Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

A break from grading

At lunch at Massey College today, the closest available seat was beside a fellow Junior Fellow and photography client who was having lunch with Carolynn Benett, the Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs.

We were soon joined by a climate change advisor from the Ontario provincial government and ended up talking about carbon capture and storage; the dangers of sea level rise; mitigation pathways for meeting the Paris Agreement climate change targets; the lack of a sufficient climate change plan from any Canadian party or government so far; the imperative not to invest further in long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure; renewable energy options; nuclear power; ways to reduce and replace diesel use in remote communities; and passive houses.

Labour art project denied

Ages ago I submitted a photo essay to the Canadian Labour Congress for their “Workers’ Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice” project.

It was meant to be funded as part of the (at least dubious, and almost certainly offensive, given that people have lived here for many thousands of years) Canada 150 celebration.

The call to photographers in June 2016 explained: “The CLC invites photographers to participate in a historic exhibition on workers’ rights, social justice, and equity.” They went on to say:

Workers have historically taken the lead role in fighting for social justice issues, which have had an impact far beyond the workplace and into every part of the daily lives of Canadians. Therefore, the exhibition will be both a celebration of victories and an opportunity to take stock of the continuing struggles for social justice. Where have we succeeded as a social movement?

In the end, the people behind the proposal (Vince Pietropaolo and John Maclennan) told the photographers that it’s not going to happen due to lack of funding.

As such, I am making my photo essay submission public: Victories and continuing struggles.

Why we can’t avoid dooming our grandchildren

A recent Slate article proposes a neurological mechanism for why human behaviour so frequently consists of choices where we harm our own long-term future prospects and those of others in order to satisfy near-term preferences.

Not only do our brains seem to regard our future selves as strangers, but most people rarely think about the “far future” more than a few years out, and imagining the future becomes harder as people age: “The data showed that having children or grandchildren did not increase future thinking.”

This may help explain why so many grandparents maintain behaviours and continue to support politicians who are burning up their grandkids’ future by rapidly destabilizing the climate.

Lately it’s hard to avoid the feeling that we’re going to permanently wreck the climate and any prospects for peace and stability in human civilization because we’re psychologically incapable of behaving otherwise. Climate change is racing at full speed through a gap in human reasoning, all because we can’t really accept how serious the consequences will be and because we are so unwilling to be the first to undertake a shared sacrifice to avoid disaster.

350.org origin

We took 350.org for our name, reasoning that we wanted to work all over the world (they don’t call it global warming for nothing) and that Arabic numerals crossed linguistic boundaries. And then we took a leap of faith that in retrospect seems ludicrous — since there were seven continents, each of those seven young people working with me took a chunk of one and set to work: Kelly Blynn on South America, Jeremy Osborn in Europe, Phil Aroneanu in Africa, Will Bates on the Indian subcontinent, Jamie Henn in the rest of Asia, May Boeve at home in North America, and Jon Warnow on the antipodes (he also got the internet). Our success the year before meant that a couple of foundations (the Rockefellers, the Schumanns) were willing to help fund our work, and so the rest of the team was getting paid small salaries, and they had money to travel. But how do you just land in, say, Vietnam or Peru or Kazakhstan and start “organizing”? We found out.

McKibben, Bill. Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist. Times Books; New York. 2013. p. 12 (hardcover)

Contentiousness in climate activism

Charley Tilley has studied social movements overall and activism specifically as a set of “contentious performances”, in which organizers choose from a “repertoire” on the basis of who they want to influence and what opportunities exist for doing so.

Repertoires which are familiar can easily become stale and ineffective, as Micah White discusses in the context of big marches, and as was also widely discussed in the context of various cities sharing strategies to effectively shut down Occupy encampments. The fairly clear failure of the huge People’s Climate March and Toronto’s March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate makes it frustrating that a group of Toronto activist organizations are preparing another march on the same model (with the same name!). Given the urgency of climate change, we can’t dedicate our energy to repeating failed tactics.

If actions like marches have become routine, and lost their ability to produce broad media coverage or political action, we should expect climate change activists to begin engaging in more contentious forms of activism like barricades. One risk – of course – is that with a complacent population that broadly tolerates the status quo such actions will reinforce rather than undermine support for the existing political and economic order.

