not, heavy meat consumption is not in sympathy with our environment. This is not a vegan manifesto, it’s a matter of climate arithmetic.
www.urban75.net
