Green political futures between utopia and apocalypse: Radical hope beyond economic growth - PowerPoint Presentation

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Green political futures between utopia and apocalypse: Radical hope beyond economic growth in a climate-changed world

John BarrySlide2
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“

We are clearly now, living in a time of transition. Our stories are crumbling before our eyes, but we don’t have new ones which we are yet prepared to believe in....We can see humanity’s utter degradation of the rest of nature, but we don’t know how to stop doing it – or rather, we know exactly how to stop doing it but we are not prepared to even contemplate making the changes necessary, because they would break our stories open and leave them exposed to the wind

”.

(

Hine & Kingsnorth, 2011: 2).Slide4

Green visions of the futureLike other oppositional progressive ideologies (socialism, feminism) – future visioning part and parcel of green thinking

Futurity

hardwired into green

/

ecological

political

thinking e.g.

central

concept/discourse of ‘sustainability/ sustainable development’ Slide5

Scenario building

Standard part of

sustainability politics and policy-making

State policy-making,

esp. in relation to

environment,

climate change,

food, energy issues

Businesses – especially energy relatedTo civil society initiatives such as Transition Towns or environmental NGOs Slide6
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Slide8

Green Utopia: local, slow, based on time not stuff

Slow food, towns and cities of the future

Localised

, slower and less stuff

Intentional

communities, transition towns – pioneers and experiments in new low impact, low carbon ways of livingSlide9

Techno-optimism – ‘biofuelling the hummer’

Dominant response (politically and culturally) to the ecological

crisis

Mythic thinking – wish fulfilment

Economic growth and technology, like Achilles Lance, can heal the wounds it inflictsSlide10

“The

problem is unemployment; only growth can create the jobs. Schools and hospitals are underfunded; the answer is faster growth. We can’t afford to protect the environment; the solution is more growth. Poverty is entrenched; growth will rescue the poor. Income distribution is unequal; the answer is more growth.

If the answer to the problem is always more growth then who dares ask the question: what if the problems are caused by economic growth

?

”

Hamilton

, 1998: 26; emphasis added).Slide11

The Apocalyptic…’the lifting of the veil’

Central element of the ‘big picture’ analysis of ecological green thinking

Global ecological crisis

Climate change

Revelation, transformation, paradigm shift

…as well as ‘end times’

‘The end of more...the start of better’Slide12

Apocalypse and redemption

Apocalyptic vision peers through what Morpheus, in the film

The Matrix

, tells Neo is “the world that has been pulled over our eyes”

And the truth will set you free?

Dominant

science/fact based discourse of green politics for decades

….limited success and the

normalisation of collapse? Slide13

How are we to think about collapse?

Is it brave, realistic and/ or defeatist and anti-human to contemplate and prepare for civilisation collapse?

Unreasoned (and ideologically or otherwise motivated) scaremongering ?

Contemplating the fragility of civilisation and our current ways of life

A post-human vision – to be welcomed to challenge the ‘arrogance of humanism’ and (potentially) ‘re-enchant our disenchanted world’ or at least recover its intrinsic and not just instrumental value?

Post-collapse thinking – what forms of knowledge, tools, concepts, ways of working do we need?

Thinking in a time of triage and turbulence: can democracy, justice, equality survive a collapse?

Revisiting and learning from history: what lessons and ‘coping mechanisms’ can we learn from studying the collapse of previous societies, cultures and civilisations ? Slide14

Courage and collapse

We

must pay

attention both to the

possibility

of catastrophe

and alternatives

.

If we do not face the genuine possibility of future catastrophe, we cannot envision an appropriate set of informed responses. That

is why

we should imagine

the end of the

world (including the end of the world as we know it….later) Slide15

The polemics of green futures

"anti-packaging

jihadis

", "degrowth militants", "green

Mr

Magoos

",

"an army of tattooed-and-bearded, twelve-dollar-farmers'-market-marmalade-smearing, kale-bothering, latter-day Lady Bracknells".  "Far from being central to progressive thought this cauldron of seething, effervescing misanthropy is in fact utterly alien to the rich tradition of humanism on the left and must be thoroughly excised from our ranks".    Slide16

Beyond ecocidal economic growth

The dominant political economy imaginary of endless

technologically-created economic growth

“The

predominant frame is simply that growth is good. Most news stories take this for granted and reinforce it with the language they use. Growth attracts positive words like strong, buoyant and good; in its absence look for weak, stagnant and bad. When a frame becomes universally accepted and constantly reinforced, it can be hard to see it.

Growth framing is now so inbuilt that, for many people, questioning it has become unthinkable and doing so seems misguided, unrealistic or even

deranged

”.

(

Matthews and Matthews, 2015; emphasis added)Slide17

Economic growth as ideology and myth

“The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time the dominant intellectual force” (Karl Marx, 1845).

