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Book Review: Environmentalism from Below and scroll down.

 

 

Haymarket Books, Chicago, Illinois to be published on Jan 16, 2024

Review by Roger Lohr

Environmentalism from Below by Ashley Dawson outlines struggles in the Global South that are impacted by the climate crisis with a focus on food, urban sustainability, energy transition, and conservation. The Global South is a code name for poorer countries from South America, Africa, and southern Asia such as India and Indonesia. Grassroots groups are up against powerful nations and corporations, which rely on border control and military power. Solutions such as carbon trading, offsetting, and even the Green New Deal are depicted as ineffectual in the book.

Environmentalism from Below makes its case sprinkled with Karl Marx, and crammed with organizational acronyms in almost every paragraph. It consists of alarming statistics regarding our world and its population directly blaming capitalism, as a system that requires ceaseless growth on a finite planet by maintaining control of natural resources.

Among the views are that the Green New Deal (GND) falls far short of transformational change and international climate change “agreements” (i.e., Paris, Kyoto) that were made had signatory countries forwarding loans instead of reparations to the Global South countries so that financiers gained a stranglehold. The GND is depicted as a fragmented, contradictory set of policies to employ government spending to offset cyclical downturns of capitalism by increasing demand and employment within a green overhaul of infrastructure of fossil capitalism – colloquially, “everything must change so that things can remain pretty much the same.”

The book outlines the more recent Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 as $369 billion for clean energy or tax breaks for pollution reduction, environmental cleanups, domestic manufacture of batteries and solar panels — at the same time giving ConocoPhillips drilling rights over 30 years in the Alaskan tundra for an estimated 600 million barrels of oil and signing 7,000 drilling leases approved by President Biden in 25 months (outpacing Trump!). Some may view this legislation as a compromise while others see a sellout.

“The carbon footprint of the world’s top 1% is more than 75 times higher than the bottom 50% and capitalism is characterized by a relentless drive to acquire surplus value that is ecologically inherently destructive. Production and consumption are without limits separating humans from nature and transforming everything into commodities. Laws are written to justify enclosure and exploitation of the environmental commons around the world.”

“Agribusiness grows 30% of the world’s food with 90% of global grain trade controlled by four companies that dominate vertically and horizontally including seeds, fertilizer, processing, packing, distribution and retail.” This has occurred prior to the more recent changes involving artificial intelligence and the undeniable climate change effects on small farmers such as unpredictable weather patterns, shorter growing seasons, extreme temperatures, droughts, pests, crop diseases.

The book cites a number of organizational efforts on urban issues with regard to those living on the lower fringes of society in India and South Africa for example. Most of the urban experiment explanations in the book feature the word “BUT” outlining how their efforts were crushed by the powers that be in each vicinity.

With regard to the energy transition that is often touted as a way for us to survive, the book states that “the growth of renewable energy 1990-2015 has been matched and in many places outstripped by the growth of fossil fuel extraction and consumption. It reported that coal contributed more than double as much to the global primary energy supply as all of the renewable sources combined. Much of the coal issue is exemplified by activity in India trying to become more energy self-sufficient which auctioned the rights to develop 41 new coal mines many in bio-diversity-rich areas. The cost of renewable energy has been decreasing but fossil fuels are expanding in tandem with renewable energy and market-driven energy transition is not coming to fruition.”

Greed for land control or development can involve pollution which often impacts farming, livestock, air, water, and soil. Activists who try to combat the onslaught against environmentalism are often faced with brutal tactics including threats, harassment, and assassination in a litany of retaliatory violence and property damage. Protesters are violently dispersed and arrested arbitrarily. The lawsuit strategy is used “to censor, intimidate, and muzzle activism.”

“Fortress conservation” refers to protected areas or enclosed territories such as national parks, wilderness areas, and nature reserves. “There are now about 108,000 protected areas on Earth. This land was taken from Indigenous people who were forcibly dispossessed of the land in the name of conservation. In short, colonial powers have seized, militarized, criminalized, and destroyed a way of life.”

“The 30 X 30 concept (30% of the planet should be protected by 2030) organized by a consortium of organizations such as National Wildlife Federation, WWF, Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, and hundreds of similar environmental, scientific, government orgs, and businesses joined with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund incorporated rhetorical gestures for inclusion, democracy, and empowerment of Indigenous cultures in the manifesto without acknowledging one billion people that live in these areas. These people will need to be dispossessed and displaced and they will not be involved with the control of protected areas, or the decisions of whether a location is protected and what that means for the local people.”

One specific carbon offset practice is outlined whereby “polluters pay for governments in the Global South to plant fast-growing eucalyptus trees to offset carbon emissions – trees designed to be cut down in only a few years for industrial use.” According to the author’s information, “carbon trading and offsetting will render it empirically infeasible to achieve reductions in carbon emissions in aggregate on the global scale with continued use of resources so savings would not occur rapidly enough to stay within the prescribed two degrees carbon budget.”

An analogy for the NET ZERO concept as described in Environmentalism from Below is “claiming that you are not gaining weight because you are paying someone else to go on a crash diet, even while you continue to gorge yourself.”

The People’s Manifesto document calls for “restitution of protected areas with plans for reparations tying together labor, climate justice, migration, and land restitution as an effort designed to reverse the unsustainable global structures built on colonialism and racial injustice.” This is tantamount to “returning the 85 million acres of American National Parks to a consortium of recognized native American tribes who would be entrusted with stewardship of the lands.”

Climate migration is a real thing and currently there is no international recognition for asylum eligibility for refugee people displaced by environmental disasters or the slower onset of impacts of climate change. “In 2022, 32.6 million people were displaced from their homes by natural disasters. “

“The world’s 10 largest greenhouse gas emitters historically produced 72% of total GHG dating back to 1850 (48% from the US, UK, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Australia). The poorest 50% of the world population are responsible for 7% of global carbon emissions. It is projected that 2-3.5 billion people will find themselves living in climates that will become uninhabitable (India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, Sudan) and 30% of the world population will have to move to save their lives within 50 years.”

“Rich countries spent more on immigration enforcement (policing, walls, detention, etc.) than on the climate funding suggested in 2009 Copenhagen Conference. The US spent $19.6 billion in 2020 on enforcement compared to $1.8 billion on climate financing (this is 11 times the amount, and Canada is similarly 15 times the amount). Interestingly, there are some interlocking board members on fossil fuel companies and border security/detention companies.”

The industrialized countries (the Global North) are often ready to provide funding for bank bail-outs or military endeavors in times of emergencies. The climate emergency could be far deeper on the global scale. Environmental From Below suggests that the way to achieve a zero-carbon world is to enact a profound socio-economic transformation including a socially-owned renewable energy section that is under public ownership and democratic control. This is a romanticized fantasy that the Earth is populated by “an indivisible living community of interrelated and interdependent beings with inherent rights and our responsibility in relation to other beings and the community as a whole should be with respect and in defense of rights and harmonious co-existence of all beings.”

Most of us are very alarmed by the statistical trends of climate change and concerned with the serious impact on our way of life. But it is unlikely that the pie-in-the-sky recommendations for reparations and transformation that will turn the world helter-skelter would ever happen. The powers that be control resources and military might. They greenwash the climate crisis and do little to phase us out of an economy that is based on fossil fuels. The solution? The concepts of Utopia, Nirvana, and Shangri-la come to mind.

Roger Lohr of Lebanon, NH, who owns and edits XCSkiResorts.com, has published articles and promotional topics on snow sports, sustainability, and trails in regional and national media.