It would be extremely helpful and
absolutely necessary to try and read the outcome of the UN Conference
on Climate Change that took place in Paris, using a pair of bifocal lenses,
to allow us not to stop to a more superficial look, to the outer peel of a
negotiating process that went on and on for years, mushrooming into
other threads and processes. A pair of bifocals would help us
de-codify what happened in Paris and what future will offer us. These
lenses are made of other materials, you will never find them in
scientific essays, studies of climatology, in the myriad of
elaborations on the Earth or intact forests' carbon storage
capacity, you will not find them in the drawers of government
leaders, or businesspeople, entrepreneurial or non-governmental
experts. These lenses are makeshift, bound together by duct tape
and a rubber band, and allow us to see things under a completely
different perspective. The time has come now to make an effort and
put ourselves on the other side, on the side of air and sky. On the
side of the Earth and its inhabitants, not necessarily as an impulse
driven by mysticism or ecocentrism. Indeed such shift is partly
justified by the urgency of admitting that we humans, as small as we
are, generate dramatic upheavals, and are such a small thing when
compared to the complexity of ecological balances and life, and that
therefore it would be a good thing for us to lower our ecological
footprint and carry a lighter rucksack. Putting ourselves on the
side of the sky, on the other side of that sky nowadays darkened by a
thick suffocating cloud of smog, upset by anomalous events, heavy
rainfall, heat and cold, altered migratory cycles, clouds that
indigenous knowledge cannot read anymore, means assuming another
perspective, a decolonized and feminine one, of a Mother that is
rapidly being depleted by productivist fury and growth obsession.
A
very thoughtful and challenging study comes to mind to that
regard, titled “Antarctica as a cultural critique: the gendered
politics of scientific exploration and climate change” by CUNY
professor Elena Glasberg. Glasberg studied the “official” history
of the conquest of Antarctica, written and made mostly by males, men
driven by the desire to conquer even that last segment of unknown
land, and proposed another viewpoint, based on post-colonial and
queer thought, notably putting ourselves on the side of ice, and
re-read that myth under a gender lens. Maybe it is not casual that
the Earth is Mother, and as a Mother she is inextricably bound to our
existence to each of our primeval cells. Paris was a much awaited
event, a point of arrival full of expectations and realistic
disillusionment. Maybe as never before has the French capital become
stage of an evident chasm between the “mainstream” narrative of
climate change and that which took shape outside, in the streets, in
marginal neighborhoods, in the participation of people from all walks
of life, and from everywhere, that not only took to the streets to
defy a ban, but contributed to build another perspective of
ecological and social justice. The papers adopted in Paris have to be
studied carefully. They tell us that in fact governments of all
parts of the world believe that climate change is not a matter of
human rights, that thousands of people, women and men whose very
survival is at stake should not be considered as right-holders. These
people live in lands that always inspired our dreams of untouched
paradise, painted by Paul Gauguin or portrayed in glossy brochures of
all-inclusive travel agencies, be them the Maldives, or a myriad of
other islands, splinters of rock, sand, coral and land in the Pacific
Ocean. Thousands of people that are forced to migrate, without
water, land, food , shelter are considered only as items of
accounting for private charity or development and humanitarian aid
agencies. Those papers testify the sovereign interest of nations in securing a blanc check and inventing new tricks to continue to postpone
their doomsday date, when they will have to stop pumping oil and gas
from the Earth.
At the negotiating table, this game was
played on a computer keyboard, cutting and pasting words, adding or
removing brackets. Outside of this editing feat, reality is made of
suffering and pain and nothing new or unexpected came out in Paris. A
“self fulfilling prophecy”, one could say. As a matter of fact,
the absolute majority of countries had already tossed their chips on
the table, written in black and white whatever they intended to do to
contribute to limit temperature increase.
2 degrees, 1.5 degrees, 3 degrees.
