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| The world is now in the grip of a climate emergency, and this requires a response which is ethically informed and courageous, rather than cautious and self-protective. Credit: STILLFX / getty images |
However, there are sections of civil society, including the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC), which are moving from helplessness to collective, creative, peaceful action aimed at disrupting the ailing status quo.
Conventional approaches to social change have proven ineffective against an entrenched malignancy that is poisoning our nation's proper response to the current climate emergency. Therefore, the Board of ARRCC is embracing civil resistance as one of its approaches to change.
I want here to explain why peaceful civil resistance could be a healing and transformative moral response at this pivotal moment.
This fight is a moral one
Quietly, most Australians have had a gutful of the incestuous connections between the big end of town and our elected representatives. In their book Game of Mates, Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters expose how well-connected business interests have perverted decision-making in this country in order to line their own pockets. Coal, oil and gas corporations are exerting undue influence over governments at every level.
Adani's new coal project is but another example of this - except, this time, the implications are truly global.
For the world to have any chance of avoiding an escalation of dangerous damage to the climate, experts tell us that much, if not all, of the world's oil reserves should remain in the ground. If Adani's proposed Carmichael coal mine is established, it will be a mega-mine. The result of its annual output would be greenhouse gas pollution greater than the annual emissions of whole countries like Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, and equivalent to that of Malaysia.
Furthermore, if Adani's planned rail link and port expansion go ahead, several other coal mining companies are waiting to dig for coal in the Galilee Basin. More cheap coal will flood the world's markets, undermining the competitiveness of renewables. This would indeed be one of the "carbon bombs" that Bill McKibben talks about.
The lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people are already being affected and currently low-lying habitable parts of the world will almost certainly disappear from rising sea levels. Extreme weather-related disasters are increasing in frequency and severity. The Great Barrier Reef will be gone forever, as will other ecosystems and their diverse species. The resulting depths of suffering are unimaginable.
This is indeed a climate emergency, yet Australian governments - state and federal - remain in denial.
Instead, at ARRCC, we hold up a vision of renewable energy, the protection of ecosystems and sustainable lifestyles enabling a safe climate and fairness for all. Grounded in our various religious traditions, we envisage economies geared for human need rather than human greed, and respectful of planetary limits. This would mean more constrained lifestyles for the wealthy, including more use of public transport and reduced meat consumption; and it would mean decentralised, non-polluting, relatively inexpensive electricity for those currently facing energy poverty. It would also mean just, orderly transitions for communities affected by the shift away from coal mining.
As a nation, we have the resources to support regional communities who are being affected by our necessary transition away from mining. Already various towns such as the Hunter Valley have been through boom and bust. Instead of allowing such communities to be left flailing, there could be an orderly, planned transition so that these communities can be productive and flourishing into the future. In our vision for the future, just a fraction of the $1bn loan sought by Adani from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility could produce more and more sustainable employment opportunities.
When what is legal is not what is moral
This struggle is beyond the political. It is a deeply moral one. Along with others working to address global warming, those of us who are inspired by our spiritual traditions see our elected decision-makers marching in lockstep with coal and other mining lobbies, and regard it as immoral.
Their obsession with coal and gas has set the nation travelling in entirely the wrong direction. Our emissions are rising. Our governments pronounce they are controlling our emissions, while at the same time doing all they can to facilitate fossil fuel extraction and frustrate the take-up of renewables. In every other sphere, leaders are issuing calls to move away from the mining, export and burning of fossil fuels. They are not only climate scientists, public health experts, religious leaders, farmers and many business leaders.
The distortion of the political moral compass has meant that police powers are being actively and increasingly used to prevent civil society from challenging extractive industries. State and federal governments are actively seeking ways to silence organisations who speak out for climate action, threatening their tax deductibility or charity status. Environmentalists are publicly belittled.
The law supports continued, unfettered fossil fuel exploration and extraction. It allows huge tax breaks and other forms of subsidy to flow to fossil fuel companies. It protects mining companies, sanctioning poor practices by under-regulation. Climate injustice is legitimised by spurious economic mantras.
Penalties for protesting in a number of states have been increased dramatically. Large scale police intervention was used near Bentley in the northern rivers district of NSW to protect the interests of coal seam gas mining company, Metgasco. Over the course of three years, several hundred people were arrested at Maules Creek by NSW police to protect Whitehaven Coal, which has incidentally been issued paltry fines for numerous breaches of the conditions of their mining license.
Across Australia, ordinary citizens who non-violently protest threats to farmlands, groundwater, old-growth forests and water catchments must face potential arrest by police who are being directed to protect profit-seeking companies.
Australia's legal and regulatory systems have become divorced from ethical value systems.