“Who

, in the light of biophysical reality, can remain committed to the growth-forever vision? Apparently our decision-making elites can... Their commitment is not to maximize the cumulative number of people ever to live at a sufficient standard of consumption for a good life for all. Rather, it is to maximize the standard of resource consumption for a small minority of the present generation, and let the costs fall on the poor, the future and other species” (Daly, 2013: 4-5; emphases added)Slide18

The Poetics of Green Futures

The poetic as an appropriate and perhaps better way to think about the futureSlide19

“Klee’s ‘Angelus

Novus’ [1920;

right] shows an angel looking as though he

is

about

to move away from something he

is fixedly

contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one

single catastrophe

which keeps piling wreckage

and hurls

it in front of his feet. The angel

would like

to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole

what has been smashed. But a storm is

blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught

in his

wings with such a violence that the

angel can

no longer close them. The storm

irresistibly propels him into the future to

which his back is turned, while the pile of

debris

before him grows skyward.

This

storm is what we call progress

.”

Walter Benjamin,

Theses on a Philosophy of HistorySlide20

Living in denial, in ignorance, in slumber

Actually existing unsustainability – permanent ecological crisis since 1980s, but effects ‘shifted’ in time (future will deal with it) or space (global south ‘under-polluted’ in neoliberal terms

).

‘Social recession’ since 2007 economic crisis

Green consumerism and techno-optimism

“make me green and sustainable

…but not just yet” becomes

Greening business as usual...crisis and catastrophe as business opportunities

Link between denial, anxiety and guiltSlide21

The lure and insight of the poetic

“Go

, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always

present”.

T.S. Elliott, ‘Burnt Norton’Slide22

Allan Ginsberg, Howl (1955)

“What

sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the

crossbone

soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!…

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

…

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs

!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us

!

”Slide23

Walt Whitman, ‘Leaves of Grass’ (1855)

I

accept reality, and dare not question it

Materialism

first and last imbuing.  

Hurrah

for positive science! long live exact demonstration!

Fetch stonecrop, mixt with cedar and branches of lilac;   This is the lexicographer—this the chemist – this made a grammar of the old cartouches;

These

mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas;  

This is the geologist—this works with the scalpel—and this is a mathematician.  

Gentlemen! To you the first

honors

always!

Your

facts are useful and real—and yet they are not my dwelling;  

(I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.)  

Less the reminders

of properties told, my words:

And

more the reminders, they, of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,  

And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully

equipt

,

And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives, and them that plot and conspire.

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Rejecting dominant narrative of ‘progress’

Benjamin, anticipating modern green thinking, rejected

the ideology of Progress,

the almost theological

conviction that western society was building Paradise on earth through technology and social management and corporate rule.

“

Where we see historical

Progress, the

angel of history sees only victims piled high as a storm of destruction—all justified, of course, by our historic mission, whether that be Manifest Destiny, the War to end all Wars, or the mission to bring democracy and free markets to the globe” Benjamin

The ecological apocalyptic imaginary as a wake up call, not an invitation to a wake

(some sort of ‘happy nihilism’)Slide25

Beyond economic growth and capitalism

“questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries” (Jackson, 2009: 14). Slide26

Radical Hope in Turbulent, Uncertain Times

“What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it”

(Lear, 2006

: 103). Slide27

Radical Hope

Lear’s study

asks what surely has to be regarded as a profound (if deeply

troubling) existential

question, what Lear calls ‘an extreme possibility of human existence

’(

2006: 10), namely,

‘

if our way of life collapsed, things would cease to happen. What could this mean? . . . What would it be to be a witness to

this breakdown

?

’ (ibid: 6; emphasis added).

“We

live at a time of

a heightened

sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable.

Events around the

world—terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even

natural aware

of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name . . . Perhaps if

we could

give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better

ways to

live with

it”

(Lear, 2006:

7).Slide28

New stories to live by…

Not what we can do for climate change, but what climate change can do for us

What

happens when we stop believing in our cultural stories and myths?

What

happens when the structures of meaning that have shaped, not only our culture, but also our identities, begin to breakdown

?

Ecological crisis as a crisis of meaning not just a crisis of meansSlide29

Eight Principles of Uncivilisation

1.We

live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history.

2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can

be reduced

to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.

3.We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been

telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our

civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth

of our

separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact

that we

have forgotten they are myths.Slide30

4.We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.

5.Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet.

6.We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time.

7.We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.

8.The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.Slide31

The end of the world as we know it…is not the end of the world

The redemptive within green politics

Apocalyptic visioning (from breakdown to breakthrough – the Upside of Down?)

Recovery of the world as a realm of meaning from a storehouse of means (Heidegger)

…

Centrality of creativity and imagination ... (

poetry and the poetic, disruptive, transformative)

Preparation for greiving for ways of life that may no longer be possible (never mind desirable)

“Without vision, there the people perish”Slide32

Radical Hope in the

21

st

Century: Unreasonable thinking and

acting

in turbulent times