Dictatorships and the coercive dilemma

Coercive institutions are a dictator’s final defense in pursuit of political survival, but also his chief obstacle to achieving that goal. This book argues that autocrats face a coercive dilemma: whether to organize their internal security apparatus to protect against a coup, or to deal with the threat of popular unrest. Because coup-proofing calls for fragmented and socially exclusive organizations, while protecting against popular unrest demands unitary and inclusive ones, autocrats cannot simultaneously maximize their defenses against both threats. When dictators assume power, then, they must (and often do) choose which threat to prioritize. That choice, in turn, has profound consequences for the citizens who live under their rule. A fragmented, exclusive coercive apparatus gives its agents social and material incentives to escalate rather than dampen violence, and also hampers agents from collecting the intelligence necessary to engaged in targeted, discriminate, and pre-emptive repression. A unitary and inclusive apparatus configured to address significant mass unrest, however, has much better intelligence capability vis-a-vis its own citizens, and creates incentives for agents to minimize the use of violence and to rely instead on alternative means of repression, including surveillance and targeted pre-emption. Given its stronger intelligence capability, the mass-oriented coercive apparatus is also better at detecting and responding to changes in the nature of threats than its coup-proofed counterpart, leading to predictable patterns of institutional change that are neither entirely path dependent nor entirely in keeping with the optimization predicted by rational design.

Greitens, Sheena Chestnut. Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence. Cambridge University Press. 2016. p. 4-5

Sheena was in the Oxford M.Phil in International Relations program during the same two years as I was, and we both served on the executive of the Oxford University Strategic Studies Group.

Related:

Peter Dauvergne on environmentalism as a social movement

Saying mainstream environmentalism now reflects the interests and concerns of the rich is like coming upon a river of spawning salmon and noting the colour red. There are naturally many shades of difference. Not all of the mainstream, everywhere, has to the same extent come to embrace markets, corporations, and technologies as solutions. Nor does everyone have equal faith in the value of economic growth, CSR, and eco-consumerism as ways to move toward global sustainability. And nor is everyone equally pragmatic, calling for “evolution not revolution.” Environmentalism will always be a “movement of movements,” with a great diversity of values and visions surfacing out of a turbulent sea of informal groupings and formal organizations. Environmentalists share a commitment to try to protect the environment, yet sharp differences even exist in the understanding of the word “environment,” from those who mean nature (wildlife and ecosystems) to those who really mean living spaces for humans (cities, towns, parks, and beaches).7 (p. 6-7)

…

7. The phrase “movement of movements” is more often used to describe the global resistance to capitalism and globalization than to characterize global environmentalism. I use the phrase, however, to emphasize the diversity of environmentalism, which itself overlaps with movements against capitalism and globalization (and for global justice). For a discussion of this phrase in relation to anti-globalization activism and alter-globalization campaigns (offering social justice alternatives to globalization), see Tom Mertes, ed. A Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible (Verso, 2004). For a sense of the great diversity of environmentalism, see Further Readings, “Environmental Activism (“insider” critiques of),” “Environmental Discourses and Movements (varieties of),” “Environmental Justice Movements,” “Environmental NGOs and Transnational Networks,” “Environmentalism (developing countries),” “Environmentalism (overviews) and “Voluntary Simplicity, Localization, and Eco-Villages.” (p. 154-5)

Dauvergne, Peter. Environmentalism of the Rich. MIT Press; Cambridge. 2016.

Laval divesting from fossil fuels

Yesterday, Quebec’s Université Laval announced that it will become Canada’s first university to fully divest from fossil fuels:

“Today, Université Laval commits to taking responsible action to switch its endowment fund investments in fossil energy to other types of investments, such as renewable energy,” announced Éric Bauce, Executive Vice Rector in charge of sustainable development, while confirming that Université Laval is the first university in Canada to do so. To do this, Université Laval will form a responsible investment advisory committee, including student representatives, who will be tasked with recommending methods, practices, and actions. Furthermore, an annual progress report on the investment transition will be released.”

The story was covered by Le Devoir, Ricochet, and le Soleil.

The student group which successfully campaigned for divestment — ULaval sans fossiles — has been organizing since November.