Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Guardian author Peter Sutoris, we need to rediscover the environmental connectedness of indigenous peoples, though we might get to keep some of our tech toys.
The climate crisis requires a new culture and politics, not just new tech
Peter Sutoris
Mon 24 May 2021 21.00 AESTThis moment calls for humility – we cannot innovate ourselves out of this mess
We are living through what scientists call the Anthropocene, a new geological age during which humans have become the dominant force shaping the natural environment. Many scientists date this new period to the post-second world war economic boom, the “great acceleration”. This rapid increase in our control over the Earth has brought us to the precipice of catastrophic climate change, triggered a mass extinction, disrupted our planet’s nitrogen cycles and acidified its oceans, among other things.
Our society has come to believe that technology is the solution. Electricity from renewable sources, energy-efficient buildings, electric vehicles and hydrogen fuels are among the many innovations that we hope will play a decisive role in reducing emissions. Most of the mainstream climate-change models now assume some degree of “negative emissions” in the future, relying on large-scale carbon capture technology, despite the fact that it is far from ready to be implemented. And if all else fails, the story goes, we can geoengineer the Earth.
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Our civilisation is underpinned by extractivism, a belief that the Earth is ours to exploit, and the nonsensical idea of infinite growth within a finite territory. Material possessions as markers of achievement, a drive to consume for the sake of consumption, and blindness to the long-term consequences of our actions, have all become part of the culture of global capitalism. But there is nothing self-evident about these things, as indigenous peoples teach us.
Many indigenous groups got to know their natural environments intimately and sustained themselves over millennia, often despite harsh conditions. They came to understand the limits of what these environments could support, and they grasped that caring for the environment was simultaneously an act of self-care. Pacific islanders would designate no-go areas of the ocean to avoid overfishing, while high-altitude farmers in the Andes would rely on terraces that reduced erosion to grow their crops. It is not a coincidence that as much as 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversityis located within territories inhabited by indigenous peoples.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/24/climate-change-crisis-culture-politics-technology
Talk of society re-embracing indigenous lifestyles in my opinion is nonsense. People who choose to live this way, I have no problem with that. But most of us enjoy our comforts.
Most people in advanced countries, even people whose ancestors lived indigenous lifestyles, live modern lifestyles of their own free will.
Authors like Peter Sutoris talk the talk, but my guess is he is typing on a computer which contains lots of plastic and refined metal, lives in a warm, waterproof and comfortable house, has a nice place to sleep, and has a freezer stuffed full of food, at least some of which he didn’t have to hunt or grow.
The idea of ending “speciesism”, ending prioritisation of human welfare, might sound nice and fluffy, but a serious attempt to downgrade human welfare as a priority would almost certainly have severe consequences. You don’t have to look far back in history to find periods of horrible suffering, like Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or the periods of severe famine in early Soviet times, all caused by governments which focussed on priorities other than taking care of their people.
I think Peter Sutoris is preparing to re-brand Kool-Aid as “Speciesism”.
(And thanks once again Eric for taking one for the team here by reading the absolute tosh that The Guardian publishes, thereby saving us from the prospect of having our intellects compromised)
Can we still watch the pride parades of lions, lionesses, and their [unPlanned] cubs? Or would that be speciest appropriation?
That said, Planned People… Persons will complement Planned Parent/hood. From conception to grave following a progressive path and grade.
Welcome to The Outer Limits. You have now entered The Twilight Fringe. Perhaps an episode of V.
And you quote The Grauniad…..why?
Clickbait ?
Everyone on this site knows it’s a long lost rag with dwindling readership that panders to the far left: not worthy of our effort.
Don’t give it the time of day.
Sadly our leaders and our elites have been taken in and are going full pelt towards the deconstruction of our current civilisation.
In reality, global population will start to decline towards the end of this century and the best approach would be to manage that decline with the use of our existing systems and infrastructure (improving with time) instead of dismantling it all.
If we cause impoverishment of peoples around the world they will raise the birth rates again in order to try and avoid poverty and isolation in old age and we will never reach a satisfactory resolution.
As usual, the doomsayers will bring about the very outcome that they purport to fear.
Peter sutoris amongst other things is a “Social Scientist, ” I have extensive experience with assessing the growth potential of development intervention” and aspects of health, it seems hes been preaching the faith in the poorer parts of the southern hemisphere and Eastern Europe,
He’s a interventionist, plying his brand of environmentalism to the poor and uneducated,
Similar in some respects to what 18th and 19th centenary imperialists did in poorer parts of the world , we used to exploite the poor now we preach to them what they can and can’t do with what they have left,
The common denominator between Peter and the imperialists is ,its all about whats good for the west,at the expense of the poor.
Eric, sorry about the sad ending to your spider deal. We had a similar deal with summer bats at our fishing cottage in Canada. They roosted in the outside rafters during day, but they had to follow our boat at dusk and eat all the mosquitos we attracted while we fished for smallmouth bass off the cottage.
What numskulls like Sutoris and the Guardian never understand is scope and scale of what they propose. Great to advocate an indigenous lifestyle, but lets not be that extreme. Pick the peak of Rome at AD1 for comparison. Romans had nothing like an indigenous life style at that time. They had roads, aquaducts, sophisticated agriculture, the Coliseum…Yet at that time the maximum estimated world population was 300 million; could have been as low as 150 million. There are demographers that study and argue such stuff.
Well, now the world population is approaching 8 billion.
Unintentionally advocating by implication the removal by death of about 7.7 billion people to save the climate is not something any thinking person should want to be associated with.
