Of course it's easy to understand why people would react
to the unfolding ecological crisis with a great deal of urgency.
But I want to explain a couple reasons why counterintuitively
that might actually be a really bad place to respond from.
First of all, urgency – here I'm thinking of as this feeling that, you know,
“we only have two years left”, “we only have three years left”,
“we only have four years left”...
And that begs the question: “Left until what?”
Because already right now, every single year, tens of millions of people
are dying from a variety of causes related to the ecological crisis.
Hunger, drought, extreme weather.
And hundreds of species are going extinct every single year.
Countless habitats are being lost.
So this urgency, this idea that we have a short amount of time to act,
normalizes the very real forms of harm that already being felt.
But they're being felt disproportionately
by poor people, by racialized people,
by indigenous people, by people outside of the global north and by other forms of life.
And obviously that's something that we don't want to normalize.
But that the institutions in power do want to normalize,
because those forms of harm are where they get a lot of their power.
That kind of urgency... It misses out on the fact that it was urgent.
I mean...
If there ever could have been justified believing in these institutions of power,
relying on the media to inform us,
on scientists to, you know, point out the truth,
on government to take action to protect us.
It was urgent in the seventies, it was urgent in the eighties...
But of course all of those institutions failed us
in those different objectives of informing us or protecting us.
Because that is not the role of those institutions.
The role of those institutions is to accumulate
power for themselves and to exploit the rest of us.
So that sense of urgency normalizes and naturalizes
those institutions as well, as though they actually are going
to institute some kind of healthy transformation
to take care of us in the next few years, in the next few decades.
And that's related to how that urgency helps this reductionist approach
that strips away all the complexity of the ecological crisis.
Which is really a great many crises happening simultaneously
in an interconnected way, across ecological and social dimensions.
From hunger and borders and pollution, habitat loss, to the warming of the climate.
It reduces it to this very technocratic terrain were the only focus is climate change
and therefore pretty much the only focus is greenhouse gases.
And that's something that favors technocrats.
To measure greenhouse gases, to set goals on reducing carbon emissions.
And that's not something that the rest of us can really participate in in any active way.
It's also completely absurd.
It's an absurdly simplistic reduction.
And that's not actually how this crisis is unfolding.
And that's not the singular cause of this crisis.
Of course carbon emissions are important.
But you cannot realistically look at carbon emissions
without looking at capitalism,
without looking at borders, without looking at habitat loss,
without looking at industrialized agriculture.
And the institutions in power certainly are not going to question
or get rid of capitalist forms of production.
They will simply put capitalist infrastructures and institutions
to work producing different commodities,
but in the same general ways that are so exploitative and so destructive.
And finally this sense of urgency is really, really dangerous.
That reductionism... It strips away all of these concerns,
for example of colonialism, of racism
and how that's related to the ecological crisis.
And it also allows for authoritarianism to come
into these movements that are responding to the ecological crisis.
And these are movements that have accomplished a great deal.
Spreading knowledge, feeding people,
housing people, saving lives on the front lines,
saving habitats, stopping important infrastructure projects.
And by and large these movements have been anti authoritarian, horizontal,
autonomous, creating solidarity with one another, without centralizing structures.
But now you have all these academics and all these politicians
– who have not put their lives in the line, who do not participate
in a deep and meaningful way in these movements –
who want to be able to lead these movements.
Either to gain their own power or to support these
sort of false solutions that will increase the power of dominant institutions.
And when people feel that there's a lot of urgency,
that there's a ticking clock, they'll get desperate.
And so if someone comes along promising to be able
to wave a magic wand and solve the problem
– and right now that magic wand is this idea of state intervention,
that massive state intervention and new policies like the “Green New Deal”
will solve this crisis – then people will go against their better judgment.
And they'll surrender their own experience in order to follow these leaders.
And that kind of authoritarianism in environmental movement is very dangerous.
Because it will decrease the effectiveness of those movements.
It will definitely de-center our own needs or make it harder
for us to use these movements to protect ourselves from these very real crises.
And it also opens the door to eco-fascism.
And even if it doesn't get as far as eco-fascism,
still a lot of these authoritarian would-be-movement-leaders,
in Extinction Rebellion, in the climate movement,
a lot of these academics, they are cryptoracists.
They are people who don't want us to pay as much attention
to questions of ongoing colonialism and questions of racism.
Basically they want to put their power first,
ahead of all these other concerns
that we need to continuously be emphasizing and driving home.
So if climate change, if the ecological crises are not urgent...
If they're already here, if they're already a disaster
and one that's going to be with us for very long time.
Than what is the most important thing?
The most important thing is not to let ourselves be fooled
with some kind of band aid solution
or some kind of quick fix from above.
The most important thing is to make the deep and long lasting changes
that will allow us to heal the damage that's been done over the next centuries,
that will allow us to build up societies that exist in reciprocal relationships
with all other living beings and with the rest of the planet.
Instead of continuing this exploitative relationship,
instead of continuing capitalism.
And so coming up with real long term radical total solutions,
total changes, total transformations
to how we organize, how we live
and how we relate with one another and with the rest of the natural world.
A part of that means revolution.
A part of that means tearing down all the structures
– both physical and social – that are responsible for ecocide.
It means stopping those who derive their power and their wealth from destroying the planet
from destroying the possibility of dignified life and survival.
From the tech billionaires to government leaders, to military leaders.
Stopping them. All of them. By any means necessary.
And it also means taking care of one another.
So that we can survive this crisis,
that we can survive this catastrophe.
Taking care of one another in the best way possible.
Our neighbors, our friends,
other living beings that we're in relationship with
that allow us to feed ourselves and clothe ourselves and house ourselves.
And to have healthcare and have healthy lives.
Basically, to take care of all of those ecological relationships.