New York Times - Eric S. Godoy* | Aaron Jaffe*
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| Shoes representing protesters at the climate talks summit in Paris last year.
Credit
Andre Larsson/NurPhoto, via Getty Images |
This year is on track to become the
hottest ever recorded, and a growing number of
environmentalists are using a particular type of language in response. Some are calling for a huge "mobilization" to "combat" climate change. In
an article in the New Republic in August,
Bill McKibben, the unofficial spokesperson of the climate movement in
the United States, insisted in very literal terms that, we are at
war with climate change.
In
the United States, we are familiar with war metaphors; and they are
often politically useful. We have been through wars on poverty, drugs,
cancer and even Christmas. In these cases, metaphors are understood as
metaphors, but when McKibben points to territory ceded, space invaded,
cultural loss and human suffering, he intends to be taken at face value:
"It's not that global warming is
like a world war," he writes. "It
is a world war."
War
rhetoric serves a valuable function. It stresses the seriousness of the
harm, its structural nature and the need to struggle against it. Wars
require people to sacrifice and to share responsibility for a joint
effort larger than individual preferences and comforts. They can also
motivate solidarity: The goal of defeating the enemy orients all
activity, and whatever may divide or distract us from achieving that
goal must be put aside. In the rhetoric-bag of political discourse,
"war" is a forceful weapon.
McKibben
is one of the most visible and motivating climate activists in North
America. He has written an astounding number of influential
articles and
books, co-founded an
organization leading an international fossil fuel divestment campaign, spoken across the country to
full auditoriums and participated in high-profile protests, some leading to his
arrest. Most recently, he
called on
all of us to unite with the Standing Rock Sioux against the Dakota
Access pipeline. Our goal here is not to attack McKibben so much as the
rhetorical strategy that he, along with others, have made increasingly
popular.
The
idea that climate change is a war is inaccurate, and a potentially
counterproductive frame for organizing the resistance needed to secure a
habitable planet. By stressing existential threat, war tends to divide
the world into allies and enemies, against whom we need to risk all.
McKibben insists that climate change is "a world war aimed at us all."
But aimed by whom? It is variably polluting industries, tepid or
two-faced politicians, our own political passivity, and even the laws of
physics. McKibben often writes as if nature itself was a bellicose
agent.
This
approach ignores the environmental movement's earlier rhetorical and
organizational strengths. As a political force, the movement grew from
roots in the nonviolent soil of civil rights struggles, and was
radicalized in antiwar protests and resistance against nuclear weapons.
This legacy is not merely historical: it is alive and well in the
language and action of
ongoing resistance at Standing Rock.
Another
problem with deploying such war metaphors is that doing so assumes a
distinction between allies and enemies that disguises the unequal
effects felt by "us all." McKibben, to his credit, does recognize this.
For
instance, he admits that the "first victims, ironically, are those who
have done the least to cause the crisis." Here he refers to the world's
poor, who have contributed only a small amount of the total greenhouse
gases while richer countries produce
higher carbon emissions.
And some even benefit from doing so. The affluent enjoy "cheap" fuel
and other products of industry, and shareholders profit from such sales.
Meanwhile, the most recent
International Panel on Climate Change report
notes that the poor and marginalized face greater food scarcity and
price insecurity, and the threat of violent conflict connected to this
instability. In actual war, too, the poorest and marginalized often find
themselves on the front lines while the richer are insulated or even
benefit; McKibben himself explains how this was true of United States
industrialists during World War II.
In
other words, the first victims are not suffering from the relentless
assault of the physical environment alone, but of other humans who
leverage their social position to displace wider costs and extract
private benefits. Given McKibben's dedication to protests like the one
at Standing Rock reservation, he is well aware of these forces.
Humans
are already divided into different groups or classes, with relative
advantages and vulnerabilities. Climate change exacerbates this
inequality, and our rhetoric ought to reflect this fact and resist false
universalizations. Beyond the inherent injustice of disproportionate
and unnecessary suffering, growing environmental inequality tends to the
violences of
displacement,
resource-competition and
actual war.
