The Arrogance of Cancún
ENVIRONMENT, 27 Dec 2010
The lesson of this feeble climate deal? Governments have played God and failed. It is up to the activists now.
In the efforts to protect our planet from ourselves, the high level talks at Cancún were our last chance … and they failed. But we can learn from this sad episode: we must stop asking governments and international organisations for solutions that they don’t want to – and can’t – implement. And we must stop pretending to be God, thinking we can “fix” the planet.
Eighteen years ago pressure from the environmental movement forced the UN to convene the Earth summit: 120 heads of state, 8,000 officials and innumerable environmentalists gathered in Rio; an image of the orchestra playing while the Titanic sank comes to mind.
The conference, as the Ecologist reported at the time, merely reinforced predominant mythology and highlighted the powerful vested interests working against a solution. In effect, the lambs were put under the care of the wolves. “After reaching the summit, every path goes down,” observed the leading Mexican environmentalist Juan José Consejo. He warned environmentalists that their cause had been co-opted and that policies and actions taken in the name of ecology were in fact very damaging for the environment.
But we did not learn enough. We continued looking to the powerful to solve things. The Kyoto summit in 1997 was a timid step in the right direction, but it never fulfilled its promise. This year, at the People’s summit in Cochabamba, Bolivia, interesting proposals were presented; but Cancún did not take them into consideration, and the feeble deal it eventually cobbled together could not overcome last year’s failure at Copenhagen. As Vía Campesina, the International Peasant Movement, observed: no agreement would have been better than such a poor one.
Meanwhile, the International Forum for Climate Justice, convened by hundreds of organisations from many countries, made an alternative and more valuable Cancún declaration. Under the slogan “Let’s change the system, not the planet”, the declaration revealed the true counter-productive nature of the official proposals, which are trapped in “market environmentalism”. It argues that we should abandon developmentalism, establish limits, concentrate in local spaces, and reclaim valid traditions. All this, however, falls into the intellectual and political trap of the dominant mentality by still hanging on to institutions and their abstract slogans.
To affirm or to deny climate change supposes that we understand our planet well, that we know how it reacts – both now and for the next hundred years – and that we have the appropriate technological fix. This is plain and simple nonsense, and intolerably arrogant.
To continue putting our trust and hope in institutions to put things right goes against all our experience and focuses our energy in the wrong place. Yes, we still need to fight some institutional battles. For example, we can celebrate the agreement just signed in Nagoya, where 193 UN member states created a de facto moratorium on geoengineering projects, condemning any attempt to manipulate the “planet thermostat”. But we must do that without surrendering our will to the government administrators of capital, who will continue protecting the major players in environmental destruction.
All governments, even the most majestic, are composed of ordinary mortals, trapped in bureaucratic labyrinths and fighting vested interests that tie their hands, heads and wills. Even if Evo Morales governed the entire planet we would not be able to “fix” the current environmental problems.
We must look down and to the left, as the Zapatistas of Mexico say: to the people, and what we can do ourselves. For example, stop producing waste, rather than recycling it. This requires a lot of things, from rejecting plastic bags and packaging to radically abandoning the flush toilet – one of the world’s most destructive habits, absorbing 40% of water available for domestic consumption and contaminating everything in its way. And instead of overusing polluting vehicles, let’s reclaim auto-mobility, on foot or bikes. Just as we strive to eat and drink sensibly, let us live our whole lives in a different way.
If we define the issues in those terms, dealing with them will be in our own hands, not in those of global institutional creatures that will never do what is needed. They cannot play God, no matter how much they pretend to.
The time has come to change the system, not the planet. That depends on us, not on those who gain status and income from the system. As the Brazilian writer Leonard Boff observed, activists leaving Cancún were very disappointed with the outcome; but they are determined to finally take control of the whole issue and to live their lives their own way, not in the way dictated by the market or the state.
Go to Original – guardian.co.uk
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