Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

Daniel Carpenter and Andrew Delbanco on abolitionism

Delbanco’s essay considers abolitionism as a general category of political vision, one impelled by “imprecatory prophets” whose contribution is, in part, to envision what their contemporaries regarded as “preposterous” and to make it seem possible. Abolitionists render a moral case against the existence and endurance of or or more of a society’s perceived wrongs, such as slavery and racial castes. And perhaps others: alcohol, or gender discrimination, or abortion, or the hierarchy of heterosexuality over gay and lesbian lives. The abolitionist then and now requires moral clarity in the form of a sharp division between good and evil in which the viewer and reader can tell the two apart. Abolitionism also requires a refusal to settle for half-measures; it paints these compromises themselves as part of the problem, as resting firmly on one side of the binary divide. And, not least, abolitionism must conjure a world without the evil institution whose demise it seeks: a promised land.

From Daniel Carpenter’s forward to: Delbanco, Andrew. The Abolitionist Imagination. Harvard University Press. 2012.

Perhaps climate change activists should begin calling themselves fossil fuel abolitionists.

Tim DeChristopher’s expectations about the future

Orion Magazine has posted the transcript of a highly interesting conversation between Tim DeChristopher and Terry Tempest Williams:

[T]here’s no hope in avoiding collapse. If you look at the worst-case consequences of climate change, those pretty much mean the collapse of our industrial civilization. But that doesn’t mean the end of everything. It means that we’re going to be living through the most rapid and intense period of change that humanity has ever faced. And that’s certainly not hopeless. It means we’re going to have to build another world in the ashes of this one. And it could very easily be a better world. I have a lot of hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world in the ashes of this one. And I have very little doubt that we’ll have to. The nice thing about that is that this culture hasn’t led to happiness anyway, it hasn’t satisfied our human needs. So there’s a lot of room for improvement.

We are in the process of committing the world to a terrifying amount of climate change. It seems plausible that as it gets worse, people will eventually become less willing to work together to deal with it. Hopefully the next few years will see the emergence of a movement strong enough to close off the worst possibilities of extreme warming, and capable of adapting to keep humanity on a comparatively sane and cooperative path in the future.

Toronto350 letter on Line 9

Toronto350.org has submitted a letter of comment on the proposed reversal of the Enbridge Line 9 pipeline.

Given the unwillingness of the Alberta and federal governments to take climate change seriously, the best strategy open to us at this stage seems to be doing what we can to reduce the scale of fossil fuel exports, particularly by stopping oil pipelines and coal export infrastructure.

Pierre Trudeau on radical strategy

One passage from Pierre Trudeau’s Federalism and the French Canadians strikes me as especially relevant to climate change organizing:

In a non-revolutionary society and in non-revolutionary times, no manner of reform can be implanted with sudden universality. Democratic reformers must proceed step by step, convincing little bands of intellectuals here, rallying sections of the working class there, and appealing to the underprivileged in the next place. The drive towards power must begin with the establishment of bridgeheads, since at the outset it is obviously easier to convert specific groups or localities than to win over an absolute majority of the whole nation.

…

Consequently, radical strategy must be designed to operate under the present electoral system of one-man constituencies.

While all this seems plausible, it is also cause for special concern in the area of climate change. Political change may be necessarily incremental, but the time we have left in which to change the trajectory of future emissions is short. There is a long lag between when we produce greenhouse gas pollution and when we feel the full effects, and there is an enormous danger that by the time our politics has awoken to the reality of the permanent harm we are causing, we will have committed ourselves to an extreme quantity of harm.

Global climate activism update

Bill McKibben in the July/August 2013 issue of Orion Magazine: United We Sweat.

Incidentally, a photo of mine may be in this magazine. It doesn’t appear in the online version, but it could be in the paper copy. If anyone happens to come across a copy of Orion, I would be grateful if they could take a peek. This is the photo in question.

From The War of the Ring

I have long found Tolkien to be an effective antidote to leaden academic prose. His sentences demonstrate such craft, and his epic language – evocative of Beowulf and Norse legend – contrasts pleasingly with the sesquipedalianism of the academy.

Reading The War of the Ring yesterday, I found a passage that is ironic in hindsight. Gandalf is explaining why vanquishing Sauron is a sufficient task, even though it may leave other perils to be faced by those in the future:

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

This is strange to read, in light of climate change realities. The weather future generations shall have is now largely ours to rule, and we must decide how much suffering we are willing to impose on them for our convenience and for the pleasure of extravagant energy use.

I have heard it argued that there is no point in dealing with climate change, because some other problem will inevitably arise to confront those in the future. Alternatively, some argue that climate change should be ignored until other ills which they consider more pressing have been addressed. To me this seems a cowardly bit of rationalization. We have the knowledge know to foresee the consequences of our energy choices, and we have several varied courses of action open to us. In choosing how to rule the weather of the future, we ought to acknowledge that and confront the implications.

October film screening and donations

In October, Toronto350.org will be putting on two 700-person showings of the film ‘Do the Math‘. Both will be on the same night, at the Bloor Cinema in central Toronto. We are in the process of lining up speakers and beginning the process of promoting the event.

In another new development, Toronto350 is now able to accept donations via PayPal. Donations will go toward our ongoing campaigns for fossil fuel divestment at the University of Toronto and against the proposed Line 9 oil sands pipeline. We are an all-volunteer group with no fixed costs, so any donations will go directly toward supporting our work.