These figures make the difference in a gambling game that skilled
negotiators have sorted out with language that holds almost
everything together, an “aspirational” goal (we will have to get used to new lingo here, between “aspirational” and
“transformational”, rather than binding a clear targets) towards
the containment of temperature increase of 1.5 C as to preindustrial
levels. No strings attached, no commitments. Again, it will be up to
the invisible hand of market and its thaumaturgical capacity to
provide a solution. An invisible hand that becomes pretty damn
visible when it sticks new prospecting and drilling derricks in the
ice, in the seas, in forests, or when it fells these to plant
agrofuels, or evicts communities whose only crime is that of managing
ecosystems from time immemorial, under the pretext of keeping them
intact, and ensuring that they can absorb those toxic gases - even
pumping them underground - that the new and old “Norths” of the
world will continue to produce. This is what “net negative
emissions” are all about, another trick to show that – apart from
minor corrections – the route remans the same, and is chartered by
the ideology of extractive capitalism.
Putting ourselves on the side
of the sky today means taking a stance and the decision to unveil the
trick, overcoming old rhetorics of a geographical North that exploits
a colonized South. That North and that South do not exist anywhere
but in handbooks of geopolitics of political correctness or
opportunism. What we have today are communities in the North and in
the South that suffer climate change, that are violated in the quest
for new fuel, that resist and practice alternatives. It is not
surprising that Parties in Paris did not agree to acknowledge that
the only possible way out is that of inducing an oil shock, not a
traditional shock of oil markets, but a shock therapy – to
paraphrase Naomi Klein – that would envisage the end of fossil fuel
prospecting and a progressive but rapid reduction of fossil fuel
extraction and use. Figures speak for themselves: 800 billion USD are spent
every year by fossil fuel companies to look for new gas and oil, as
against less than the expected 100 billion allocated every year to
support developing countries in their ecological transition. Much of
this money is under the form of loans or private funds from companies
or financial institutions and will reignite the spiral of debt, a
double debt, ecological and financial.
If we put ourselves on the side of the
sky, if we want to stop being relentlessly smothered, we will have to
keep 80% of the gas and oil underground. This is what science tells
us, but politics makes a selective use of science, so no decision has
been taken on the matter in Paris, Nor was anything agreed on the
moral obligation to compensate those that have suffered loss and
damage caused by climate change.
Nevertheless, the official “narrative”,
that of the United Nations, of governments, and some big NGO
(possibly affected by some sort of Stockholm syndrome) tells us that
Paris represent an initial success. It invites us to look at the
glass “half-full” when the glass is now full of cracks, and does not seem to be willing to wear new glasses. Hence, our bifocals help us to de-codify and unveil, and at the same time focus on the
other side of the sky. And this is where a work in progress comes
into form, women, peasants, workers, citizens, activists, pacifists,
ecologists, communists and post-communists, indigenous peoples, small
entrepreneurs that practice another economy, philosophers and
artists, human chains and red lines. This “commune” has a
powerful toolbox at hand, made of reclaiming ecological debt and
struggling for climate justice, stopping CO2lonialism, recognition of
the rights of nature and communities, ecocide, nonviolent resistance.
This other side of the sky has declared a state of climate emergency
in Paris, and built its agenda, the agenda of peoples and of the
Earth, by intertwining the critique to te development model to that
of the current phase of extractive capitalism, to patriarchal power
structures, where often “human” is synonymous of “man”, to
the construction of authentically decolonized language and practices.
So, our bifocals help us in looking beyond. And the beyond is made of
us reclaiming our future, from bottom up, continuing to weave
networks and relations, exchanging knowledge and practices, spinning
a texture of resistance, and not only limiting ourselves to
resilience, putting our minds and bodies between the sky and the
Earth, between bulldozers and oil drilling machines.
for an edited version published on The Other News:
http://www.other-news.info/2015/12/on-the-other-side-of-the-sky/
for an edited version published on The Other News:
http://www.other-news.info/2015/12/on-the-other-side-of-the-sky/