Good heavens. What an utter idiot. Environmental connectedness of indigenous people? Wot?
Smallpox anybody?
Peter Sutoris should go to Canning Town tube station and try out his ideas on the commuters there.
Griff, Loydo, any other CAGW zealot out there. You too Nick Stokes. What does fighting climate change mean? What do you want the climate to be once victory is declared against climate change?
Many species want to eat flesh. Perhaps the author wants to volunteer to be food for them
The madness continues-
Explainer: What the Dutch court carbon emissions ruling means for Shell (msn.com)
It’s not Royal Dutch Shell’s consumers that have to reduce their emissions but Shell. Infantile logic common to watermelons and now it infects our unelected legal jurists.
Affluent people can afford to be environmentally aware. The best thing for the environment is to spread prosperity (as we are actually doing) to all the peoples of the world.
If the greenies manage to bork civilization, the ensuing environmental destruction will exceed even the wildest nightmares their feeble little brains are capable of imagining.
I daresay “Educating The Anthropocene” sounds impressive to your average Guardian reader ( as opposed to those of us who visit to check on the nutters ).
I want to believe that the sorts who read the Guardian aren’t as dim as the people who write for it – but honestly… there isn’t much evidence for that and I see profoundly stupid talking points regurgitated by people who one might reasonably expect to to be in possession of critical faculties allied to some subject knowledge.
Maybe it’s a tribal allegiance thing … maybe an anthropologist could investigate?
This complete idiot watched Disney’s Bambi and Pocahontas too many times as a child. His idea of nature is absolutely stupid. There is no such thing as an “indigenous” person. Mankind has constantly migrated back and forth and different groups have shared genes because of weather and climate changes since the dawn of prehistory. The people who sustained their tribes were the lucky ones, the others are only known because of archeological digs. Sustainable living, aka subsistence living, is not pretty and certainly not safe. It wasn’t until man started extracting that our population started growing.
i can’t for the life of me understand why so many people romanticize indigenous and primitive peoples. Yes, while they may have seemed to live in harmony with nature, they also suffered from all sorts of problems that are much more easily dealt with in modern society. Imagine dying of infections and diseases that are fairly easily cured today…imagine suffering an injury and needing medical/surgical intervention and there being no anesthesia….infections with no antibiotics…cancer (well, assuming you would even live long enough to develop cancer) with certain death and no chance of a cure…childbirth with no modern intervention for mother or child….sorry, there’s nothing about all that to be romanticized or sought after!
A noble savage fantacist. Didn’t we call “harsh conditions” over “millenia” the stone age? “An act of self-care,” with a typical (male) life span about 25 years, and an infant mortality rate at around %75, and starvation and untreatable disease vying for the primary cause of death.
“They grasped” no such thing as “caring for the environment.” In fact, those idyllic primitives were mostly responsible for the processes of the new meaning that Sartoris assigns to “extractivism.”
The ExxonMobil vote demonstrates beyond any shadow of doubt that morons are now in full control of the United States.
On the same day that a Dutch court orders Royal Dutch Shell to curtail its business, it is obvious that pseudoscience and superstition have prevailed in the West.
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are laughing their asses off.
Just another adherent to a religion of cosmological maintenance
Peter Aboriginal people lived in “harmony” with nature because they knew no other way. You seem to be another white European lost in the “Nobel savage living in paradise” fallacy. They were not noble and it wasn’t paradise. Life was brutal and short. None of them want to go back.
Mao and Stalin were model anti-specieists, by eliminating vast swaths of the human species. They fought valiantly again the systemic specieism that is the basis of our western society. They raised their fists against specieism!!
Indigenous lifestyles and peoples like the American Plains where one could smell the aboriginal villages for miles before you arrived at them, and the people from those villages had to up tents and move every several months because after a while, even they couldn’t stand the smell or find new places to dig holds to put their waste in?
Those indigenous societies that lived in harmony with nature?
I just turned 67.
Over the years I’ve heard lots of wacky ideas.
PeTA people not wanting others to use insulin produced from animals.
End animal research.
Ban products tested on animals.
Back in the ’60’s there were the anti-(nuke, oil, capitalism, chemicals, God, Christ, etc., etc.) groups flying their own banners. Many sincere in supporting their cause.
CAGW has given them a common banner (or should I say, “lever”?) to achieve their aims.
Those who are sincere need to examine just who has been waving the CAGW banner and for what end?
A couple of starting point:
How many of them are poor?
How many of them are politicians?
How many of them don’t do without what they’d have you do without?
How many of them have gained wealth and/or authority at the expense of your personal freedom?
How many of them think Greta and/or AOC are wise?
Time to get “woke” for real!
The Guardian is a glorified tabloid at this point, minus the entertainment value.
My response to such ideas only needs two words, and it can be directed to the author, Hollywood morons, and politicians alike. “YOU FIRST.” Similarly, after Warren Buffett repeatedly telling us he could pay more taxes, I’m still waiting for him to write a $100M check addressed to US Treasury with a “thanks for everything” written on the memo line.
“Our civilisation is underpinned by extractivism, a belief that the Earth is ours to exploit, and the nonsensical idea of infinite growth within a finite territory.”
I read a lot of business news and have never seen anyone claim that there can be infinite growth. We can always give up extractivism and return to the Paleolithic. Who’ll volunteer to go first, Mr. Sutoris? Ale Gore? Bill McKibben? Barack Obama who went from a poor college grad to a very wealthy man- I doubt he’ll want to go back to poverty. Bill Gates? In his book, Gates says we don’t need to go back to poverty, especially himself.