One
thing we all share is that we secure existence in and through a
relationship with our environment — all living things do. In recognition
of this fact, Marx thought of the human body as part of the natural
world and called nature an extension of our bodies. Following Marx,
contemporary theorists like
Jason Moore and
John Bellamy Foster
describe our changing, and dangerously unstable metabolic relationship
with nature. Humans are a unique species in that we form complex
relationships to regulate this metabolism as we produce our food, water,
shelter and more robust needs.
As
these relationships are organized today, and as the climate changes,
the affluent can afford an increase in food prices, ship in bottled
water during droughts and relocate businesses and homes when the seas
rise, while those without access to such privileges have fewer options
and disproportionately suffer.
What
would winning a "war" against climate change even look like? McKibben
suggests a huge mobilization to produce green technologies, solar
panels, wind turbines and electric cars. He cites the public seizure and
transformation of private factories during World War II that enabled
the United States to produce bombers and other instruments that helped
win the war.
Certainly
greener technologies can help, but solar panels won't purify Flint's
lead-ridden water or lower asthma rates in the Bronx, some of the
highest in the country because of the proximity to
trucking lanes.
Technology alone can't address the environmental injustice
disproportionately confronting minorities. However, if we understand
that the enemy is not our physical environment, but the unjust social
relations that allow some to gain at the expense of and risk to others,
then technological solutions can be a part, but only a part, of the
plan. Crucial to this plan is gaining social control over the private,
exploitative and even irresponsible direction of the human-nature
metabolism.
For
this reason, Naomi Klein has called for solutions that go beyond the
technological. She emphasizes, not just green energy, but also "people
power." Her most recent
book and film,
"This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate," feature a number
of grass-roots movements resisting the forces that threaten people's
relationships with their environment — sometimes even in the name of
"green" solutions, such as hydroelectric dam projects. We want to follow
Klein's lead in shifting the conceptual focus from technologies of
power to relations of power. Despite his recent rhetoric, McKibben
follows a similar course.
We
urgently need to motivate action, but given the ambiguities and dangers
surrounding war rhetoric, we need better orienting language. Perhaps,
as some
have suggested, "revolution" is the better path.
While
world wars aim to decimate enemies and their capacities for violence,
"revolutions" aim to transform violence and oppression by empowering
people. Instead of a war against physics, a revolution in the control
and direction of climate, natural resources and energy policy could
enable democratic participation to redress past harms and guide
environmental goals of the future. Such a revolution would affirm the
right to a clean, healthy environment for all people; it would transform
the relationships that regulate our metabolism with nature,
relationships that now allow some to profit by denying this right to
others. Solar panels alone won't transform these relationships and
secure this right.
McKibben
worries that if the United States does not take the lead, China,
already a significant developer of renewable energy, would win the
renewables race. In this way American exceptionalism and national
chauvinism lurks beneath the surface of so many universalist stances.
Like
the arms races and technology gaps characteristic of the nearly
catastrophic Cold War, such a national frame reinforces an
us-versus-them mentality which reduces rather fosters much needed
international coordination and popular organization. After all, even if
we stop emitting today or if
our renewable
sector takes the lead, the world will continue to warm. A wider vision
of global cooperation in which China, the United States and so many
others work hand in hand to confront the global environmental challenges
should supplant the narrow focus on American leadership. But is this
likely within the context of nationalist war rhetoric?
"Revolution"
can be just as motivating as "war," but a green revolution would center
the human-nature metabolism over and against the drive for profits. It
would answer the question McKibben leaves open, namely, how we get from
green technology to more just ecological and social relations.
In this light, Exxon and its
climate science obfuscation
is not so much an enemy as a paradigmatic symptom of the worst kinds of
behavior generated by profit-driven systems. The enemy is the violence
perpetrated by racial, gendered, political, juridical and existing
economic metabolisms with nature. Their exploitative organizations would
remain unconcerned with climate justice even if the nation were
mobilized to mass produce solar panels and wind turbines. In other
words, Climate change demands not only a race to develop and deploy new
energy technologies, but a revolution to democratize all forms of power —
fossil fuels, wind, solar, but most important, economic and political
power.
*Eric S. Godoy teaches in the department of social science and cultural studies at the Pratt Institute.
*Aaron Jaffe is an assistant professor of philosophy and liberal arts at The Juilliard School.
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