During your career you’ve written about the power of brand
names, populist movements around the world, and free market fundamentalism. Why
now a book and film on climate change?
You know,
The Shock Doctrine, my last book, ends with climate
change. It ends with a vision of a dystopic future where you have weak
infrastructure colliding with heavy weather, as we saw with Hurricane Katrina.
And rather than working to prevent future disasters by having lower emissions,
you have all these attempts to take advantage of that crisis. At the time, it
seemed to me that climate change was potentially going to be the biggest
disaster-capitalism free-for-all that we’ve seen yet. So it was quite a logical
progression for me to go from writing about disaster-capitalism in
The
Shock Doctrine to writing about climate change. As I was writing
The Shock Doctrine, I was covering the Iraq War and profiteering
from the war, and I started to see these patterns repeat in the aftermath of
natural disasters, like the Asian tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina. There are
chapters in that book on both of those events. Then I came to the idea that
climate change could be a kind of a “people’s shock,” an answer to the shock
doctrine – not just another opportunity by the disaster capitalists to feed off
of misery, but an opportunity for progressive forces to deepen democracy and
really improve livelihoods around the world. Then I came across the idea of
“climate debt” when I was doing a piece on reparations for
Harper’s
magazine. I had a meeting with Bolivia’s climate negotiator in Geneva – her name
is Angélica Navarro – and she put the case to me that climate change could be an
opportunity for a global Green Marshall Plan with the North paying climate debts
in the form of huge green development project.
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy you wrote about the potential
of a “people’s shock.” Do you see that it’s happening, a global grassroots
response to some of the extreme weather we’re experiencing?
I see a people’s shock happening broadly, where on lots of different fronts
you have constituencies coming forward who have been fighting, for instance, for
sustainable agriculture for many, many years, and now realize that it’s also a
climate solution. You have a lot of reframing of issues – and not in an
opportunistic way, just another layer of understanding. Here in Canada, the
people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living
downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate
change – they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies. But the fact that
it’s also ruining the planet adds another layer of urgency. And it’s that
layering of climate change on top of other issues that holds a huge amount of
potential.
In terms of Hurricane Sandy, I really do see some hopeful, grassroots
responses, particularly in the Rockaways, where people were very organized right
from the beginning, where
Occupy Sandy was
very strong, where new networks emerged. The first phase is just recovery, and
now as you have a corporate-driven reconstruction process descending, those
organized communities are in a position to respond, to go to the meetings, to
take on the real estate developers, to talk about another vision of public
housing that is way better than what’s there right now. So yeah, it’s definitely
happening. Right now it’s under the radar, but I’m following it quite
closely.
In a piece you wrote for The Nation in November 2011 you
suggested that when it comes to climate change, there’s a dual denialism at work
– conservatives deny the science while some liberals deny the political
implications of the science. Why do you think that some environmentalists are
resistant to grappling with climate change’s implications for the market and for
economics?
Well, I think there is a very a deep denialism in the environmental movement
among the Big Green groups. And to be very honest with you, I think it’s been
more damaging than the right-wing denialism in terms of how much ground we’ve
lost. Because it has steered us in directions that have yielded very poor
results. I think if we look at the track record of Kyoto, of the UN Clean
Development Mechanism, the European Union’s emissions trading scheme – we now
have close to a decade that we can measure these schemes against, and it’s
disastrous. Not only are emissions up, but you have no end of scams to point to,
which gives fodder to the right. The right took on cap-and-trade by saying it’s
going to bankrupt us, it’s handouts to corporations, and, by the way, it’s not
going to work. And they were right on all counts. Not in the bankrupting part,
but they were right that this was a massive corporate giveaway, and they were
right that it wasn’t going to bring us anywhere near what scientists were saying
we needed to do lower emissions. So I think it’s a really important question why
the green groups have been so unwilling to follow science to its logical
conclusions. I think the scientists Kevin Anderson and his colleague Alice Bows
at the
Tyndall Centre have been the most
courageous on this because they don’t just take on the green groups, they take
on their fellow scientists for the way in which neoliberal economic orthodoxy
has infiltrated the scientific establishment. It’s really scary reading. Because
they have been saying, for at least for a decade, that getting to the emissions
reduction levels that we need to get to in the developed world is not compatible
with economic growth.
What we know is that the environmental movement had a series of dazzling
victories in the late 60s and in the 70s where the whole legal framework for
responding to pollution and to protecting wildlife came into law. It was just
victory after victory after victory. And these were what came to be called
“command-and-control” pieces of legislation. It was “don’t do that.” That
substance is banned or tightly regulated. It was a top-down regulatory approach.
And then it came to screeching halt when Regan was elected. And he essentially
waged war on the environmental movement very openly. We started to see some of
the language that is common among those deniers – to equate environmentalism
with Communism and so on. As the Cold War dwindled, environmentalism became the
next target, the next Communism. Now, the movement at that stage could have
responded in one of the two ways. It could have fought back and defended the
values it stood for at that point, and tried to resist the steamroller that was
neoliberalism in its early days. Or it could have adapted itself to this new
reality, and changed itself to fit the rise of corporatist government. And it
did the latter. Very consciously if you read what [
Environmental Defense Fund president] Fred Krupp
was saying at the time.
