George Monbiot. (Photo: Verso Books)
George Monbiot, author of How Did We Get Into This Mess?, discusses how Western neoliberal policies, colonialism and the privatization of the public commons have brought the environment and climate to a crisis point, and what people can do about it.
Mark Karlin: Your compilation of essays is so compelling in offering insight on how we have come to such a crisis point in civilization. First, however, I wanted to ask you a cross-Atlantic question. To what extent have the US and UK neoliberal policies and their political alliance helped "get [us] into this mess"?
George Monbiot: It would be wrong to blame only neoliberalism (sometimes described in the US as market fundamentalism) for every element of the mess we're in. It would be wrong to blame only capitalism. For example, a profound shift in the relationship between humans and the living world began with the widespread use of coal, particularly at the beginning of the English Industrial Revolution (which became the template for industrialization in many other countries). It permitted the continuous economic growth that eventually improved the living standards of many people, while simultaneously enabling the conquest and repression of others. But it also set in train an environmental conflagration -- in both capitalist and communist nations -- that continues to rage today. I see coal as a more important determinant of human history than either capitalism or communism.
However, neoliberal ideology has greatly exacerbated the predicament of both people and planet. By ripping holes in the social safety net, shutting down organized labor, privatizing and degrading public services and deregulating predatory capitalism, it has reversed many of the gains in human welfare that took place between 1945 and the 1970s, spread precariousness and financial crises, and enriched the ultra-wealthy at the expense of the rest. One result is that inequality, which declined steeply in the mid- to late 20th century, has now risen so swiftly that in the US and UK it is heading toward the extreme levels of the 1920s.
At the same time, by insisting that corporations should regulate themselves and that governments should not intervene on behalf of the public interest, it has accelerated the environmental crisis and constrained the options for responding to it.
In terms of climate change, you argue that "everything is connected." How so?
As we learn more, evidence appears that at least some elements of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis appear to be correct. At first, I was highly skeptical of his claims. But we are beginning to discover some of the extraordinary ways in which ecosystems and the species they contain help to regulate the earth's systems. For example, by bringing up nutrients from their feeding zones in deep water and releasing them (through defecation) into the upper layers of sea (the photic zone), whales fertilize the growth of algae. The algae, in turn, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Then, as they sink into the abyss, they remove that carbon from circulation, sequestering it for thousands of years.
One hypothesis contends that the Younger Dryas (a brief ice age that commenced 12,800 years ago and lasted for 1,300 years) could have been triggered by the mass extinction of large mammals in the Americas after the first humans arrived there, as the methane formerly produced by large herbivores such as mastodons, mammoths, ground sloths and giant bison no longer entered the atmosphere. Another contends that the Native American genocides -- that were followed by mass reforestation across much of the Americas -- drew sufficient carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to help trigger the Little Ice Age between the 1500s and 1800s. While these hypotheses are highly speculative, they do suggest that the gas fluxes caused by changes in animal and plant populations are sufficient to cause planetary-scale impacts.
Economists and business schools tell us that the successful exploitation of resources depends upon isolating and commodifying them. This ethos has crept into almost every aspect of our engagement with the natural world, especially with the spread of the natural capital agenda (which I see as disastrously misconceived). But the more we know about how ecosystems function, the clearer it becomes that they cannot be safely disaggregated.
Can you expand on "the process of dehumanization so necessary to the colonial project"?
Colonialism often claimed to be a civilizing mission, whose purpose was to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry bookkeeping. In reality, it was robbery with violence: the state-sponsored theft of land, labor and transportable resources. Where local people resisted this piracy, they were killed, often in large numbers. For all this to happen, you must persuade yourself that the inhabitants of the places you are invading have no rights, that, unlike you, they are not entitled to remain in their homes and on their land, to decide how, where and for whom they will work, to own or control the resources their land contains. In other words, they have to be not like us. The colonial imperative explains the racism that still characterizes many of our relationships.
Once you have dehumanized those whose land and labor you wish to seize, anything is possible. The famines the British engineered in India, the concentration camps they built in Kenya, in which so many were tortured and beaten to death, these are almost inevitable outcomes of the dehumanization process. Particularly in the United Kingdom, such atrocities have been surgically excised from public awareness. Those we killed weren't really people, so we need know nothing about them. We don't do body counts. We never did.
Does your book end on an optimistic note, when you state, "In asserting our values we become the change we want to see"?
Yes. Every time we tell ourselves "this is impossible to change," we forget that the systems we confront are made by men and women and can be unmade by men and women, through their replacement with better ones. We appear to be trapped in a situation, imagining that there is no hope of change. Suddenly, almost unimaginably, opportunities we could not have foretold appear, and those who are prepared can make use of them. That's our crucial responsibility at times like this: to be prepared. To develop the organizations, the narratives, the strategies that can be deployed when the propitious moment arrives. We have missed many such chances in recent years (not least in 2008) because we have not been ready.
Please continue this article here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35668-george-monbiot-never-ending-growth-cannot-be-sustained-on-a-finite-planet
No comments:
Post a Comment