Elected leaders' alignment with Adani
The obsession with coal of our ruling elites has already led to the cynical alignment of both federal Labor and the Coalition with Adani, against the Wangan and Jagalingou people who are courageously defending their ancestral lands in central Queensland through the Courts. It has had the Queensland Palaszczuk government granting Adani relatively unlimited, long-term access to the state's precious artesian waters for a negligible cost. It now has the Townsville local council expecting taxpayers to foot the bill for an airstrip to be used by Adani, at a time when 140 of the council's own employees are being laid off.
It has both Queensland Labor and the federal Coalition in full support of Adani despite the exposure of Adani's corrupt practises, numerous well-researched submissions, visits from constituents, letter-writing campaigns, petitions and public polling results. Nothing appears to shake their commitment to Adani and the company's disingenuous promises of employment.
For the citizen who is morally opposed to the mine and desires to avoid all complicity with its establishment, civil resistance has become the only option left. As Quaker and civil resistance advocate, Jason MacLeod, has written:
"Asking whether individual and collective action is legal or illegal is, in my opinion the wrong question. Cooking the climate, trashing Traditional Owner rights, destroying the living wonder of the Great Barrier Reef, and poisoning our water are all legal. There is no intrinsic value in legality, especially when laws are divorced from ethical value systems. A better question, is what action will lead us into right relationship with one another and God's creation? What will take us closer to a just and sustainable peace? What individual and collective action clearly communicates 'no' to injustice while simultaneously saying 'yes' to dignity?"The power of civil resistance
Civil resistance is clearly not the ethical person's first choice of strategy, given that laws are generally important for the protection of life and property. However, it has historically played a positive role in transforming societies where injustice appears to be irredeemably entrenched. Many successful social change movements have included civil resistance - the overthrow of communism in Poland, Ceausescu in Romania, apartheid in South Africa, British rule in India, to name a few.
Civil resistance is not the same as individual acts of civil disobedience. It works by mobilising large numbers of people who maintain nonviolent discipline, and act in strategic concert over time to withdraw their consent and cooperation from unjust rulers or systems. It is also known as people power, nonviolence, nonviolent action, and nonviolent resistance.
Nonviolent resistance serves to draw public attention to a form of violence or injustice, and to delegitimise it by juxtaposing it with nonviolence. The belief of those who practice nonviolence is that voluntary suffering can educate and transform the public's helpless acquiescence to an ongoing injustice.
The Board of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change believes that, in our own society today, people of goodwill are facing various injustices which have become entrenched. One of these is the close connection our elected representatives have with fossil fuel industries, especially coal. As a faith-based organisation, we should do what is morally needed in the situation. While adhering to principles of nonviolence, including the love of our enemies, we believe it is ethical to organise civil resistance actions against those forces which threaten all that we love.
The world is now in a climate emergency, and this requires a response which is purely ethically informed and courageous, rather than cautious and self-protective. To refrain from doing all we can to oppose Adani and other fossil fuel extraction companies is to hold back from full solidarity with the Wangan and Jagalingou, with coming generations and with all those currently suffering because of climate disruption.
Some believe this to be extreme. In our view, it is being truly conservative to act according to our traditional values with the goal of conserving this sacred earth. We believe that in our context today, it is part of our mission as people of faith to include civil resistance in the suite of options we offer faith communities as they respond to the climate challenge.
Some other parts of the environment movement are also moving in this direction. What ARRCC hopes to add is the legitimation which comes from our historical connections with long religious traditions, our beliefs and values which are grounded in scriptures and spiritual practices.
Nonviolence is at the heart of all the major faiths. For example, the Israelite prophets warned the people and their rulers, at the risk of losing liberty or life. The Christian tradition has a well-grounded theology around the power of redemptive suffering and self-sacrifice for the good of others. The Buddhist tradition has for thousands of years aspired to loving-kindness towards all beings. This includes people with whom we disagree, people who are doing wrong and other sentient beings which also deserve our respect.
From the Hindu tradition, Mohandas Gandhi taught his followers in the Indian Independence movement Satyagraha, which informed other liberation movements such as the U.S. Civil Rights movement. In Gandhi's own words, it means "the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence." It aims not to coerce an opponent, but to convert the wrongdoer in order to achieve true cooperation.
ARRCC will continue to take all legal options open to us to convince our leaders to act for climate justice. However, henceforward if and where necessary, ARRCC will not stand back from civil resistance in the spirit of Satyagraha.
Always with compassion. Always peaceful. Always respectful. We will stand up for climate justice if and when necessary. We will seek to win open dialogue. We will seek consensus. Always in love.
*Thea Ormerod is the President of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change.
Links
- Support for the Adani Coal Mine is Scientifically and Morally Unjustifiable
- Climate Change and Reparative Justice: Interrogating the Polluter Pays Principle
- Destroying Our Future: Why Only a Moral Revolution Can Save the Earth Now
- There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster Anymore: Why Wilful Ignorance is Not Innocence