It was go along or get along.
Exactly. We now understand it’s about corporate partnerships. It’s not, "sue
the bastards;" it’s, "work through corporate partnerships with the bastards."
There is no enemy anymore.
More than that, it’s casting corporations as the solution, as the willing
participants and part of this solution. That’s the model that has lasted to this
day.
I go back to something even like the fight over NAFTA, the North American
Free Trade Agreement. The Big Green groups, with very few exceptions, lined up
in favor of NAFTA, despite the fact that their memberships were revolting, and
sold the deal very aggressively to the public. That’s the model that has been
globalized through the World Trade Organization, and that is responsible in many
ways for the levels of soaring emissions. We’ve globalized an utterly untenable
economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the
world, and it’s killing us.
It’s not that the green groups were spectators to this – they were partners
in this. They were willing participants in this. It’s not every green group.
It’s not
Greenpeace, it’s not
Friends of the Earth, it’s not, for the most
part, the
Sierra Club. It’s not
350.org, because it didn’t even exist yet. But I think
it goes back to the elite roots of the movement, and the fact that when a lot of
these conservation groups began there was kind of a
noblesse oblige
approach to conservation. It was about elites getting together and hiking and
deciding to save nature. And then the elites changed. So if the environmental
movement was going to decide to fight, they would have had to give up their
elite status. And weren’t willing to give up their elite status. I think that’s
a huge part of the reason why emissions are where they are.
At least in American culture, there is always this desire for
the win-win scenario. But if we really want to get to, say, an 80 percent
reduction in CO2 emissions, some people are going to lose. And I
guess what you are saying is that it’s hard for the environmental leadership to
look some of their partners in the eye and say, "You’re going to lose."
Exactly. To pick on power. Their so-called win-win strategy has lost. That
was the idea behind cap-and-trade. And it was a disastrously losing strategy.
The green groups are not nearly as clever as they believe themselves to be. They
got played on a spectacular scale. Many of their partners had one foot in US CAP
[Climate Action Partnership] and the other in the US Chamber of Commerce. They
were hedging their bets. And when it looked like they could get away with no
legislation, they dumped US CAP completely.
The phrase win-win is interesting, because there are a lot of losers in the
win-win strategy. A lot of people are sacrificed in the name of win-win. And in
the US, we just keep it to the cap-and-trade fight and I know everyone is tired
of fighting that fight. I do think there is a lot of evidence that we have not
learned the key lessons of that failure.
And what do you think the key lessons are?
Well one of them is willingness to sacrifice – in the name of getting a
win-win with big polluters who are part of that coalition – the communities that
were living on the fenceline. Communities, in Richmond, California for instance,
who would have been like, “We fight climate change and our kids won’t get as
much asthma.” That win-win was broken because you get a deal that says, “OK you
guys can keep polluting but you’re going to have to buy some offsets on the
other side of the planet.” And the local win is gone, is sacrificed.
I’m in favor of win-win, you know. The book I am writing is arguing that our
responses to climate change can rebuild the public sphere, can strengthen our
communities, can have work with dignity. We can address the financial crisis and
the ecological crisis at the same. I believe that. But I think it’s by building
coalitions with people, not with corporations, that you are going to get those
wins. And what I see is really a willingness to sacrifice the basic principles
of solidarity, whether it is to that fenceline community in Richmond, California
or whether it’s with that Indigenous community in Brazil that, you know, is
forced off their territory because their forest has just become a carbon sink or
an offset and they no longer have access to the forest that allowed them to live
sustainably because it’s policed. Because a conservation group has decided to
trade it. So these sacrifices are made – there are a lot of losers in this model
and there aren’t any wins I can see.
You were talking about the Clean Development Mechanism as a
sort of disaster capitalism. Isn’t geoengineering the ultimate disaster
capitalism?
I certainly think it’s the ultimate expression of a desire to avoid doing the
hard work of reducing emissions, and I think that’s the appeal of it. I think we
will see this trajectory the more and more climate change becomes impossible to
deny. A lot of people will skip right to geoengineering. The appeal of
geoengineering is that it doesn’t threaten our worldview. It leaves us in a
dominant position. It says that there is an escape hatch. So all the stories
that got us to this point, that flatter ourselves for our power, will just be
scaled up.
[There is a]willingness to sacrifice large numbers of people in the way we
respond to climate change – we are already showing a brutality in the face of
climate change that I find really chilling. I don’t think we have the language
to even describe [geoengineering], because we are with full knowledge deciding
to allow cultures to die, to allow peoples to disappear. We have the ability to
stop and we’re choosing not to. So I think the profound immorality and violence
of that decision is not reflected in the language that we have. You see that we
have these climate conventions where the African delegates are using words like
"genocide," and the European and North American delegates get very upset and
defensive about this. The truth is that the UN definition of genocide is that it
is the deliberate act to disappear and displace people. What the delegates
representing the North are saying is that we are not doing this because we want
you to disappear; we are doing this because we don’t care essentially. We don’t
care if you disappear if we continue business-as-usual. That’s a side effect of
collateral damage. Well, to the people that are actually facing the
disappearance it doesn’t make a difference whether there is malice to it because
it still could be prevented. And we’re choosing not to prevent it. I feel one of
the crises that we’re facing is a crisis of language. We are not speaking about
this with the language of urgency or mortality that the issue deserves.
