I did a double take when I read that headline. From the Guardian, really? Yes.
Save us the smugness over 2018’s heatwaves, environmentalists
In this historically precarious moment, we need something more fundamental than climate strategies built on shame and castigation
There was a barely stifled schadenfreudian glee echoing across the liberal press through this burning hot summer. Environmentalists could scarcely disguise their we-told-you-so smirks as one suffocating heatwave after another rolled over the globe, wildfires savaged landscapes from Siberia to California and broken temperature records kept piling up.
But yearning for catastrophe is an ugly desire, and it is exactly the wrong way to think about global warming. Disasters always hit marginalised people first and worst, and as tempting as it might be to hope the calamities of 2018 bring new kinds of change, that desire only betrays how badly environmentalism needs to be overhauled.
It is a historically precarious moment for the environment. We constantly hear dire warnings from some UN body or scientific panel that we have this many years left and these thresholds before we hit the tipping points and the whole world unravels. Despite this piercing urgency, the languages at hand are so consistently inept that it often feels impossible to know what real change might be or how to talk about it.
The reflexive condescension of environmentalism that looks down on those working in industry is precisely what we do not need. Working people whose livelihoods and families depend on resource extraction have no time for catastrophism, and defaulting to that desire sets back climate justice movements immeasurably.
Ecology has to speak to class directly and confront inequality with believable claims that a different world is possible.
Individualising responsibility is one of capitalism’s prime defensive strategies: reducing ecology to just another consumer decision and isolating governments from culpability. Blaming the choices individual people make in the context of limited options and grinding employment pressures is a fool’s errand. We are all implicated in these extractivist ideologies: we’re all burning almost everything we can get our hands on, and we are as bound up with the contradictions as anyone.Advertisement
We do not need another set of climate strategies built on shame and castigation. We need something more fundamental – something beyond exhortations to recycle more – that can open viable routes to real action. We need an approach that matches the scale of the problem.
Read the entire article here
Well..nearly went to share that Guardian article – and then read it ALL first.. I don’t like the selective editing of the article on this website, because it his the fact the Guardian article, for all its critiquing of environmental catastrophism, doubled down on calling people to use indigenous people to support environmental activism!
Environmentalism did not get a political foothold until the western middle class became affluent enough to care about environmental quality. Poor people living near-subsistence lifestyles do not have the time or energy to care about their impact upon the environment. This is why most of the trash that goes into the ocean is coming not from the affluent and high-consuming west, but from poor regions where people simply don’t care.
Unfortunately, Progressivism’s only answer to pollution is more poverty when the real answer lies in more affluence. People who have moved up the Maslow Curve and are economically secure are willing to spend what it takes to mitigate their impact upon the environment.
It is important to let extremists fully expose themselves for all to see on a regular basis. That way the politicos and media groups that associate with them also expose themselves. The dogma will not last in a cyclical (natural) world but it is hard to live with at times.
I was particularly impressed with this line from the original story:
Gads! I wonder what that is mean to mean?
Ownership Kip.
The land should be for ”everyone”.
After the brutally cold winter those heat waves were very, very welcome.
Just sayin’
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-high-and-low-temperatures
“A critique of capitalism and consumption is necessary but insufficient when examining the state of the environment. Capitalism has proven spectacularly malleable and agile, and it will exist long after any climate crisis is averted, if the crisis is framed only as one of climate. We must destroy the colonial assumptions that dominate our relationships with land and the natural world.”
These authors are too chickenshit to actually come out and say what they really mean. What they mean is they want capitalism destroyed and replaced by a 1 world government. Orwell warned against this type of thinking.
“There was a barely stifled schadenfreudian glee echoing across the liberal press through this burning hot summer. Environmentalists could scarcely disguise their we-told-you-so smirks as one suffocating heatwave after another rolled over the globe, wildfires savaged landscapes from Siberia to California and broken temperature records kept piling up.”
This is paramount to the Nazi propaganda convincing people in Germany and elsewhere that Jews had horns etc and were otherwise not human.
I have seen accounts from citizens from German cities who were surprised that Jews, that were being marched past (no doubt on the first part of their trip to the gas chamber), looked absolutely normal.
In other words, the propaganda was sufficient for normal people to believe that Jews were not people.
http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/images/sturmer/DS-1936-41.jpg
Sound familiar?
A warm summer is not just a summer but a heat wave.
A cold winter is an aberration.
A bush fire is AGW as predicted.
No one publishes the real reason for the seriousness of the bus fire.
A hurricane causes devastation. Global Warming in action.
Counts of hurricanes have decreased. significance ignored.
etc.
Cheers
Roger
Snowing in Alberta and skiing in downtown Calgary already . Yep the earth has a fever alright .
The climate con-men need to find another scam .
“Ecology has to speak to class directly and confront inequality with believable claims that a different world is possible.”
Eliminate inequality at the source — the human being. Clone them. When all are identical the world will be one big step closer to this goal.