Many loved, accepted and understood traditions will be unsettled by climate change

-by Robert McLean

New ways of living forced upon us by climate change will unsettle many traditions.

This recently published book
encourages us to adopt
a vocabulary for a new era.

Chief among them and probably the most disconcerting for most will be society’s governance.

Market driven capitalism has existed in its concentrated form for about two centuries and while the benefits to humanity have been many its fundamental thesis of infinite growth has led us into a blind canyon.

Not only is there no apparent way out, also crowding in as humanity mills about, huddled in a finite space, are the effect and impacts of a seriously disrupted climate system.

That climate disruption has been brought upon us by an incessant need for profit and, within that, our careless and wasteful use of fossil fuel powered energy and ceaseless consumption of “stuff”.

Existing forms of societal governance, primarily democracy in the developed world, seem illusory in the benefits they promise and despite the many advances that can be pointed to, they simply take us deeper into that blind canyon.

Any reasonable response to the dilemmas of climate change insists that we live and behave differently and that by implication equally insists that we consider our governance processes.

Adhering to existing status quo practices simply ensuring our ongoing association with “business as usual”, means methods and behaviours that have unleashed climate disrupting gases remain uninterrupted.

Governance processes covering every variety of “isms” have been contemplated, but most every considered option or alternative seems to fall within the boundaries of what exists.

The recently published book, “Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era”, edited by Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis does however reject the illusion of growth.

It calls for a fresh public debate; a debate that has been colonized by the idiom of “economism”.

An Amazon.com comment about the book says, “Degrowth is a project advocating the democratically-led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability.”

Here in Australia we have “The Simplicity Institute”, a non-profit education and research centre dedicated to advancing the Simplicity Movement.

The Institute says it is: “Directing our critique toward consumerist and growth-obsessed economies, our defining objective is to show that lifestyles of reduced and restrained consumption are a necessary and desirable part of any transition to a just, sustainable, and flourishing human community.

“We aim to promote this vision of the good life and help build a new society based on material sufficiency,” the Institute says.

The one “ism” rarely even considered, even by adventurous thinkers, is that of anarchism.

Anarchy is a desperately misunderstood idea

Interestingly, it is a method of governance, or lack of governance that should appeal to the libertarians among us.

However, most equate anarchy with disarray in every sense, portraying it as primarily as rape and pillage in which man’s base and less than honourable behaviours are given full rein.

Such a judgement is incorrect and makes no allowance for the fact that most men, in fact the overwhelming majority irrespective of culture, colour or any other difference, are fundamentally decent and wholesome people who inherently align with all that is good about being human.

Stereotypical incantations have seen anarchy wrongly lumped in with political evils that are about dominating and controlling people, rather than seeing it through the clear lens of freedom.

Noam Chomsky - he has thought
deeply about anarchism.

Renowned public intellectual, who aligns himself with the values of anarchy, linguist Professor Noam Chomsky, has written extensively about this form of human freedom.

Looked at through the prism of what exists, few of us sufficiently intellectually athletic to imagine or contemplate a life unencumbered by state control.

Centuries of living under, and within a statist system has produced little about which we can boast and bequeathed a process in which millions, probably billions of people have died violent deaths and, as a bonus, endowed us with a way of life that has seriously disrupted earth’s climate system and threatened an apocalyptic end to life as we know it.

So where do we stand, what do we do?

We can point to what exists and say with confidence “it doesn’t work” and as the Degrowth editors, and others suggest, initiate urgently a public conversation about the governance of society.