You’ve said that progressives’ narratives are insufficient.
What would be an alternative narrative to turn this situation around?
Well, I think the narrative that got us into this – that’s part of the reason
why you have climate change denialism being such as powerful force in North
America and in Australia – is really tied to the frontier mentality. It’s really
tied to the idea of there always being more. We live on lands that were
supposedly innocent, “discovered” lands where nature was so abundant. You could
not imagine depletion ever. These are foundational myths.
And so I’ve taken a huge amount of hope from the emergence of the
Idle No More movement, because of what I
see as a tremendous generosity of spirit from Indigenous leadership right now to
educate us in another narrative. I just did a panel with Idle No More and I was
the only non-Native speaker at this event, and the other Native speakers were
all saying we want to play this leadership role. It’s actually taken a long time
to get to that point. There’s been so much abuse heaped upon these communities,
and so much rightful anger at the people who stole their lands. This is the
first time that I’ve seen this openness, open willingness that we have something
to bring, we want to lead, we want to model another way which relates to the
land. So that’s where I am getting a lot of hope right now.
The impacts of Idle No More are really not understood. My husband is making a
documentary that goes with this book, and he’s directing it right now in
Montana, and we’ve been doing a lot of filming on the northern Cheyenne
reservation because there’s a huge, huge coal deposit that they’ve been debating
for a lot of years – whether or not to dig out this coal. And it was really
looking like they were going to dig it up. It goes against their prophecies, and
it’s just very painful. Now there’s just this new generation of young people on
that reserve who are determined to leave that coal in the ground, and are
training themselves to do solar and wind, and they all talk about Idle No More.
I think there’s something very powerful going on. In Canada it’s a very big
deal. It’s very big deal in all of North America, because of the huge amount of
untapped energy, fossil fuel energy, that is on Indigenous land. That goes for
Arctic oil. It certainly goes for the tar sands. It goes for where they want to
lay those pipelines. It goes for where the natural gas is. It goes for where the
major coal deposits are in the US. I think in Canada we take Indigenous rights
more seriously than in the US. I hope that will change.
It’s interesting because even as some of the Big Green groups
have gotten enamored of the ideas of ecosystem services and natural capital,
there’s this counter-narrative coming from the Global South and Indigenous
communities. It’s almost like a dialectic.
That’s the counternarrative, and those are the alternative worldviews that
are emerging at this moment. The other thing that is happening … I don’t know
what to call it. It’s maybe a reformation movement, a grassroots rebellion.
There’s something going on in the [environmental] movement in the US and Canada,
and I think certainly in the UK. What I call the “astronaut’s eye worldview” –
which has governed the Big Green environmental movement for so long – and by
that I mean just looking down at Earth from above. I think it’s sort of time to
let go of the icon of the globe, because it places us above it and I think it
has allowed us to see nature in this really abstracted way and sort of move
pieces, like pieces on a chessboard, and really loose touch with the Earth. You
know, it’s like the planet instead of the Earth.
And I think where that really came to a head was over fracking. The head
offices of the Sierra Club and the NRDC and the EDF all decided this was a
“bridge fuel.” We’ve done the math and we’re going to come out in favor of this
thing. And then they faced big pushbacks from their membership, most of all at
the Sierra Club. And they all had to modify their position somewhat. It was the
grassroots going, “Wait a minute, what kind of environmentalism is it that isn’t
concerned about water, that isn’t concerned about industrialization of rural
landscapes – what has environmentalism become?” And so we see this grassroots,
place-based resistance in the movements against the Keystone XL pipeline and the
Northern Gateway pipeline, the huge anti-fracking movement. And they are the
ones winning victories, right?
I think the Big Green groups are becoming deeply irrelevant. Some get a lot
of money from corporations and rich donors and foundations, but their whole
model is in crisis.
I hate to end a downer like that.
I’m not sure that is a downer.
It might not be.
I should say I’m representing my own views. I see some big changes as well. I
think the Sierra Club has gone through its own reformation. They are on the
frontline of these struggles now. I think a lot of these groups are having to
listen to their members. And some of them will just refuse to change because
they’re just too entrenched in the partnership model, they’ve got too many
conflicts of interest at this stage. Those are the groups that are really going
to suffer. And I think it’s OK. I think at this point, there’s a big push in
Europe where 100 civil society groups are calling on the EU not to try to fix
their failed carbon-trading system, but to actually drop it and start really
talking about cutting emissions at home instead of doing this shell game. I
think that’s the moment we’re in right now. We don’t have any more time to waste
with these very clever, not working shell games.
Jason Mark is editor of Earth Island Journal. This interview has been
edited for clarity and length.
First published at Earth Island Journal
